By Malcolm A. Kline

February 6, 2004 - If you have seen signs for the Muslim Student Association on college campuses and wondered who they are, where they came from and whether they exist on student fees alone, you are not alone. Federal investigators are curious too.

The Senate Finance Committee is investigating non-profit groups to determine whether those organizations might be a source of funding for terrorist activities. Among the groups that the Committee wants Internal Revenue Service records on: the Muslim Student Association (MSA), active on campuses throughout the United States.

"Many of these groups not only enjoy tax-exempt status, but their reputations as charities and foundations often allow them to escape scrutiny, making it easier to hide and move their funds to other groups and individuals who threaten our national security," Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus pointed out in their letter to the IRS.

"Often these groups are nothing more than shell companies for the same small group of people, moving funds from one charity to the next charity to hide the trail," the senators write. "These groups also receive donations from foreign sources, including countries the government has identified as having a significant problem with terrorism."

On some campuses, notably the University of Virginia until about eight years ago, the MSA is virtually the only religious group that school officials will recognize. On other campuses, even without exclusive recognition, the MSA makes its presence felt.

In late January, according to our UCLA correspondent, the MSA held its annual Islamic Awareness Week on that campus. In all, the MSA claims chapters on 138 campuses nationwide.

Nor is this the first time the MSA has come up in a federal investigation. Last February, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a computer science major from the University of Idaho at Moscow. The U.S. Justice Department indictment charged Hussayen with visa fraud and the transfer of large amounts of cash from Iraq to the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA). Hussayen was head of his university's MSA, according to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The U.S. indictment also connects Hussayen with a tacit endorsement of suicide bombers posted on a web site that he registered. Hussayen, the indictment charges, registered the site exactly one year before the September 11 attacks. The posting, which appeared in June 2001, about three months before the fateful hijackings, was entitled "Provision of Suicide Operations."

Written by a radical Saudi sheikh, the posting read, "the Mujahid must kill himself if he knows that this will lead to killing a great number of the enemies, and that he will not be able to kill them without killing himself first, or demolishing a center vital to the enemy or its military force, and so on."

"This is not possible except by involving the human element in the operation. In this new era, this can be accomplished with the modern means of bombing or bringing down an airplane on an important location that will cause the enemy great losses."

The national MSA protested the Bush Administration's decision, shortly after the September 11 attacks on the United States, to freeze the assets of groups that federal investigators linked to the Palestinian Hamas faction that took a benign view of the hijackings. "American Muslims support President Bush's effort to cut off funding for terrorism and we call for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict," the groups, including the MSA, insisted in their petition to the Bush Administration. The MSA claims credit, in turn, for the founding of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Terrorism expert Steven Emerson reports that, "In September 2002, a full year after the 9/11 attacks, speakers at ISNA's annual conference still refused to acknowledge Bin Laden's role in the terrorist attacks." Emerson, a former congressional staffer and television reporter, became immersed in the study of terrorism soon after the Oklahoma City bombings in the mid-1990s which he covered for CNN.

The MSA in turn links up to other organizations that are tacitly radical. For example, MSA events frequently feature speakers from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). Emerson told a congressional committee that "WAMY's U.S. office was incorporated in Falls Church, Virginia in 1992 by Osama bin Laden's brother, Abdullah bin Laden."

Another terrorism expert, Stephen Schwartz, told Congress that the form of Islam that governs such groups is Wahabism, the official sect in Saudi Arabia. "Shia and other non-Wahabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahabi control," Schwarz testified.

Schwartz, then-director of the Islam and Democracy Program for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained exactly what this meant. "Wahabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, content of preaching-including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi, Arabia-and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation," Schwartz said.

"Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East (Studies), and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism."

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

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