FIGHTING THE CAMPUS WAR AGAINST ISRAEL AND THE JEWS
John Perazzo
FrontPage Magazine, August 11, 2009

The Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA) has chapters at nearly 600 colleges and universities across North America. Treated by administrators and student governments alike as a respectable political organization, the MSA has, over the past few years, sponsored a series of vile expressions of Jew-hatred in a variety of campus and non-campus venues. A few examples serve to illustrate the content of the MSA's character: In October 2000, the president of UCLA's MSA led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of "Death to Israel!" and "Death to the Jews!" At UCLA's annual "Anti-Zionist Week" festivities, rank-and-file MSA members have raised money for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, who are solemnly sworn to the mass murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel. At its Annual Conference in 2003, the Iowa MSA invited, as a guest speaker, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad -- on record as a proud "supporter of the Hamas movement." Alkalima, the newspaper of UC Irvine's Muslim Student Union (an MSA campus affiliate), once published a special report called "Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid," which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression. At the 7th annual MSA West Conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2005, former MSA member Ahmed Shama praised Hamas and Hezbollah for being "uncompromising" on their principles, and for refusing to "shake hands with the other side." MSA's Muhammad al-Asi is a frequent guest speaker on university campuses; his hatred of Israel is his trademark theme. In an article titled "The Qur'an Says Zionist Israel Will Be Shattered," al-Asi wrote: "The prophet of Allah...summed it up when he said: 'The final hour shall not commence until the Muslims engage Yahud [Jew] in warfare. And the Muslims will deal the deathblow to Yahud....'" Appearing as a guest speaker at UC Irvine, al-Asi stated: "We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly [sic] with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in Occupied Palestine." Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, formerly a community activist and currently an Oakland, California-based Imam, is a frequent guest lecturer at MSA events. A passionate supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, he endorses suicide bombings as a legitimate "resistance" tactic: "Palestinian mothers are supporting their children who are suicide bombers, saying, 'Go honey, go!' That ain't suicide; that's martyrdom." In a May 2006 appearance at UC Irvine, Malik-Ali accused the "apartheid State of Israel" of carrying out a "holocaust" and a "genocide" against the Palestinian people. Referring to Jews as "new Nazis" and "a bunch of straight-up punks," he told Jews directly: "The truth of the matter is your days are numbered. We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious." Imam Abdul Alim Musa, founder and director of the As-Sabiqun movement (which seeks to recreate an Islamic caliphate), is another frequent speaker at MSA events. During a May 9, 2007 "Islamic Revival" at UC Irvine, Musa said: "Who ran the slave trade...who funded [it]? You'll study and you will find out: the Jews.... It was the Jewish bankers...in Vienna, with pockets full of money, funding and insuring, that's who did it." In June 2007, Musa held the U.S. and Israel jointly culpable for both attacks on the World Trade Center (in 1993 and 2001). The racist anti-Semitism that rolls off the tongues of each of the foregoing speakers is also the defining feature of the organization that has anointed them as its leading mouthpieces. Established in January 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the MSA is the most well-known and influential Islamic student organization in North America. Neither its benign-sounding name nor its professed objective -- "to serve the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada" -- betray any hint of its repugnant ideology or its radical Islamic roots. MSA was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather organization to Hamas and al Qaeda. In fact, MSA (according to documents confiscated by the FBI) was named explicitly in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood's likeminded "organizations of our friends" who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation.... In its earliest days, MSA was financed largely by Saudi Arabia. In return, the organization promoted the kingdom's extremist Wahhabi strain of Islam.... Wahhabi textbooks do not recognize Israel as a sovereign state and do not show it, by name, on any map. Instead, all maps bear the name "Palestine." From its inception, MSA had close links with the extremist Muslim World League, whose chapters' websites have featured Osama bin Laden's propaganda. MSA formerly solicited donations for the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001 because that organization was giving financial support to the genocidal barbarians of Hamas. MSA also has strong ties to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which serves as a vehicle through which the Saudi government funds Islamic extremism and international terrorism. WAMY was co-founded by a former senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and by Osama bin Laden's nephew. Moreover, WAMY raises funds for Hamas. A Saudi opposition group reports that WAMY disseminates literature encouraging "religious hatred and violence against Jews, Christians, Shi'a and Ashaari Muslims." As WAMY puts it, this literature is expressly designed "to teach our children to love taking revenge on the Jews and the oppressors, and teach them that our youngsters will liberate Palestine and Jerusalem when they go back to Islam and make jihad for the sake of Allah." A number of noxious organizations have splintered off from MSA, including: the Muslim Arab Youth Association (a now-defunct group that sponsored conferences featuring known Islamic terrorists as guest speakers); the Islamic Circle of North America (currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for possible connections to Islamic terrorist groups); and the Islamic Society of North America (created by MSA with the help of Sami Al-Arian, former North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad). The MSA uses the current obsession with "diversity" in American higher education as a form of protective coloration to conceal its goals. Not all of the MSA's rank-and-file members are aware of the organization's roots as an anti-Semitic hate organization. Some, in fact, are under the impression that they have simply joined a fraternity of sorts, dedicated to cultivating friendships, promoting outreach, and fostering interfaith understanding on campus. And indeed, not all MSA campus chapters are equally radical. But the national MSA, which serves as the umbrella group for the various campus MSAs, is a veritable training ground for those shock troops who spearhead the campus war against Israel and the Jews.