Another Muslim outreach director under the Obama bus?

^{Minha Husaini (left)}

Minha Husaini, the Obama campaign’s most recent Muslim outreach director, “participated in a meeting in mid September that was attended by several controversial Muslim activists,” Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer, reported late last evening.

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. …

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.

This is not the problem. Susan Schmidt reported in the Wall Street Journal

Participants included leaders of the Council of American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, which have been cited by the government in the past for ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Popkin wrote:

One meeting attendee was Mahdi Bray (left) [executive director of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation], 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 which he can be seen pumping his fist in the air in support of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In a 2004 interview, he called the Israeli assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader an “unlawful, cowardly and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism.” Bray did not return a call requesting comment.

Schmidt writes the U.S. Justice Department “has asserted in court proceedings that [MAS]’s organizers were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global group promoting political Islam.”

Popkin continues:

Also attending the meeting was Nihad Awad (left), executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is a Muslim-American civil rights group that has, as its website states, “consistently and persistently condemned terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.” Nonetheless, the group has many critics, especially in law-enforcement circles, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.

Schmidt adds that CAIR’s legislative director was also in attendance.

Popkin also reported:

A second meeting participant speaking on condition on anonymity said he was stunned to learn that Awad and Bray had been invited to an event where Obama representatives would be present. The participant said Awad and Bray are considered politically “radioactive.” He said that some in the Obama group knew ahead of time that top CAIR officials would be in attendance–an allegation the Obama campaign disputes.

Additionally, Popkin reported, the Obama campaign’s former Muslim outreach coordinator, “Chicago-based lawyer Mazen Asbahi (left) also attended the meeting.”

[Ashabi] abruptly resigned in August after the Wall Street Journal and websites that track fundamentalist Islam began questioning Asbahi’s involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups. When reached by NBC News, Asbahi would not comment about the September gathering or his brief stint eight years ago on an investment fund board which also included a fundamentalist imam.

Minha Husaini identifies herself in her LinkedIn profile as an Obama Organizing Fellow from the Washington D.C.-Metro area.

The New York Times reported June 24, 2008:

Some Muslim supporters of Mr. Obama seem to ricochet between dejection and optimism. Minha Husaini, a public health consultant in her 30s who is working for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia, lights up like a swooning teenager when she talks about his promise for change.

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

The NYT article was also reported at Madhi Bray’s blog.

According to her Muslim Public Service Network profile:

Minha Husaini (MSN/MPSN 1995) interned with Senator Joe Lieberman during her MPSN summer. She graduated from University of California-Irvine with a degree in Political Science, and went on to complete a Masters in Health and Public Administration at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles complemented with certificates in Biostats and Epidemiology and Clinical Trials Design and Management. After several years working in e-commerce healthcare supply chain management, Minha moved to Banda Aceh, Indonesia as the Project Coordinator for Tsunami reconstruction efforts with the NGO Gemma9 where she worked on coastal reforestation and capacity building initiatives. Minha is currently an International Development Consultant with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Banda Aceh, developing strategic plans to educate women and families on health, social and nutritional issues.