How many times has the Obama campaign met with groups tied to or connected with terrorist organizations?

Thursday, October 09, 2008



The Obama campaign's Muslim outreach director participated in a meeting in mid-September that was attended by several controversial Muslim activists, NBC News has learned. The Obama campaign now concedes that was a misjudgment, and that its top Muslim staffer would not have attended the meeting if she had known the full participant list beforehand.







"Would a campaign staffer have attended if they were aware of the complete list of attendees? No," said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email statement to NBC.







The Muslim outreach meeting







On September 15, newly named Muslim outreach director Minha Husaini spoke to a small group of Muslim leaders and potential Obama supporters at a hotel in Springfield, Virginia, several meeting participants and the campaign said. Two other Obama-affiliated Democratic Party workers joined Husaini and also spoke to the crowd. Some Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based Muslim activists and interested citizens attended, and flyers were passed out from "Arab Americans for Obama" stating Sen. Obama's goals for achieving peace in the Middle East, protecting the civil liberties of Arab Americans and ending the war in Iraq.







Several participants told NBC News that Husaini and other speakers delivered a standard Obama campaign pitch. "They said, ‘We're here to get the concerns of Muslim voters and let everyone know that the Obama campaign does want the support of the Muslim community,'" recalled one participant, who requested anonymity. The meeting was not advertised and some attendees got text phone messages notifying them that day of the meeting's location, the participant said.







Nearly a month later, the meeting is drawing controversy--and not because of anything said at the meeting itself.







The attendees







One meeting attendee was Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society, several of the participants said. The MAS website describes Bray as an imam and "long time civil and human rights activist." Bray's critics say he has a history of defending terrorists. They point to a video of Bray at a rally in 2000, for example, in ...