CNS news has the goods on Rashad Hussain, the 31-year-old Indian-American whom Obama just appointed as America’s first ambassador to the Organization of Islamic States. A few years ago, Mr. Hussain was a vocal defender of an accused (and later confessed) funder of the Islamic Jihad, a terror organization that has killed 200 Israelis. And someone took the trouble to alter an Internet archive to excise this information.
Rashad Hussain was quoted as telling a Muslim students’ event in Chicago that if U.S. Muslims did not speak out against the injustices taking place in America, then everyone’s rights would be in jeopardy.
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) cited Hussain as making the remarks in connection with Sami al-Arian, a university professor and activist sentenced in 2006 to more than four years in prison (including time already spent in custody) after he had pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The U.S. government designated the PIJ as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, and in 2003, then Attorney-General John Ashcroft described it as “one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad has killed more than 100 Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks. Its victims include American citizens Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old New Jersey college student killed in a 1995 suicide bombing in Gaza, and 16-year-old Shoshana Ben-Ishai, shot dead in a bus in Jerusalem in 2001.
I very much doubt the Obama administration goes about trying to find defenders of terrorism to appoint to ambassador’s jobs. The problem, rather, is that the pool of available candidates appears to be extremely narrow. Most American Muslims are economic immigrants and their children, who have come to America because their interest in the American dream outweighs religious and political concerns. The fact that Obama has had to dredge up this character shows how hard it is to find the right sort of candidate. But surely he could have done better than this.
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