Below are the four most recent newsletters from the Tennessee Council for Political Justice, which are all installments in a four-part series.

Newsletter #185 — Islamophobia Makes Tennessee Unsafe (part 1 of 4)

The Muslim Brotherhood’s CAIR says “Islamophobia is close-minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims” and “[a]n Islamophobe is an individual who holds a closed-minded view of Islam and promotes prejudice against or hatred of Muslims.”

CAIR has declared Tennessee to be one of the most Islamophobic states in the U.S.

The founder and former director of the Tennessee American Center for Outreach (ACO), Remziya Suleyman, for years repeatedly singled out Tennessee and blamed specific Tennessee organizations and specific individuals for bringing Islamophobia to the state.

Paul “Iesa” Galloway who was a Texas CAIR Director from 2002 to 2006, now runs the ACO and has taken over Suleyman’s job of identifying Islamophobia in Tennessee.

Nihad Awad, who publicly voices his support for HAMAS, is also the head of Galloway’s former organization, CAIR. Awad has been a regular visitor to Tennessee and CAIR has regularly inserted itself into Tennessee’s political activities. CAIR liberally uses accusations of Islamophobia to single out targets.

Galloway now lives in Nashville, runs the ACO Muslim advocacy organization and is a registered lobbyist talking directly to Tennessee’s state legislators. Until recently the ACO was a named local partner organization to Daoud Abudiab’s Faith and Culture Center. The listing has been changed to “Local Muslim organizations and centers.”

The Islamist activist Daoud Abudiab’s Faith and Culture Center had planned to hold an Islamophobia conference on September 26, 2015 but renamed it after the jihadi murder in Chattanooga. Pushing the idea that the Chattanooga jihadist’s actions had nothing to do with Muslims or Islam they renamed the event to “Our Muslim Neighbor: Creating a Community of Inclusion in Middle Tennessee.”

Daoud Abudiab, former co-chair of Tennessee’s American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC), now serves as board president of the far-left TIRRC (TN Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition), a pro-amnesty and open borders organization which supports the lawlessness of illegal immigration, calling it “family reunification.” TIRRC received $310,000 of Soros money in 2012 and $469,000 in 2013. Can there be any question about what their REAL agenda is.?

Abudiab is a supporter of the open borders group Clergy for Tolerance. He also spearheads “Our Muslim Neighbor“ (OMN) initiative which is the sole focus of his Faith and Culture Center. Read “The Dark Side of the Interfaith Syndicate: ‘Our Muslim Neighbor,’ CAIR.”

CAIR and the Tennessee Islamist bullies use name-calling like “Islamophobe” to silence and threaten or provoke action against any criticism of Islam or political sharia. CAIR has been prolific in assembling reports and a website labelling individuals, organizations and actions they call the “Islamophobia Network.”

SoundVision, a department of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), instructs that Islamophobia includes acts such as “…depicting the Prophet as a terrorist, disrespecting the Quran, torturing prisoners, bombing civilians or occupying Muslim lands, these are all signs of Islamophobia” and it includes “any kind of hate crime or speech against Islam and Muslims.”

The Islamic State just released its 9th issue of its English magazine called “Dabiq” with an introduction promoting the shooting in Garland Texas as “inspiration” for Muslims living in the “lands of the crusaders.”

CAIR and Tennessee’s Islamist bullies like Abudiab, Galloway and Suleyman are now on notice that Islamic State (IS) sympathizers are encouraged and will be incited to respond to accusations of Islamophobia, with deadly violence. So why are Islamist agitators like CAIR, Suleyman, Galloway and Abudiab knowingly, willfully and recklessly continuing to mark the targets?

Are Islamophobia accusers willing to intimidate people into silence by whatever means? Can they justify the violence used by IS to silence critics of political Islam in Tennessee, once and forever?

After the jihad terrorist murders in Chattanooga, why would Tennessee’s Department of Homeland Security enable the deliberate inciting to violence?

Newsletter #186 — Islamophobia Makes Tennessee Unsafe (part 2 of 4)

Leftists and Islamists: The Red-Green Alliance Points ISIS Sympathizers To Tennessee Targets

In November 2014, Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) co-hosted a meeting called “Canaries in a Coal Mine: How Islamophobia Threatens Us All.”

Who and what is the ISPU?

The ISPU was founded in Detroit by Muslims shortly after 9-11. It opened a D.C. office in 2010 to have easier access to politicians. ISPU describes itself as a “non-partisan and independent think tank and research organization.” even though an Obama appointee, Dalia Mogahed, ISPU Director of Research blames Republicans for Islamophobia. (more on Dalia in Part 3.)

ISPU’s list of “scholars” includes the Jew-hater Hatem Bazian, Muqtedar Khan who is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s IIIT (International Institute on Islamic Thought), Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR’s former national legal director, and Sherman Jackson, whose Muslim Brotherhood ties are well documented.

