PLAINTIFF BEHIND TRUMP TRAVEL
BAN RUNS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD MOSQUE, Imam
born and raised in Egypt, migrated to U.S., by Leo Hohmann, 3/16/17, WND
The main plaintiff in the Hawaii
case blocking President Trump’s revised temporary travel ban is an imam with
ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The irony is hard to miss: Trump has
talked about declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and now
it is a Brotherhood-backed imam who is playing a key role in blocking his
executive order on immigration.
Imam Ismail Elshikh, 39, leads the
largest mosque in Hawaii and claims he is suffering “irreparable harm” from the
president’s executive order, which places a 90-day ban on travel to the U.S.
from six countries.
One of those six countries is Syria.
Elshikh’s mother in law is Syrian and would not be able to visit her family in
Hawaii for 90 days if Trump’s ban were allowed to go into effect.
Hawaii’s Obama-appointed federal
judge, Derrick Watson, made sure the ban did not go into effect, striking it
down Wednesday while buying Hawaii’s claim that it amounts to a “Muslim ban.”
The state’s attorney general, along with co-plaintiff Elshikh, claims the ban
would irreparably harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families.
According to the
lawsuit: “Plaintiffs allege that the
Executive Order subjects portions of the State’s population, including Dr.
Elshikh and his family, to discrimination in violation of both the Constitution
and the INA, denying them their right, among other things, to associate with
family members overseas on the basis of their religion and national origin. The
State purports that the Executive Order has injured its institutions, economy,
and sovereign interest in maintaining the separation between church and state.”
The vast majority of Hawaii’s
roughly 5,000 Muslims attend Elshikh’s mosque, the Muslim Association of Hawaii, which is located in a residential area of Manoa,
Honolulu. The mosque, despite its ties to what many believe is an extremist and
subversive organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, may now hold the key to
whether the Trump travel ban passes muster in the federal court system.
Elshikh was born and raised in
Cairo, Egypt, the home base of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal is to
spread Shariah law throughout the world.
The proof that his mosque is
affiliated with the Brotherhood is found in the court records for Honolulu
County, which lists the deed holder as the North American Islamic Trust.
John Guandolo, a former FBI
counter-terrorism specialist and now private consultant to law enforcement
at Understanding
the Threat, said all mosques under the “Muslim
Association of” moniker are typically affiliated with the Brotherhood.
But the clincher in this case is
that the mosque property is traced to NAIT, “confirming it is a Muslim
Brotherhood organization,” Guandolo told WND in an email.
The Trump administration has said it
is considering banning the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. by including it on
the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Meet
Ismail Elshikh, plaintiff in Hawaii’s lawsuit against Trump travel ban
NAIT is one of more than 200
unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation
terrorism-financing trial of 2007-08 in Dallas, Texas. The organization has
direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as documented by the FBI in evidence
presented at the trial. (See Sec.
VII, Page 8 of court document.)
NAIT is a financial subsidiary of
the Islamic Society of North America and holds the deed to more than 325
mosques in 42 U.S. states that are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood,
according to Discover
the Networks.
“Because NAIT controls the purse
strings of these many properties, it can exercise ultimate authority over what
they teach and what activities they conduct. Specifically, the Trust seeks to
ensure that the institutions under its financial influence promote the
principles of Sharia law and Wahhabism,” according to Discover the Networks.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded
in 1928 in Cairo, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna. It has been banned by Egypt’s
current regime, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab
Emirates.
A bill in Congress, the Muslim
Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015-16, has been languishing in
committee since November 2015. House Speaker Paul Ryan has not advanced the
bill or done anything to promote it.
Several members of the Trump
administration have said they favor declaring the Brotherhood a terrorism
organization, but so far that has not happened. One high-level Trump adviser,
Mike Flynn, said he was in favor of banning the Brotherhood before
he was forced to resign for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and other
top White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador
to the United States.
Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson,
described the Brotherhood as “an agent of radical Islam” during his Senate
confirmation hearing.
Former U.N. Ambassador John
Bolton told
Breitbart News last month that the U.S.
should declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
“The fact is, the Brotherhood is a
front for terrorism,” he said. “A number of Arab majority-Muslim countries,
like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have already
designated it as a terrorist organization. I’ve had Muslim leaders from the
Middle East say to me, ‘Are you people blind to what’s going on right in front
of you and the role that the Brotherhood performs, really on an international
basis?’”
But instead of banning the
Brotherhood, the U.S. is letting a Brotherhood-backed imam dictate U.S. refugee
and visa policy, Guandolo said.
Judge Watson, who was a Harvard law
classmate of Barack Obama’s, issued an injunction halting Trump’s executive
order from going into effect, agreeing with Hawaii’s claim that the temporary
ban, 90 days on visa travelers and 120 days for refugees, would irreparably
harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families.
As for refugees, Hawaii takes very
few. Of the 49 states participating in the federal refugee resettlement
program, only Mississippi has taken in fewer refugees than Hawaii since 2002.
Only 127 refugees have been sent to Hawaii since 2002, and nearly zero have
been Muslims from the six nations on Trump’s list. The vast majority sent to
Hawaii have been from Burma and Vietnam.
The six nations on Trump’s list for
a 90-day moratorium on visas and a 120-day pause on refugee resettlement are
Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia.
Of the 127 refugees Hawaii has taken
since the State Department started keeping online records in 2002, only one refugee
has been from a country on Trump’s list, Iran, according to the State
Department’s Refugee Processing Center database.
“There was one refugee from Iran who
went to Hawaii and that probably was a Christian. That is the majority of what
we are taking from Iran are Christians,” said Ann Corcoran, editor of Refugee Resettlement
Watch, which has been tracking
resettlements in the U.S. for the past 10 years. “The biggest group were from
Burma and Vietnam, and there were none from Africa, so what we have in Hawaii
are a bunch of hypocrites whining about ‘irreparable harm’ from pausing refugee
resettlement when, in fact, they take hardly any refugees and almost no Muslim
refugees.”
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