A group of alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Western Ontario (UWO) hope that a letter protesting a plan to set up a $2-million endowment for a new Islamic studies chair at Huron University College from groups “implicated in violent jihad” will pressure Huron’s principal to reject the funding.
Trish Fulton
The controversy began in March after an announcement by Huron, a college affiliated with UWO, that it will accept funds raised to establish a new Islamic chair in the faculty of theology. The money will be collected in part by the London, Ont.-based Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), and will come from private donors and other Muslim groups, including the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Islamic Centre of Southwestern Ontario (ICSO).
In April, a letter signed by 26 alumni, faculty and friends of UWO, including associate professor of economics John Palmer and former political science lecturer Rory Leishman, appealed to Huron’s interim principal, Trish Fulton, to reconsider her “ill-advised” decision to “accept funding from any organization implicated in violent jihad.”
Leishman, a London-based freelance journalist and spokesperson for the signatories, said three of the organizations that are part of the fundraising effort to establish the chair – MAC, IIIT, and the ICSO – are of particular concern.
The letter states that MAC leaders insist the Muslim group is “peaceful, moderate and democratic,” but its website says, “We believe that, in the 20th century, the approach of Imam Hassan Al-Banna best exemplifies [a] balanced, comprehensive understanding of Islam.”
Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, “was an anti-western exponent of violent jihad who called for the eradication of the state of Israel, and as we pointed out in the letter, he is commended in the 1988 covenant of Hamas for having declared that ‘Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,’” Leishman told The CJN.
MAC’s president, Dr. Wael Haddara, a UWO medical professor, told the National Post his group is only interested in Al-Banna’s theology and not his politics, and that MAC has no ties to the Brotherhood.
Leishman said he also takes issue with the Islamic Centre of Southwestern Ontario, because it’s headed by Assem Fadel, 75, who is also president of the World Islamic Call Society’s (WICS) Canadian branch, which recently had its charitable status revoked by the federal government.
According to a May 7 Ottawa Citizen article, government files revealed that WICS was established as a front by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to fund terrorist plots, including the failed 2007 plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
According to government documents, money was wired to Fadel’s personal bank account from Gadhafi’s “jihad fund,” transferred to the WICS bank account in Canada, and then to bank accounts of known terrorists, the Citizen reported.
Upon hearing WICS had been linked to the JFK plot, Fadel told the Citizen, “The allegations are unbelievable,” adding that money from Gadhafi’s “jihad fund” was transferred into his bank account before being deposited into the charity’s account, because the deposit was in U.S. funds.
“The charity doesn’t have a U.S. bank account, so the money came to me and I distributed the money as directed by the mother organization in Libya,” Fadel said.
The letter to Fulton also gave examples of the IIIT’s brush with terrorism.
“In 2003, Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani, a co-founder and former president of the IIIT, was cited as an unindicted, co-conspirator in the trial of Sami al-Arian, an Islamist activist who served a 57-month prison sentence in the United States for conspiring to channel funds to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”
The PIJ is considered a terrorist organization by Public Safety Canada, which describes it as “one of the most violent Palestinian terrorist groups.”
In a sworn affidavit filed in 2003, David Kane, a senior special agent with the U.S. Custom Service, referred to al-Alwani and IIIT’s founding president AbdulHamid AbuSulayman as “ardent supporters” of PIJ and Hamas.
“They have repeatedly voiced their ideological support, and I’ve seen repeated instances of their financial support,” Kane wrote.
Fulton, who responded to the letter on April 7, said that she was “aware of the allegations against IIIT,” but said the plan to fund the endowment “was approved by our executive board after a thorough due diligence process.”
She added that the process included “reviewing the outcomes of the various decisions that were before the U.S. District Courts dealing with IIIT and its members.”
She added that there is no credible evidence that MAC’s objective is anything other than "[To establish an Islamic presence in Canada that is balanced, constructive and integrated.”
Leishman said he considers Fulton’s response to his group’s concerns to be a “brush off,” adding that it’s reckless for Huron “to accept funding from an organization that has been tainted and associated with terrorism, as has the IIIT.”
In a statement, Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, said if the money is tied to terrorist groups, it’s cause for serious concern. “Funds that are derived from organizations associated or affiliated with known extremist groups tarnish the integrity of the academic institutions concerned. Such funding also raises questions about the potential influence of such groups on a Canadian campus,” he said.
Leishman said that despite Fulton’s promise that the chair will be chosen by the executive board and the dean of theology, the letter signatories are “not at all reassured by that, given that… he who pays the piper calls the tune.”
Fulton told The CJN that she takes the signatories’ concerns very seriously, and when she received the letter in April, it did cause her to re-evaluate her decision, “if only to respond effectively to their concerns. Like any other university, we follow a protocol with respect to any donations that we receive… The particular allegations that were raised in the letter were not new to us. We had thoroughly investigated them in the past.”
She said that the Muslim Brotherhood has “nothing to do with our chair in Islamic studies in theology, nor with MAC or IIIT… They think that the teachings of Hassan Al-Banna are appropriate to guide the context of Muslims integrating into modern society.”
She added that Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949 and that the concerns that people have with the Brotherhood, “particularly the militant wing of it, are current concerns. To me they don’t connect logically to Hassan Al-Banna.”
But Leishman said he thinks Fulton is “being willfully blind to the truth on that. We pointed out to her the character of Al-Banna and she just ignored it. I think that is just irresponsible.”
Fulton said that if the allegations that the groups had ties to terrorist organizations were true and accepted as fact, she would decline the funding.
“If something were to come up after the fact, we would do the right thing,” she said.
