President Obama’s top national security advisers have just hosted Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah at the White House.
Bin Bayyah is the principal deputy to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist and the driving force of the IUMS. In addition to being behind the 2004 fatwa, Qaradawi also promotes suicide bombing against Israel. The IUMS strongly supports the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas, the terrorist organization designated as such under American law. Indeed, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – a close ally of both Qaradawi and Turkey’s Islamic supremacist prime minister (and Obama fave) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – was welcomed into the IUMS as a member in 2004. As detailed here on other occasions (see, e.g., here), Hamas’s charter explains that the group’s imperative to destroy Israel is an Islamic obligation, and it cites authoritative scripture – frequently repeated by Qaradawi – stating that the world will not end “until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: ‘O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’”
News of the White House meeting with bin Bayyah was broken last night by Steve Emerson and John Rossomando of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. The meeting took place at the Obama administration’s request, according to an account of it posted – along with a photo – on bin Bayyah’s website. Since its original posting, the account has been edited to omit mention of Obama National Security Adviser Tom Donilon’s participation.
This news comes just one week after the Obama administration announced plans to negotiate with the Taliban directly. Those negotiations eventually fell through.
And then of course, there was this in 2011: