Why is the Texas State Government giving $13 Million to Islamic extremist mosques and community groups?

The Texas state government has handed over $13 million of federal and state monies to mosques and community groups aligned with Islamic terrorist movements such as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as hostile foreign regimes.

Middle East Forum  In sermons reviewed by the Middle East Forum and published in this report, officials and imams of beneficiary mosques expressed rhetoric that was openly pro-terror and anti-semitic. In two instances, beneficiary mosques appear to be directly partnered with the Iranian regime.

Twelve of the eighteen Islamic organizations that received monies from the the state of Texas were found, in an investigation carried out by the Middle East Forum, to be under varying levels of Islamist influence.

These twelve organizations with extremist links received almost 99.4 percent of the funds provided by the Texas state government to Islamic organizations.

While a few thousand dollars in the state government’s data consists of the return of escheated funds, the vast majority of the millions spent appear to be the result of direct state grants, subsidy programs, and federal sub-awards managed by the Texas state government.

Details about the beneficiaries below:

• Islamic Education Center of Houston
• Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association
• Clear Lake Islamic Center
• Islamic Center of Round Rock
• Islamic Center of Brushy Creek
• Islamic Center of Greater Austin
• Muslim American Society Katy Center
• Foundation to Advance Islamic Teaching in Houston
• ISGH and the Islamic Education Institute of Texas
• Muslim Community Center for Human Services

Islamic Education Center of Houston 

In 2022, the mosque. a leading outpost of the current Iranian regime, organized the filming and performance of a song by children at the mosque, pledging allegiance to Ayatollah Khamenei.

In 2023, members of Congress called on the Biden administration to investigate four mosques accused of links to the Iranian regime, which included IEC Houston. Lawmakers pointed out that the Houston mosque is on land that belongs to the Alavi Foundation, which the U.S. government alleges is a front for the Iranian government.

Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association

In a video for an Iranian regime media outlet named Islamic Pulse, which is based in the city of Qom, IABA’s imam, Jafar Muhibullah, praised the work of Zakzaky and his efforts to establish Shi’ite Islamist ideas in Nigeria, praising the “victory of the Islamic revolution in 1979” in Iran, which sought to “establish justice” and “remove oppression.”

Muhibullah is openly aligned with Iran’s Supreme Leader. In a sermon delivered by Muhibullah in the Iranian city of Qom, he praises and discusses a letter written to the youth of the West by “our leader” Ayatollah Khamene’i.

Clear Lake Islamic Center

CLIC is a radical institution. Following the October 7 attacks, CLIC’s imam, Waleed Basyouni, called for “victory over the disbelieving people.” A year later, he publicly mourned the death of Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the designated terrorist organization Hamas.

Basyouni and AlShukry are top officials at the AlMaghrib Institute, a leading Salafi organization. AlMaghrib’s late founder, Muhammad Alshareef, once wrote a paper titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed,” in which he claims Jews control the media and murder prophets. Other leading AlMaghrib clerics have included Abdullah Hakim Quick, who calls for the killing of homosexuals, urges God to “purify” Al-Aqsa from the “filth of the Yahud [Jews],” and “clean Afghanistan and Iraq” from the “filth of the Kafiroun [unbelievers].”

In 2021, CLIC sponsored an event, in collaboration with Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, to mourn the passing of the prominent Kashmiri jihadist Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

Geelani was previously described as the “head of jihad” for Jamaat-e-Islami’s branch in Kashmir. Since 2000, Geelani was also involved with Hizbul Mujahedeen, a terrorist organization designated by the U.S. government. In its obituary for Geelani, Al Jazeera described Geelani as the terrorist group’s “spiritual leader.”

Islamic Center of Round Rock

In a 2021 sermon at Round Rock, the speaker offers long explanations of why Jews have no claim to the land of Israel and insists the land will be “purified” from the “filth” of the “Zionist” presence.

Zionists, he claims, are “torturing and killing the children.” Because “Zionist influence” is everywhere, including within America’s “political system,” he argues that when “we, the Muslims in the 21^st century, get rid of the Zionist regime in that area, we will bring freedom to the entire world.”

Another talk, given just weeks after the October 7 massacre, argues that the Jews kill prophets because “this is their attributes.” Christians, the speaker claims, support Israel because they fear “how powerful the Islamic state could become if there’s no force that will stop them.”

The speaker encourages the mosque’s congregants to support American Muslims for Palestine, which members of Congress allege has “ties to Hamas.”

Islamic Center of Brushy Creek

The Islamic Center of Brushy Creek’s imam, Jawad Rasul, studied at the extremist Salafi AlMaghrib Institute. He previously worked at Al-Furqaan Foundation, a prominent Salafi group that receives support from the Qatari regime. An undercover FWI investigation in 2022 found that books sold by Al-Furqaan Foundation advocated jihad and peddled 9/11 conspiracy theories.

While serving as imam, on his social media, Rasul has shared specious claims that no civilians were targeted in the Hamas pogroms of October 7, posted a video about the “true face of Judaism,” and shared conspiracy theories that Israel created ISIS.

In January 2024, after the White House disavowed Nihad Awad, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) over his apparent praise of the October 7 attacks, the Islamic Center of Brushy Creek signed a letter in support of CAIR.

Islamic Center of Greater Austin

The mosque’s imam, Dawood Yasin, is a former recruit of Tablighi Jamaat, a global Deobandi missionary movement linked by security services to dozens of terrorism and radicalization cases.

The mosque has organized multiple events on the “genocide” and “massacres” in Gaza. On October 18, Dawood Yasin hosted the pro-Hamas activist Sami Hamdi, who offered a histrionic speech filled with tears, conspiracy theories about “Zionist” power over the American political system, and wildly inflated casualty numbers in Gaza.

Sami Hamdi is a prominent supporter of Hamas. Canadian and Australian universities have previously cancelled events with him, after he celebrated the October 7 attacks, tearfully telling an audience, reports Canada’s National Post, to “celebrate the victory” of the Hamas massacre: “Allah has shown the world that no normalization can erase the Palestinian cause. When everybody thought it was finished, it is roaring. How many of you felt it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened? How many of you felt the euphoria? Allahu Akbar!”

Muslim American Society Katy Center

Muslim American Society (MAS) – Katy is a branch of the nationwide Muslim American Society organization, which federal prosecutors have described as “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.”

In 2019, Members of Congress called for an investigation into MAS after one of its branches in Philadelphia hosted an event in which children sang about torturing and beheading Jews.

Main Alqudah, a founder of the MAS Katy Center, declares in rulings published by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, that women may not engage in public speaking, and insists that girls must be taught to wear the hijab from the age of seven.

Alqudah has admitted that, while in Jordan, he “advocated for the imposition of Islamic law instead of secular law.” Alqudah also disclosed involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. Today, MAS Katy frequently invitesprominent supporters and advocates of the Muslim Brotherhood to its events..

Foundation to Advance Islamic Teaching in Houston

Foundation to Advance Islamic Teaching in Houston (FAITH), which operates several schools in the Houston area, was founded by Hamdy Radwan, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood activist. Radwan has explicitly statedthat the terrorist organization Hamas is “not” a “terrorist organization,” but “freedom fighters.”

Radwan long served as a leading official in the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors have described as “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.” In 2019, Members of Congress called for an investigation into its Philadelphia branch after it hosted an event in which children sang about torturing and beheading Jews.

Until recently, Radwan served on the board of Islamic Relief USA, the leading charitable institution of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose funding of Hamas proxies in Gaza and other Islamists have led to bans and the blacklisting of the organization in multiple Arab and European countries.

At its U.S. branch, Islamic Relief staff have included Khaled Lamada, who, in 2017, circulated text on social media praising the “jihad” of the “Mujahidin” for “causing the Jews many defeats,” and republished claims on Facebook that praised Hamas for inflicting a “huge defeat” against the “Zionist entity.” Another staff member, Yousef Abdullah, has praised the killing of Jews, among other anti-Semitic remarks.

Yousef Abdallah is a perfect example of Islamic Relief’s duplicity. When he is not in front of the cameras at interfaith events, his private social media posts reveal an intense, violent anti-Semitism.

Islamic Relief regularly encourages hatred against women, Jews, Christians, the LGBTQ community, and Muslims belonging to minority sects through their sponsorship of fundamentalist imams and activists at their events. Click here to see some rather vivid examples.

Abdallah’s hatreds are not an aberration in the Islamic Relief franchise; he is just another example of this Islamist charity’s extremism.

ISGH and the Islamic Education Institute of Texas

The ISGH network does not comprise just the Education Institute, but dozens of schools and mosques under its control across Houston. The ISGH network has a long history of extremism, frequently holding events with proxy organizations for the violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami, such as the Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), as well as Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD).

In 2018, the Middle East Forum uncovered that HHRD partnered with designated terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan. This and other evidence of ICNA and HHRD’s extremism and terror ties led to inquiries by Congress, as well as an official investigation launched by the Inspector General for the United States Agency for International Development in 2021.

In partnership with HHRD and ICNA, in 2017, several ISGH mosques hosted Yusuf Islahi, a member of the Central Advisory Council of the Indian branch of Jamaat-e-Islami. Islahi reportedly claimed that Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks, as part of a conspiracy to defame Islam.

In 2024, the ISGH hosted, in collaboration with the radical Muslim American Society (profiled above) the activist Nida Abubaker, a Texas-based Islamist who backs Palestinian “resistance” and Palestinian “fighters.” Abubaker is the daughter (and advocate for) convicted terrorist Shukri AbuBaker; as well as a supporter of Al Qaeda terrorist Aafia Siddiqui.

Muslim Community Center for Human Services

MCCHS’s early advisory board included Azhar Azeez, a key radical Islamic activist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Azeez is today the CEO of Muslim Aid, a terror-aligned charity, established by the violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami, headquartered in the United Kingdom.

Another former advisor to the MCCHS, Yusuf Kavakçı, is a prominent Turkish Islamic extremist long involved with Hamas networks in North Texas. After he returned home to Turkey, Kavakçı has come a leading voice for the Turkish regime and an open defender of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the early 2000s, the founder of MCCHS, Basheer Ahmed, was a contributor to the Association of Muslim Social Scientists and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, key Hamas-linked thinktank institutions of the global Muslim Brotherhood, and leading components of a terror finance network investigated by the federal government in the 2000s.

In more recent years, MCCHS continues to invite Islamist imams to its events, including Azhar Subedar, a DFM imam who trained in the United Kingdom with Tablighi Jamaat, a global Deobandi missionary movement linked by security services to dozens of terrorism and radicalization cases; and AbdelRahman Murphy, who once stated, “There is no such thing as an innocent Israeli” and seemingly praised Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas.

Not to mention, there are MUSLIM-ONLY communities being built deep in the heart of Texas: