Abed Ayoub (left)Abed Ayoub, the CEO of Islamic Relief USA, a powerful charity with links to Hamas is an official advisor to the State Department and USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), a RadicalIslam.org investigation has found.

Ayoub has been advising the Obama Administration since at least April 2010. He and his organization have been publicly embraced by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

Ayoub was born in a Palestinian refugee camp and raised in Jordan. After high school, he moved to Yugoslavia and Germany and ultimately ended up in California. He became a volunteer for the Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA) and went on to become its CEO in 2008. He is a governance committee member of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), IRUSA’s parent group. He is also on the Board of Trustees of the Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty.

Ayoub joined the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group in November 2011, specifically the Sub-Group on Faith-Based Groups and Development and Humanitarian Assistance, according to IRUSA’s press release. It says he will “take part in dialogue and provide input on relevant topics including the challenges and opportunities for partnership. The group also will identify model action programs or projects for collaboration between the U.S. government and NGOs.” The release says it will “meet through November 2012.” The timing and phrasing suggests that this isn’t the group’s expiration date and that the election will determine whether its work continues next year.

According to his bio, Ayoub was appointed to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid in April 2010, where he “provides advice, analysis and recommendations to USAID on the most pressing development issues in the world today.” He was reappointed to another two-year term in May.

On November 23-24, 2010, Ayoub spoke at Washington National Cathedral and the White House. In August 2011, he was given a Distinguished Community Service Award by the Department of Agriculture. President Obama mentioned his administration’s work with IRUSA at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, 2012. On June 21, Ayoub spoke at an event hosted by Vice President Biden (there’s a picture of the two together on this page).

That’s quite a list of accomplishments for a man whose bio states that he’s a governance committee member of IRW. In 2006, Israel arrested the IRW’s project coordinator of its Gaza office, Iyaz Ali, for funneling money to Hamas. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ press release stated that IRW operations in Gaza and the West Bank were inseparable from that of Hamas:
“The IRW’s activities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip are carried out by social welfare organizations controlled and staffed by Hamas operatives. The intensive activities of these associations are designed to further Hamas’ ideology among the Palestinian population,” it states.
The Israeli government says that Iyaz Ali admitted to knowing that the organizations supported by IRW are Hamas entities. These organizations incite acts of terrorism and provide material aid to the families of Hamas terrorists that are wounded or in Israeli custody.

Joe Kaufman writes that IRW is the creation of Hani Al-Bana, a former trustee of a group called Muslim Aid. The British government cleared Muslim Aid in 2010, raising objections from some terrorism experts because of the group’s well-documented ties to terror-linked Islamist groups. The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report further reports on the Brotherhood ties of IRW leaders, including one that used to be the Minister of Religious Affairs in Sudan.

Ayoub’s group, IRUSA, tries to put some distance between itself and IRW on its website by saying they are “legally separate and independent affiliates (also referred to as ‘partner offices’).” IRUSA’s Facebook page says it is a “legally separate and independent member of a global family of collaborating relief organizations that share a common vision, mission, and family identity, and all of which use the term ‘Islamic Relief’ as part of their organizational name.”

As mentioned, Ayoub is both the CEO of IRUSA and a governance committee member of IRW. IRUSA’s president and chairman of the board, Mohamed Amr Attawia, sits on IRW’s Board of Trustees. Americans for Peace and Tolerance discovered that Attawia was listed as the New England director in a 1991 phone directory of the American Muslim Brotherhood. Attawia also once was the Vice President of the Muslim American Society, a Brotherhood front.

The immense movement of money transferred between the two shows they operate as one. The Money Jihad blog documents the movement of about $5 million, $6 million and $9.5 million from IRUSA to IRW in 2007, 2008 and 2009 respectively. The IRUSA’s December 31, 2010 financial report says, “The majority of IRUSA’s programs are administered through grants with [IRW],” with a total of nearly $22 million that year alone.

Kaufman reported in 2007 that IRUSA’s Registered Agent is Kazbek Soobzokov, who was the attorney for Wagdy Ghoneim. Ghoneim was a radical imam in California who was arrested in November 2004. The Department of Homeland Security had evidence that he was fundraising for Hamas, and he voluntarily left the U.S. On September 30, he preached that Muslims who call themselves liberals or secularists should be prosecuted as apostates.

IRUSA’s events regularly feature Islamist speakers. At least nine of its fundraisers for Palestinians this year featured Hatem Bazian, the chairman of American Muslims for Palestine. These took place in Elk Grove, CA; Stockton, CA; Redmond, WA; Brooklyn, NY; East Rutherford, NJ; Dublin, OH; Garden Grove, CA; Orlando, FL and Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Bazian’s group holds events that preach extremism including support for the destruction of Israel and at least two board members worked closely with the Holy Land Foundation, a charity shut down for financing Hamas. Bazian said in 2004 that Muslim-Americans need to follow in the footsteps of the “uprising in Iraq” and the “intifada in Palestine” by having an intifada in the U.S. to “change fundamentally the political dynamics in here.” He warned, “They're gonna say some Palestinian [is] being too radical – well, you haven't seen radicalism yet."

In June, Bazian said that the U.S. wants to ally with India against China because “we always like that the darker people fight our war and the more these people die is better for the officers because racism can be manifested across many sectors.”

He claimed there is a “systemic process of targeting Muslim leadership of organizational structures by eliminating the existing leadership that has developed over the last 40 years…” Bazian repeated this theme in a video posted in September. He said that the “military-industrial complex” is behind the “Islamophobic production industry.”

“Those who are working on Islamophobia, they believe that the more hatred we have of Muslims in here, the more that we have reflexive hatred of Muslims abroad, thus authorizing or making the need for military action and the death and destruction more palatable to us without having to think we are actually killing humans,” Bazian said.

The IRUSA "Fundraising Dinner for Palestine" in Richardson, Texas on January 15 featured Sheikh Kifah Mustapha. The government designated him an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation. He is listed among “individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” The Palestine Committee was set up by the Brotherhood to support Hamas in the U.S. Mustapha’s mosque has extensive links to the Brotherhood and he sang in a band that performed pro-Hamas songs.
On June 23, IRUSA held a "Fundraising Dinner for Palestine" at the Islamic Center of Charlotte in North Carolina. The mosque is owned by the North American Islamic Trust, a Muslim Brotherhood entity that was also labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial.

IRUSA will be holding its First Annual Change the World Banquet on December 1 in Anaheim, California with Imam Zaid Shakir, whose radicalism has been documented at RadicalIslam.org (click here, here and here). Also scheduled to speak is Imam Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston, a mosque linked to Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, an influential terrorism-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric. The mosque was founded by Abdurahman Alamoudi, a highly successful Brotherhood operative that is now in prison on terrorism-related charges.

IRUSA also sponsored a fundraiser for the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on March 3. CAIR is another designated unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial. The government says CAIR is a creation of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. Speakers at the event included Kifah Mustapha and Edina Lekovic, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which was also founded by Brotherhood ideologues.

What’s especially shocking about the influence of Ayoub is that IRUSA appears to be on the radar screen of top counter-terrorism officials. A budget analyst for the National Geospatial Agency may have lost his security clearance because of his wife’s employment with IRUSA. In April 2011, Patrick Poole, a national security and terrorism reporter, quoted a high-level Justice Department source as saying to him:

“Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers.”

It is alarming to think that the leader of a group with strong Islamist ties, including links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, is advising the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The White House is even embracing him and promoting his group.

Answers are needed. How did Abed Ayoub and Islamic Relief USA get this high-level access and influence with this background? And what is IRUSA using its influence in the Obama Administration to accomplish?

The remains of Americans killed in Benghazi are taken off a transport aircraft (Photo: Reuters)












Data points continue to accumulate about the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. The picture that is beginning to emerge from connecting those dots is deeply concerning on multiple levels. Two related issues dominate this analysis: The stripping of security protection from the Benghazi mission prior to the 9/11 anniversary attack and the refusal to send or even permit local help on the night of the attack.

