Local media is reporting that the head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has made remarks supportive of Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the leader of a radical Detroit-area Islamic group in Canada who was killed in a shootout with the FBI on Wednesday. According to the report:
Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he has a completely different knowledge of Abdullah from his 10 years of association. Walid said that Abdullah, who is married and has children, let homeless people sleep in the group’s mosque and fed people who were hungry. “I know him as a respected imam in the Muslim community,” Walid said. Walid said he and other imams from the local Muslim community plan to sit down today with Andrew Arena, the head of the Detroit FBI office, to talk to him about their concerns about linking the weapons and smuggling charges to the Muslim faith. The indictment repeatedly states that Abdullah cited Islam as a way to justify his calls to violence. Walid criticized any links between the allegations of violence to Islam, saying that the faiths of other defendants in other cases are not relevant. The incident, he said, may inflame already tense relations between federal agencies and those who feel Muslims have been unfairly targeted within their own mosques. “As much as our president says nice, flowery things about Muslims and Islam in Cairo or Istanbul, these types of stories just erode that,” Walid said.
Documents released in the Holy Land Trial have revealed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as identifying the organization itself as being part of the U.S. Brotherhood. A recent post discussed an interview with the Deputy leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in which he confirms a relationship between his organization and CAIR. Investigative research posted on GMBDW had determined that CAIR had it origins in the U.S. Hamas infrastructure and CAIR and its leaders have a long history of defending almost all individuals accused of terrorism by the U.S. government, frequently calling such prosecutions a “war on Islam.” As discussed in previous posts, It appears that the FBI has recently ended its long-standing relationship with CAIR.