A couple of days ago we reported on a Homeland Security advisory panel that recommended terms like “jihad” and “sharia” not be used because people might actually understand what was being discussed and get concerned. Better, they said, to use convoluted, politically correct, English phraseology to communicate that to strive for clarity.

The collection of clowns that the Obama administration assembled for this committee is rather astonishing. At least one of them had called 9/11 a good thing:

Now we find that another, more troubling figure is on the same panel. This is not a mouthy chowder-headed kid of no noticeable accomplishment beyond Islamic tendencies, this person has a history of supporting Islamic terrorism and 9/11 Truther-ism.

A current adviser to the Department of Homeland Security is a Muslim leader who has accused America of doing Israel’s “dirty work,” named Israel as a “suspect” in the September 11 terror attacks and has been criticized as an apologist for terrorists.

Salam Al-Marayati is the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He currently serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee’s (HSAC) Foreign Fighter Task Force, as well as the HSAC Subcommittee on Faith Based Security and Communications. (Note: this is not the Muslim DHS advisor The Daily Caller wrote about on Monday.)

In 2001, Al-Marayati suggested that Israel — not Islamic extremists — was ultimately behind the September 11 terror attacks.

“If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies,” he said.

He has since tried to walk back his comments, but the results are laughable

He claims when he made the statement no one knew who was behind 9/11. He made that statement around October 22, 2001. By that point the US had been attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, for nearly three weeks. In short, the man is a baldfaced liar.

But his record isn’t limited to this particular venture into Islamic fantasy land.

Back in 1999, Democrat House Minority Leader, the aptly named Dick Gephardt, apppointed Al-Marayati to the National Commission on Terrorism only to rescind the appointment when it was discovered Al-Marayati was sympathetic to terrorists.

And there is a lot more:

Two years later, in a March 2003 Los Angeles Times article, Salam al-Marayati blasted the FBI, stating that they had been targeting people on the basis of race and religion.[9] Ignoring several prominent terrorism cases across the country, he added, “That’s what they’ve been doing since the attacks, and we don’t know of any case that has resulted in the arrest, indictment or prosecution of a terrorist.”[10]

Commenting on the government’s actions against alleged terrorist financiers, specifically of Rafil Dhafir of Help the Needy (indicted in February 2003, convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2005) and his cohorts, in October 2004, Salam al-Marayati said, “It is a sham. You just hope at the end of a long battle these people can be vindicated because they did nothing wrong.”[11]

In response to the government’s recent refusal to grant MPAC’s request to release Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, and Global Relief Foundation funds to a third-party,[12] al-Marayati asserted, in 2004, that “the government…betrayed us.”[13]

At a fundraising dinner for Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Sami Al-Arian in Anaheim, California in 2006, al-Marayati said to the attendees, “So if we have this case where we are being dictated upon, not only on terminology, but dictated upon on who speaks for us, and our organizations, our charities, are shut down one by one. Therefore, brothers and sisters, there is a storm that is coming. That storm is going to be worse than Japanese internment.”[14]

Beyond the effect these words may have in causing hysteria, distrust, and fear in the Muslim-American community, al-Marayati has advised Muslims to shun FBI efforts to recruit informants. Speaking to an audience in Dallas in 2005, he stated, “We reject any efforts, notion, suggestion that Muslim should start spying on one another. In fact if you look at the Lodi case, the disaster of Lodi is that Muslims were reporting each other to the authorities saying, ‘Oh, this person is an extremist’ and the other camp saying the same things so both of them got in trouble. So, we are, this is the model not to follow.”[15]
MPAC, meanwhile, has issued policy papers which argue for the removal of Hizballah and Hamas from U.S. terrorist designations. The 1999 counterterrorism “policy paper” asks “…is Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which calls for the creation of an Islamic republic, a terrorist organization? Again, most of its members are not actively involved in terror.”

It then tries to minimize Hizballah’s brutal attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 — an attack which killed 241 U.S. military personnel:

“…this attack, for all the pain it caused, was not in a strict sense, a terrorist operation. It was a military operation, producing no civilian casualties —exactly the kind of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against Washington’s enemies.” (emphasis added) [16]

The 2003 counterterrorism paper advocated removing Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hizballah from the federal government’s list of designated terrorist groups.

For reasons that have no honorable explanation, in fact the best face you can put on it is craven moral cowardice, Barack Obama has decided that a few hundred dead Americans is a small price to pay in order for him to win personal accolades. He is stocking Homeland Security advisory groups with people of profoundly anti-American and pro-Islamic terrorism views and then professes surprise that we are subjected to a regular series of terror attacks.