Read and weep?

ROSEMONT, Ill. – It is time for the United States to stop treating every American Muslim as somehow suspect, leaders of the faith said at their largest annual convention, which ended in Rosemont yesterday.

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said.

“Muslim Americans feel an increasing level of tension and scrutiny in contemporary society,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States and the convention organizer.

Maybe Muslim Americans should examine, more closely, the affiliations they have at hand.

Let’s look at The Islamic Society Of North America.

Established in 1963 by the by the Saudi-funded Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) calls itself the largest Muslim organization on the continent. Its annual convention draws more attendees — usually over 30,000 — than any other Muslim gathering in the Western Hemisphere.

And:

ISNA focuses heavily on providing Wahhabi theological indoctrination materials to a large percentage of the 2,500+ mosques in North America. Many of these mosques were recently built with Saudi money and are required, by their Saudi benefactors, to strictly follow the dictates of Wahhabi imams — an edict that affects the tone and content of the sermons given in the mosques, the selection of books and periodicals that may be read in mosque libraries or sold in mosque bookshops, and the policies governing the exclusion or suppression of dissenters from the congregations.

We all know about Wahhabi.

Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz describes ISNA as “one of the chief conduits through which the radical Saudi form of Islam passes into the United States.”

According to Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani’s testimony before a State Department Open Forum on January 7, 1999, extremists have taken over “more than 80 percent of the mosques in the United States … This means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to 80 percent of the Muslim population, mostly the youth and the new generation.” Kabbani based his statement on his personal investigation of 114 American mosques. “Ninety of them,” he said, “were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology, based on their speeches, books and board members.” This is largely due to the efforts of ISNA.

According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, ISNA “is a radical group hiding under a false veneer of moderation”; “convenes annual conferences where Islamist militants have been given a platform to incite violence and promote hatred” (for instance, al Qaeda supporter and PLO official Yusuf Al-Qaradhawi was invited to speak at an ISNA conference); has held fundraisers for terrorists (after Hamas leader Mousa Marzook was arrested and eventually deported in 1997, ISNA raised money for his defense); has condemned the U.S. government’s post-9/11 seizure of Hamas’ and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s financial assets; and publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Islamic Horizons, that “often champions militant Islamist doctrine.”

If I were a Muslim American, who wanted to be an AMERICAN first, I would make sure the perception people have of me is not negative: The first thing I would do is to denounce all terror attacks and not use them as excuses for poor US Foreign Policy; I would then make sure I assimilate into American culture, as far as my morals and beliefs allow. THEN I would see to it that those I chose to keep company with are above reproach. These Islamic groups such as ISNA, and CAIR, have TOO many very seriously tainted records for my liking. There are too many facts on the record of these groups funding Palestinian terrorists. Add to that the serious questions about teaching radical Islamic hatred to the Muslim youth in the US…it’s no wonder they ALL have an image problem.

Muslims and terrorism go well together, like it or not. When one reads either word, MUSLIM or TERRORIST, or TERRORISM, one almost always thinks of ISLAM.

Many people read ISNA and CAIR in the same context.

Your friends can define who you are. Once Muslims figure this out and make some choices, their image problems might go away.