The Hawaii Public Housing Authority Board of Directors voted unanimously Thursday morning to appoint Muslim Association of Hawaii President Hakim Ouansafi as HPHA Executive Director. According to information presented to the Board, Ouansafi’s appointment has already received approval from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development which is required under conditions of a 2002 “Corrective Action Order” giving HUD oversight of the troubled agency. Ouansafi’s appointment also received the support of Gov Neil Abercrombie’s Director of Human Services Pat McManaman who told the Board that Ouansafi’s application “really stood out”.
According to the Hawaii Islamic Information Office, Ouansafi’s Manoa Mosque is backed by Prince Abdulaziz Bin Fahad Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Ouansafi, who acknowledges that “foreign money ... come(s) with strings attached,” has publicly mooted plans to build a larger mosque in downtown Honolulu.
Paid $88,000 per year, the HPHA manages Hawaii’s 6,000 public housing units scattered throughout 80-plus sites statewide. HPHA is in the midst of a $135M public-private renovation of the Towers at Kuhio Park, Hawaii’s largest public housing project. As has been the case with many agency heads since Governor Neil Abercrombie took office, the previous Executive Director, Denise Wise, resigned October 12 “for personal reasons” after about one-and-one-half years at the helm.
Ouansafi is best known as the progenitor of Hawaii Islam Day. By misrepresenting the foundation date of his own religion, Ouansafi conned the 2009 Hawaii Legislature into passing a resolution designating September 24, 2009 as Islam Day in Hawaii. He did this by falsely claiming a Julian date in the year 622 was actually a Gregorian date. September 24, 2009 just happens to be September 11, 2009 in the old Julian Calendar.
Ouansafi was nailed for falsely claiming to represent the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation as part of a promotional event for the Muslim Association of Hawaii in March, 2011. The fake FLEF event came after the October 2010 arrest of “jihadi wannabe” Abdel Hameed Shehadeh who had been attending Ouansafi’s Manoa Mosque in between failed efforts to enter Pakistan and join the Taliban. After the arrest of Shehadeh, Ouansafi was quick to go to the media and trumpet his “secret” role in the investigation—effectively warning away any other violent jihadis. Akamai observers noted that Shehadeh came to Hawaii with an open and public FBI tail one source described as “big enough to make a peacock blush” thus giving Ouansafi little choice but to cooperate.
In a 2010 book published by The Brookings Institution, author Akbar S. Ahmed interviewed Ouansafi. After a visit to Ouansafi’s Mosque, Ahmed describes how Ouansafi expelled a follower of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi for “diluting our religion.” Ouansafi bizarrely claimed to Ahmed that it was Arabs, not Polynesians who first discovered Hawaii—and that the words Hawaii and Honolulu are both Arabic names, not Hawaiian. Ouansafi also told Ahmed that “Hakim” was Hawaiian for “wise leader”—an assertion quickly debunked by a search through Pukui and Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary. Interestingly, the Hawaiian term “haku ‘epa” does mean to lie or deceive and “haki wale” refers to a weak leader, easily broken.
Ouansafi, as President of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, has questionable adherence to the First Amendment—which should raise questions about his willingness to abide by the standards of transparency demanded of HPHA under State and Federal law. As Islamists organized rioting over cartoons of Mohammad published by a Danish newspaper, Ouansafi’s Muslim Association of Hawaii Islamic Information Office website February 20, 2006 posted a statement by "Muslim Religious Leaders." The statement didn’t denounce the deadly riots, instead it attacked free speech, vainly proclaiming "The events in Denmark concerning the Messenger of God represent an entirely unacceptable crime of aggression that has violated the highest sanctities of the Muslim people."
A 2009 Hawai`i Free Press investigation into the national and international resources working with Ouansafi’s MAH is titled: On the trail to Hawaii Islam Day: Saudi money, Libyan assassins, Palestinian Jihad, London bombers, Malaysian sodomy, and laughing Islamists.