JIm Popkin writes at MSNBC:

The Obama campaign’s Muslim outreach director participated in a meeting in mid September that was attended by several controversial Muslim activists, NBC News has learned. The Obama campaign now concedes that was a misjudgment, and that its top Muslim staffer would not have attended the meeting if she had known the full participant list beforehand.

“Would a campaign staffer have attended if they were aware of the complete list of attendees? No,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email statement to NBC.

The Muslim outreach meeting
On September 15, newly named Muslim outreach director Minha Husaini spoke to a small group of Muslim leaders and potential Obama supporters at a hotel in Springfield, Virginia, several meeting participants and the campaign said. Two other Obama-affiliated Democratic Party workers joined Husaini and also spoke to the crowd. Some Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based Muslim activists and interested citizens attended, and flyers were passed out from “Arab Americans for Obama” stating Sen. Obama’s goals for achieving peace in the Middle East, protecting the civil liberties of Arab Americans and ending the war in Iraq.

Several participants told NBC News that Husaini and other speakers delivered a standard Obama campaign pitch. “They said, ‘We’re here to get the concerns of Muslim voters and let everyone know that the Obama campaign does want the support of the Muslim community,’ ” recalled one participant, who requested anonymity. The meeting was not advertised and some attendees got text phone messages notifying them that day of the meeting’s location, the participant said.

Nearly a month later, the meeting is drawing controversy--and not because of anything said at the meeting itself.

The attendees
One meeting attendee was Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society, several of the participants said. The MAS website describes Bray as an imam and “long time civil and human rights activist.” Bray’s critics say he has a history of defending terrorists. They point to a video of Bray at a rally in 2000, for example, in which he can be seen pumping his fist in the air in support of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In a 2004 interview, he called the Israeli assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader an “unlawful, cowardly and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism.” Bray did not return a call requesting comment.

Also attending the meeting was Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is a Muslim-American civil rights group that has, as its website states, “consistently and persistently condemned terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.” Nonetheless, the group has many critics, especially in law-enforcement circles, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.

In an interview on Thursday, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said that the group has filed a legal brief seeking to have its name removed from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the federal terror case. “Obviously we see it as politically motivated and a cheap way to stigmatize” CAIR and other Muslim groups, Hooper said.

Hooper said that CAIR has consistently condemned “every act of terrorism” by groups including Hamas and Hezbollah. But he would not answer whether CAIR condemns those designated terrorist groups themselves. “I’ve already answered your questions,” he said, and abruptly ended the interview. Nihad Awad, the executive director, did not return a call seeking comment.

GMBDR has more on CAIR's denials:

Investigative research, however, reveals that CAIR has a rather weak history on the condemnation of terrorism. A Lexis/Nexis search for media reports from 1995 until September 10, 2001 found no reports of any condemnation by CAIR of terrorism committed by group or individuals acted in the name of Islam. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, CAIR alone and together with other Islamic organizations, issued condemnations of the attacks and following assertions of conspiracies to blame Muslims issued by the head of CAIR/NY, CAIR National issued a statement in December 2001 acknowledging the role of Osama Bin Laden. In 2005, CAIR signed on to a fatwa against terrorism by the Fiqh Council of North America that has been criticized for it’s lack of specificity about individuals and organizations, the vagueness of it’s definition of terrorism, it’s lack of theological justification, and the weakness of the implied penalties.

A n examination of some of CAIR’s record with regard to terrorism in Israel also demonstrates that rather than condemning such terrorism, CAIR spokesman appear to have supported it. One media report indicates that at the Islamic Association for Palestine’s third annual convention in Chicago in November 1999, CAIR President Omar Ahmad gave a speech praising suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam” stating: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam -that is not suicide. They kill themselves for Islam.”

Several reports state that during a November 2001 interfaith event, CAIR/NY Executive Director Ghazi Khankan stated:

“From a religious point of view, [Palestinians] have the right to defend themselves. Such selfdefense cannot be equated with Bin Ladin. The people of Hamas who direct their attacks on the Israeli military are in the correct position. Those who attack civilians are wrong,” He also added: “Who is a soldier in Israel and who is not? Anyone over 18 is automatically inducted into the service and they are all reserves. Therefore, Hamas in my opinion looks at them as part of the military. Those who are below 18 should not be attacked.”

In April 2002, a media report indicates that CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper defended Saudi payments to families of suicide bombers in Israel stating:

“The families of suicide bombers are just as needy as those killed by military attacks, he said.” They want to make it sound like (all the money is for) the families of suicide bombers”

In October 2002 Congressional testimony, CAIR leader Nihad Awad appears to refer to Hamas and other terrorist organizations as “indigenous independence movements” when he stated:

“In the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has used the war on terrorism to step up its brutal suppression on indigenous independence movements.”

In March 2002, CAIR issued a rare condemnation of an attack by Hamas in which a suicide bomber killed 20 and wounded 100 during a Passover celebration in Israel. The statement did not mention Hamas by name and at the same time condemned Israeli actions in greater detail and with far harsher language than the condemnation of the suicide attack:

“We condemn this attack and all other attacks on innocent civilians. Illegitimate and counterproductive tactics must not be used in the legitimate struggle to end Israel’s brutal occupation. This attack is of particular concern coming as it did during a religious observance in which the focus is remembrance of God. We ask the international community to similarly condemn actions by the Israeli armed forces that also target civilians and impose daily humiliation and suffering on an entire population through blockades, home demolitions, assassinations, indiscriminate shooting, torture, land confiscations and a wide variety of Apartheid-like and oppressive practices. To break this cycle of violence and counter-violence, all parties must focus on a political solution based on justice and equality, not force of arms.” CAIR has frequently mentioned this press release as proof of its condemnation of terror.

In a February 2003 TV interview, Ibrahim Hooper was asked about Palestinian Islamic Jihad in connection with terror. He replied: “

Well, obviously, I’m not going to support some tactics of the Islamic Jihad, but they’re in a world apart from al-Qaeda. They’ve never threatened anyone outside of Israel and the occupied territory.”

CAIR was created in 1994 as an out growth of the Hamas infrastructure in the U.S. and the organization has had a long history of involvement in fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and support for terrorism.