An official of the largest Muslim group in the U.S. with purported terrorist ties has been invited to a meeting at the White House to seek out his views on the subject of religious discrimination in America.
Hassan Shibly, chief executive director of Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR) Florida, has been tapped to represent the Muslim community in the U.S., anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson revealed.
Noticeably, the moderate group Muslim Reform Movement has not been invited in the meeting, Emerson told WND.
Since 2008, the FBI has prohibited any communication with CAIR officials due to its ties with Muslim Brotherhood, WND reported.
"Why would the White House include CAIR when FBI policy is to avoid the group?" Emerson asked.
Emerson, head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, said his group got an email from the White House, saying that "CAIR state chapter representatives have been included in broad meetings."
"The meeting's focus is understandable, but the inclusion of a prominent CAIR official serves only to enhance the status of a group with documented ties to a terrorist financing network," he said.
WND said CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror finance case against Texas' Holy Land Foundation and its former officials.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson called on a probe on CAIR and mentioned the Holy Land case during the presidential debate on Tuesday.
The organisation that became CAIR was founded as a front group for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the report said.
Emerson claimed that Shibly attending the meeting and meeting Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is troubling as he is helping a family sue the FBI, saying that an agent shot and killed a friend of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2013.
The friend, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an FBI agent after admitting his involvement in a triple murder in Massachusetts. He charged at the agent but was shot dead.
Emerson said the Muslim Reform Movement is an organisation of non-Islamist Muslims.
"For the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR," Emerson said.
