Report: Islamist radicals find warm welcome in Obama White House

Daily Caller ^ | October 22, 2012 | Neil Munro

[Cincinatus' Wife]

White House visitor records show that administration officials have hosted numerous White House meetings with a series of U.S.-based Muslim political groups that have close ties to jihadi groups and push to reduce anti-terrorism investigations.

The visits were discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which compared the Obama White House’s visitor records with its database of Islamist advocacy groups.

For example, the records show that officials from the Council on American Islamic Relations have visited the White House 20 times, according to the organization’s report.

Members of CAIR were invited to the White House, even though an April 2009 FBI statement said the bureau “does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner” because of its ties to the Hamas jihadi group.

Read the White House Visitor Logs

Administration officials also invited Syrian-born Louay Safi to the White House twice in 2011, even though he had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two terrorism cases, and had been barred from Fort Hood following the 2009 jihadi attack by a Muslim U.S. Army major.

In contrast, White House officials have not invited Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona-based, American-born moderate Muslim and former Navy officer.

“We’ve never been invited and nether have any of [the 24 leaders in] our American Islamic Leadership Coalition,” Jasser told The Daily Caller.

The absence of invitations to real Muslim moderates allows White House officials to pretend that members of the well-funded, U.S.-based radical group are moderates, even when they’re linked to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, he said.

Jasser’s nonpartisan coalition includes left-wing and feminist Muslims who are frequently criticized by the groups invited to the White House, he said.

“The White House has selectively omitted genuine [Muslim] moderates and instead has picked radical Muslims to meet,” said a statement from Steve Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The closed-door White House meetings legitimize the radicals, but do not bring them into the mainstream, Emerson told TheDC.

“The American public has a right to know why the White House is meeting with Hamas front groups,” he added.

The visitor logs show that many of the Muslim advocates met with coalition-building officials in the White House, rather than with national security officials. The officials they met with include Paul Monteiro, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Amanda Brown, assistant to the then-White House director of political affairs Patrick Gaspard.

Gaspard is now the executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

The White House’s Secret Service guards do not veto invites from White House officials, but merely tell the officials if the guests will be arrested on existing charges if they arrive at the gates.

The meetings were likely intended to boost the president’s nationwide effort to bind often-rivaling constituency groups into the Democratic Party’s diversity coalition.

That disparate coalition already includes groups claiming to represent environmentalists, blue-collar workers, immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, gun-control advocates, Jews, gays, tort lawyers and many others.

In April, White House officials invited members of the National Network for Arab American Communities to a White House meeting.

“Our issues are American issues that affect our entire nation … and we will ensure that our community’s voice is at the forefront of public debates around healthcare, immigration and national security reform,” Linda Sarsour, NNAAC’s national advocacy director, said in an April press release.

Sarsour has been a White House visitor on seven different occasions. Her network includes 23 separate member associations, including the Illinois-based Arab American Action Network.

That group’s director, Hatem Abudayyeh, has been under criminal investigation at least since late 2010, when FBI agents raided his home as part of an investigation into terror-related financing.

Abudayyeh visited the White House in April 2010, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s study.

Muslim voters likely comprise less than one percent of the nation’s electorate. Many are in blue states, including California and Illinois, but a significant number of Muslims have settled in Michigan and Virginia, where every vote could potentially sway a close election.

Overall, 75 percent of Muslim Arab Americans support Obama, while 8 percent support Gov. Mitt Romney, according to a poll of 400 Arab Americans taken in September by the Arab American Institute.

In turn, Christian Arabs strongly favor Romney by 16 percentage points, reducing Obama’s overall support among Arab Americans to 52 percent, according to the poll.

In 2008, Obama won 67 percent of the Arab-American vote.

James Zogby, the Arab-American founder of the AAI, estimates there are a combined 833,000 Arab-American voters in Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

The White House’s Muslim constituency group meetings are supplemented by additional meetings outside the White House.

In June, George Selim, the White House’s director for community partnerships, told TheDC that “there is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues.”

Selim’s office was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.

The CAIR meetings were arranged even though CAIR has extensive ties to jihad groups, including Hamas — the Palestinian affiliate of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Top officials, including President Barack Obama, have participated in the Muslim outreach.

Obama has chosen to meet personally with leaders of several Muslim groups, including the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

That group’s co-founder, Iraqi-born Salem al-Marayati, visited the White House six times. He has denounced several successful convictions of jihadi terrorists, and has repeatedly called for Muslims to stop cooperation with the FBI except when it is mediated by MPAC or other Muslim groups.

