Author: Stephen Schwartz
Publication: NationalReview.com
Date: March 11, 2003
What is the real nature of the Muslim
Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA)? This octopus-like entity
has infiltrated numerous college and university campuses in North America,
and has taken the lead in corralling young Muslims to defend the fascist
dictator Saddam Hussein. According to MSA, the correct position for Muslims
in America involves their marching alongside neofascists and Stalinists,
with the legions of "useful fools" who flock to bogus "peace" demonstrations.
When its leaders speak to mainstream
media, MSA presents itself as a campus-service organization not much different
from other collegiate faith groups. But the reality is very different,
and deeply sinister. MSA is a key element in the Wahhabi lobby, and a cornerstone
of the conspiracy by Saudi-backed extremists to control American Islam,
as well the public discourse about Islam in America.
Above all, MSA now seeks to present
itself as moderate and opposed to terrorism, even though its chapters have
distributed the propaganda of Osama bin Laden on its websites, along with
publicity-recruiting campaigns for Wahhabi subversion of the Chechen struggle
in Russia.
To best understand the MSA and its
history one should turn to the work of Hamid Algar, a Western Muslim scholar
of impeccable academic credentials, who also happens to be a ferocious
critic of the U.S. and Israel. Algar, a member of the University of California-Berkeley
faculty, is the biographer of Ayatollah Khomeini and among the leading
historians of Islamic spirituality alive today.
But although he is no friend of
President Bush or Ariel Sharon, Algar has described with stunning accuracy
the nature of the MSA. In his brief work Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, published
in 2002, he writes: "Some Muslim student organizations have. functioned
at times as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad,
especially in the United States. The Muslim Student Association of the
U.S. and Canada was established in 1963, one year after the Muslim World
League [MWL] with which it had close links." Let us note here that the
MWL was established by the Saudi regime as an extremist Islamic equivalent
of the old Communist International or Comintern, and that its cadres included
numerous Islamist "revolutionaries" from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
and from Pakistan.
Algar continues, "Particularly in
the 1960s and 1970s, no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at
the annual conventions of the MSA. Its numerous local chapters would make
available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the [MWL]'s publications,
in both English and Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified
its connections with Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained
strong." Algar notes that in 1980 the organization published a translation,
which was actually a text puffed up to give it more substance, of writings
by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th century founder of the dispensation named
for him, which is presently the state sect in the Saudi kingdom.
With some sarcasm, Algar points
out "it might appear at first sight puzzling that students pursuing a higher
education should be attracted to a Wahhabi reading of Islam. they found
in Wahhabism a 'rationalized' Islam, stripped of the niceties and ambiguities
of juristic reasoning, the complexities of theology, and the subtleties
of Sufism" [Islamic spirituality]. He calls attention to MSA's role in
the creation of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, which is
best described as a branch of the Saudi religious militia operating to
impose Wahhabi conformity on all of American Islam.
In addition, the MSA has strong
ties with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), established in 1972
and directed from the Saudi capital, Riyadh. WAMY's U.S. offices in Northern
Virginia have been a central target of the federal investigation of terrorist
funding and money laundering by Islamist groups following the horrors of
September 11th.
The foremost aim of the Wahhabis
is always to impose a single voice on Muslims. Right now, this means projecting
the image, in U.S. media as well as on campuses, that all right-thinking
Muslim believers consider an attack on Saddam and his regime to be aggression
against Islam. This is a lie. Thousands of Iraqi Shias, Kurds, and other
Muslims in the U.S. support the Bush project for the liberation of Iraq
from the fascist regime, and for the broader liberation of Islamic societies
from the grip of tyranny and terrorism, leading to a new epoch of democracy,
prosperity, and stability.
This month, Shia Muslims in the
New York area will use their commemoration of Ashura, the main Shia holiday,
as an opportunity to express loyalty to America, support for the removal
of Saddam, and opposition to Saudi-funded terrorism - which has always
aimed first to kill Shia Muslims. But you won't hear that from MSA chapter
leaders on our campuses - just as you won't hear from International ANSWER,
the Stalinofascist cabal that organizes pro-Saddam marches, about the crimes
of the Butcher of Baghdad. Like the new breed of out-front Jew-baiting
Stalinists, and the revived isolationist Judeophobes who see the hand of
Sharon pulling President Bush's strings, MSA stands for the "peace" of
the grave - surrender to tyranny abroad and promotion of treason here at
home.
(Stephen Schwartz, an author and
journalist, is author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from
Tradition to Terror. A vociferous critic of Wahhabism, Schwartz is a frequent
contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.)
