August 22, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The notion of the Democrat party - an organization which has at every juncture shown blistering hostility to people of faith - opening their Denver convention this week with an “interfaith” extravaganza is preposterous, a bad joke at best. Likewise their offering up Ingrid Mattson - current president of one of America’s most radical Islamist pressure groups, the Islamic Society of North America - as a representative of the American Muslim community is equally absurd.
ISNA is an American wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian terrorist group and was named last summer as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Hamas terror prosecution, U.S. vs Holy Land Foundation et al.
One might hope that considering the Obama campaign’s significant missteps in dealing dealing with the Muslim world - see for example, Barack Obama’s New Muslim Advisor Cements Campaign’s Ties To Terror Friendly Organizations and Mazen Asbahi, Obama’s Immoderate Muslim Outreach Director, Forced To Resign - that a less antagonistic Muslim could have been found.
Ms. Mattson is an incendiary personality, spreading hate filled intolerance as a pivotal leader in the Muslim Brotherhood linked ISNA, for example, the following March 14, 2007 citation by Charles A. Radin, a staff writer for the Boston Globe:
“CAMBRIDGE - The president of the Islamic Society of North America warned last night that American Jews who ally with right-wing Christians to oppose Muslim organizations are pursuing a high-risk strategy that could backfire. Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, at an event sponsored by the school and four Muslim student organizations, Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian-born convert from Roman Catholicism who became the Islamic society’s first woman president last year, said that many American Jews have an existential fear that Muslims are anti-Israel.
Such fear leads Jews to ally with Christian fundamentalists who are supportive of Israel and critical of Islam, she said.
Right-wing Christians are very risky allies for American Jews,” Mattson said, “because they [the Christians] are really anti-Semitic. They do not like Jews” and enter into the alliance on the basis of fundamentalist beliefs that it would be desirable for all Jews to return to Israel. She suggested that fundamentalist Christians might turn against Jews or that there could be backlash from ordinary Americans against Jewish and fundamentalist Christian supporters of Israel.” [source, http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/03/14/islamic_leader_urges_jews_be_wary_of_fundamentalists/]
As Joel Mowbray wrote in a March 26, 2004, piece in Jewish World Review, “Why are Jews lending legitimacy to dangerous Muslim groups?”“Though Dr. Ingrid Mattson appears moderate, she is insidious precisely because she maintains that façade while steadfastly refusing to criticize radical Islamists, claiming that there is no such thing as Wahhabism and that the term “Islamic terrorism” should not be used in the media. Most shocking of all, though, is how little concern she expressed about suicide bombings in an essay she wrote shortly after 9/11. At a CNN-sponsored “town hall” forum in October 2001, Mattson - with a straight face - claimed that the radical, Saudi-sponsored form of Islam known as Wahhabism was akin to the Protestant movement in Christianity. Wahhabism “really was analogous to the European protestant reformation,” she explained.
This wasn’t an isolated use of the analogy. At a November 2003 roundtable sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies Conference, Mattson said the Wahhabist movement in Islam is “a very old struggle...between the more theologically austere Muslims who like Protestant Christianity believe that there should be no saints there should be no intervention between you and G-d.”
Mattson takes a similar “see no evil” approach to the idea of Islamic terrorism. Mattson was one of several Muslim “scholars” quoted in a Washington Times article shortly after 9/11 who claimed that the media should not use the term “Islamic terrorism.” Mattson took this stance despite the fact, as the Times paraphrased her, that “Islamic terrorists themselves use this term.”
The reason Mattson is able to pass herself off as a moderate is probably because she clears the low bar set for most Muslims: the ability to explicitly condemn suicide bombings. But she hasn’t done so for very long. In a remarkably revealing essay Mattson penned for Beliefnet.com in October 2001, she wrote that, until then, Palestinian suicide bombings “simply did not cross my mind as a priority among the many issues I felt needed to be addressed.” She stated it as matter-of-factly and inconsequentially as someone who apologizes for forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning because it “simply did not cross my mind as a priority.” [source, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0304/mowbray_2004_03_26.php3?printer_friendly]
Under Mattson’s leadership, nothing has been done to moderate ISNA’s radical views, as a matter of fact the organization’s traditional anti-Semitism is on full display as terror authority Joe Kaufman [Chairman of Americans Against Hate] noted in a telephone interview:The Democrat leadership by their actions in giving the Islamist Mattson a prominent speaking role on the first night of the Democrat convention, have granted undeserved legitimacy to her and the organization which she leads, proving that the Democrats remain tone-deaf and incapable of dealing with the greatest challenge that the West is facing, Islamofascism.