It should be noted that the Dallas Morning News report which revealed that Louay Safi, the Development Director for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) had been suspended as a lecturer for the U.S. military pending a criminal inquiry also contained Dr. Safi’s brief response:
Safi said legal assaults on him and other Muslims, even as Washington sought their advice, showed the government’s divided approach to Islam. “There are those who are prejudiced and would like to deny Muslims their rightful place in this country,” Safi said, “and there are people who are more open-minded. It’s as simple as that.”
Dr. Safi has been perhaps the leading voice at ISNA in complaining that criticism of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood is a form of “Muslim bashing.”
A post from yesterday discussed the Dallas Morning News report that revealed the suspension. The report also revealed that ISNA has failed to make good on pledges of financial support for the families of the Ft. Hood shooting victims.
Three days after the Fort Hood massacre, Safi announced that ISNA was launching the Fort Hood Family Fund. “Mosques throughout the country are expected to join fellow Americans in contributing to help the families of the victims,” his news release said. A fund Web site said the initial goal was “to raise $100,000 for immediate relief,” with further amounts invested in a mutual fund. ISNA promised “to maintain full transparency to ensure that your donated dollar gets to its intended destination.” About $55,000 had been collected by early December, Safi told The News . When he went to Fort Hood at the beginning of that month to train officers, Safi took a $10,000 check to the Association of the U.S. Army. Ron Taylor, president of the military-support charity’s regional chapter, said he was grateful for the donation. Safi called him about a week later and promised $100,000 more after learning that The News was asking questions about the money, Taylor added. He said recently that the pledge had not materialized. Taylor admitted to wondering what was going on. And he recalled how Safi described Hasan to him – not as a religiously motivated extremist who planned to kill soldiers but as “someone who just lost it that particular day and did some bad things.”
In November and in connection with the Ft. Hood shooting, Dr,. Safi had complained of “double standards” saying:
As with Timothy McVeigh, the sniper, we focused on the person, not their religion. You wouldn’t take a Christian or a Jewish soldier who did something like this and look at other Christians and Jews and say, ‘Can we trust them?’ ” said Qaseem Uqdah, a former Marine and executive director of the American Muslims in Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council.
A report by the Hudson Institute has identified ISNA as a major part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The organization has a long history of fundamentalism, anti-semitism, and support for terrorism and during the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Although recently ISNA has issued condemnations of terrorism which for the first time identify Hamas and Hezbollah by name, there is no indication that the organization has ever addressed or acknowledged its history.
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The original version of this post cited UPI as a source for Dr. Safi’s response. However, this response had ready been reported in the original Dallas Morning News article which was the basis for the post. We have rewritten the post to take this oversight into account.