STEVE EMERSON: I STAND BY MY FILM “THE GRAND DECEPTION”
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3916/steve-emerson-i-stand-by-my-film
Steve Emerson: I stand by my film
‘The Grand Deception’ was well-researched, using sources that included faithful Muslims and the FBI. Instead of addressing facts, CAIR chose to attack me personally.
When the facts are on your side, argue the facts, the old legal cliché instructs.
But, in the case of CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush, the facts aren’t on his side. So for his Jan. 3 column, “‘Deception’ film promotes intolerance of Islam,” he chose instead to call me names.
Though Ayloush, local chief of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), wrote what he framed as a critique my new documentary, “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception,” Ayloush failed to make a single reference to its content.
His column was a rebuttal to Register Editorial Board member Rory Cohen’s favorable review of the film. But Ayloush opted for character assassination and tried to deceive readers into believing the film tries to smear all Muslims as radicals. Convenient, considering he perpetuates the claim himself – and therefore fulfills his own prophecy – that there is a “war on Muslims.” Ayloush called the trial/execution of Saddam Hussein illegitimate and “an attempt to create a major sectarian division among Muslims” (having, years earlier, also accused the United States of becoming the “new Saddam”).
He must not have even seen the Grand Deception film. If he had, he’d know our sources include law enforcement officials with first-hand experience investigating and prosecuting terror supporters, in addition to faithful Muslims who oppose those who rationalize terrorist groups and resist the Islamist ideology mixing faith with law. He’d also know that he, himself, makes a brief appearance in the film – disparaging the FBI.
RELATED COLUMNS:
Hussam Ayloush: Deception film promotes intolerance of Islam
Rory Cohen: Tracking Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Grand Deception’
Ayloush devotes most of his column to re-hashing old propaganda put forth by several of my critics, all of whom come from a biased and partisan viewpoint.
That’s par for the course, since my organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, has exposed the duplicity and radical ideology behind the benign veneer put forth by Ayloush and CAIR, in general. It’s not my imagination that positions CAIR in a Hamas-support network created by the Muslim Brotherhood in America. Internal records seized by the FBI do that. I’ve posted many of them to my website at this URL: http://www.investigativeproject.org/case/65
Rather than address that evidence, Ayloush calls me part of “a well-established and well-funded industry that employs fear to create an aura of suspicion around Muslims and to portray them as a threat.” But what does the FBI say about his organization?
“[U]ntil we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS,” an FBI liaison wrote in 2009, “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”
We showcase this letter in our film. We then show Ayloush’s sermon at an Anaheim mosque – made six weeks after IPT first broke the news that the FBI had officially cut ties to CAIR – during which he tells Muslims to be afraid of the heavy hand of American law enforcement.
Ayloush claimed that since 9/11 the FBI has been “actually paying informants as instigators to enter the mosques to monitor, to provoke, and forcefully to recruit Muslims to become informants and threaten them with retaliation for refusing to comply.” He added that “Unfortunately there are certain corrupt anti-Muslim, maybe power-hungry, FBI agents who are actually approaching law-abiding and peaceful American Muslims today in their house of worship, in their masjids and coercing them into becoming FBI informants and instigators against their community.”
Here’s the bottom line: We were very careful in researching and producing “The Grand Deception.” We even requested interviews from Ayloush’s associates at CAIR’s national headquarters and other Islamists we talk about in the film. None agreed to answer our questions. It’s less risky for them to avoid direct questions and sit on the sidelines saying bad things about me.
My first documentary, “Jihad in America,” won several prestigious journalism awards including the George Polk Award and Investigative Reporters and Editors’ (IRE) Best Investigative Reporting Award in Print, Broadcast, or Book. Ayloush prefers you not know this.
I’m just as proud of this new film and stand by everything in it. The Muslim Brotherhood is now the dominant power in Egypt. We expose its shadowy fronts operating in the United States and take viewers to their radical rallies and speeches throughout the country.
I’m not asking you to take my word for anything. We’re showing you the radical speech on tape.
