What Ted Cruz Also Gets Right- At Least Somewhat

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The  US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO is complaining that Republic Presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz has refused to meet with a Texas delegation of Muslims sponsored by the organization.According to the USMCO press release:

WASHINGTON, April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — This evening, representatives of the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), a coalition of leading national and local American Muslim groups, will hold a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to condemn the refusal of GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his congressional staff to meet with Muslim constituents during today’s second National Muslim Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill.

Some 330 Muslim delegates from 28 states are meeting with a third of the House of Representatives and almost half of the Senate.

Earlier today, 14 Texas Muslim delegates to the National Muslim Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill tried to meet with either Sen. Cruz or a member of his congressional staff, but were told no one would meet with them. The delegates had tried to arrange a meeting for several weeks prior to today’s event.”

National Muslim Advocacy Day delegates are promoting a legislative agenda in support of equality and social justice, and will outline the domestic priorities of the American Muslim community, including:

Read the rest here

Not surprisingly, the USCMO statement is cleverly deceptive by claiming that Senator Cruz refused to meet with “Muslim constituents.” The statement should actually have said that the Senator refused to meet with Muslims associated with a US Muslim Brotherhood organization. As we reported in March 2014 on the formation of the USCMO, the group is  comprised of eight US Muslim organizations most of which are part of the US Muslim Brotherhood: 

  •  Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA)
  • The Mosque Cares (Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed)

As we earlier  discussed, one of the common tactics of the US Muslim Brotherhood is to construct coalitions of its own front organizations as well as inter-related groups and individuals, giving the appearance that the Brotherhood has more broad-based support than it actually enjoys. The USCMO appears to be the latest in a long series of such coalitions formed by the US Muslim Brotherhood. (A Gallup poll , no longer online but available here, concluded that “No national Muslim American organization represents a large percentage of the community” with CAIR, ICNA, and the Imam W. Deen group  scoring no more than  12, 2, and 3 percent respectively on whether the group represented the respondents interests.) In December 2014, the GMBDW was the first to report that the USCMO had announced plans to hold what was described as the first-of-its-kind National Muslim Advocacy Day. 

In February of this year, we reported that the USCMO had announced that it had held the 1st International Conference of Muslim Councils in the West February 1-3 in Arlington, A and that was described as “a major initiative for Muslims in Western nations” but was in fact the first known large public gathering of the Global Muslim Brotherhood. Participants in the conference we identified at that time included Oussama Jammal, the USCMO Secretary-General, CAIR leader Nihad Awad Anas Altikriti, the most important leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK and Mohammed Kozbar, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Finsbury Mosque in London. Since then, we have further identified conference participants Abdallah Ben Mansour, in a photo captioned only “France representative” but who is in fact the President of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE,) and the the Sveriges Muslimska råd (Swedish Muslim Council), also tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. As we reported, the conference was expected to feature a White House briefing and a visit to the US Congress as well as a banquet to which various government official around the world were to be invited.

Given that the USCMO is so clearly a part of the Global Muslim Brotherhood, a network that demonstrably does not have the interests of the US or the West at heart, the GMBDW sees no particular reason to grant them an audience although it might have been wiser to do so and avoid the publicity that his refusal would clear generate on behalf of the organization. If asked, we would have suggested a public venue for such a meeting where Senator Cruz could have questioned the participants about the nature and ties of the organization. In any event, we judge that the Senator got this one at least partly right just as his woefully inadequate description of Islamism in a recent town hall meeting rightfully made the distinction with the religion of Islam. None of the above should in any way be taken as a GMBDW endorsement of Senator Cruz in any way, shape, or form and for our recent post on the Islamophobic rhetoric of the front-running Republican candidates, go here.

DreamShot

 

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