More on this story. “The National Prayer Service and the Wahhabi Lobby,” by Winfield Myers for American Thinker, January 17:
Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), will deliver a prayer at the National Cathedral during the National Prayer Service on January 21st. The event is part of the festivities for the inauguration of Barack Obama, which occurs January 20. A convert to Islam, Mattson directs the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary.
ISNA has close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group, and was named an un-indicted co-conspirator in U.S. v Holy Land Foundation, a case that uncovered covert financing of the terrorist group Hamas. Since her election as ISNA president in 2006, Mattson’s apologias for the radical Wahhabi sect of Islam have gained a much wider audience.
Daniel Pipes has written that, under Mattson’s leadership, ISNA is “a key component of the Wahhabi lobby.”
In a “Meet Ingrid Mattson,” Campus Watch adjunct scholar Jonathan Schanzer offered specific examples of Mattson’s denials and deceits regarding radical Islam’s threat to the U.S. Among them:
* Wahhabism is simply a “reform movement” that “really was analogous to the European protestant reformation”;
* Contrary to statements by Director of National Intelligence Adm. Michael McConnell that “there are sleeper cells in the U.S,” Mattson claims that in fact “there aren’t any sleeper cells“;
* The president’s use of the term “Islamic” when speaking of terrorist attacks on the West is “not only inaccurate, but unhelpful.”…
Read it all.