Obama's Muslim ties called into question

The head of a terrorism watchdog group says Barack Obama's new Muslim outreach director should have never taken part in a meeting last month in Northern Virginia that was attended by two Muslim leaders who support terrorist groups.



NBC News reports that Obama's Muslim outreach director Minha Husaini spoke to a small group of Muslim leaders and potential Obama supporters at a hotel in Springfield, Virginia, on September 15. One of the Muslim leaders attending the meeting was Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society. Bray once equated the Israeli assassination of a Hamas leader as "an unlawful, cowardly, and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism."

Joe Kaufman, chairman of the group Americans Against Hate, notes Bray and other leaders of the group are supporters of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. "The organization has just recently used the Internet to call for the murder of Jews and the waging of war against non-Muslims," he contends. "It's certainly not an organization that anyone from a political campaign should be attending a meeting with."

Another Muslim leader who attended the September meeting was Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was listed by the government as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing case.

The Obama campaign claims its Muslim outreach director would not have attended the event had it known beforehand who all the attendees were. However, a participant at the meeting contends the Obama camp was aware that top CAIR officials would be in attendance.