News Analysis
Wake Forest University's Radical Imam
When Wake Forest University hired Khalid Griggs in February 2010 to be its first Muslim Assistant Chaplain, President Nathan O. Hatch hailed the "broader dialogue among people of different faith traditions" and the "greater awareness of differing beliefs" that he apparently supposed would flow naturally from the appointment.
Hatch might have been excused for his ignorance at the time, because the Center for Security Policy (CSP, a Washington, D.C. think tank, had not yet published its seminal study on Islamic law (shariah) and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). "Shariah: The Threat to America." Once that work came out in October 2010, though, it is difficult to understand how the president of such a respected American university could have remained so oblivious to the serious implications of allowing an individual like Griggs with openly-publicized links to the Muslim Brotherhood access to Wake Forest students.
Actually, someone with Hatch's level of professional responsibility might have been expected to demonstrate a better awareness of Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] activities well before 2010: the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial concluded in November 2008 with a unanimous 108-count guilty verdict for the top leadership of this ostensible Islamic "charity" which was found to have channeled millions of dollars to the Islamic terror organization HAMAS, the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
By order of the judge in the case, voluminous documents from that Richardson, TX trial were posted to the Internet precisely for the purpose of educating Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood's activities in the U.S. A university president, who has been entrusted with the academic formation of thousands of impressionable young minds, has no greater responsibility than to investigate thoroughly the background of those he brings onto his campus.
In the case of Khalid Griggs, Hatch's failure has been and continues to be egregious. Even a cursory Google search readily turns up the information that Griggs is closely affiliated with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). Had Hatch done even the minimal homework expected of a college sophomore, he would know that ICNA was included on a Muslim Brotherhood document submitted (unopposed) into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial titled, "A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends," which identified ICNA as an entity or affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Further, ICNA was named by the Department of Justice (DoJ), which prosecuted the case, an unindicted co-conspirator.
To make things even worse, it turns out that Wake Forest's new imam isn't just "affiliated" with ICNA: he's the Chairman for the ICNA Council for Social Justice. This means he's a senior ranking official of an organization the Justice Department named over three years ago as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror case.
There's more. Khalid Griggs is the Imam and a founding member of the Community Mosque in Winston-Salem, NC. Together with other founding members, including Ibrahim Hanif, Jamal Abdullah, and Salih Abdul Latif, Griggs is a member of The Islamic Party of North America. Its signature publication, "Taking Islam to the Street: The Da'wah of the Islamic Party of North America," candidly describes its ideology as "a revolutionary Islam" grounded in the teachings of Maulana Abu'l a'la Maududi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Muammar Qaddaffi, and Sayyed Qutb.
Maududi was the hugely influential Pakistani Salafist who founded Jama'at-i-Islami (Society of Islam) and effectively bridged the thinking of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyed Qutb, perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood's foremost theoretician.
The Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution toppled the Shah of Iran and instituted a savage reign of jihadist terror whose reverberations continue to destabilize the Middle East and beyond.
Muammar Qaddaffi was the brutal, terror-sponsoring Libyan dictator overthrown and killed in early 2011.
The Community Mosque of Winston-Salem also features a direct link from its site to the Muslim Brotherhood's IslamOnline.net website where Yousuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood's modern-day senior "spiritual leader," dispenses fatwas and jihad advice. These are the ideologues to whom Khalid Griggs and his Winston-Salem mosque colleagues look for inspiration. Is this the type of thinking that Nathan Hatch finds acceptable for Griggs to share with Winston-Salem students?
It gets worse. Griggs is also a member of the Shura Council for the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA), an organization co-founded and led by Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. MANA's General Secretary, Ihsan Bagby, is also affiliated with self-identified Muslim Brotherhood front groups that the DoJ listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR—also known as HAMAS in the U.S.), the Fiqh Council of North America, and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). MANA's website includes an essay by Imam Mohamed Balanonie entitled "The Role of the Masjid," which explains that the Masjid (mosque) is the headquarters of the "Islamic State," a "springboard" for the "implementation of Islam," and "the starting point to the expansion of Islam and the Islamic conquests." Ensuring there is no mistake about the offensive role of the mosque in the execution of jihad, Balanonie quotes Ibn Taimiyah, who wrote that the mosque is a place where "matters of politics were dealt with, troops and platoons were deployed" and "the war booties are divided."
