Government bodies must investigate Texas K-12 schools established and run by persons and organizations with direct ties to designated terrorist organizations, urge leading reformist Muslim voices.
Following the Middle East Forum’s January report on Islamist efforts to secure public funding in Texas, a new investigation indicates that a private Islamist-run school and radical curricula provider in the Dallas suburbs, previously established and staffed by Hamas-aligned operatives, are today teaching children hatred of “disbelievers” and lauding the work of banned terror charities.
Previous school staff appear to have included two close relatives of the Doha-based Hamas leader Khaled Mishal, family members of convicted terrorists, a deported Hamas operative, and an unindicted co-conspirator in America’s largest terror financing trial.
Radical Curricula
Brighter Horizons Academy, based in the city of Garland, is a subsidiary of the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF), a leading Islamist curricula publisher that produces and disseminates textbooks, written by leading Islamist operatives, to private Islamist-run schools across the country.
ISF curricula and textbooks, which are used at its Brighter Horizons Academy, include a series of publications with names such as “I Love Islam,” “Learning Islam,” and “Living Islam.” Several of the textbooks acquired by the Middle East Forum teach young children open hatred towards non-Muslims.
I Love Islam: Level 2 preaches: “Those who reject (truth), among the People of the Book and among the pagans, will be in the Hellfire, to stay there. They are the worst of creatures.”
The ISF textbook does not offer any additional commentary, other than to describe the language as “words of wisdom.”
The ISF’s Level 5 and 6 textbooks offer non-scriptural rhetoric against non-Muslims as well: “Allah continues giving severe warnings to the kuffar [non-believers]. He reminds them how the people before were destroyed; to make them aware that they may be next.”
And: “Punishment of the Disbelievers (Kuffar) … And those who disbelieve in Allah will suffer the punishment of Hell, which is a terrible place to be in. … So they admit they’re guilty and will be doomed in the depths of Hell.”
ISF textbook Iman: The Heart of Life interprets scripture about believers and non-believers to stress the importance of jihad: “These verses describe the attitude of believers when they spare no efforts for the sake of jihad, striving hard in God’s cause. When Muslims gave up jihad, did not abide by God’s will, started fighting among themselves and were submissive in the face of their enemies, God caused them to suffer greatly by allowing them to be dominated by those who do not fear Him or have any mercy for Islam.”
Islamist ideas about modesty are imposed early. ISF’s I Love Islam Textbook: Level 4 explains that girls may not “show their hair, necks, arms, or legs … when girls leave the house, especially if they have reached maturity.” The Level 5 textbook even insists that “Girls should not e-mail boys, and boys should not e-mail girls, unless they have a good, Islamic reason to communicate.”
ISF textbooks promote “Muslim Scholars” who are in fact leading Islamist figures of dangerous international Islamist networks. ISF’s Islam in America textbook, for instance, includes praise for Jamal Badawi, whom it praises for his “exceptional eloquence and profound yet moderate understanding of Islam….”
In fact, Badawi is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent clerical body, based in Doha: the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). Federal prosecutors listed Badawi as an unindicted co-conspirator during the 2008 trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a major terrorism financing organization once based just a few miles away from the ISF’s offices.
Badawi describes suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists as “freedom fighters” and “martyrs.” He also advocates the right of men to beat their wives if they show “disregard for [their] marital obligations.”
The textbook also offers praise for Siraj Wahhaj, a leading radical imam who has denounced homosexuals, non-Muslims, and “Satanic” America, and has advocated jihad and the killing of adulterers.
The same ISF textbook encourages the work of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its head, Nihad Awad. The textbook authors describe CAIR as a “civil liberties group” which “represents a new level of political participation for the Muslim community” and helps Muslims “fight discrimination” and “hate crimes.” In 2025, the state of Texas designated CAIR as a terrorist organization, because of its leadership’s reported links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The children are directly exposed to hate preachers. Imams active at Brighter Horizons Academy have included Ramadan Elsabagh, a listed contractor for the school through his business, the Furqan Corporation. In 2017, Elsabagh posted a recorded prayer to his Facebook page calling to “destroy the Zionists and their allies, and those who assist them and those who allowed them into the abodes of the Muslims ... Oh Allah save [Al Aqsa] from the hands of the accursed violators ... Oh Allah destroy them.”
Brighter Horizons’ principal, Leila Kayed, openly shares extremist material on social media. Her Instagram account includes promotion of a video by a far-Right operative Richard Medhurst, in which the notorious Kremlin-supporter accuses the United States of committing terrorist attacks against Russian interests; and of an Israeli-American conspiracy to attack Iran and Russia for financial gain.
Terror Operatives
ISF’s Islam in America textbook advertized the work of designated terrorist charities linked to Hamas and Al-Qaeda.
Islam in America highlights the work of the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, almost a decade after both were shut down and designated as terror financing operations over their links to Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden respectively. The textbook does not mention this fact, only telling children that these charities provide aid to mostly Muslim victims of tragedy, and help “Muslims leading prosperous lives in the United States and Canada” to feel “part of the ummah.”
The textbook, published in 2011, also praises charities such as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), some 7 years after the U.S. government designated the charity over its ties to Osama Bin Laden.
Interestingly, Natalia Suleiman, who taught children at ISF’s Brighter Horizons between 2002 and 2010, worked for IARA in Sudan in the 1990s.
Suleiman also worked as an administrative assistant to Shukri Abu Baker, once CEO of the Holy Land Foundation, who was convicted alongside four other HLF officials, notes the U.S. government, for providing “approximately $12.4 million in support to Hamas and its goal of creating an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.”
The Brighter Horizons teacher even testified in support of these Hamas operatives during the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007.
The ISF textbook aims to dismiss the prosecution of these charities as politically-motivated, neglecting to mention the court-proven links between these charities and violent terrorist organizations, the convictions of its leaders, and the violent anti-semitism encouraged by these charities and their officials.
This is perhaps explained by the additional personnel overlap between designated terror organizations and this North Texas school and curricula provider.
Majida Salem is the wife of convicted Holy Land Foundation Hamas operative Ghassan Elashi. She also worked as an Islamic studies teacher at Brighter Horizons School. In fact, Salem, who remains apparently supportive of her terror-supporting husband’s actions, served as a member of the “curricula design” team for the ISF’s textbooks.
Her ISF partner in that team was Nabil Sadoun, an ISF director who also reportedly taught at the school. Sadoun, the Dallas Morning News reports, is a “Jordanian Islamist activist deported from the United States in 2010 for concealing Hamas ties on immigration paperwork.” The newspaper adds: “Sadoun was on the national and local boards of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which also was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation [terror financing] case.”
FBI documents filed in federal court in 2010 stated: “The FBI has concluded that [Nabil] SADOUN---through his membership in and/or affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States (US-MB). Palestine Committee (PALCOM), United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), and Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA)-was affiliated with HAMAS. The FBI has also uncovered evidence that SADOUN knowingly provided material support to the HLF-a HAMAS front organization-after HAMAS’s designation as a terrorist organization.”
The ISF lists Sadoun as the lead author and director of the textbook that praises the work of Islamist activists and designated terror financing operations listed above. The textbook was published in 2018, some eight years after Sadoun was deported because of his court-determined connections to terror.
ISF officials’ terror ties appear to have been present at the school’s conception. Both the ISF and Brighter Horizons list Rasmi Almallah as a founder. Almallah also served as a board member of designated terrorist organization the Holy Land Foundation, and was listed by federal prosecutors in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the charity’s terror trial.
In 1992, the Dallas Morning News reports, Almallah was listed in incorporation documents for the Islamic Association of Palestine, once Hamas’s chief U.S. proxy. His co-founders included Hamas politburo leader Mousa Abu Marzook.
And in 1997, a federal court convicted an employee at one of Almallah’s Texas businesses for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Eyad Ismoil was found to have “[driven] an explosives-laden van that blew up under the twin towers, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 others.”
ISF’s earliest leaders look to have included convicted terrorists as well. The organization’s 990 tax return for 2001 lists its vice-president as Mufeed Abdelqader, seemingly the same person as Mufid Abdelqader, another convicted Holy Land Foundation terrorist and the brother of one of Hamas’s surviving leaders, top official Khaled Mishal (or Meeshal).
Indeed, it appears the Hamas leader’s niece, Sarah Abdulqader, is a teacher at Brighter Horizons. Sarah, who also uses the surname Mishal, has been a passionate supporter of her convicted Hamas-financing father.
Other ISF leaders have included Ghassan Hitto, a Syrian activist backed by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. In the 2000s, Hitto is alleged to have been involved with American Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas networks in the United States. Local media reports Hitto was “heavily involved in running the Dallas-area Brighter Horizons Academy.”
