Minnesota’s governor promotes Islamists

Islamists in Minnesota hit pay dirt when they invited Governor Tim Walz to speak at their annual lobbying day last month. Instead of doing what a prudent politician would have done — send a polite note regretting his absence — Walz attended the event and showered participants and organizers with praise.

“Our Muslim community adds so much culturally, so much economically, so much socially, so much to the arts, that Minnesota cannot be Minnesota without each and every one of you and with this community here,” he said during the Muslim Day at the Capitol hosted online by the Minnesota Chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS-MN) last month.

By rewarding MAS-MN leaders with praise like this, Walz gave political capital to an organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), an Islamist movement that supports Hamas, seeks to impose sharia law in Western democracies throughout the world and in so doing, undermine women’s rights. No responsible politician would share the stage, online or otherwise, with a MB front group, but that’s what Walz did.

MAS leaders will deny it, but their organization’s ties to the MB are irrefutable. In 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that the organization was founded in Illinois in 1993 by Islamists intent on obscuring their connections to the MB. In 2012, convicted terrorist Abdurrahman Alamoudi stated, “”Everyone knows that MAS is the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Not Walz, apparently.)

It’s not as if the Minnesota chapter of MAS is an Island of progressivism in a sea of Islamism. MAS-MN’s executive director Asad Zaman, who appeared at the event, has used social media to broadcast Holocaust denial, and numerous posts praising the South Asian Islamist group, Jamaat-e-Islami responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians during Bangaldesh’s 1971 Liberation War. He has even praised Jamaat-e-Islami leader Motiur Rahman Nizami who was convicted and executed for his role in the killings.