By Beila Rabinowitz and William Mayer
May 10, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Imam Fouad Elbayly is stepping down two weeks after he issued a fatwa against an ex-Muslim critic of Islam, "If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death."
Elbayly also warned that there could be violence by his congregants at the Islamic Center of Johnstown “I’m trying to control my people here...I don’t want them to get hot and cause trouble."
PipeLineNews.org brought the nature of Elbayly’s terrorist threat to the public in a series of articles:
Pittsburgh Imam Justifies Killing Of Apostates, Threatens Violence Against Hirsi Ali
In an unconvincing effort at damage control, the Islamic Center’s lawyer Dennis J. Stofko wrote a letter to the local paper which claimed that, “The board and members of the Islamic Center of Johnstown were shocked and regret the comments made by Imam Elbayly…"
For his part Elbayly also offered a half-hearted apology - “I was mistaken in my understanding of that issue. I misspoke and I apologize" - which is understandable given that both he and the center might now likely be under the scrutiny of law enforcement.
Significantly, Elbayly has not publicly rescinded his fatwa calling for the Islam critic’s death.
With or without Elbayly, the Islamic Center of Johnstown remains a security concern. It is a radical institution which practices jihad through conversion [da’wa], considering non-Muslims to be inferior until they accept Islam.
Declarations by the ICJ’s attorneys or congregants that they do not share Elbayly’s fundamentalism - now that he has been outed - strain credulity.
Contact information for the mosque appears on a hard-core fundamentalist web page[http://www.geocities.com/mutmainaa/youth/dawah_materials.html] which links to Islamist web sites that provide “a list of organizations where you can obtain Da’wah materials and books worldwide."
In addition to ICJ, the following groups also appear:
Al Haramain, whose operations were closed down by the US Treasury Department and Saudi Arabia for being “terrorist financiers."The Islamic Propagation Centre International [IPCI] whose founder Ahmed Deedat has admitted to being funded by bin-Laden and boasted that he met him many times]
WAMY [World Assembly of Muslim Youth], MWL [The Muslim World League IANA [The Islamic Assembly of North America] all of which have been raided and members arrested in connection with the funding of terrorism.
While imam Elbayly is no longer the public face of the ICJ, the radical Islamist agenda of the Islamic Center of Johnstown remains and can not be mitigated by a lawyer’s disclaimer or the now ex-Imam’s ludicrous assertion that he “misspoke" regarding opinions he repeated several times.
Though the imam is now laying low Elbayly’s “people" at the Islamic Center of Johnstown still might "get hot and cause trouble," like the kind that was being planned against Fort Dix.
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