A Tunisian radio website is reporting that Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood leader Rachid Ghannouchi will be speaking in Washington DC this Tuesday as a guest of honor at an event organized by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). According to the announcement:
February 21, 2014 Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi, will speak, as a guest of honor, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014, at a conference held at the Mayflower Hotel (Washington DC – USA) to celebrate the Tunisian Constitution. This event is organized by the Centre for the Study of Islam and (Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy) Democracy, CSID, chaired by Radhouane Masmoudi, and the National Council on US-Arab Relations.
The GMBDW reported in June 2013 June that Rachid Ghannouchi was the keynote speaker at the CSID’s 14 Annual Conference.
Rachid Ghannouchi (many spelling variations) is the head of the Tunisian Ennahda Party, essentially the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia. Mr. Ghannouchi has been a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and is currently and Assistant Secretary-General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), both organizations led by Global Muslim Brotherhood Youssef Qaradawi. In2009, an Egyptian news report referred to Ghannouchi as a leader of the MB “abroad.” Ghannouchi is also one of the founding members of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a Saudi organization closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and dedicated to the propagation of “Wahabist” Islam throughout the world. Ghannouchi is known for his thinking on the issue of Islam and citizenship rights. In January 2011, Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia after a long exile in the U.K and two weeks after the Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben was forced from power in the events which triggered the “Arab Spring.” Mr. Ghannouchi gave a 2011 Arabic-language interview in which he predicts the end of Israel, a viewpoint which is not surprising given that he has had a long history of ties to Palestinian extremism and calls for terrorism. From 1988-92, the Islamic Committee for Palestine organized conferences and rallies in the United States that featured the leading figures from Islamic extremist movements throughout the world. One example of such a conference took place in Chicago from December 22-25, 1989 and featured Mr. Gahannouchi as a speaker. Its theme was “Palestine, Intifada, and Horizons of Islamic Renaissance” and other speakers included Abd Al-‘Aziz Al’Awda, the “spiritual leader” of Islamic Jihad and Muhammad ‘Umar of Hizb Al-Tahrir, the Islamic Liberation Party.
For more on the extremist background of Rachid Ghannouchi, go here.
The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) was founded in 1998 in what appears to have been a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign affairs analyst” and who has at least a dozen past or present affiliations with global Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas organizations. Our predecessor publication reported in June 2013 reported that Radwan Masmoudi, the founder and President of CSID, had lost his bid to become the Tunisian ambassador to the U.S. Our predecessor publication had reported in January 2013 that Masmoudi, was being considered for the post. In the media report discussed in that post, Masmoudi also acknowledgec for the first time that he has been a part of the Ennahda movement since the 1980’s.