| Smart diplomacy™ at work... |
| Flaccid power? |
Sheikh Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi was issued a visa for a 17-city tour of US mosques to raise money and support for the Syrian uprising. He arrived New Year's Day.
The radical Syrian cleric has made no secret of his virulent anti-gay views. Appearing April 28, 2011, on al Aqsa TV, the official network of the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza, al-Nabulsi said: "Homosexuality involves a filthy place and does not generate offspring. Homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual. That is why, brothers, homosexuality carries the death penalty."
| There you have it, LGBT (and all the other 53 kinds of other-gendered) Americans -- you now know where you stand. If it's between you and a sword-wielding, gay-hating Muslim, you not only lose, you're dead... |
In addition to his anti-gay pronouncements, Sheikh al-Nabulsi has publicly endorsed holy war against Westerners and Jews as well as suicide bombings against Israel, America's democratic ally in the region.
"All the Jewish people are combatants," he said in a religious edict that appeared in Arabic on his personal website.
"[The Israelis] do not have a regular army; they have a reserve army, and all the people can fight, so this is essentially an entirely aggressive entity from A to Z. This is the Sharia ruling."
"The enemy . . . says 'suicide operations' to deceive Muslims, that this is suicide, but we should call them 'martyrdom operations,' " he said.
The Muslim leader came to the United States for a fundraising tour for a newly formed coalition of radical Islamist militias fighting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian civil war has cost more than 100,000 civilian lives, according to United Nations' estimates.
The cleric's tour was sponsored by the
| Shaam Relief: this generation's NorAid... |
The Syrian American Council submitted al-Nabulsi's visa request to the State Department's Syria desk. A Department official told the American Media Institute that all visa requests, especially for individuals from countries on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, get scrutinized.
"Every visa applicant undergoes a screening to detect connections to terrorism, and that includes inputs from multiple federal partners," the official said.
| All of which failed... |
"Under current policy, a foreign national applying for a US visa who is known to have promoted jihad and suicide bombings would be ordinarily deemed 'undesirable' and denied a visa," according to a report from the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a Washington, DC-based group founded by investigative reporter Steven Emerson.
After the Investigative Project on Terrorism published translations of these and other comments from his website, al-Nabulsi issued a statement on Jan. 18, denying that he promoted the killing of civilians.
"It is not permitted to kill civilians, non-combatants, using any method, regardless of their national, ethnic or religious background," he said in a statement distributed by the Syrian American Council.
| He was just lying then. It's perfectly permissible for a devout holy man to lie to infidels as often as required. You could look it up... |
Within days of AMI's contact with the State Department, al-Nabulsi removed the reference to killing Jewish civilians from his website.
"They say one thing in Arabic and another in English," Emerson said. "Deception is part of the arsenal of war, and these guys have perfected deception to an art. They know how to play America and our vulnerabilities so their disinformation is accepted as the truth."
Or chances are the Obama administration simply wants to look the other way. To avoid offending Muslims, they ignore hate speech.
