Jihad Watch reader Will has notified me about some illuminating links on a central website for Minnesota mosques. The Dar Al-Hijrah Cultural Center website links to numerous Minneapolis-area mosques and other Islamic institutions: AbuBakr Islamic Center; Al-Amal School; Dar Al-Hijrah itself; Darul-Quba; Dar al Farooq; Islamic Center of Minnesota; Islamic Cultural Community Center (ICCC); Islamic Affairs Agency; Islamic Relief & Social Srvices [sic]; Islamic Institute of Minnesota Cemetary [sic]; Islamic Center/Columbia Heights Mosque; Islamic Center of Minneapolis (Dinkytown Masjid); MCC - Masjid Ar Rehman; Masjid Al-akbar; Masjid At-Taqwa; Masjid Omar Ibn-AlKhattab; Masjid Al-Qanateen; Masjid Umatul Islam; MAS/Masjid Ummatu Muhammad, Islamic Information Office; Masjid An-nur; Masjid Tawfiq; Minnesota Da’wah Institute (MDI); Oromo Muslim Community of The Twin Cities; and Tawfiq Islamic Center (TIC).
It thus appears to be a completely mainstream Islamic organization in the Minneapolis area. Yet check out their logo: the Minnesota/Somalia link has become a jihad pipeline.
And the same website also links to pseudo-moderate War-Is-Deceit practitioner Tariq Ramadan; the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); Muslim American Society (MAS), which is the chief arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America; the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within"; the jihadist Islah Movement in Somalia; the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); and even to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.
In one sense, this is understandable: Usama Hasan, an Imam in the U.K., said that Sheikh Qaradawi was “massively influential and probably the number one scholar in the Arab world.”
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been praised by Saudi-funded dhimmi pseudo-academic John Esposito as a champion of a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.” But numerous statements of Qaradawi demonstrate that he anything but a “reformist” or a genuine champion of “democracy, pluralism and human rights” – and is, in fact, positively Hitlerian in his Jew-hatred and bloodlust.
During the uprising against the Mubarak regime, a Muslim website published a chapter from Qaradawi’s book Laws of Jihad, including this passage: “One of the forms of jihad in Islam is jihad against evil and corruption within [the Islamic lands]. This jihad is crucial in order to protect society from collapse, disintegration, and perdition — for Muslim society has unique characteristics, and if these are lost, forgotten or destroyed, there will be no Muslim society.”
Qaradawi also enjoys a reputation as a moderate beyond just Esposito: the former Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is himself widely assumed to be a “moderate” despite evidence to the contrary, has hailed Qaradawi as a “very very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world.” And another Muslim leader whose moderate bona fides have been questioned, the vaunted “Muslim Martin Luther” Tariq Ramadan, wrote a foreword to one of his books in 1998, and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone welcomed him to the city in 2004 and praised him repeatedly, despite the fact that during that visit Qaradawi explained to the BBC that suicide attacks against Israelis were not actually suicide at all, but “martyrdom in the name of God.” (Qaradawi has since been banned from Britain, as well as from the U.S.)
And the things that Qaradawi tells the millions of Muslims that he reaches are anything but moderate. In January 2009, during a Friday sermon broadcast on Al-Jazeera, he prayed that Allah would kill all the Jews: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” He also declared: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler.”
But no doubt everyone assumes that these Minnesota mosques are “moderate.”