Excerpt:
Two Muslim clerics with outspoken backgrounds are among the speakers at St. Cloud State University's Islam Awareness Week, which starts today.
One of them is Siraj Wahhaj, who will speak on "What is Jihad?" at 2 p.m. Thursday in the Atwood Memorial Center Theatre.
Wahhaj, an American-born imam of a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y., is on the executive committee of the Muslim Alliance in North America, a network of organizations addressing needs in American Muslim communities.
In 1991, speaking to an Islamic association of Texas, Wahhaj called Operation Desert Storm "one of the most diabolical plots ever in the annals of history," and that the war to oust Iraq from Kuwait was "part of a larger plan, to destroy the greatest challenge to the Western world, and that's Islam."