* Popular guest speaker at Muslim Students Association events on college campuses across the United States
* Believes that Sharia (Islamic Law) should govern all nations
* Says there is no evidence that al Qaeda was reponsible for the 9/11 attacks
* Believes that homosexuals should be killed because the Koran mandates it
* Claims that “missionaries from the World Health Organization and Christian groups went into Africa and inoculated people for diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever, and they put in the medicine the AIDS virus”
Born on February 1, 1946 in Harlem, New York, Sheikh Khalid Yasin is a Muslim convert (he was raised as a Christian) and a Malcolm X disciple who has been a popular guest speaker at Muslim Students Association (MSA) events on college campuses across the United States. Based in Atlanta, he has spoken at such schools as Minnesota State University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Sinclair Community College, St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Washington State University — all at the invitation of MSA’s campus chapters. He also has spoken at George Mason University. Moreover, he has lectured with Omar Bakri Mohammed (the founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun), a pro-al Qaeda cleric who in 2006 was banned from the United Kingdom because of his religious extremism.
Yasin’s public pronouncements — at speaking engagements and on DVDs he has produced — include the following:
On September 11, 2001, Yasin was in Saudi Arabia soliciting the support of an al Qaeda front known as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation — which eventually would be designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government — to help finance the creation of his proposed “Islamic Broadcasting Company” (IBC).
In 2005 researchers for the Australian television program Sunday found that Yasin had engaged in a pattern of fraud and misrepresentation vis a vis IBC. For example, in 2004 Yasin traveled from his UK residence to Australia, armed with elaborate promotional materials for his startup IBC venture. One brochure, complete with photos and architects’ drawings, gave details of a proposed TV broadcast center in England’s Coventry Technology Park. Depicting IBC as “a unique investment opportunity” that “will host up to 50 multimedia TV channels and five radio stations,” Yasin held fundraisers ostensibly designed to help launch the company. At one 2004 event, some $90,000 was pledged in a single evening.
But all the money raised by Yasin quickly disappeared, and IBC never materialized. According to Walid Ali, managing director of the Islamic Broadcasting Group, Yasin’s brochure was “a work of fiction, indeed fraud” — “the drawings were lifted from someone else’s brochure.” Moreover, Yasin’s only connection with Coventry Technology Park was a small office space rented out by his UK associate, Channel Islam, which broke its lease in 2007 and was thereafter pursued by debt collectors.
Yasin’s misrepresentations extend also to the Curriculum Vitae (CV) which he prepared to support his application to the UK’s Immigration Department. In the CV, Yasin identified himself as a graduate of two separate institutions of higher learning. Yet neither school has any record of any graduate named Khalid Yasin.
When a questioner for the aforementioned Sunday program asked Yasin about his qualifications as a preacher, Yasin replied: “I say to you that whatever qualifications I have, they are subjective. And I don’t even care. And if there was a choice for Khalid Yasin I would take any qualification, academic qualification I have and I throw it out the window. And I tell you whatever other qualifications I have, whatever convictions I have will stand on their own.”