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Obama's Muslim Outreach Coordinator Resigns Over Past Board Connection

By Howard M. Friedman

Mazen Asbahi, a corporate lawyer at the Chicago law firm of Schiff Hardin, resigned earlier this week as the volunteer Arab American and Muslim American Outreach Coordinator for the Obama campaign. Wednesday's Wall Street Journal disclosed that Asbahi decided to resign just two weeks after his appointment when an Internet newsletter reported that eight years ago he had for a few weeks served on the board of Allied Assets Advisors Fund. One of the Fund's other board members was Jamal Said, a fundamentalist imam who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case against alleged Hamas fund raisers. That case ended last year in a mistrial. Asbahi had quickly resigned from the Allied Asset's board when he learned of charges against Said. Allied Assets is a subsidiary of the conservative the North American Islamic Trust. Reporting on the incident, the AP Wednesday quoted Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who said: "This incident just shows how Islamophobic the political climate is right now." (See prior related posting.)

Full post as published by Religion Clause on August 08, 2008 (boomark / email).