A Florida mosque tied to radical Muslim figures has received federal funding for a program aimed at preventing terrorist attacks.
The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded more than $440,000 to the Valrico-based Deen Center in Fiscal Year 2024, Florida records show. The Deen Center’s staff have promoted individuals who have defended violent “jihad,” called Jews “oppressors” and said “the Jews … control the whole world by the money,” among other extreme rhetoric, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.
The Deen Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Deen Center founder Eddie Redzovic has hosted multiple extremists on his program “The Deen Show,” including a conspiracy theorist in 2020 who said 9/11 was a “false flag” designed to incite hatred toward Muslims while Redzovic expressed agreement. A Muslim guest in 2021 described “the Jews” as “the oppressors” and “our enemies.”
A 2023 guest on Redzovic’s show was a pastor who said that “the Jews have been doing Freemason secret rituals beneath the Temple Mount for quite some time in the tunnels.”
A Saudi-based Muslim cleric who has stated that “the Jews … control the whole world by the money” also appeared in a video promoting the Deen Center.
The Deen Center’s website also boasts of endorsements from scholars such as Bilal Philips, a preacher who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings but never charged. The U.S. and other countries have banned or deported Philips over his support for Islamic terrorism, according to Counter Extremism Project.
The website also features an endorsement from a British cleric who has declared that “Islam teaches its followers to seek death on the battlefield” and “dying while fighting jihad is one of the surest ways to paradise and Allah’s good pleasure.”
NEW: Today, DHS announced that it will distribute $160 million in Nonprofit Security Grant Program funds as a first tranche of additional funding that the Biden-Harris Administration secured to protect faith-based institutions and nonprofit orgs against targeted attacks.
… pic.twitter.com/MoHlI4bubt
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 21, 2024
The funding for the Deen Center was awarded under the DHS’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, designed to support “physical security enhancements and activities to nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of terrorist attack.” The DHS’s media office did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
The Deen Center’s homepage complains of “Islamophobia” in America stemming from “a negative portrayal of Islam in the Media and political discourse which causes distrust.”
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