Obama's Radical Guests
By Joseph Klein 
August 19, 2010 
FrontPage Magazine
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/19/obamas-radical-guests/2/

With all of the hubbub surrounding President Obama's apparent endorsement of the Ground Zero mega mosque and community center complex at last week's White House Ramadan dinner, none of the cable talk shows that I have watched have bothered to examine the guest list. I think that is a mistake because the guest list gives some insight into what Obama really believes.
Amongst all of the ambassadors and other dignitaries, two "community" leaders with a radical Islamic agenda stand out.
The first was Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). [1]
ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development [2], an Islamic "charity" which was convicted in 2008 by a federal jury for giving more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
One month after 9/11, Dr. Mattson described the extremist Wahhabism ideology that inspired the 9/11 terrorists this way:
It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European Protestant Reformation.
In a September 2002 interview with PBS [3], Mattson stated that she did not see "any difference" between Christian leaders criticizing Islam or al Qaeda [4] on the one hand, and Osama bin Laden [5] citing "Islamic theology to justify violence against Americans" on the other.
And apparently, President Obama is following Mattson's advice in purging the phrase "Islamic terrorism" from his administration's lexicon. Is it any wonder that she was on Obama's guest list for the Ramadan dinner?
The second radical Islamic White House dinner guest was Salam Al-Marayati [6], a co-founder and director of  the Muslim Public Affairs Council [7]. This is an individual who likes to speak about building bridges and inter-faith dialogue, but only as a cover for his more radical views. What Islamists such as Al-Marayati like to do is invert the meaning of American ideals and history to suit sharia (Islamic law) and the Islamic narrative of the oppressed victim. For example, he said that:
When Patrick Henry said, `Give me liberty or give me death,'  that statement epitomized jihad [Islamic holy war].
Al-Marayati has also excused Palestinian terrorism and condemned Israeli acts of self-defense. Back in 1996, for example, a Palestinian named Muhammad Hamida shouted  Allahu Akbar (Allah is Great) as he drove his car intentionally into a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem, killing one Israeli and injuring 23 others. He was shot dead before he could wreak any further mayhem.
Who did Al-Marayati choose to condemn? Not the terrorist, but rather the person or persons who ended his rampage, whom Al-Marayati demanded be extradited to the United States for trial in an American court on terrorism charges!
This so-called "moderate" was so bad that in 1999 then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri decided to withdraw his nomination of Salam Al-Marayati to the 10-member National Commission on Terrorism that was being formed.
It gets even worse. Al-Marayati's Muslim Public Affairs Council has issued policy papers which argue for the removal of Hezbollah and Hamas from U.S. terrorist designations.
And on the very day of the horrific 9/11 attacks, on a Los Angeles radio program al-Marayati said
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.
Now, this same Salam Al-Marayati is a guest in President Obama's White House along with his fellow radical Islamist Dr. Ingrid Mattson.
You can learn a lot about someone by the company he keeps  -  or, in President Obama's case, the people he invites to dinner at the White House.