Muslim Public Affairs Council

Islamism

The Mus­lim Pub­lic Affairs Coun­cil (MPAC) was estab­lished orig­i­nal­ly in 1986 as the Polit­i­cal Action Com­mit­tee of the Islam­ic Cen­ter of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia whose lead­ers had back­grounds sug­gest­ing they were asso­ci­at­ed with the  Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. A 1989 US Mus­lim Broth­er­hood doc­u­ment intro­duced as evi­dence in the Holy Land Foun­da­tion ter­ror­ism financ­ing tri­al refers to the last name of one of the MPAC lead­ers, Math­er Hathout, in a list of “Islam­ic Cen­ters and Groups in the field.”  MPAC has since devel­oped into the polit­i­cal lob­by arm of the U.S. Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and as opposed almost every coun­tert­er­ror­ism action pro­posed or car­ried out by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, often sug­gest­ing that the efforts were aimed at the U.S. Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty. MPAC has also act­ed to sup­port a vari­ety of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions as well as facil­i­tat­ing a wider range of ter­ror­ism by defend­ing or jus­ti­fy­ing vio­lence car­ried out by Islam­ic groups. Nev­er­the­less, MPAC has devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly exten­sive rela­tion­ships with agen­cies of the U.S. gov­ern­ment includ­ing meet­ings with the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the FBI. MPAC and its lead­ers have made anti-Semit­ic state­ments that assert or imply an orga­nized Jew­ish effort to defame and exclude U.S. Mus­lims from U.S. polit­i­cal life and has engaged in fre­quent and vir­u­lent demo­niza­tion of Israel includ­ing describ­ing Israeli actions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque as a “rape of the soul of the Islam­ic peo­ple”, assert­ing that the objec­tive of Israeli actions in Gaza was “gross killings of Pales­tin­ian civil­ians, includ­ing women and chil­dren”, and accus­ing sup­port­ers of Israel of using tac­tics sim­i­lar to Hitler’s. In Decem­ber 2009, MPAC report­ed that “Israeli doc­tors had extract­ed human organs from dead Pales­tini­ans dur­ing the 1988 intifa­da and into the 1990s.”  MPAC leader Salman Al-Maray­ati sug­gest­ed on a talk radio show on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 that Israel might have been behind the 911attacks.