♻RetweetIslamists in Ohio
Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 12:00:49 pm PDT
Patrick Poole exposes some of the latest activities of Siraj Wahhaj, the Brooklyn-based radical imam named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; he’s been helping to raise funds for the Sunrise Academy Islamic school in Central Ohio: Hometown Jihad: The School Gym that Terror Built.
Another Islamic extremist associated with The Sunrise Academy is Salah Sultan, featured in a video in this LGF post from last year, telling a Kuwaiti television interviewer that the 9/11 attacks were planned by the US government.
As I have noted earlier in an earlier article here at FrontPage (“CAIR’s Blood Money”), Wahhaj’s fundraising prowess in Central Ohio has been impressive. Last summer when CAIR-OH brought Wahhaj in as keynote speaker at their annual banquet held in Dublin, Ohio (immediately due north of Hilliard), CAIR-OH raised a whopping $100,000, a fact touted in a press release published on CAIR’s own website.
This success by CAIR-OH, along with Sunrise Academy’s previous fundraiser for their sports complex, is probably what prompted the leadership of the school to bring Wahhaj back for yet another fundraising dinner on February 16, 2007, sponsored by a local Columbus mosque, Masjid Abubakar Al Siddique, and held at the school.
The leadership of Sunrise Academy might have reason to believe that it is insulated from criticism of its promotion of extremism. Immediately following my original “Hometown Jihad” article, noting Salah Sultan’s continued operations out of Sunrise Academy despite his direct connections to terrorist supporters and organizations, the school enlisted the help of the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio (IACO) and the local print media to help coordinate retaliatory responses against myself and FrontPage Magazine. IACO’s President Les Stansbury responded immediately by circulating the aforementioned email by Sunrise Academy middle school science teacher Norma Tarazi, which accused me of endangering the school’s children and characterizing my article as “hate speech”, to various media outlets.
I noted in a follow-up article, “Hometown Jihad: Blowback”, that Columbus Dispatch religion reporter Felix Hoover also rallied to Sunrise’s cause, responding to IACO and Tarazi’s email plea by publishing an extensive whitewash of Sunrise Academy and Salah Sultan, “Muslim Milestone”, that likened FrontPage as a neo-Nazi white power front advocating for the reestablishment of an “overwhelmingly Christian and overwhelmingly white heritage”. Hoover’s article also served as a plug for Sunrise’s open house, a hastily organized event which the school admitted was in response to my initial FrontPage “Hometown Jihad” article.
The Columbus Dispatch’s lengthy 1,340-word defense of the school, which went out of its way to describe Salah Sultan as a terror-condemning, moderate Muslim, was published just days before Sultan was recorded by MEMRI giving an interview to the Saudi Al-Risala TV, where he claimed that 9/11 was planned by the US government to launch a war on Islam and he praised the Yemeni al-Qaeda cleric Al-Zindani. Al-Zindani is also listed along with Sultan’s mentor, Youssef Al-Qaradawi, as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the US government and prohibited from entering the country. MEMRI provides a complete transcript and video of Sultan’s Al-Risala interview.
The Columbus Dispatch piece was quickly followed-up with a glowing article by Khalila Perrin in the local Hilliard Northwest News, “Islamic school celebrates 10 years of growth”, which also plugged the Sunrise Academy open house, but made no mention of the school’s Salah Sultan controversy. To date, not a single critical word of Sunrise Academy has been issued by the Columbus-area print or TV media establishment.
Frank says:
