CAIR's Dawud Walid Recognized in Lansing

Our favorite local CAIR executive director, Dawud Walid, was at Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing last September receiving an award from the mayor Virg Bernero.

“Walid was giving a speech, ironically titled ‘Building Bridges.’ The event was the City of Lansing’s first annual Unity Iftar Program,” writes Joe Kaufman at FrontPage Magazine. (“Hate and Terror Awarded”).

Kaufman's article gives all of us some additional background on Walid, whom we know around here for magically appearing as official spokesman at every single Muslim-related event in Michigan. Kaufman writes:

First and foremost, Walid is involved with CAIR-Michigan, as the organization’s Executive Director. CAIR recently was designated by the United States government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial that ran from July through October of 2007, which dealt with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. During the trial, the FBI provided testimony proving CAIR’s involvement with the former head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, in his American Palestine Committee. The government reiterated CAIR’s “affiliation” with Hamas, in a federal court brief filed in December of 2007.

As well, Walid is an active member of the North American Imams Federation (NAIF). Other members of NAIF include Mazen Mokhtar, an Al-Qaeda web designer who was indicted in April of 2007 for tax evasion and for filing false tax returns, and Siraj Wahhaj, an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The President of NAIF is Omar Shahin, a former representative of two Hamas-related “charities,” KindHearts and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), both of which have been shut down by the U.S. government.

Furthermore, Walid is the assistant imam of Masjid Wali Muhammad. Formerly Muhammad’s Temple No. 1, the mosque has very close ties to the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its former Supreme Minister, Elijah Muhammad, whose picture adorns the inside of the mosque.

The mosque’s ties to NOI have not escaped Walid. In February of last year, he joined others, at a press conference to welcome the group and its overtly anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan, to Detroit. About Farrakhan’s appearance, Walid stated with great anticipation, “We have been told that Minister Farrakhan is going to be making a big announcement at this meeting.”

Speaking of “bridges,” I find Walid an interesting example of a bridge himself, the way he somehow straddles the unbridgeable divide between historical Islam, and the whacked-out science fiction version taught as Nation of Islam doctrine. (“When It Comes to Role Models, Allah Knows Best”);

Walid’s ties with NOI and Farrakhan are all the more interesting right now as we've been commenting lately on the ties between so many black churches, the NOI, traditional Islam, and all of them seem to work so closely with many black political leaders. See ("What’s Kwame Got to Do with Dearborn? Part I"); and (" Detroit Clergy Look Forward to Ecumaniacal Embrace of Nation of Islam").

Read the rest of Kaufman’s very thorough article here.