To sum this up, Wake Forest University's Assistant Imam, Khalid Griggs, is also the Imam at a Winston-Salem mosque with an aggressively jihadist mission statement. He is a board member of ICNA, a Muslim Brotherhood front organization that the DoJ listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding case. He is a Shura Council member of MANA, which views mosques as Muslim community centers where Islamic conquests are planned and launched. All of this information is freely available on the Internet, as the numerous hyperlinks in this essay attest. The Team B II report, "Shariah: The Threat to America," was published more than a year ago and the Holy Land Foundation trial documents have been posted to the Internet for three years now.
What part of a university president's job is more important than conducting this kind of due diligence on the personnel who will be in direct, perhaps even daily, contact with the young students that parents send to Winston-Salem in the expectation that they will be guided in an academic environment that is professional, safe, and terror-free? There is none.
President Nathan Hatch owes the alumni, parents, students, and the Wake Forest University Foundation Board of Directors a thorough explanation of exactly how Khalid Griggs' resume ever made it past the first screening, and how such an individual could have been permitted contact and interaction with Winston-Salem University students for almost two years.
Clare M. Lopez, a senior fellow at the Clarion Fund, writes regularly for RadicalIslam.org, and is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, and counterterrorism issues. Lopez began her career as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Call To Action
Are you concerned about the appointment of Imam Griggs as Assistant Chaplain at Wake Forest University?
Contact the university to express your concern.
Write to:
Office of the President
Nathan O. Hatch
Wake Forest University
PO Box 7226
Winston-Salem
NC 27109
Or email hatch@wfu.edu
Postscript
This investigative report by Clare Lopez came about following an email we received from one of our subscribers, Donald Woodsmall, who responded to our call seeking contributors to our "UReport" initiative.
Mr Woodsmall, who is an alumnus of Wake Forest University, heard about Imam Griggs' appointment as Assistant Chaplain and started to do his own research. He also enlisted the assistance of two of the esteemed authors of the report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” (commonly referred to as the “Team B II Report” - see link below). The report, which was published by the Center for Security Policy, was submitted to Congress in 2010.
It was through Mr. Woodsmall’s impeccable research, that Imam Griggs has been revealed to be a compatriot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a proud member of the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA) and the Islamic Council of North America (ICNA), both radical Islamist organizations.
Mr Woodsmall contacted the president of Wake Forest University, Nathan O. Hatch, and alerted him to his findings. Far from receiving a reply thanking him for his efforts and echoing his concern regarding Imam Griggs' appointment, President Hatch's reply made no reference whatsoever to Mr Woodsmall's findings and instead praised Imam Griggs' wisdom, spirituality and pastoral experience.
Below are the original documents Mr Woodsmall submitted to RadicalIslam.org:
Letter from Donald Woodsmall to Wake Forest University President, Nathan Hatch - August 10, 2011
Reply from Wake Forest University President Nathan Hatch - October 5, 2011
Second letter from Donald Woodsmall to Wake Forest President, Nathan Hatch - December 7, 2011
Attachments mentioned in Donald Woodsmall's second letter:
Shariah: The Threat To America (The Team 'B' II Report)
Excerpt from "Taking Islam to the Street: The Daw'ah of the Islamic Party of North America
Email correspondence between Donald Woodsmall and one of the authors of the Team 'B' Report
Are events like this being run on your campus or in your community? If so, we want to hear about them. In addition, if you come across interesting stories in your local media or material on the Internet regarding radical Islamic activity that concerns you, please let us know about it.
Send us an email.
Recent Articles
When Wake Forest University hired Khalid Griggs in February 2010 to be its first Muslim Assistant Chaplain, President Nathan O. Hatch hailed the "broader dialogue among people of different faith traditions" and the "greater awareness of differing beliefs" that he apparently supposed would flow naturally from the appointment.
Hatch might have been excused for his ignorance at the time, because the Center for Security Policy (CSP, a Washington, D.C. think tank, had not yet published its seminal study on Islamic law (shariah) and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). "Shariah: The Threat to America." Once that work came out in October 2010, though, it is difficult to understand how the president of such a respected American university could have remained so oblivious to the serious implications of allowing an individual like Griggs with openly-publicized links to the Muslim Brotherhood access to Wake Forest students.
