US media is reporting that the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has lost its funding from the US Department of Security that it had been receiving as part of a program to counter violent extremism. According to a CNN report:
The Department of Homeland Security is cutting some organizations out of grant money to counter violent extremism — including nearly a dozen that the Obama administration considered worthy of receiving the funds. The department announced the revised list of 26 recipients for the $10 million in total grant money last week, excluding 11 organizations that the Obama administration had designated to receive funding, which aims to foster community-based solutions to countering terrorist recruitment and radicalization….. The Muslim Public Affairs Council, which describes itself as an organization that works to promote “Islamic values of civic engagement, public safety and healthy identity formation,” is another group that lost funding. It said in a statement that it was told it “did not meet the criteria of working with law enforcement to counter violent extremism.” MPAC also said it is “considering all legal options in light of these changes.”
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) was established originally in 1986 as the Political Action Committee of the Islamic Center of Southern California whose leaders had backgrounds suggesting they were associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. A 1989 US Muslim Brotherhood document introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial refers to the last name of one of the MPAC leaders, Mather Hathout, in a list of “Islamic Centers and Groups in the field.” MPAC has since developed into the political lobby arm of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and has opposed almost every counterterrorism action proposed or carried out by the U.S. government, often suggesting that the efforts were aimed at the U.S. Muslim community. MPAC has also acted to support a variety of Palestinian terrorist organizations as well as facilitating a wider range of terrorism by defending or justifying violence carried out by Islamic groups. Nevertheless, MPAC has developed particularly extensive relationships with agencies of the U.S. government including meetings with the Department of Justice and the FBI.
For more on MPAC, go here.
Discussion2 Comments
Stephen Coughlin has been an incisive critic of the entire “Countering Violent Extremism” evasion for years. Clearly it is a pretext to ignore the source of the violence and the true nature of the danger. (Of which overt violence constitutes a very small part.)
The problem with Coughlin and that crowd is that they want to locate the source of the violence in Islam itself as opposed to his Islamism…..this is profoundly wrong and dangerous.