Recent ISPU “research” targets Republican legislators, and this “research” is being used to convince the leftists at the November meeting to ally with Islamists living in the U.S. Since when is the red-green alliance “non-partisan?”

Very little public information is available about who actually started and funded the ISPU, but its 2002 Form 990 lists Iltefat Hamzavi as a Financial Director who signed the 990. Hamzavi’s Foundation’s 990 shows $6,500 directed to the ISPU in 2012 along with donations to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ISNA and Mercy-USA. Hamzavi is listed as the ISPU Board Chairman in its 2013 annual report.

The ACMCU/ ISPU Targeting Meeting

The November meeting’s moderator was Dalia Mogahed, a defender of Muslim Brotherhood groups like CAIR. She was an Obama appointee to his Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

The ACMCU/ISPU event highlighted self-serving “research” on Islamophobia “and its connection to bigotry targeting other communities.” Participants and promoters of this effort are banking on America’s becoming a “minority-majority” country by 2050 (fueled by illegal immigration and refugee resettlement?) This meeting was designed to cement the Left (women, gays, illegal immigrants, etc.), the Black community, and the Muslim community together in a liaison of victimhood.

In March, ING’s (Islamic Networks Group of which Tennessee AMAC is an affiliate) leader Maha ElGenaidi and ISPU’s Dalia Mogahed held a private research briefing in San Jose and described the ISPU “research” this way:

The research examines Islamophobia by studying state-level anti-rights legislative efforts and their connection to bigotry targeting other communities … and the eventual demographic shift to a “majority-minority” population by the year 2050. (emphasis added)

The ISPU decided that state-level legislation in these subject areas was evidence of bigotry:

• abortion
• anti-immigration
• anti-sharia
• LGBTQ
• right to work
• voter ID

Aping the language of the left, ElGenaidi and Mogahed said the goal was for “change agents to empower and inform collective action.” Tying the global jihadist movement to the Left, whose actual goals are antithetical to Islamic doctrine, just shows how insidious and insincere the Islamists’ intentions really are. CAIR-Michigan’s Director Dawoud Walid said it best:

This raises legitimate questions about Islamists like Mwafaq Aljabarry whose Democrat voting history didn’t prevent him from running in the Tennessee Republican primary for a State House seat as an alleged conservative. And, there is Mohamed Elibiary who claims that his calling to reform the conservative movement before the 2016 election is the reason he left his position with the Department of Homeland Security.

Lobbyist and “voice of Tennessee Muslims” Paul “Iesa” Galloway is also busy promoting himself as a states’ rights conservative 10th Amendment Republican just like his Muslim Brotherhood-supporting mentor Mohamed Elibiary.

ISPU Targets State Legislators

Using radical leftist Alinsky tactics, the ISPU collated its “research” into an interactive map targeting certain elected officials. Did they consider that recent examples of Leftist violence may have put the targeted legislators at serious risk of bodily harm? Do they even care?

For example, the ACMCU and the ISPU are aided in targeting Islamophobes by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The SPLC (assets of over $250 million), according to their “research,” lists the Family Research Council (FRC) as a “hate group.” In 2012, a SPLC follower said that this report inspired him to shoot the security guard at the FRC offices as part of his plan to “kill as many as possible.” Following the shooting, the SPLC posted “FRC Deserves ‘hate group’ label“ which was the SPLC’s justification for targeting the group despite the shooting.

The SPLC has also published a dossier on Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. In June 2013, a mob of leftist pro-illegal immigration agitators trespassed on his private home property in an effort to intimidate and retaliate against him for enforcing the Kansas’ voter registration law that requires proof of citizenship.

Saul Alinsky made leftist radicalism a profession. He created a school to train radicals and wrote a curriculum called Rules for Radicals. He said there were no hard and fast truths, no moral or ethical considerations that should guide a radical’s demands. Nor were there hard and fast rules about how radicals should go about getting demands met. Alinsky wrote:

“The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.

Leftists have a dense history of political violence with the more recent examples of Ferguson and Baltimore’s burning, looting and shootings.
The jihadists and the Left are more natural allies than anyone ever realized.

Newsletter #187 — Islamophobia Makes Tennessee Unsafe (part 3 of 4)

The ACMCU/ISPU November Targeting Meeting, cont’d

The November meeting’s moderator was Dalia Mogahed, co-author of Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, with ACMCU director Esposito. Like Esposito, she is a defender of Muslim Brotherhood groups like CAIR. In 2009 Obama appointed Mogahed to his Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, making her the first Muslim woman White House advisor. She said that her role would be to “convey….to the President and other public officials, what it is Muslims want.” In a 2014 interview she said Muslims wanted “to be show[n] greater respect” and to be treated as “equals” and not perceived as needing to be “fixed or managed.”