The Islamic Society of North America was declared an unindicted co-conspirator in a successful 2008 trial of a Texas-based Muslim group that smuggled funds to Hamas. In October 2011, Mohamed Magid, the Sudanese-born president of ISNA, told top Justice Department officials that “teaching people that all Muslims are a threat to the country … is against the law and the Constitution.”

Some of Obama’s deputies, especially Valerie Jarrett and Tom Perez, who runs the civil-rights section in the Justice Department, have also been enthusiastic supporters of the outreach policy.

Jarrett spoke at ISNA’s 2009 conference, and Perez spoke at its 2012 event.

TheDC emailed or called the White House, MPAC, CAIR, Safi, Sarsour’s press secretary and Abudayyeh for comment. None responded.

Any outreach to Islamic groups carries a political risk for American politicians because many Arab groups are infused with the bitter ethnic and religious politics in their foreign homelands.

The most important of those conflicts is the resentment among many Muslim Arabs over the remarkable successes of the small Jewish-majority state of Israel.

“War and occupation in our home countries leads to political and legislative attacks on us here … we must advocate and organize within our community to affect change,” says an Arab language speaker on the Arab American Action Network’s website.

Also, many of the Muslim-advocacy groups are led by religious zealots, ensuring a conflict with social-liberal groups in the diversity coalition. For example, in June 2010, Monteiro met with Muzzamil Siddiqi, the former head of the Islamic Society of North America, even though Siddiqi had declared in 2001 that that he “supported laws in countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.”

Numerous Democratic and Republican politicians have already grappled with this problem.

In August 2007, then-Democratic governor of Virginia Tim Kaine appointed a Muslim immigrant — Esam Omeish — to a Virginia panel on immigration. He rapidly rescinded the appointment after learning of Omeish’s vocal support of jihad, the name given to war waged for Islam, during a radio talk-show.

Omeish was one of the top officials at a radical-linked mosque in Falls Church, Va., that hired Anwar al-Aulaqi as its imam prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. Aulaqi subsequently fled and was later tied to numerous jihadi attacks, including the 9/11 and Fort Hood attacks.

President Obama approved a drone strike in Yemen that killed Aulaqi in September 2011.

Omeish has been welcomed to Obama’s White House three times.

In 2006, California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer revoked a routine “certificate of achievement” award to a Californian employee of CAIR after a conservative blogger brought to light inflammatory statements made by the awardee. “When a mistake has been made, the record has to be set straight,” Boxer’s office announced.

CAIR officials have visited Obama’s White House twenty times.

But CAIR’s regional offices includes some exceptional people, said Brian Levin, director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, San Bernardino.

However, he added, “I personally will not sit at any event where CAIR is participating … [because] their national leadership has been involved in things so that I’d rather abstain from even appearing to endorse.”

MPAC’s leadership has evolved and improved, Levin argued. MPAC’s al-Marayati “is not a bad guy … there’s a difference between him and CAIR, by a long-shot,” he added.

Republicans have also misjudged some of these radical Muslim groups.

Before and shortly after the 9/11 jihad attack, President George W. Bush met with jihad-linked immigrants, including CAIR co-founder Nihad Awad and Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a leader in several American Islamist groups.

In 2001, Bush’s administration invited Alamoudi to speak at the national prayer service for the jihadis’ 9/11 victims. In 2004, Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in prison for plotting to kill a top Saudi government leader.

Bush’s deputies learned their lesson and later scrubbed invitations to jihad-linked advocates.

Regardless of ethnicity or nationality, said Levin, “politicians really have to be carefully watching who you associate with, because many times they’re antithetical to the general goals you champion.”

[Cincinatus' Wife]

LINKS at Source

[Eye of Unk]

I bet Romney will put off taking up residence in the Whitehouse for a long time after Obama leaves.

I would not want to be there until after a total sanitation of the property, all the linen and furniture replaced, seriously I would not want to be in the Whitehouse. Just turn it into a museum.

[Armaggedon]

Obama is an Islamo-Marxist-Chiicago Gangster. Throw the traitors out of our White House.

[Slyfox]

We've just learned that Huma, her unemployed husband Anthony,
and their baby Jordan are moving into a $3.3-million Park Avenue
apartment...

[Cincinatus' Wife]

.....Top officials, including President Barack Obama, have participated in the Muslim outreach. ......

NASA Chief Bolden's Muslim Remark to Al-Jazeera Causes Stir "....."When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."

On Fox News Channel, commentator Charles Krauthammer called Bolden's comments "a new height of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of 'to feel good about your past scientific achievements' is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy. If I didn't know that Obama had told him this, I'd demand the firing of Charles Bolden."

White House spokeswoman Moira Mack said the president's intention is collaboration.

