Sheikh Gilani (Photo of US Capitol: Stefan Zaklin/Getty Images)
UPDATE: Tahirah Amatul-Wadud lost the Democratic primary to the incumbent. Neal won with 71% of the vote (49,654 votes) .Amatul-Wadud still managed to win 29% (20,508 votes), a remarkable success given her background. There was only minor critical media coverage of her candidacy that mentioned her extremist links and donations from outside of the state, particularly from Hancock, NY, where MOA’s headquarters is located.
MOA’s newspaper argued that her loss was still somewhat of a political victory, as Rep. Neal’s campaign had 26 times as much money and he is a 30-year incumbent. MOA boasts that she won the backing of “Massachusetts Peace Action, National Women’s Political Caucus, the Progressive Democrats of America, Pittsfield City Councilor Helen Moon, and a host of others.”
At least two members of the jihadi cult Jamaat ul-Fuqra, also known as Muslims of the Americas, ran for office for this year.
The member running for Congress in Alaska recently ended his campaign after Clarion Project’s expose on him was published, but Fuqra’s congressional candidate in Massachusetts is still fighting to win the Democratic primary on September 4. She has garnered fawning media coverage that fails to mention the documented extremism of Fuqra, the ongoing federal investigation into the group or legitimate concerns about her ideology.
Alaskan Congressional Candidacy Ends
The Must Read Alaska website reports that Gregory Jones, an admitted member of Fuqra/Muslims of the Americas (MOA), has ended his campaign for the Democratic primary. The Alaska Division of Elections website now lists him as a withdrawn candidate.
The author of Must Read Alaska confirmed to the Clarion Project that Jones ended his candidacy after we published our expose, though there is no way to confirm a causal relationship.
Our expose included included newly-declassified FBI documents showing deep concern about MOA activity in Alaska and that a counter-terrorism investigation was launched from 2009 to 2011 and may have been revived since.
In 2016, Clarion Project broke the story that Jones, an admitted MOA member who has met with their radical leader in Pakistan, was a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention. He also ran for the state House in District 8 and, although he lost, received 18 percent of the vote.
During that campaign, Assemblywoman Amy Demboski mentioned our research and was depicted as a state-wide villain by the Alaskan media. The Alaskan Democratic Party upheld Jones as a near martyr, victimized by Demboski’s anti-Muslim bigotry.
Our article with these documents vindicated her, but to date, not a single media outlet has reported on the revelations. Nor has anyone apologized to her.
Jones himself said that the author of Clarion’s expose, Ryan Mauro, should be prosecuted for “hate speech and harassment.” He also called Mauro “a bigot and racist.”
A FBI spokesperson responded to the controversy by saying it was not aware of a militant Islamist compound in Alaska, which was interpreted as a clearing of Jones’ name. In actuality, MOA itself said it was setting up an “Islamic village” in Alaska. At any rate, the status of that project had no bearing on whether the public should be concerned about Jones’ membership in MOA.
Now we know from newly-declassified FBI documents that there was a counter-terrorism investigation into MOA from 2009 to 2011 and that it may have been revived since. FBI documents made it clear that the bureau views MOA as an extremist threat, even if it could not find evidence of illegal activity to justify continuing the investigation at that time.
MOA/CAIR Congressional Candidacy in Massachusetts Marches Forward
In Massachusetts, the MOA candidacy of Tahirah Amatul-Wadud has made the ballot by collecting over 2,300 signatures for the 1st Congressional District’s Democratic Party primary on September 4. She is challenging the incumbent, Rep. Richard Neal.
Amatul-Wadud is challenging Neal from the left as a progressive, despite the extremely un-progressive ideology of MOA and her spiritual leader in Pakistan, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani. Rep. Neal has held the seat since 1988, enabling Amatul-Wadud to benefit from the anti-establishment political environment.
Her campaign website boasts that she’s the first African-American Muslim woman to run for Congress, but makes no mention of the Islamist groups she chooses to belong to.
In November 2015, Amatul-Wadud posted an article on Facebook by Sheikh Gilani that was filled with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even drew moral equivalence between Hitler and his Jewish victims, suggesting that the U.S. was misled into going to war with Nazi Germany.
The article reads:
“There was no need for America to go to war against Hitler. Hitler was not the enemy of America or the American people. There was a mutual animosity between Hitler and the Jews. So, the American people paid a very heavy price for fighting someone else’s war.”
Her leader’s article then suggests that a Zionist conspiracy orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Al-Qaeda’s attack on 9/11 to get the U.S. to attack Muslim countries, a common theme in MOA materials.
“Many government agencies want the world to believe that Osama Bin Laden destroyed the World Trade Center…it was the job of insiders,” it says.
Amatul-Wadud is also a board member of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the U.S. Justice Department has identified as an “entity” of the Muslim Brotherhood with links to Hamas.
Despite ideological differences, CAIR and MOA have been getting closer and closer.
Federal prosecutors said in a 2008 court filing:
“From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”
MOA responded to Clarion’s original article about Amatul-Wadud’s candidacy with an article attacking the author as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
The local media coverage of Amatul-Wadud has been wholly positive, without ever once pressing her about why she remains loyal to Sheikh Gilani and MOA.
Voters make their choices based on an array of issues and preferences. Links to an Islamist group like MOA should be a factor in a primary voter’s mind.
In addition, a progressive voter in the primary must ask the question, “What is progressive about MOA and Sheikh Gilani?”
Listen to Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro talk about Fuqra and the candidates on The Glenn Beck Program (Mauro comes on the show at 14:55 minutes):
video