Actually, someone with Hatch's level of professional responsibility might have been expected to demonstrate a better awareness of Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] activities well before 2010: the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial concluded in November 2008 with a unanimous 108-count guilty verdict for the top leadership of this ostensible Islamic "charity" which was found to have channeled millions of dollars to the Islamic terror organization HAMAS, the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
By order of the judge in the case, voluminous documents from that Richardson, TX trial were posted to the Internet precisely for the purpose of educating Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood's activities in the U.S. A university president, who has been entrusted with the academic formation of thousands of impressionable young minds, has no greater responsibility than to investigate thoroughly the background of those he brings onto his campus.
In the case of Khalid Griggs, Hatch's failure has been and continues to be egregious. Even a cursory Google search readily turns up the information that Griggs is closely affiliated with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). Had Hatch done even the minimal homework expected of a college sophomore, he would know that ICNA was included on a Muslim Brotherhood document submitted (unopposed) into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial titled, "A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends," which identified ICNA as an entity or affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Further, ICNA was named by the Department of Justice (DoJ), which prosecuted the case, an unindicted co-conspirator.
To make things even worse, it turns out that Wake Forest's new imam isn't just "affiliated" with ICNA: he's the Chairman for the ICNA Council for Social Justice. This means he's a senior ranking official of an organization the Justice Department named over three years ago as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror case.
There's more. Khalid Griggs is the Imam and a founding member of the Community Mosque in Winston-Salem, NC. Together with other founding members, including Ibrahim Hanif, Jamal Abdullah, and Salih Abdul Latif, Griggs is a member of The Islamic Party of North America. Its signature publication, "Taking Islam to the Street: The Da'wah of the Islamic Party of North America," candidly describes its ideology as "a revolutionary Islam" grounded in the teachings of Maulana Abu'l a'la Maududi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Muammar Qaddaffi, and Sayyed Qutb.
Maududi was the hugely influential Pakistani Salafist who founded Jama'at-i-Islami (Society of Islam) and effectively bridged the thinking of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyed Qutb, perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood's foremost theoretician.
The Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution toppled the Shah of Iran and instituted a savage reign of jihadist terror whose reverberations continue to destabilize the Middle East and beyond.
Muammar Qaddaffi was the brutal, terror-sponsoring Libyan dictator overthrown and killed in early 2011.
The Community Mosque of Winston-Salem also features a direct link from its site to the Muslim Brotherhood's IslamOnline.net website where Yousuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood's modern-day senior "spiritual leader," dispenses fatwas and jihad advice. These are the ideologues to whom Khalid Griggs and his Winston-Salem mosque colleagues look for inspiration. Is this the type of thinking that Nathan Hatch finds acceptable for Griggs to share with Winston-Salem students?
It gets worse. Griggs is also a member of the Shura Council for the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA), an organization co-founded and led by Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. MANA's General Secretary, Ihsan Bagby, is also affiliated with self-identified Muslim Brotherhood front groups that the DoJ listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR—also known as HAMAS in the U.S.), the Fiqh Council of North America, and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). MANA's website includes an essay by Imam Mohamed Balanonie entitled "The Role of the Masjid," which explains that the Masjid (mosque) is the headquarters of the "Islamic State," a "springboard" for the "implementation of Islam," and "the starting point to the expansion of Islam and the Islamic conquests." Ensuring there is no mistake about the offensive role of the mosque in the execution of jihad, Balanonie quotes Ibn Taimiyah, who wrote that the mosque is a place where "matters of politics were dealt with, troops and platoons were deployed" and "the war booties are divided."
To sum this up, Wake Forest University's Assistant Imam, Khalid Griggs, is also the Imam at a Winston-Salem mosque with an aggressively jihadist mission statement. He is a board member of ICNA, a Muslim Brotherhood front organization that the DoJ listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding case. He is a Shura Council member of MANA, which views mosques as Muslim community centers where Islamic conquests are planned and launched. All of this information is freely available on the Internet, as the numerous hyperlinks in this essay attest. The Team B II report, "Shariah: The Threat to America," was published more than a year ago and the Holy Land Foundation trial documents have been posted to the Internet for three years now.
What part of a university president's job is more important than conducting this kind of due diligence on the personnel who will be in direct, perhaps even daily, contact with the young students that parents send to Winston-Salem in the expectation that they will be guided in an academic environment that is professional, safe, and terror-free? There is none.
President Nathan Hatch owes the alumni, parents, students, and the Wake Forest University Foundation Board of Directors a thorough explanation of exactly how Khalid Griggs' resume ever made it past the first screening, and how such an individual could have been permitted contact and interaction with Winston-Salem University students for almost two years.
