Rep. Ellison's Hajj

The only Muslim in Congress participated in the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and now the funding for that trip is coming into question:

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison's groundbreaking pilgrimage to Mecca last month was paid for by an American Muslim organization that has ties to Islamic radicals and is "the Muslim equivalent of the neo-Nazi party," his critics say.

Ellison, a Democrat, became the first U.S. congressman ever to make the hajj pilgrimage when he visited Islam's holy city in December. The trip was funded by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, a non-profit interfaith group that is one of 55 branches of the MAS nationwide. The pilgrimage was hailed by Muslim activists in the U.S.

"A U.S. congressman going on hajj sends a very positive message to the Muslim world about America and the religious diversity in America," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group.

But Ellison, the only Muslim in Congress, is coming under fire for his ties to MAS, which one terrorism expert called "the Muslim equivalent of the neo-Nazi party."

"It is the de facto arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.," said Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. "The agenda of the MAS is to ... impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism policy."

The MAS was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement created in Egypt in 1928. Radical members of the Brotherhood founded the terror group Hamas and were among the first members of Al Qaeda.

The Muslim American Society's former secretary general has acknowledged that the group was founded by the Brotherhood, and in 2004 he estimated that about half of MAS members were in the Muslim Brotherhood.

He's a Democrat. Nothing will come of it.