The Muslim Students Association of Florida State University (MSA-FSU) has been outspoken on a number of noteworthy matters in recent years. In 2003, for instance, the organization opposed a bill — drafted by Republican State Rep. Dick Kravitz of Florida — proposing a ban on state-paid financial aid for foreign students hailing from six of the seven countries on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorism-sponsoring nations: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya and North Korea. (Cuba was also on the State Department list but was amended out of the bill.) MSA-FSU president Hadia Mubarak complained that the measure was discriminatory because most countries on the list were Islamic nations: “What [Kravitz is] saying is if you’re born in Libya or Syria you’re more likely to be a terrorist than anyone else. I can’t think of anything more inflammatory.”

Mubarak, who later became the first female ever to be elected president of MSA National, encouraged Muslim Americans to run for public office as a means of “get[ting] involved and speak[ing] out on behalf of their own community.” She asserted that “right-wing xenophobes pose the greatest threat to American democracy and liberties than anyone else” (sic), because “their fear and intolerance of Islam fuels them to incite hatred and fear of Muslims at all levels of society.” She deplored the “dogged insistence among policy makers and the American public alike to view Islam itself as the source of current tensions between the United States and the Muslim world.” And she stated that it was vital not “to ignore real grievances that fuel anger and resentment towards the United States.”

In February 2011 MSA-FSU held a Libyan solidarity rally at the Florida State Capitol, in support of the rebels in Libya who were seeking to end the 42-year regime of President Moammar Quaddafi. Citing as an inspirational success story the recent achievement of Egyptian demonstrators who had forced the resignation of their own longtime president, Hosni Mubarak, one MSA-FSU member urged Americans to “stand and demand from our government to support (sic) the revolutionaries despite and interest the U.S may have because of Libya’s oil reserves.”

Also in 2011, MSA-FSU spoke out against the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s “Palestinian Wall of Lies” (PWL), an ad campaign designed to educate students at Florida State (and a number of other campuses) about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Denouncing PWL as an unwarranted attack against the Islamic faith and its practitioners, MSA-FSU sought to discredit the campaign by forming a so-called “Palestinian-Israeli Coalition Against Hate.” Collaborating with MSA in this coalition were the Center for Participant Education, the College Democrats, Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, ‘Noles for Israel, and the FSU chapters of Students United for Justice in Palestine.