Asim Ghafoor was a political consultant, spokesman, and public relations director for the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), which the U.S. government shut down in December 2001 because of the organization’s ties to terrorism. Ghafoor was also spokesman for the Committee to Free [GRF’s] Rabih Haddad, and he was the legal assistant to GRF attorney Ashraf Nubani.

GRF is not the only organization with ties to terrorism with which Ghafoor has been involved. While he was with GRF, Ghafoor was also the spokesman for Care International. The December 6, 2002 Wall Street Journal reports: “Records indicate close ties between [Care International] and the Boston branch of Al Kifah Refugee Center, the Brooklyn branch of which was named by prosecutors as the locus of the 1993 conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center. . . . Al Kifah’s Boston office on Commonwealth Avenue is located in the same suite that Care International listed in its 1993 incorporation documents. A website registered by Al Kifah has been used by Care International. . . . And the militant Islamic newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) listed [as] its publisher Al Kifah until April 1993, after which it listed Care International as its publisher.” According to another report, “Care International gave more than $180,000 over the last five years [from 1996 to 2001] to Global Relief Foundation.”

Asim Ghafoor acted as the “custodian” of “Dr. Naheed’s Legal Defense Fund.” On June 22, 2001, in the midst of a divorce and custody battle, Naheed Morrill did not appear for the scheduled court hearing. Instead, she and her three daughters were en route one-way to Pakistan, via London. Morrill was arrested by authorities and accused of kidnapping “with the intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of the parental rights of Clarence Grant Morrill.” Naheed Morrill was also accused of “diverting funds to support al Qaeda.”

Asim Ghafoor is well entrenched in politics.  He was previously the political director for the Islamic Institute. According to Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, the “Islamic Institute was instrumental in establishing Islamist connections with the Bush administration.”

On October 20, 2000, as a legislative assistant in the office of Congressman Ciro Rodriguez, Ghafoor represented the Democratic side of a debate taking place on Islam Online (www.islamonline.net). Islam Online is a website that “publishes religious/legal opinions in support of suicide bombings” and a site that once sponsored a live internet chat with Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin.

Before the 2000 Presidential election, in another political debate sponsored by radioislam.com, Ghafoor said, “we are here not just to be nice to people, not to say great things about people but to bring truth and justice and Islamic ways to this country. . . . you should rule by Islam otherwise you’re a Kafir (unbeliever, non-Muslim).”

In the past, Asim Ghafoor has had close ties to the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), which the group Judicial Watch has described as an organization of “Radical Islamic activists.” Hillary Clinton returned a $50,000 donation the AMA had made to her New York Senatorial campaign for statements made by members of the group she deemed “offensive and outrageous.” Ghafoor was upset that Rick Lazio, Hillary’s opponent in the election, called the donation “blood money.”

On October 4, 1997, Ghafoor participated in the AMA’s second national convention in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a featured speaker, along with such notables as: Abdurahman Alamoudi, Eric Vickers, Maher Hathout, Rafiq Jaber, Nihad Awad, Sami Al-Arian(of whom Ghafoor was a supporter), Abdeen Jabara (an attorney who once defended Omar Abdel-Rahman and served as president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Mahjabeen Islam-Husain (a founding board member of the United Muslim Association of Toledo and a fierce opponent of what she terms the “Zionist Agenda”), and Ahmad Sakr (a Muslim Students Association founder who has written that “some of the children of Israel … lost their mission in life as human beings and became entertainers like monkeys, apes and chimpanzees, and still others became filthy of mind and body, gluttonous eaters of carnivorous animals, and lived totally a corrupted life as swines”).

Asim Ghafoor also participated in both the 3rd and 4th Annual National Conventions of the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), and he was a contact for the AMA National Leadership Training Conference on July 21, 2001.

At the International Business And Trade Forum 2002, held in Washington, D.C., Ghafoor moderated an event that featured speaker Bassam Ossman, who chairs the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), a Saudi-funded corporation that owns between 20 and 27 percent of all United States mosques. NAIT also owns the Islamic Academy of Florida (IAF). According to World Net Daily, “The IAF was described as a criminal enterprise in the federal indictment handed down . . . against school founder Sami al-Arian and others alleged to be Palestinian Islamic Jihad fund-raisers.”

Asim Ghafoor is the founder and currently the Managing Director of AG Consulting Group. The management team of AG Consulting Group includes Hady Amr, who was the national director of Ethnic American Outreach for Al Gore’s presidential campaign and is co-president of the Arab Western Summit of Skills. Amr is also passionately anti-Israel. In her article entitled “Why Capitol Hill Supports Israel,” she exhorts those opposed to Israeli policies to make their presence felt via political activism and fundraising. “Those who curse Sharon and his supporters in Congress from the comfort of the couch should be ashamed of themselves,” she writes. In her piece, “Policies, Presidents and the 2004 Elections,” Amr tells of her feelings for President George W. Bush. “I drove down to Nashville,” she writes, “and spent September and October and November working for peanuts and eating cheap tacos for lunch and dinner because I was willing to do what I could to keep George Bush out of the White House.”