Mogahed was born in Egypt, immigrated to the U.S. at age 5 with her family and became a naturalized citizen. Her accomplishments educationally and professionally are many and notably, often include legitimating Muslim Brotherhood groups.

Mogahed is a strong and vocal supporter of sharia law. She says the West’s understanding of sharia is “oversimplified” and that “the majority of women around the world associate it with ‘gender justice.’” Do the Yazidi women and young girls subjected to Islamic State’s sex slavery agree with her?

Mogahed’s White House appointment has successfully helped the radical, Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, ICNA and MAS become entrenched in the Obama administration.

In 2008, she supported recommendations for the administration to engage with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and work with HAMAS, to improve relations with Muslims worldwide.

In 2011 Mogahed was instrumental in getting a White House meeting between Obama and the spiritual head of the Maronite Christians in Lebanon cancelled. She reportedly received the request from the “higher leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.”

In 2009 Mogahed said that “Islamophobia in America is very real” but then in 2013 she said that Islamophobia is “made up,” and unrelated in any way to terrorist acts such as 9/11 or the Boston marathon bombing. She blames Islamophobia on Republican politicians. Mogahed is the ISPU Director for Research.

The November meeting’s panelists

The ACMCU/ISPU event highlighted self-serving “research” on Islamophobia “and its connection to bigotry targeting other communities.” The panel of “experts” representing these “other communities” included:

• Saeed Khan — ISPU Fellow and Research Fellow at Wayne State University’s Center for the Study of Citizenship
• Ajenai Clemmons — Policy Dir. at the National Black Caucus of State Legislators
• Madihha Ahussein — Staff Attorney at Muslim Advocates
• Joe McCartin — Exec. Dir, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Bd. Member, Interfaith Worker Justice

The National Association of Lay Catholics includes Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) in their database of Alinsky-inspired socialist community organizations. The IWJ lists several affiliates in Tennessee including the Workers Interfaith Network (WIN) located in Memphis. Not surprisingly, WIN is a member of a group that promotes BDS against Israel. WIN board members are also members of the Socialist Party. WIN’s founder, a Methodist minister from Chicago, authored a study guide about Islam.

The IWJ board predictably includes a Muslim Brotherhood representative. Naeem Baig is the president of ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), an organization named in the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memo. Baig also serves in a leadership role with Religions for Peace USA (RFPUSA), itself tied to Islamist Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the USA. Tennessee’s Daoud Abudiab’s Faith and Culture Center partners with RFPUSA and the “Our Muslim Neighbor” project belongs to the RFPUSA.

The welcoming message at ICNA’s 1999 annual conference was this: “We have a culture and civilization which once ruled the world and still has the viability to rule the world again,” similar to the written goals in the ICNA member handbook.

Ajenai Clemmons represented the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, a “national network and research clearinghouse for approximately 675 African-American state legislators across the country…” The sole “no” vote for this year’s Tennessee resolution condemning the BDS campaign against Israel and the increasing incidence of anti-Semitism was cast by the Memphis black Democrat G.A. Hardaway.

The lead researcher on this mapping project, Saeed Khan, regularly speaks at Jew-hater Hatem Bazian’s Islamophobia conferences. In his talks the “non-partisan” ISPU researcher labels conservatives, white Republicans and Tea Party members as Islamophobes.

Madihha Ahussein is a staff lawyer from Muslim Advocates, a national legal advocacy organization that sounds like the ACLU for Muslims. Their positions on FBI informants and government entrapment, denials of homegrown radicalization, and almost “reflexive criticism of counter-terrorism investigations,” are consistent with CAIR.

The ISPU “non-partisan?” The ISPU says they are “transforming their research approach” moving away from simply being a “think tank” to becoming a tool and asset for Alinsky-styled activists. Their 2015 event was titled “Elections 2016, American Muslims, Organizing People, Power and Change.” The ISPU has analyzed decades of Muslim political participation data.

The USCMO (U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations) is the self-styled “first national Muslim (Brotherhood) political party.” Founding members of the Council (many with ties to HAMAS) include unindicted Holy Land Foundation co-conspirator named Muslim Brotherhood organizations, fellow traveler Muslim Brotherhood organizations, and AMP (American Muslims for Palestine), one of the most vocal Muslim Jew-hating organizations in the U.S.

One initiative of the USCMO is to conduct a U.S. Muslim census so they can tell politicians how many votes can be bartered.

The ISPU and the USCMO: working in concert, first for power and then to turn our Judeo-Christian country away from its allies and civilizational foundations.

Newsletter #188 — Islamophobia Makes Tennessee Unsafe (part 4 of 4)

The Tennessee September renamed Islamophobia conference

The Islamist activist Daoud Abudiab’s Faith and Culture Center originally planned on holding an Islamophobia conference on September 26, 2015 but renamed it after the Chattanooga jihadist murders. Pushing the idea that the Chattanooga jihadist’s actions had nothing to do with Muslims or Islam, the event is now called “Our Muslim Neighbor: Creating a Community of Inclusion in Middle Tennessee.”

