The US Agency for International Development (USAID) held a Muslim Outreach Seminar today:

Islam 101

We know foreign assistance can improve understanding with the Muslim world.
—Amb. Randall Tobias, USAID Administrator

Working with struggling democracies, promoting citizen participation and strengthening basic services, USAID is strategically appealing to the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide.

In order to better understand the countries in which we work, the Office of South Asian Affairs invites you to a comprehensive seminar on Islam and its practices.

Sounds good. Who could object. But unfortunately, the seminar’s guest speaker was a representative of an Islamist front group:

Guest Speaker: Ahmed Younis
National Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council

The New York Post reports that on July 14, 2002, Ahmed Younis gave a speech in Irvine and implicitly supported the murder of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft:

July 4, 2005 — WASHINGTON — A nationwide FBI project designed to improve ties between the Islamic and law-enforcement communities went horribly wrong when it was revealed the organizations have issued incendiary statements against the United States, The Post has learned.

Questions are being raised by counterterrorism officials — including FBI field agents — over the bureau’s high-profile involvement in a program called Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative, which is being run out of Northeastern University.

Among the groups participating in the project is the Muslim Public Affairs Council — an organization whose members have claimed Israel was to blame for 9/11, have opposed freezing the assets of Islamic charities linked to terrorism and have denounced several FBI arrests of suspected terrorists in the United States.

Steven Emerson, whose Investigative Project think tank studies Islamic extremism in the United States, released a tape of a speech MPAC National Director Ahmed Younis gave in Irvine, Calif., on July 14, 2002, in which he directed incendiary comments at then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

“I am a person who believes that if Thomas Jefferson or Madison or the like were alive today, they would go to John Ashcroft’s house and just shoot him,” Younis said, according to the tape.

For more on MPAC: lgf: search.