Claim: "Islamic Speakers Bureau Backed By Radical Profs"
A California nonprofit dedicated to"teaching about Islam & Muslims" at U.S. high schools and college campuses features a board of advisors that is stacked with some of the most controversial activist professors in the field of Middle Eastern studies today. The imprimatur of these scholars may signal a troubling shift toward the support of proselytizing efforts and the further unraveling of Middle East Studies in America.
The board of Islamic Networks Group (ING) is a veritable Who's Who of Islamist apologists and activists. Leading the list is John Esposito, the founding director of the Saudi-funded Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He famously stated that the suicide-bombing Hamas organization engages in"honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture."
Joining Esposito on the ING board is Sherman Jackson of the University of Michigan, who was a trustee at the North American Islamic Trust and worked with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both un-indicted co-conspirators in the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation.
There's also Ingrid Mattson, a convert to Islam, who is a professor at the Hartford Seminary and president of the un-indicted co-conspirator ISNA. While much of her work is controversial, she is famous for a CNN chatroom interview in 2001 in which she stated that the radical Saudi Wahhabi ideology is"a reform movement" that"really was analogous to the European Protestant reformation."
Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who is not a scholar but sits on the ING board, publicly declared his own extremism at an ISNA convention. In 1991, he reportedly delivered a speech titled"Jihad is the Only Way" to the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), which is an arm of the radical organization Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan.
While Maha El-Genaidi, the founder, president and CEO of ING, does not appear openly to embrace radicalism, she reportedly has worked with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), also an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. El-Genaidi also participated in an event sponsored by the Muslim Students Association with Siraj Wahhaj, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing....