Replies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5JE4w02Y8
QUOTE:

Added September 15, 2006
From TheIPT
On Sept 9th 2001 Dr. Maher Hathout participated in a benefit in support of Jamil Al-Amin held in Irvine California. al-Amin had been arrested for killing an Atlanta law enforcement officer and wounding a second in March of 2000.

For more info see the following article: http://counterterrorismblog...

===
===

http://counterterrorismblog.org/2006/09/speech_tape_compounds_question.php

"Speech Tape Compounds Questions on Hathout’s Human Relations Award"
By Steven Emerson
(September 15, 2006)

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Add one more item to the list that makes Maher Hathout’s selection for a major human relations award so mind-boggling: His spirited defense of an accused -- and later convicted -- cop-killer.

Hathout, president of the Islamic Center of Southern California and a senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), already has a lengthy record of hate speech to his credit. He has called Israel a nation of butchers and accused the United States of state terrorism; he has justified the actions of Hizbollah and defended terrorist financiers.

Despite these seeming disqualifiers, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations announced recently that the Muslim activist would receive its prestigious John Allen Buggs Award in ceremonies next month. The award is given annually for what the commission describes as “outstanding human relations work.” I wrote about the award on "New Republic Online" on August 31 (reprinted with permission) and will discuss the issue again on the Fox News Network.

And despite his long record of vitriolic statements, he has maintained -- as recently as a September 7 appearance on the Fox News Network, in which he tried to refute documentation of his extremism presented by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) -- that he is a moderate who condemns both Hizbollah and Hamas. More about that record below.

But now IPT has uncovered the tape of a speech that Hathout gave at a benefit dinner held to raise defense funds for Jamil Al-Amin at his trial on charges of shooting one Georgia sheriff’s deputy to death and seriously wounding another.

No fewer than a half-dozen times in the speech Hathout referred to Al-Amin as “our brother.” He said he would always take Al-Amin’s word over that of supposedly untrustworthy police. And he veered off into generalized charges of racism against the United States, and even piggybacked on the Al-Amin case his standard charges of “apartheid racial slaughtering” of Palestinians by Israel.

The man now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin first came to public attention as the 1960s black militant H. Rap Brown, serving then as so-called Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party. Among his best-known statements from that period: “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” and “If America don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down.” Brown converted to Islam while imprisoned on a robbery conviction in the early 1970s, later adopting his Islamic name.

In the case in which Hathout defended him, he was charged with shooting two Fulton County, Georgia, sheriff’s deputies who had sought to arrest him in connection with earlier charges of impersonating a police officer and accepting stolen property. One of the two officers -- both of them African-Americans -- died within hours.

A jury found Al-Amin guilty after only brief deliberations. He was sentenced to life imprisonment."