A “moderate” Muslim assumes a new position.
Imam Suhaib Webb is the new Resident Scholar for MakeSpace, a Washington, DC, area mosque meeting in Alexandria, Virginia’s Dunya Restaurant, MakeSpace announced October 29. Both Webb and MakeSpace have radical backgrounds belying their “moderate” Muslim pretensions.
An Oklahoma convert to Islam, Webb came to America’s capital from a Resident Scholar position at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC). Previously he served as the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City’s (ISGOC) imam. Praised by MakeSpace as a “world-class visionary,” Webb’s reputation as a modern Muslim thinker has placed him in “The Muslim 500: The World’s Most Influential Muslims.”
Yet examination of Webb reveals a radicalism suggesting more than coincidence in the fact that Oklahoma City beheader Alton Nolen and Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended ISGOC and ISBCC’s sister mosque, respectively. Webb had been an associate of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a senior Al Qaeda propagandist killed by a September 30, 2011, American drone strike in Yemen. Webb appeared with Al-Awlaki two days before September 11, 2001, at a fundraiser for the legal defense of H. Rap Brown, an Atlanta Muslim later convicted of shooting two Georgia police officers. The Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) group, meanwhile, runs ISBCC.
Webb himself has denounced “secularism…a radical, lunatic ideology” in contrast to the “dynamic, empowering, pluralistic Islam of the prophet’s era.” “I love CAIR,” Webb says of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical faux civil rights group and an unindicted terrorism financing coconspirator. Webb also critiqued his “demonization of others,” having “compared ISIS to Ebola. While I don’t agree with ISIS, al-Qāida, certain progressives and others, I…apologize to anyone that I have spoken ill towards or demonized.” Denunciations of America and Israel (e.g. “America’s Frankenstein monster”) along with anti-Semitism also appear in Webb’s views.
Webb “is hailed as a moderate,” anonymously wrote a former Muslim convert who attended ISGOC. Webb, though, “explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad.” ISGOC members like Webb “try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.”