Biden’s New Muslim Liaison to Fight ‘Institutional Islamophobia’

ByDaniel Greenfield April 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In 2010, the Islamic Society of North America honored one of the unindicted co-conspirators of the World Trade Center bombing.

Also at the ISNA convention were three members of the Obama administration: Rashad Hussain, George Selim and Mazen Basrawi. Hussain went from working as Obama’s envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to serving as Biden’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, while George Selim joined the ADL as its VP of National Affairs.

And Mazen Basrawi was brought in as the Director of Global Engagement at the National Security Council under Biden and will now also double as the White House Muslim liaison. The appointment reveals that the Biden administration sees Muslims in America as an adjunct of the foreign Muslim governments and Islamist entities whose cooperation it is trying to solicit.

In a little over a decade, Basrawi has gone from attending an Islamist conference that featured some of the worst of the worst to a role at the National Security Council.

At the ISNA conference, Basrawi may have been in attendance when the Muslim Brotherhood founded group honored Imam Siraj Wahhaj. Wahhaj, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first WTC attack, has declared, “I will never ever tell people, ‘don’t be violent, that is not the Islamic way’: the violence has to be selected” and predicted, “In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who recently faced rape accusations from multiple women, and had supported terrorist attacks on Americans in Iraq, was a keynote speaker. Other speakers included Hamza Yusuf who had defended the Blind Sheikh, the World Trade Center bombing figure, and warned two days before 9/11 that “this country is facing a very terrible fate.” That fate seems to be here.

Basrawi was one of the many Islamic appointees of the Obama administration traveling through the DOJ and then into the NSC. And Islamic groups are celebrating his latest appointment.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) described itself as being “proud” to announce Basrawi’s appointment and was “excited to see what Basrawi brings to this role.” CAIR cheered that it was looking “forward to working with Mr. Basrawi to address issues of concern to the American Muslim community, including institutional Islamophobia in federal law enforcement.”

Considering CAIR’s history of support for Islamic terrorism, that’s likely to get Americans killed.

Basrawi juggling a role at the NSC and as Biden’s Muslim liaison intersects when it comes to Islamic terrorism. In 2003, Basrawi, then a UC Berkeley law student, signed an ad falsely accusing the War on Terror of depriving Muslims of rights. When John Yoo returned from helping fight terrorism at the DOJ to teaching at UC Berkeley, Basrawi campaigned for his removal.

“They are stripping noncitizens of what is left of their existing rights, and engaging in illegal foreign policy,” Basrawi had ranted. “It’s those sorts of things that have affected our communities.”

Basrawi soon joined the Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers which was set up two weeks after 9/11 to fight investigations of Islamic terrorism. BAAML worked with CAIR and agitated to censor law enforcement training materials discussing Islamic terrorism including those by Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and Stephen Coughlin.

He also began donating money to Democrats including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and former Nation of Islam member Keith X. Ellison. Shortly thereafter, Basrawi was working for the Obama administration at the DOJ where he defended the Islamic mega-mosque in Murfreesboro, TN in court, and regularly attended the administration’s ‘Iftar’ dinners.

At law school, Basrawi had been protesting Yoo’s role fighting terrorism at the DOJ and, in a changing of the guard that was all too typical of the Obama era, he was working at the DOJ.

There Basrawi was able to conduct a tour of anti-American groups with the full backing of the Obama administration. At the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders had defended Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups, Basrawi lectured on fighting a mythical 9/11 “backlash” against Muslims and declared, to loud cheers, that, “we can say a man by the name of Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States”.

Even though his donations to Hillary didn’t pay off, Basrawi stayed behind at the Justice Department under Trump while donating money to Joe Biden and MoveOn. After maxing out his contributions to Biden, Basrawi moved up the ladder in the new Democrat administration.

It was a long way up the ladder of Islamist activism from the bygone days when Basrawi had started an Islamic culture club at Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School, but even then he had been building the kind of resume that would appeal to Islamists and later to Democrats.

Despite his current sensitive position, Basrawi’s Facebook friends network includes Hatem Bazian, the the godfather of campus Islamism and antisemitism, Keith Ellison, Anwar Khan, the head of Islamic Relief USA, BDS activist Noura Erakat, Hady Amr, Salam Al-Marayati, Wajahat Ali and other hateful personalities whom we have covered elsewhere. They also serve as a map tying together government officials, activists, nonprofits and journalists into a network.

“Though I oppose the undemocratic electoral college, I accept that that is the constitutional form of government in which we currently live,” Basrawi posted after the 2020 election.

That’s the system we “currently live” under, and one that, as Imam Sirraj Wahhaj had predicted, would be destroyed to make way for an Islamic theocracy depriving us all of our rights . “If 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us,” he had predicted.

“Wherever you came from, you came to America. And you came for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah’s deen,” the unindicted World Trade Center bombing co-conspirator honored and hosted by the Islamist organizations of America, declared.

Mazen Basrawi is only one of many working his way through the system on a long march through our institutions. They have told us their mission. Now they are carrying it out.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.