White House To Liberal-Minded Muslims: Drop Dead

White House officials are boosting the visibility and clout of Islamic revivalist groups in the United States, and are sidelining the growing network of liberal-minded, modern American Muslims.

“We don’t have any contacts in the administration,” said Avi Zonneveld, founder of Muslims for Progressive Values, based in Los Angeles. “The Canadian government is much more accessible,” she said.

“We’re not invited” to take part in administration meetings, said Zuhdi Jasser, the Syrian-born president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, based in Phoenix, Ariz. His group, which boasts on its website it is motivated by “a love for America and a love of our faith of Islam,” has been consulted by the State Department‘s Muslim outreach office, but domestic agencies have only reached out to the well-funded and media-magnified Islamist groups that seek to revive Islamic political power, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council, he said.

Administration officials declined to explain why they have not reached out to groups of liberal-minded Muslims. “Federal Departments and Agencies engage with a wide variety of Muslim organizations and groups throughout the country, often through open forums and meetings and we have also consulted a wide variety of academics and researchers about the views of Muslims in America,” according to a March 8 statement from White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro.

Among the Muslim groups with the greatest access to the White House are MPAC, based in Los Angeles, and the Islamic Society of North America, based in Plainfield, Ind. MPAC is an advocacy group with few members, and ISNA is a umbrella group for many groups and mosques that practice orthodox Islam, which mandates the subordination of democratic governments to Islamic rules.

On March 6, for example, Denis McDonough, a White House deputy national security advisor, delivered a speech in Northern Virginia at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), where he said that “when it comes to preventing violent extremism and terrorism in the United States, Muslim Americans are not part of the problem, you’re part of the solution.”

Yet the head cleric at the mosque, Mohamed Magid, is also president of the ISNA, which was founded by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the United States, and which has cooperated with other brotherhood-affiliated groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations. A federal judge in July 2009 concluded that CAIR has associations with Hamas, which is both an Islamist terror group and an affiliate of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood.

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