RECOMMENDED READING: The Silencing

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Blogger Martin Solomon has published a useful account of the events and controversy surrounding the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) which in May agreed to drop a lawsuit alleging that 16 individuals and entities, including The Boston Herald and Fox 25-TV, conspired to publish and broadcast false and defamatory statements about the society. According to local media reports, the lawsuit claimed that the news organizations and Jewish advocacy groups orchestrated a media campaign to stop the construction of a new mosque associated with the ISB. Of particular interest in Solomon’s account of the affair are the connections of the ISB to the global Muslim Brotherhood leaders Youssef Qaradawi, Abdurahman Alamoudi, and Solah Soltan:

Qaradawi, according to the Herald, was listed as an ISB board member for at least three years, and was, and still is, a proposed trustee on the real estate trust as well. …They claim no significant connections to either Alamoudi or Qaradawi. In fact, they claim no contact with Alamoudi since he left Boston in 1984, though discovery brought about by the ISB’s lawsuit (more on that later) has uncovered a check on behalf of the ISB to pay Alamoudi’s expenses for a speaking engagement in late 2000, and ISB Trustee Osama Kandil (himself targeted in the Herald series with accusations denied by the ISB) signed the “Free Abdurahman Alamoudi” petition — a petition that calls the terror-supporting Alamoudi “our community leader” — sometime in ‘03 or ‘04.Following the ISB’s denial of a Qaradawi connection, the Herald uncovered the fact that the Sheik’s endorsement was used in an Arabic-only fundraising brochure in 2003 which the paper obtained and had independently translated. Other apparent connections to radicals have plagued the Mosque. For instance, the group has invited the Muslim Brotherhood connected Dr. Salah Soltan as a speaker. Soltan is an advocate for suicide bombing, and has praised terrorist Sheik Al-Zindani among other things. Another society guest has been Imam Siraj Wahaj, a character witness for the “blind sheik” Omar Rahman, and a man who “calls for replacing the American government with a caliphate.”

Solomon also points about connections between the ISB and the Muslim American Society (MAS), a lesser known part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood:

The overlap between the Muslim American Society and ISB is so great that it’s difficult to unravel where one group ends and the other begins. Until very recently, the ISB shared space with the local chapter of the Muslim American Society, the ISB’s email list is now hosted and run by the MAS, and commentators have noted what a considerable amount overlap there is among the leadership of local Muslim groups overall.

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