Ayloush doesn’t want you to see any of this and judge for yourself, so he waged an ad hominem attack on me. Just call someone an “Islamophobe” and hope it all goes away.
That’s not going to happen.
I propose a dialogue about the actual content of “The Grand Deception.” We can do it in Orange County with Ayloush, in Washington, D.C with CAIR National officials, or anywhere that works. OC Register editors can moderate.
I hope CAIR accepts. If not, I’m happy to screen the film for Register readers and answer their questions.
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Rory Cohen: Tracking Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Grand Deception’
by Rory Cohen
Orange County Register
December 3, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3836/rory-cohen-tracking-muslim-brotherhood-grand
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A new documentary film, “The Grand Deception,” delves into the subversive culture of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, bringing to light footage of radical Islamists, masquerading as moderate Muslims, who call for violent jihad against the United States and its allies.
“While working at CNN as a correspondent in 1992, I had been sent to Oklahoma City, and I just happened to pass by the Oklahoma City Convention Center, where I witnessed thousands of people coming out dressed in Middle Eastern garb. I went inside and found out it was a radical Islamist conference with calls to kill the Jews and attack America,” Steve Emerson, the film’s producer and an award-winning journalist, said in an interview, explaining that the event prompted him to create a documentary called “Jihad in America” to research the subject. “If I looked good, it was only because others in the business were not doing their job.”
In many ways, they still aren’t.
Take, for instance, the invocation given by Siraj Wahhaj, one of the Brotherhood’s celebrated imams. He was the first Muslim clergyman to give an invocation before Congress in the early 1990s. Yet days following that humble speech, Wahhaj, touted as a moderate, was caught on tape at a Brooklyn mosque where he said, “You know what this country is? It’s a garbage can… It’s filthy.” He prayed that America would “crumble” and be replaced by Islam. One would think this would be the end of his political career. Yet he made an appearance this summer at the Democratic National Convention for “Jumah” prayers. Ironically, a Catholic cardinal’s request to deliver a prayer at this same event was turned down.
Emerson’s film delves not into spiritual leaders who spew anti-American ideas – it also documents leaders within mainstream Muslim groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, who have helped to finance terrorism.
Influence at many mainstream mosques and Muslim organizations, from the Islamic Circle of North America to the Muslim Students Association, is not necessarily a moderate one as is portrayed. These groups were described in a declassified Muslim Brotherhood as capable of helping teach Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
The MSA, in particular, has gotten better at masking some elements of radicalism, but audio unearthed by the Investigative Project on Terror presents a different picture.
“Osama bin Laden – I don’t know this guy,” Amir Mertaban, the president of MSA West, said during a 2007 speech entitled “Methods of Da’wah” and cited in the documentary. “I don’t know what he did. I don’t know what he said. I don’t know what happened. But we defend Muslim brothers, and we defend our Muslim sisters to the end. Is that clear?”
While not part of the movie, the DVD’s archive material details, perhaps the most notable and shocking case concerning an MSA member is that of Hasan Akbar, an American Muslim extremist who attended the MSA-controlled student mosque at UC Davis. After college, Akbar joined the U.S. Army and, in the early hours of March 23, 2003, he detonated a grenade amidst sleeping members of his 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, stationed in Kuwait – killing two soldiers and wounding 15.
One of the most troubling cases presented in the documentary is against Muslim Brotherhood figure Abdurahman Alamoudi. An FBI wiretap caught him stating that al-Qaida should have killed more Americans in the African embassy bombings in 1998. An Islamic adviser to President Bill Clinton, Alamoudi publicly denounced terrorism while he secretly raised funds for al-Qaida. “We are against all forms of terrorism,” he said publicly. Years after he successfully infiltrated the government at the highest level, the FBI caught on.
The film is based on primary source materials and interviews with recognized experts, such as Lafif Lakhdar, who fought for the Islamists as an Algerian revolutionary and is now a vocal critic of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism.
Former FBI officials interviewed in the documentary refer to the Islamists network as insidious – a “Trojan horse.” The film takes 70 minutes to demonstrate how far the Muslim Brotherhood has reached within our own political fabric in less than three decades. It is a must-see.
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