As Fox News Bureau Chief of Intelligence Catherine Herridge suggested on the “Mike Huckabee” show on Oct. 27, both of these critical subjects may have been driven by a perceived need to cover up the existence of the role being played by the U.S. mission in Libya to serve as a command hub for the movement of weapons out of Libya to Syrian rebels fighting to bring down the Bashar Al-Assad regime.

It has now been established through the persistent work of Congressional leadership figures and such investigative journalists, media and talk show hosts  including Fox News, Michael Coren at Canada’s Sun News, Aaron Klein at World Net Daily and Diana West that the Benghazi mission played a central role in a U.S. government policy of “engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East,” as Center for Security Policy president, Frank Gaffney, put it.

According to media reporting, Benghazi was staffed by CIA operatives whose job may have been not just to secure and destroy dangerous weapons (like RPGs and SAMs) looted from former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s stockpiles during and after the 2011 revolution, but also perhaps to facilitate their onward shipment to the Al-Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

President Barack Obama signed an intelligence finding sometime in early 2012 that authorized U.S. support for the Syrian rebels and by mid-June 2012, CIA operatives reportedly were on the Turkish-Syrian border helping to steer weapons deliveries to selected Syrian rebel groups. According to an Oct. 14, 2012 New York Times article, most of those arms were going to “hard-line Islamic jihadists.”
One of those jihadis may well be Abdelhakim Belhadj, former leader of the Al-Qa’eda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting GroupAbdelhakim Belhadj (LIFG) and head of the Tripoli Military Council after Qaddafi’s ouster.

During the 2011 revolt in Libya, Belhadj was almost certainly a key contact of the U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition, Christopher Stevens.

In November 2011, Belhadj was reported to have met with Syrian Free Army (SFA) leaders in Istanbul, Turkey, as well as on the Turkish-Syrian border. Further, Belhadj’s contact with the SFA comes in the context of  official policy adopted by the post-Qaddafi Libyan “government,” which sent a delegation to Turkey to offer arms and possibly fighters to the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels. "There is something being planned to send weapons and even Libyan fighters to Syria," according to a Libyan source quoted in a November, 2011 Telegraph report.

The multilateral U.S.-Libya-Turkey agreement to get weapons into the hands of Syrian rebels – which were known to be dominated by Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood elements -- by working with and through Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist figures like Belhadj, seemed confirmed by the appearance of a  Libyan-flagged vessel, Al-Entisar, which docked at the Turkish port of Iskanderun on September 6, 2012.

Suspected of carrying weapons bound for the Syrian rebels, the ship’s cargo reportedly included Russian-designed, shoulder-launched missiles known as MANPADS, RPGs and surface-to-air missiles—all of them just the sort of weapons available in Libya.

U.S. Ambassador Chris StevensStevens’ last meeting in Benghazi the night he was killed was with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, who is variously reported to have been there to discuss a weapons transfer or a warning about the possible compromise of the Libyan weapons pipeline to Syria. Whatever the topic of Ambassador Stevens’ discussion with Akin, he clearly and knowingly put himself in harm’s way to be there, in Benghazi, on the night of September 11.



The urgency that compelled Stevens to Benghazi that night seems especially difficult to understand given what was known to him as well as to senior levels of the Obama administration about the extremely dangerous situation in post-Qaddafi Libya.

It is all the more baffling then that, in view of the obvious priority that the U.S. government had placed on its Libya-to-Syria weapons pipeline operation, such a systematic effort in the weeks leading up to the September 11 attack was dedicated to stripping the Benghazi base of the security protection it so desperately needed in a deteriorating Libyan security environment and despite the repeated pleas of Ambassador Stevens and others in both Tripoli and Benghazi for more security.

From at least February, 2012 onward, the Regional Security Officer (RSO) at the U.S. Tripoli Embassy, Eric Nordstrom, had urged that U.S. security measures in Libya be expanded, citing dozens of security incidents by “Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, including Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)…”

In August 2012, Stevens reported that the security situation in Benghazi was deteriorating, yet in spite of this, the 16-man Site Security Team assigned to Libya, comprised of Special Forces led by SF LTC Andy Wood, was ordered out of Libya, contrary to the Ambassador’s stated desire that they stay.

