Uh oh. Congress Keith Ellison is going to be feeling it for a while. The Strib’s Kevin Diazhas a hefty piece this morning expanding on the interaction with a local Muslim group that picked up the tab for Ellison’s trip to Mecca last fall. Ellison didn’t want to say much about the religious visit at the time, but now he’s got the House Ethics Committee sniffing around the organization that paid for it, etc. Oh, and the organization that paid for it is ... the Muslim American Society, which gets a chunk of its income from ... wait for it .. Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA),the Inver Grove Heights charter school of Katherine Kersten fame. (For months the former Strib columnist feasted on TiZA like a lone wolf on a moose carcass.)
Reports Diaz, “TiZA has been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and probed by state officials for allegedly promoting Islam, which would violate the church and state separation required of public schools -- including charter schools. The school received state funding to pay rent to the Muslim American Society Property Holding Corp., a nonprofit spinoff of the Muslim American Society that owned the building. The corporation then turned over $879,000 to the Muslim society as a grant.” I don’t know what falls from heaven in Mecca, but this is manna to every right-wing talk radio host in town.
