UPDATE: It appears that Calvin College will no longer be hosting the event.
The American Decency Association plans to host Kamal Saleem, who claims to be a former terrorist, at Calvin College as part of a tour of Michigan. Saleem’s story of working as a terrorist all over the globe has been thoroughly debunked, but he continues to be an idol of Religious Right groups. He even spoke at last year’s Values Voter Summit following Paul Ryan where he warned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to “shut down” churches and synagogues.
Saleem has argued that President Obama is a Muslim who is using Roe v. Wade “to bring Sharia law” to the U.S. He maintains that Obama wants to make sure that “Sharia law will be supreme in America” by working with “Hamas to import Muslim people to the United States” and “legalizing terrorism.” Saleem even claims that “there are many generals who swore to destroy the United States of America are generals in the United States [military]” and that an Islamic shadow government is secretly running the U.S. through the Obama family babysitter.
He spoke at Calvin College in 2007, where he met Professor Doug Howard, who went on to write an article for Christianity Today on the “bizarre” and fantastical claims that Saleem makes in his book, The Blood of Lambs.
Because Howard, like others, raised serious doubts about Saleem’s story, Saleem has accused him of working for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Michelle Goldberg of The Daily Beast reports that “Saleem told me that Howard is an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood” and in an interview with Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, Saleem asserted that Howard supports radical Islam:
But Saleem didn’t flinch. “He’s related to a special group called the Muslim Brotherhood, and he works with them, he went to DC, he was with CAIR,” he said.
I mentioned that Howard is a Christian, which makes him an odd fit for the Brotherhood.
“So? He’s a professor of history. Islamic history professor, and he’s writing on what? On Islamic history glory. So the group he’s with, there are different groups. He rallied with them in DC, and he invited an Iranian radical to Calvin University. They spoke right there.” That Iranian radical, it turns out, was Reza Aslan, who in addition to being an American citizen raised in the Bay Area, is famous mostly for suggesting that democracy is a useful weapon against terrorism.
(“I don’t know what to say! Maybe I should add that to my faculty web page,” joked Howard in an email, adding that as part of his semester in DC, he took students to meet with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, AIPAC, the Mennonites Central Committee, and, yes, one trip to a mosque.)
But now, Saleem is once again set to speak at a college which he believes is employing a Muslim Brotherhood agent who is part of an alliance between professors and terrorists.