Note that, at any time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have ordered the deployment to Benghazi of additional security experts from the Department of Security (DoS) Bureau of Diplomatic Security (or Diplomatic Security Service—DSS), but apparently chose not to do so.

Instead, DoS hired a British firm, Blue Mountain, to manage its security in Benghazi, and Blue Mountain subcontracted the job to a local jihadist militia called the February 17 Martyrs Brigade who have known Muslim Brotherhood ties.

Furthermore, Nordstrom testified at the October 11, 2012 Congressional hearings that “in deference to sensitivity to Libyan practice, the guards at Benghazi were unarmed"-- an inexplicable practice for a place as dangerous as Benghazi.

Then, in what may have been the attack “green light,” on September 10, 2012, AQ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Libyans to avenge the death of his Libyan number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been killed in a June, 2012 drone strike in Pakistan. The timing suggests that al-Zawahiri may have given the attack go-ahead after receiving word that Stevens had arrived in Benghazi that day—further suggesting that perhaps AQ knew of Stevens’ travel plans.


Once the attack unfolded at the Benghazi base, it quickly became apparent that the minimal number of U.S. and local security staff was completely unequal to the scores of heavily armed jihadist attackers swarming the compound. And yet, despite a live-streaming video from an overhead drone, plus cables and cell phone calls that, altogether, must have been received by hundreds of administration diplomatic, intelligence and military officials (including the U.S. President, Vice President, Secretaries of Defense and State, and Directors of National Intelligence and CIA), military support from regional bases was denied repeatedly to the besieged Benghazi defenders.

Worse yet, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods, Tyrone Woodswho was providing security for CIA operatives at the Benghazi annex facility, and Glen Dougherty, who had arrived on a rescue flight dispatched by the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli, repeatedly were denied permission by their CIA chain of command on the ground to go to the aid of Ambassador Stevens and the others.

Eventually, they went anyway, and succeeded in saving many lives because of their moral and physical courage. Once back at the CIA annex, they all came Glen Doughertyunder heavy fire there too. Again, Dougherty and Woods requested military backup, at least to silence the mortar fire that they had been able to identify by laser painting it. They fought on alone for hours, but when no help came, that mortar barrage eventually took both their lives and seriously injured others.


When asked why he didn’t authorize military assets to scramble to Benghazi’s defense, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta claimed that he didn’t know what was going on and “could not put forces at risk in that situation.”

 This is patently false on both counts: Panetta most certainly did know that an American Ambassador and other staff were under military assault by jihadist forces who had invaded the sovereign territory of a U.S. diplomatic facility. Whether U.S. military assets -- either air support or Special Forces -- could have arrived in time to save lives is unknown at this point, but the administration’s refusal to say when the president first learned that Benghazi was under attack, that the ambassador was in peril and that the Al-Qaeda-linked Libyan jihadist group, Ansar al-Shariah, had taken credit for the attack invites speculation.

The White House refusal to comment on when exactly the president first met with the National Security Council after the attack began doesn’t help either. (And the weeks of deliberately false statements from a range of administration figures who tried to claim that an obscure trailer for a film no one had ever seen was to blame for the Benghazi debacle only confirms suspicions about the administration capitulation to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) demands for limits on free speech.)

For his part, CIA Director David Petraeus has denied that either he or anyone else at CIA refused assistance to Dougherty and Woods, saying that "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate." This leaves only the president himself responsible for the decision to allow the Benghazi base to fall and four Americans to die.

How could he or any of those present when this momentous decision was made not have tried to make every effort imaginable to defend American territory and save American lives? House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa believes President Obama had a political motive for rejecting Ambassador Stevens’ security requests because he wanted to show that conditions in Libya were improving, possibly to justify U.S. intervention in the Libyan revolution or even help pave the way for oil company investment.

Whatever the thinking that left a U.S. mission abroad so undefended that it practically constituted an open invitation to Al-Qaeda, and then, in cold blood, refused to launch military support in defense of Americans fighting and dying to defend U.S. sovereign territory from jihadi assault, the cover-up is fast becoming the worse failure. It is time for administration leaders, from the president on down, to explain both their actions and their failures to act.

Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 25 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).