Australian media is reporting on the Global Muslim Brotherhood ties of the Australian Islamic Mission, an organization headquartered in a suburb of Sydney. The report by The Australian begins:
October 17, 2015 The proposal by Australian Islamic Mission to build a $3 million mosque in rural Bendigo has already attracted an unsavoury crowd of protesters.
But that may not be the worst of it. Some of the people associated with AIM are so extreme they have been denied visas to the US and the UK.
For AIM’s 2014 and 2015 conferences the leading speaker is Dr. Anas Al-Tikriti, founder of the Cordoba Foundation, UK.
In August 2009, the Cordoba Foundation sponsored an event with Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, a senior recruiter for Al-Qaeda who was killed in a drone strike in 2011.
Al-Awlaki has quite a CV. He preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers, corresponded with Nidal Malik Hasan before the Army psychiatrist went on a shooting rampage in Fort Hood, and was linked to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a US airliner.
Last year, HSBC closed Al-Tikriti’s bank accounts and those of the Cordoba Foundation because, it said, to continue to provide these services was outside the bank’s ‘risk appetite’.
Another speaker at the AIM 2014 conference was Yvonne Ridley, an activist with the UK Respect party. Ridley called the Chechen architect of the Beslan school massacre ‘a martyr’ and said, ‘drinking coca cola is like drinking the blood of Palestinian children.’
In June 2010, Dr. Tareq Al-Suwaidan was the guest speaker at an AIM fundraising dinner. On a second visit to Australia in 2012, Al-Suwaidan said Islam would ‘conquer the world’ and that the Muslim community had only one hope, to love the afterlife and ‘be ready to die’.
Read the rest here.
The report goes on to note that AIM’s Victoria’s Facebook page also shared a photo of the book Fiqh al-Zakah by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, with the exhortation “Read to understand.”
In September 2014, AIM also featured Isam al-Bashir who was scheduled to lecture at a local mosque. Dr. Bashir is an important leader in the Global Muslim Brotherhood living in the Sudan.
For a profile on Tariq Suwaidan, go here.
For a profile on Youssef Qaradawi, go here.
For a profile on Isam Al-Bashir, go here.
(The GMBDW notes that this is our first report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Australia.)