Controversy
IT is suspected of being an American offshoot of the London-based Al-Muhajiroun, a group that celebrated the 9/11 attacks, referring to the hijackers as "the Magnificent 19," and posted a burning picture of the United States Capitol on its website. The Islamic Thinkers Society also used to fly the Al-Muhajiroun flag and distribute Al-Muhajiroun tracts. The Anti-Defamation League called ITS "a pseudonym or an offshoot of the British-based Al Muhajiroun, a now-disbanded radical Islamic group that supported terrorism and the imposition of Islamic hegemony worldwide."
In the CNN program ParkerSpitzer, the ex-leader of Al-Muhajiroun, Anjem Choudary, was interviewed with the title "heinous terrorist" and linked to militant groups like Al-Qaeda. Choudary however, denounced these allegations in a press release on his personal website. The ITS has also published a press release in response to the CNN interview supporting Al-Muhajiroun's former leader Anjem Choudary, but denouncing links to violence in a similar fashion, stating "as the struggle is always intellectual and political."
When the group still called itself Al-Muhajiroun, its members held an event at Queensborough Community College, during which an Al-Muhajiroun speaker said, "We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress! The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!"
Observers such as the Intelligence Summit have called the Islamic Thinkers Society a Fundamentalist Islamic group.
Before he founded Revolution Muslim, Yousef al Khattab was the chief ideologue for the Islamic Thinkers Society.
Bryant Neal Vinas, a Hispanic Catholic convert to Islam from Long Island who was convicted of participating in and supporting Al-Qaeda plots in Afghanistan and the U.S., moved in Islamic Thinkers Society circles in New York before he left the U.S. CNN reported that followers of the Islamic Thinkers Society helped radicalize Vinas and helped him connect with Islamist militants in Pakistan.
Read more about this topic: Islamic Thinkers Society
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)