A Saudi English-language newspaper has claimed that Mazen Asbahi, the former Obama campaign Muslim outreach advisor, was forced to resign because of pressure from “the Wall Street Journal and many Zionist writers” who targeted him because he was a Muslim. According to the report:
Last week, a Chicago attorney, Mazen Asbahi, who had served as the official volunteer coordinator for the Barack Obama presidential campaign since July 25 of this year resigned from that position. Asbahi, who had served as a liaison to both the Muslim-American and Arab-American communities for the campaign, stepped down due to pressure from the US national media, notably the Wall Street Journal, and many American Zionist writers regarding his questionable “affiliations” with Muslim individuals and organizations in the US. These relationships that the writers alleged were full of racist and ethnic innuendos about Arabs and Muslims and very little fact. The main concern from these pundits seemed to be that Asbahi was a Muslim and after all….Absahi issued a statement when he resigned saying, “I am stepping down from the volunteer role I recently agreed to take on with the Obama campaign as Arab-American and Muslim-American coordinator in order to avoid distracting from Barack Obama’s message of change.” Can you image how outraged the American media would be if someone was forced to resign from a campaign because they were Jewish or Catholic or any other religion of note. And they should be outraged if that would happen. But why no outrage if one happens to be Muslim? And why is it so important for everyone from the moderate right to the far left on the American political spectrum to point out that Obama is not Muslim.
The article does not explain how anybody could have reasonably expected that a Muslim outreach coordinator would not be Muslim or the absence of criticism directed against Asbahi’s replacement, also a Muslim.
Asbahi actually resigned before any media reports or blogs discussed his ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood which were first revealed by the GMBDW. As discussed in an earlier post, the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters appear to have mounted a campaign to assert that Asbahi was forced out by a campaign mounted against him by “extremist right-wing bloggers”, a charge that has already been statistically disproved. The charge that “racist and ethnic innuendos about Arabs and Muslims” were made during the affair is a further escalation of the rhetoric issued by the U.S. Brotherhood for consumption in the Arab world.
The writer, MIchael Saba, is likely the same individual individual identified as the Executive Director of Friends of Saudi Arabia (FSA), described in a publication with apparent ties to Saudi-Arabia as:
…a non-profit entity dedicated to establishing goodwill and friendship between the people of Saudi Arabia and people of other countries and cultures.
Mr. Saba is also a former director of the National Association of Arab-Americans. According to MIddle Eastern media, FSA was formed by a grandson of the late Saudi King Fahd and Delano Roosevelt, the grandson of FDR and described as a senior adviser to the Jeddah-based technology and energy think tank Xenel Industries Ltd. In 2006, the Embassy of Saudi Arabia reported that Crown Prince Sultan was planning to donate one million dollars to support the activities of the FSA.