"The president has always said that he wants NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration," Mack wrote in an e-mail."

___________________________________________________

Houston Chronicle endorses Mitt Romney for president "..................................we endorse the Republican team, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, in the belief that they can do better by Texas and the nation.

Starting with energy and continuing with NASA.

President Obama’s failure to identify the economic opportunities these resources offer is mystifying. In our 2008 endorsement we cautioned the president against demonizing the energy sector – good advice that he has never heeded (see Keystone XL Pipeline). By contrast, Gov. Romney has listed energy atop his five-point plan to rejuvenate the economy.

It can. Let us count the ways:......................................

The other launch pad ignored by President Obama is the literal one – NASA, and specifically the Johnson Space Center.

It has been an insult to the memory of American heroes like Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride to allow manned spaceflight to languish in the country that put men on the moon. The notion of paying $50 million a seat to Russia for commercial taxi service to the International Space Station is galling.

Obama has failed to articulate a bold vision of his own for the agency. That failure forsakes a legacy of scientific achievement that has showered benefits on the nation. This approach to NASA has abandoned the American imperative of lighting out for the territory and exploring new worlds. NASA’s legacy must be reclaimed...............Let’s seize upon it.

That will require more effective presidential leadership......"

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The Future of Strategic Partnerships in Space ------ "On October 23, 2012 Charles F. Bolden, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), will address the potential for international partnerships in the coming years, the roadblocks to greater cooperation, and the changing environment for actors operating in space. .....This event is closed to press and off-the-record. ......

[TigersEye]

Someday we may look back upon the intern scandals of the Clinton White House with amazement at our preoccupation with Bill, Monica Lewinsky, and cigars.

Truthfully selling ICBM guidance and multi-warhead tech to the ChiComs bothered me more. Still does. What are they doing with that?

And now here comes the icing on the treachery cake: Obama and Hillary reportedly have informed Iran that they've abandoned Israel, leaving the only Jewish State to face a nuclear Iran alone.

So they have.

We don't support Israeli attack, US tells Iran

0bama sent a letter to Tehran assuring them that the U.S. will do nothing to help Israel. That takes that off of the table removing a big worry for them that might have made them think twice. Iran is good to go now with 0bama's blessing.

[longfellow]

Where is the photo from the NY POST front cover of hitlary kissing arafatlips’ wife?
Kiss Isreal Goodbye. Vote obama biden

[elephantlips]

Makes me think, when we read about or see some book/movie regarding the invasion of our country, the scenario always is concerned with preventing the invading forces from getting to our capitol city. Our next actual invasion will probably START from inside the capitol.

[cricket]

I remember what Charles Krauthammer said in his response to this fatuosity - and slap in the face to every American. What I do not recall; is John Boehner's response; and that of the rest of our Repub 'Leadership'; so called.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate......But more than anything else, the widespread self-loathing, self-doubt, and guilt over America’s presumed historical crimes like colonialism, racism, and imperialism have undermined our foreign policy by projecting weakness and a lack of confidence in our own principles and way of life. We saw this in Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, in which he extolled––before an audience including Muslim Brothers sitting in the front row–– the mythical superiority of Islamic culture, and implicitly apologized for “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Given this history of exploitation and oppression, Muslim terrorism thus must be understood as a response to these historical injustices, a reaction to our sins rather than the expression of religious beliefs.

This progressive reflex to blame America first explains why Obama spent so much time after the Benghazi attack talking about the obscure YouTube video. In his remarks on September 12, rather than explicitly linking the murder of Americans to terrorist jihadists and defending the First Amendment, he harped on the video and thundered, “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” In his U.N. speech, again he referred 6 times to the video, and said nothing specific about jihadist terror, not to mention failing vigorously to defend the central human right of free speech enshrined in our own First Amendment. Indeed, the producer of the video has been jailed on a minor probation violation, creating that “chilling effect” the ACLU usually frets over, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey personally called a marginal pastor and counseled him to refrain from exercising his First Amendment rights. Worse yet, the administration produced an ad shown in Pakistan once more protesting our love of Islam and castigating the video, even as across the region Christians and other religions are murdered, brutalized, and driven into exile. .............

[rawcatslyentist]

We’ve got the best representation that Saudi oil money can buy.

[Josephat]

Our next actual invasion will probably START from inside the capitol.

It has already started and is near completion. Pray that we stop it in Nov.

[Travis McGee]

[Diogenesis]

Terrorism against America by Obama-the-Undocumented Liar.

[Molon Labbie]

“Hussein, I really like your white house, but it needs a dome, and minarets. (looks at Michelle) And burkas.”