DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s appointment of “de-radicalization” expert Mohamed Elibiary to the Homeland Security Advisory Council earlier this month has thus far drawn little attention from Congress or the media, despite his record of criticizing successful terrorism prosecutions and praising Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb.
Elibiary recommended the writings of Qutb, who is credited with inspiring the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist groups like al Qaida and Hamas, as offering “the potential for a strong spiritual rebirth that’s truly ecumenical allowing all faiths practiced in America to enrich us and motivate us to serve God better by serving our fellow man more.”
Elibiary also criticized the indictment and subsequent convictions of the Holy Land Foundation and five former officials for providing more than $12 million to Hamas, depicting the case as a defeat for the United States. He suggested that the convictions were part of a U.S. government policy of “denying our civil liberties and privacy at home” while pursuing anti-terror policies that have “left thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands maimed, trillions of taxpayer dollars squandered and our homeland more vulnerable than ever.”
Read Elibiary’s criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision in favor of current material-support laws here.
At a March 2010 hearing held by the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, Elibiary appeared to perpetuate the message that Islam is under attack from the West. He criticized federal law enforcement for targeting “low-hanging fruit” and using “agent provocateurs” to infiltrate mosques.
Read more about Elibiary’s congressional testimony here.
Elibiary, president and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, has also come under fire for allegedly threatening a Dallas Morning News columnist and speaking at a December 2004 conference in Dallas paying tribute to the Ayatollah Khomeini.
When Rod Dreher, then a Morning News columnist, questioned his participation in the conference, Elibiary’s reply included this suggestion: “Treat people as inferiors and you can expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe or something.”
Dreher replied that he regarded this as a threat. He said Elibiary and his fellow Islamists regarded “debate” as consisting of “yelling and bullying and blustering” and “groundless accusations of ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ and what rot. And now I suppose I have to worry that someone from your community would see me drive up, identify my car, and alter it to cause me harm. Great work, Mohamed.”