In “Islam’s Useful Idiots,” in The American Thinker, Alyssa A. Lappen discusses the barring of Kamal Helbawy from the US, and the reaction to it (many news links in the original):
The international press cried foul on October 19 after the U.S. denied a visa to a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader. Newsweek, Reuters, ABC News, The National Interest and other media complained that the “moderate” Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) founder Kamal Helbawy was barred from appearing at New York University”s Center for Law and Security. The U.S. also barred entry to Egyptian doctor and MB “guidance counsel” Abd El Monem Abo El Fotouh, who was scheduled to speak in the same discussion on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Helbawy claims to be “moderate.” The U.S. should not prevent “moderates from talking and discussing,” Helbawy stated after being pulled off his flight. El Fotouh is purportedly also temperate.
“At the end of the day, [Islam and the West] have a set of common humanist values: justice, freedom, human rights and democracy,”
he told The Economist in September 2003. Arabists consider El Fotouh “one of the brightest stars” of the MB”s so-called “middle generation.”
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t explain their actions. One can only surmise””and applaud. Consider:
“¢ In 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced suicide bombings everywhere-even in Israel. “Well he is wrong,” Helbawy replied. “He is not a Mufti,” he told the Jamestown Foundation. In the same interview, Helbawy blamed “[T]he events in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine” as “a factor” behind the July 7, 2005 London bombings-along with U.K. participation in Iraq and its “policy toward the issue of Palestine.”
“¢ “[T]he United States “¦ invaded Iraq to divide Muslims,” El Fotouh told the New York Times on August 3, 2006. It was “better to support a Hezbollah-Iranian agenda than an “˜American-Zionist” one,” he added.
“¢ Islam’s war against Israel is not “a conflict of borders and land only. It is not even a conflict over human ideology and not over peace,” Helbawy told a December 1992 Muslim Arab Youth Association gathering, taped by terror expert Steve Emerson. “[I]t is an absolute clash of civilizations, between truth and falsehood. Between two conducts-one satanic, headed by Jews and their co-conspirators-and the other is religious, carried by Hamas, and the Islamic movement in particular and the Islamic people”¦.” Muslims should never befriend “Jews and Christians,” who are only “allies to each other,” he warned.
“¢ Islamic scholars had performed their “basic religious duty” in calling on Muslims to join jihad against the U.S., El Fotouh stated in March 2003. Al Azhar had rightly urged them to “defend themselves and their faith” against an “enemy” stepping “on Muslims” land–”which the scholars called “a new Crusader battle targeting our land, honour, faith and nation.” Al Azhar’s decree, El Fotouh stated, was “no more than an attempt on the part of its scholars to fulfill their duty before God.” The U.S. had “plans to enslave the Arab nation,” he also claimed.
Read it all.