Alongside its long history of overlap with Hamas networks, Brighter Horizons benefits from curious foreign financial links. According to Brandy Shufutinsky and Pavak Patel at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Brighter Horizons “received approximately $995,000 for construction and expansion” from the “Islamic Development Bank, or IsDB,” which, the analysts note, is partly controlled by a variety of overseas Islamist regimes, including Iran, Qatar and Turkey.
A Broader Network
The ISF and Brighter Horizons are key nodes in a network of schools across the United States influenced by the ideas and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood. Within Texas, one particularly important connected organization is the Houston Quran Academy (HQA) in Houston, a school run by the Muslim American Society (MAS).
As illustrated in a report by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, MAS is one of the purest expressions of Muslim Brotherhood Islamism in the United States today. In 2019, Members of Congress called for an investigation into MAS after one of its branches in Philadelphia hosted an event in which children sang about torturing and beheading Jews.
HQA’s founder and principal, Hamed Ghazali, is also chairman of the Muslim American Society’s Council of Islamic Schools (MASCIS).
In 1988, as documented by the Causing Fitna blog, Ghazali appeared to solicit funds openly for the terror financing, ISF-linked Holy Land Foundation. In 1989, Ghazali reportedly defended calls for the killing of Salman Rushdie. In 1991, Ghazali’s work was mentioned explicitly in a memorandum produced by U.S-based leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, later seized by the FBI.
And in the early 1990s, Ghazali led the Ghazali Islamic Video organization, through which he interviewed a number of prominent jihadists, including Al-Qaeda operatives, to discuss their hopes for jihadist efforts to expand beyond Afghanistan. A speech given by Ghazali in 2010 was cited by the Anti-Defamation League as an example of anti-Semitic incitement, after he claimed “Allah gave us the Jews” as an example of those who “take the wrong path.”
Some of Ghazali’s early videos featured close involvement with the ISF’s Nabil Sadoun, in which both laud the work of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.
Another key HQA official is Main Alqudah, a founder of the MAS Katy Center (under which HQA operates). In 2013, Alqudah challenged deportation proceedings by arguing that he faced “past and future harm” if he returned to his homeland, because he “advocated [the] imposition of Islamic law instead of secular law in Jordan.” Alqudah admitted during testimony that his family members were part of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, and that he attended Muslim Brotherhood events and donated to the organization.
In one of several published “Beautiful Recitations” on MAS Katy’s social media page, imam Ahmad Elhadad stated: “O Believers! Take neither Jews nor Christians as guardians[,] they are guardians of each other. Whoever does so will be counted as one of them. Surely Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people … with sickness in their hearts.”
The ties between ISF, Brighter Horizons and HQA extend beyond Ghazali. An academic case-study of HQA alleges that the school makes use of the ISF curricula.
And in return, the ISF textbook Islam in America praises the work of HQA’s parent organization, the Muslim American Society, while admitting: “Although the Muslim American Society maintains its organizational independence, its leaders assert that the organization is influenced by the work and thought system of major mainstream Islamic movements in the Muslim World like the Muslim Brotherhood, Jama’at Islami and other known Islamic movements.”
In addition, several former Brighter Horizons staff have since worked for the HQA’s parent organization, the Muslim American Society, including former ISF directors such as Marwan Abdelqader.
Brighter Horizons and Houston Quran Academy have previously benefited from public subsidies, and appear to be pursuing involvement in new Texas state voucher programs.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, told the Middle East Forum: “The success of the Muslim Brotherhood as a mass global movement and its ideology of political Islam is greatly dependent on its ability to indoctrinate Muslim children, in mosques and Islamic schools with the view that their interpretations of Islam and shariah must reign supreme, and that all other systems of governance—especially the kind of liberal democracy arising from the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights—are to be disdained.”
Some state governments now appear to be listening to reformist Muslim concerns. Armed with the Texas Governor’s earlier November designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, and propelled by the Comptroller and Attorney General’s explicit concerns that public funds risk benefitting schools with radical ties, Texas state agencies are now turning their attention to K-12 schools established and run by persons and organizations with direct ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which the federal government also designated as a terrorist organization in January.
Dr. Jasser adds: “I applaud the efforts of Texas’ leadership to expose, defund, and protect our communities and nation from the threat of Islamist radicalization emanating from these MB cauldrons of indoctrination.”
“Practicing Muslims must be able to separate mosque and state, and lift up the preeminence of our Constitutional freedoms over Islamic governance. It is only through Islamic schools being exposed to the radiant sunlight of accountability that we will begin to get a true grasp of the extent to which Islamist radicalization is occurring in America—something I fear is far more widespread than most of us can imagine.”
