The six imams whoÂ’ve retained CAIR as legal counsel in a possible suit against US Airways are the subject of Katherine KerstenÂ’s piece for the normally idiotarian Minneapolis Star Tribune: Suspicion about imams grows as terror links pile up.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the imams’ legal representative, is an organization that “we know has ties to terrorism,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in 2003. And the Muslim American Society, which is also supporting the imams? It’s the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Chicago Tribune, which called it “the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group.”How about Omar Shahin, the imams’ spokesman and also president of the North American Imams Federation? He is a native of Jordan, who says he became a U.S. citizen in 2003. From 2000 to 2003, Shahin served as president of Islamic Center of Tucson (ICT), that city’s largest mosque.
The ICT is well known. The mosque has “an extensive history of terror links,” according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who testified about terrorist financing before the Senate Banking Committee in July 2005.
The Washington Post described these links in a 2002 article. “Tucson was one of the first points of contact in the United States for the jihadist group that evolved into al Qaeda,” the Post reported. And the ICT? It held “basically the first cell of al Qaeda in the United States; that is where it all started,” said Rita Katz, a terrorism expert quoted by the Post.
Now what would be interesting is to see a lawer with balls from US Airways bring up these terrorist links.