An influential Catholic bishop will speak on a panel tomorrow in San Diego with a representative of a Muslim organization that has been tied to a secret jihad-funding operation in Texas.
Bishop Robert McElroy, Diocese of San Diego, is speaking at a conference called “Deepening Inter-Religious Dialogue and Community Alliances” at the University of San Diego. His fellow panelist is Sayyid Syeed of the Islamic Society of North America, which was reportedly founded by members of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, which is considered to be the most influential Muslim group in the world and also committed to imposing Islamic Sharia law all over the world.
The panel will look at how “Violent extremism, terrorism, and transnational violent movements under a religious banner have led to growing public concern.” The panel will also consider how “Security-based approaches to countering violence and extremism have in turn created new threats, particularly against the Muslim community in America.”
The panel is part of a new effort of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to “dialogue” with Muslims in America.
A new committee of the USCCB was announced on Feb. 8 by Bishop Mitchell Rozanski of Springfield, MA., who said the initiative was founded because the “national conversation around Islam grows increasingly fraught, coarse, and driven by fear and often willful misinformation.” The National Catholic-Muslim Dialogue will be chaired by Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago.
Syeed’s group, the Islamic Society of North America, was reportedly founded by U.S. members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Those connected with Syeed’s group deny any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood and deny any role in funding terror groups overseas.
But Syeed’s ISNA was one of the groups named by Federal prosecutors as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008. The jury trial showed that the foundation’s charitable funds were going to fund the terror group Hamas, which is an affiliate of the brotherhood. The foundation’s leaders were found guilty of funneling upwards of $12 million to Hamas and were sentenced to between 15 and 65 years in jail.
Author Rod Dreher, then with the Dallas Morning News, has been one of the only mainstream journalists to look closely at the infiltration of violent Islamist ideology in America. Dresser went head-to-head with Syeed at an editorial board meeting of the Dallas Morning News. Dreher writes,
When I had the opportunity to ask a question, I told Dr. Syeed that his sentiments were laudable, but if ISNA really stood for peace and tolerance, why did it have on its board …and then I rattled off a list of board members and their direct connections to Islamic extremism. Dr. Syeed had been polite and professorial to that point, but at that point, he dropped his mask. He literally shook his fist at me, said this inquisition was worthy of Nazi Germany, and that I would one day “repent.” I told him mine was a fair question, and that I would appreciate an answer. I didn’t get one. But I had learned an important lesson about how groups like his operate: by evading legitimate queries, and browbeating journalists into retreat by calling them bigots and persecutors.
Dreher then describes a relentless effort by Muslim operatives to get him fired. One of his Dallas Morning News colleagues actually had to have body-guards while he was reporting on the Holy Land Foundation trial.
During the Holy Land Foundation trial, a document was presented as evidence by prosecutors that lays bare what many see as the game-plan of Muslim efforts to turn the United States into a Muslim country. Exhibit GX3-85 is an 18-page “Explanatory Memorandum” that was found by FBI agents in a raid on the home of an Islamist’s house near Washington DC.
As Dreher explains, “It lays out the Muslim Brotherhood’s (Ikhwan) plans to take control of the American Muslim community, to embed itself in civil society, and ultimately prepare the way for a sharia state.”
From the document:
The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.
In an exclusive interview, Dreher told Breitbart News,
Christian-Muslim dialogue is important and necessary, but Christians had better enter into it knowing exactly whom they’re dialoguing with, and what their Muslim dialogue partners stand for. Sayyid Syeed is not the man he presents himself as, nor is the Islamic Society of North America what so many well-meaning Christians think it is. ISNA is a Muslim Brotherhood front group, one whose leaders are highly practiced in the art of saying one thing in public, and another thing in private. They depend for their effectiveness on the ignorance of Western audiences about their ideology and their roots in radical Islam, and on the craven fear a certain kind of American — and a particular sort of churchman — has of looking Islamophobic.
The term “Islamophobic” was developed by brotherhood groups to help their progressive allies look away from evidence of Islamic radicalism, and to instead smear conventional critics of orthodox Islam as demented and crazy.
Dreher says a precondition of talks between the Catholic Church and Muslim groups,
has to be honesty, and a willingness to confront painful truths on both sides. If the Catholic bishops have done their homework on Sayyid Syeed and his organization, then their discussion may well be a combative one, but at least it will be illuminating. But I don’t expect this to happen, not at the San Diego event, or at any event. Far too many Christian leaders really [do not] want to know about the ideological roots, beliefs, and actions of Muslim-American leaders.
Dreher insists and other reporters should underscore that Syeed and his colleagues do not speak for all American Muslims, but are leaders of a radical Islam has insinuated itself into the American Muslim community.
“They don’t speak for all American Muslims, of course, but they are the ones given a platform by Catholic leaders and others,” Dreher said.
“Insofar as these closeted radicals are the only dialogue partners available, it can still be useful to talk to them, but for the sake of the truth, not to say the souls of those martyred by radical Islam, bishops and other Christians should go into these meetings with their eyes wide open and their tongues untied,” Dreher said.
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