The Biden administration recently announced its appointment of Mohamed Elsanousi, director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The White House may not know that judging by his actions instead of his words, Elsanousi is an advocate for neither peacemaking nor religious freedom.
The Sudanese-born Elsanousi spent 12 years as director of community outreach and interfaith relations for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a long-standing Muslim Brotherhood front group. He has hardly repudiated this connection, displaying it as a credential on his official Peacemakers network bio. His bio also boasts of a bachelor’s degree in “Sharia and Law” from the International Islamic University in Pakistan.
ISNA is not a minor Brotherhood operation. It is cited as the very first on a list of 29 organizations named in the Brotherhood’s “Explanatory Memorandum” outlining its plans for the future.
The 1991 manifesto, discovered by an FBI search warrant in 2004, describes such organizations as part of “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Founded in 1981, ISNA was directly connected to the infamous Holy Land Foundation, shut down in 2007 and deemed at trial to be the Brotherhood’s foremost American-based funder of Hamas—an outgrowth of the Brotherhood itself.
A close ally of ISNA is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), exposed in the same trial as another prominent Hamas money-laundering enterprise. CAIR’s leader, Nihad Awad, has openly said: “I am in support of the Hamas movement.”
Not surprisingly, despite its use of humane buzzwords and avoidance of hateful language, Islamic institutions tied to ISNA have nurtured jihad against Americans.
One example is the Islamic Society of Boston, founded the same year as ISNA by convicted terrorist conspirator Abdurahman Alamoudi with the late Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf al-Qaradhawi as a board member. When the ISB began construction on its “sister” mega-mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, its 2003 tax exemption filing named ISNA as its parent organization.
Since then, both the ISB and ISBCC have produced 14 (known) associates, former members and students who are at large, dead, in prison or have been deported for involvement in terrorism.
These include Aafia Siddiqui, currently serving an 86-year prison sentence for the attempted murder of FBI agents in Afghanistan; Tarek Mehanna, convicted of “conspiracy to provide material support to Al-Qaeda”; ISIS terrorist Ahmad Abousamra, who made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List; and the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Nevertheless, ISNA has enjoyed warm relations with the government, particularly the Obama administration. Senior presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett gave an address to an ISNA conference in 2009 and former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson spoke at another in 2016.
The group met with former Secretary of State John Kerry in both 2013 and 2015 and visited the White House multiple times in 2012 and 2013. They have continued their White House presence under the Biden presidency, including one iftar dinner in 2022.
Regarding Elsanousi himself, he has been associated with a number of troubling individuals and groups.
In 2012, he attended a conference in Mauritania that supposedly dealt with “challenges faced by religious minorities in Muslim-majority communities.” The hosting organization, the Union of Muslim Scholars, however, was headed at the time by none other than Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, who proclaimed in a 2009 Al Jazeera broadcast that Allah visited Hitler upon the Jews as just deserts for their “corruption”—though, he added, they had “exaggerated this issue [the Holocaust].”
In 2013, Elsanousi moderated an ISNA panel in Paris featuring a keynote address “on extremism and anti-Muslim sentiment” by Tariq Ramadan. According to French intelligence services, a pet “long-term goal” of Ramadan’s is the “legal extinction of the State of Israel.” In addition to being the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, Ramadan has been accused of rape and sexual molestation on many occasions, including allegations involving minors.
At ISNA’s 50th annual convention, Elsanousi appeared alongside Safaa Zarzour, who was chair of CAIR’s Chicago branch for more than a decade.
Another event over which Elsanousi presided included a speech by Dr. Ibrahim bin Saleh al-Naimi of Qatar. Al-Naimi now serves as the Hamas-sponsoring emirate’s undersecretary of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education.
Elsanousi has met with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a supporter of Hamas and long-time Brotherhood ally who recently threatened to invade Israel.
During their meeting, Elsanousi discussed ISNA’s “Shoulder-to-Shoulder” program, whose Christian interfaith partners included the deeply anti-Israel Church World Service, United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterian Church. Years later, via the Peacemakers network, Elsanousi would hold a forum with a representative of the pro-BDS World Council of Churches, of which the Presbyterian Church is a member.
In light of this, why would the Biden administration select such a person to help safeguard worldwide religious freedom? The full explanations for such decisions are typically hidden behind closed doors, but two facts are relevant.
The first is the lengths to which Muslim Brotherhood organizations will go to deceive decent non-Muslims and agents of government that they have no connection to jihad or violent intolerance. Elsanousi’s Peacemakers network is a prime example.
The second is far more unsettling. The Biden administration has a history of appointing officials openly hostile to Israel, soft on Islamic terrorism or known to have made inappropriate remarks concerning Jewish interests—31 at last count.
Elsanousi’s appointment, however, appears to be unprecedentedly dangerous. While the other officials largely expressed anti-Israel sentiments verbally, Elsanousi is the only one whose deeds are more telling. Though he speaks of interfaith harmony and peaceful resolutions to conflicts in public, he was directly involved at a senior leadership level with the world’s most powerful terrorism-fomenting Sunni syndicate, the Muslim Brotherhood; an organization whose clearly expressed intention is to vanquish the Western world’s “miserable house” through both violence and deceit.
There are many millions of people around the world suffering from a lack of religious freedom. Many of them are Christians and, of these, some have been tormented by the Muslim Brotherhood itself.
It goes without saying that those persecuted for their faith need real defenders, not fake ones.
