The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has announced that Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati traveled to Europe last month at the invitation of the State Department to speak about religious freedom and free speech. According to the report:
Last week, Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati traveled to Europe at the invitation of the State Department to speak about religious freedom and free speech. He spoke at UNESCO in Paris and at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Geneva. Al-Marayati explained that religious freedom and free speech are opposite sides of the same coin of human rights. Given the alarming degree of Islamophobia in Europe, some Muslim countries have sought to pass anti-defamation legislation to counter anti-Islamic rhetoric. In Geneva, Al-Marayati told a group of Muslim ambassadors that legislation will not resolve the problem of Islamophobia, but rather, engagement in the political, social and cultural arenas of any society. The Quran chronicles attacks against the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) without suppressing free speech.Ê Instead, the good work of the early Muslims replaced the negative stereotypes that others imposed on them. The same applies in this day and age. Many of the ambassadors were thankful for Al-Marayati’s perspective on this issue and for working to bridge the divide between Muslim and Western countries.
MPAC was established initially in 1986 as the Political Action Committee of the Islamic Center of Southern California whose key leaders likely had their origins in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Since that time, MPAC has functioned as the political lobbying arm of the U.S. Brotherhood. MPAC has opposed virtually every count-terror initiative undertaken or proposed by the U.S. government. At times this opposition was said to be on civil-rights grounds but, just as often, MPAC claimed that U.S. counter-terror efforts were aimed at the U.S. Muslim community itself. MPAC has constructed and consistently espoused an elaborate ideology defending the use of violence by Islamists and Islamist organizations. More than any other U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organization, MPAC has developed extensive relationships with the U.S. government which have included numerous meetings with the Department of Justice and the FBI.