Palling Around With Terrorists - An Obama Tradition

It isn't just William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn who stain Obama's past and present. He's closer than anyone should be to Islamic terrorists as well.

Obama's been specifically courting the Muslim vote in the United States. He courts that vote by sending his Muslim outreach director, Minha Husaini, to meet with allies of Hamas and Hezbollah.

One meeting attendee was Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society, several of the participants said. The MAS website describes Bray as an imam and “long time civil and human rights activist.” Bray’s critics say he has a history of defending terrorists. They point to a video of Bray at a rally in 2000, for example, in which he can be seen pumping his fist in the air in support of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In a 2004 interview, he called the Israeli assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader an “unlawful, cowardly and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism.” Bray did not return a call requesting comment.

Also attending the meeting was Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is a Muslim-American civil rights group that has, as its website states, “consistently and persistently condemned terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.” Nonetheless, the group has many critics, especially in law-enforcement circles, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.

In an interview on Thursday, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said that the group has filed a legal brief seeking to have its name removed from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the federal terror case. “Obviously we see it as politically motivated and a cheap way to stigmatize” CAIR and other Muslim groups, Hooper said.