Islam in America, Pages 40, 53

Smear Campaign Targets Rashad Hussain, Obama’s Special Envoy to OIC

By Delinda C. Hanley

ON FEB. 13, during his videotaped address to the 2010 U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, President Barack Obama announced the appointment of Rashad Hussain as his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC is the second largest world intergovernmental organization after the United Nations; its members represent 57 states spread over four continents and serve as the collective voice for the Muslim world. With Hussain’s appointment, the president will have direct access to the views and concerns of Muslims worldwide.

The appointment of an accomplished lawyer, a respected member of the American Muslim community, and a close and trusted member of Obama’s White House staff was intended to strengthen dialogue with the Muslim world. This did not sit well with numerous right-wing blogs and Web sites, however, whose raison d’être seems to be promoting the clash of civilizations, and fear instead of cooperation. They set in motion a hurtful smear campaign to make the president withdraw the appointment.

The day after the announcement, the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report (GMDR), a blog launched in June 2007 by anonymous editors and sponsors, manufactured a controversial story full of innuendos and exaggerations about Hussain, among them the outlandish charge that he “has a history of participation in events connected with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood as well as support for Brotherhood causes.”

A look at the GMDR Web site, <globalmbreport.com>, reveals that its sole purpose appears to be discrediting mainstream Muslim American organizations and leaders. Indeed, the blog boasts that “In August 2008, the Obama campaign Muslim outreach adviser Mazen Asbahi resigned after the Wall Street Journal disclosed his U.S. Muslim Brotherhood ties based on information developed by the GMDR.” The post also implies that Dahlia Mogahed, one of two U.S. Muslims appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, also is tied to global Muslim Brotherhood.

(This writer, who thought she knew a lot about Muslim American organizations, can’t figure out what either the Global or U.S. Muslim Brotherhood actually is. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is an opposition group, but to my knowledge there is no similar group in the United States.)

Rashad Hussain apparently was next on the anonymous GMDR blogger’s hit list—and he/she used a quote from the Washington Report as “proof” of the accusation. Shereen Kandil, who was first an excellent intern and later a valued administrative assistant for the Washington Report, wrote an activism report about a Sept. 5, 2004 Muslim Students Association meeting in Chicago at which Hussain spoke. In her report, published in the November 2004 Washington Report, she wrote:

Laila Al-Arian, daughter of civil and political rights activist and Muslim leader Sami Al-Arian, opened the session with her father’s story. She gave a heart-wrenching, emotional account of an innocent man targeted for free-speech activities, whose rights were stripped thanks in part to the PATRIOT Act. Al-Arian, who has not yet been to trial, has been held in a federal penitentiary for over a year and a half. Al-Arian’s situation is one of many “politically motivated persecutions,” claimed Rashad Hussain, a Yale law student. Such persecution, he stated, must be fought through hope, faith, and the Muslim vote....Along with many others, said Yale’s Hussain, Dr. Sami Al-Arian has been “used politically to squash dissent.” The Muslim community must speak out against the injustices taking place in America, he emphasized. Otherwise, everyone’s rights will be in jeopardy.

Four or five years after the above item was published, this writer received a phone call or a phone message, I honestly can’t remember, on a date I can’t recall—we get so many calls I’m lucky if I can remember a conversation a week later!—saying Hussain had been misquoted in Kandil’s article. I don’t remember if it was a misquote or misattribution and, since Kandil had left the magazine years ago, I did not contact her. But I do remember asking our webmaster to remove the quote in question—because this sequence of events was unusual. Normally we publish a correction or objection as a letter to the editor (see, respectively, p. 6 of this issue and the letter from Daniel Pipes on p. 3 of our October 2001 issue). Years after the fact, however, that seemed pointless. Now that oversight has come back to haunt me—and, more importantly, hurt Obama’s envoy pick.

Ironically, I had no idea about the brewing controversy, because my computer crashed the evening of Feb. 14, and I spent the following day, a holiday, at the office and at my local Mac store’s Genius Bar repairing my laptop. (Our art director’s computer also crashed that day.)

On Feb. 16 I received polite but mystifying e-mails from Josh Gerstein at Politico, Patrick Goodenough from CNSNews.com and Ellen Uchimiya from Fox News, asking why we had removed the quote in question from our Web site. I told them frankly I could not remember, but assumed we had made an error we tried to correct. The reporters told me they had contacted Kandil, and that she stood by her article.

Some “she said, he said” craziness ensued, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of this editor, our writer, and other Americans who are pleased when a talented Muslim American is (all too rarely) tapped to work for our government. When Politico located a recording from the student event, which Hussain had barely remembered, and confronted Hussain, he agreed that he had made the “ill conceived” comments.

As I pointed out to everyone who contacted the Washington Report, “Dr. Sami Al-Arian was never convicted of any terrorism charges.....[he] took a plea bargain in hopes of ending his endless ordeal. Many people, not only Muslim Americans, look at his case as proof that when an American jury is presented with facts, not innuendoes, they reach just conclusions....I’d be very curious to find out whether, if I had said this or another non-Muslim speaker or commentator, this would be such an issue. [It] seems like this [controversy] is evidence that Muslim Americans are facing serious discrimination in our post 9/11 country.”

None of the above information found its way into any articles about Hussain.

If it were up to conservative blogs and media, American Muslims would never have the opportunity to serve their country. Luckily, this time the Obama administration did not take the smear campaign seriously or cave on Hussain’s appointment. This time it was Politico, an online political magazine launched in 2007 by two former Washington Post journalists, and which Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald described as “a pernicious new presence in our media landscape...dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility,” that failed. Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program also ran with the story, and made it their scandal of the day on Feb. 16. The aforementioned Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, also penned a story, and tried to smear the Washington Report because he maintains he did not make a statement attributed to him in an article in our July 2001 issue (see aforementioned letter, which did not admit to any “ill-conceived” comments).

According to President Obama, Rashad Hussain “has played a key role in developing the partnerships I called for in Cairo. And as a hafiz of [one who has completely memorized] the Qur’an, he is a respected member of the American Muslim community, and I thank him for carrying forward this important work. Thank you for your work to advance the principles we share—justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

It’s not only Muslim Americans who should be concerned about attempts to stifle free speech. While the attack on Rashad Hussein might look as though it is aimed at Muslims, in fact the ultimate goal is to prevent all Americans from understanding that Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity, is one of the three monotheistic religions born in the Middle East, and that Muslims are as much a part of the Abrahamic tradition as Christians and Jews

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report of Middle East Affairs.