The Muslim convert Ingrid Mattson is one of the keynote speakers. She is a professor of Islamic Studies at Huron University College in Ontario Canada. She was the director of the MacDonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut as Director of Islamic Chaplaincy.

Mattson’s resume also includes positions with several major named Muslim Brotherhood organizations named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism prosecution for providing money to HAMAS.

The Faith and Culture Center (FCC) says it pursues “coexistence between people of faith and diverse cultures of the world.” Given the FCC’s use of interfaith activities to achieve its mission and vision, Mattson is at best a questionable choice for speaker.

Mattson is not a credible interfaith partner

Even though the FCC’s sole focus is to promote “Our Muslim Neighbor,” the board is designed to reflect interfaith support for this mission by including a Jew and Christians. The board member Rev. Montgomery was part of a program at the Hartford Seminary during Mattson’s tenure. Mattson requires her Seminary students to read the works of the jihadists Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abu’l-’Ala Mawdudi.

In 2006 Mattson became the first female and first Muslim convert to serve as president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ISNA (Islamic Society of North America).

ISNA was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s first U.S. organization, the Muslim Students Association (MSA). ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial for financing the terrorist group HAMAS.

HAMAS is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

ISNA is not a credible organization for interfaith initiatives. The following Quranic sura that was posted on ISNA’s website, and eventually deleted (but screen shot saved) says:

“O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors; They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust.”

Mattson works to create divisiveness between Jews and Christians, particularly Christians who support Israel. In a 2007 speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she warned Jews that “right wing Christians are very risky allies for American Jews” because the “[Christians] are really anti-semitic. They do not like Jews.”

The other conference speakers

• Reverend Richard Cizik — co-founded the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good after he was removed as the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals presumably for his far left positions on a variety of issues. Predictably, he supports the narrative that groups like the Faith and Culture Center and the Muslim Brotherhood promote, that the “American Muslim” is different than the Muslims “over there.”
• Major General Douglass Stone (retired) — well known for his work in promoting the rehabilitation of convicted violent extremist terrorists so they can return to their previous life style. He feels strongly that these violent but Islamically “moderate” individuals, many of whom he says only have ties to militants for financial, not ideological reasons, should not be punished, should be separated from the true jihadis, and provided a “program of proper care and custody, family involvement, religious teachings with moderate Islamic clerics…” Under his command, this experimental system was tried at the detention Camp Bucca in Iraq. Now in 2015, “[f]ormer Bucca prisoners are now throughout the IS leadership.”

Will Abudiab use the Tennessee 2014 hate crimes to show Islamophobia in Tennessee?

For the first time in several years, there were more anti-Muslim hate crimes than anti-Jewish hate crimes:

Hate crimes motivated by ANY bias are deplorable, but it is important to assess the nature of the reported hate crime to understand whether and what it implies. For example, the one 2014 anti-Jewish hate crime was for simple assault, which in Tennessee is minor bodily injury. Five of the anti-Muslim crimes were for vandalism and one for intimidation.

Muslim-fabricated mosque vandalism is trending in Europe and the U.S.. CAIR’s San Francisco radical executive director, Zahra Billoo, says Muslims need to report anything they think could be a hate crime or even an “incident.” She says incidents can add up so she can justify her anti-American, anti-non-Muslim and anti-Republican propaganda.

Islamists trying to exploit the Islamophobia label rush to assume that the death of every Muslim murder victim was the act of an Islamophobe, even when it isn’t. Even the murder of the three Muslim students has not been proven to be an anti-Muslim hate crime by local law enforcement, nor did prosecutors argue this when asking for the death penalty for the first degree murder crime.

Considering that:

• the Associated Press has eliminated the term “Islamophobia” from its stylebook, the media “bible” to guide accuracy in reporting, and,
• the term “Islamophobia” is nothing more than name-calling designed to suppress any criticism of Islam and Muslims, and,
• the term was invented specifically for this purpose by a Muslim Brotherhood front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) an organization investigated for being the largest monetary donor to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, and,
• in light of the Texas shooting and the Chattanooga jihadist murders and the recent exhortation in the Islamic State’s English magazine that Muslims in the West should be “inspired” by the shooting,

The Faith and Culture Center should be held responsible for any harm resulting from the inspiration they provide to attendees to further the propaganda of Islamophobia.

Will the Faith and Culture Center and ACO’s use of Islamophobia to silence critics provoke the jihadis just like it did in Garland, Texas and Chattanooga?

As a practical matter, the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security should be required to consider the very real and serious security risk this gratuitous conference poses to Tennesseans and the state’s elected leadership.