Call To Action
Are you concerned about the appointment of Imam Griggs as Assistant Chaplain at Wake Forest University?
Contact the university to express your concern.
Write to:
Office of the President
Nathan O. Hatch
Wake Forest University
PO Box 7226
Winston-Salem
NC 27109
Or email hatch@wfu.edu
Postscript
This investigative report by Clare Lopez came about following an email we received from one of our subscribers, Donald Woodsmall, who responded to our call seeking contributors to our "UReport" initiative.
Mr Woodsmall, who is an alumnus of Wake Forest University, heard about Imam Griggs' appointment as Assistant Chaplain and started to do his own research. He also enlisted the assistance of two of the esteemed authors of the report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” (commonly referred to as the “Team B II Report” - see link below). The report, which was published by the Center for Security Policy, was submitted to Congress in 2010.
It was through Mr. Woodsmall’s impeccable research, that Imam Griggs has been revealed to be a compatriot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a proud member of the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA) and the Islamic Council of North America (ICNA), both radical Islamist organizations.
Mr Woodsmall contacted the president of Wake Forest University, Nathan O. Hatch, and alerted him to his findings. Far from receiving a reply thanking him for his efforts and echoing his concern regarding Imam Griggs' appointment, President Hatch's reply made no reference whatsoever to Mr Woodsmall's findings and instead praised Imam Griggs' wisdom, spirituality and pastoral experience.
Below are the original documents Mr Woodsmall submitted to RadicalIslam.org:
Letter from Donald Woodsmall to Wake Forest University President, Nathan Hatch - August 10, 2011
Reply from Wake Forest University President Nathan Hatch - October 5, 2011
Second letter from Donald Woodsmall to Wake Forest President, Nathan Hatch - December 7, 2011
Attachments mentioned in Donald Woodsmall's second letter:
Shariah: The Threat To America (The Team 'B' II Report)
Excerpt from "Taking Islam to the Street: The Daw'ah of the Islamic Party of North America
Email correspondence between Donald Woodsmall and one of the authors of the Team 'B' Report
Are events like this being run on your campus or in your community? If so, we want to hear about them. In addition, if you come across interesting stories in your local media or material on the Internet regarding radical Islamic activity that concerns you, please let us know about it.
Send us an email.
Comments
Hatch is just a man who would sell his own soul to the devil if it would further him (at least that is what it appears). Just because someone has an academic background, does not make them intelligent. It appears they do not educate themselves in all matters. This university is one that my children will never attend.
4- Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America:
The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is 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. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.
Thank you for the info. I should like to point out what i believe to be an inaccuracy in the article above: the Shah was not overthrown by Khomeini, who but piggy-backed on the increasingly virulent protests led essentially by the mostly western-educated children of the recent middle class the Shah had fostered and developed, bringing his country from the middle ages to the modern era in one generation, albeit with less than democratic politics and methods.
The catastrophic withdrawal of support by Jimmy Carter, who was in a position where he could have leaned on the Shah to "open up" Iranian society and progressively bring in more democracy, allowed the regime to fall.
Just like this past year in the so-called "arab springtime" events, the islamist factions, aided and abetted by the french authorities who allowed Khomeini to return to Iran in a bid to increase their influence at the time Carter was letting US influence dwindle, managed to recuperate the protest movements to their benefit and to oust the moderate Shapur Bakhtiar who had stepped into the power seat after convincing the Shah to "temporarily" leave the country.
Shades of the 1917 menshevik to bolshevik catastrophy in Russia and of what is currently happening in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt...
As has often been the case, Tha lack of understanding of foreign cultures by the US leadership is very much at the root of unforeseen, although foreseable, situations with often dramatic consequences for both the US itself and the rest of the world to boot.
My excuses for the double posting. I had not seen the first one appear.
There is no doubt in my mind that Mr Hatch and the imam have struck such a deal that Hatch will be wealthy and protected for life. Why else would he give such a banal response?
Qaddafi might have sponsored some terrorist organizations for some time, as he also began to built a nuclear weapon. But America changed his mind, so gave up the nuclear program, and cooperated with the Americans to fight the Islamists.
Here are some little known facts about Libya and the real reason the powers in the West wanted him killed:
Videos: http://www.libyathefacts.blogspot.com/