**UPDATE on October 8, 2013 at 10:46am EST** The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) website appears to be back online. While Moustafa is still listed as the “Executive Director”, there appears to have been some additional deck shuffling. The number of “Policy Fellows” has dwindled from three down to one (Evan Barrett is the only one remaining). Also, the number of Muslim Board members has grown from at least three to at least seven:

SETF’s Old Fellows and Board

SETF’s Remaining Fellow and New Board.

Senator John McCain continues to become perilously close to bedding with America’s enemies. In the latest example, he’s closer to Hamas, a State Department Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, than any elected official in U.S. Government should ever be. Let’s take a look at McCain’s buddy, Mouaz Moustafa, the Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group that may be defunct. Let’s forget for a second that Moustafa hired a guy in Ahmad Soliman – who was up to his neck in Muslim Brotherhood connections – as his Research Associate.

Mouaz Moustafa and John McCain in Syria.

Let’s forget that Moustafa posed with McCain and a couple of kidnappers in Syria last May. The company that Moustafa keeps – to include McCain’s new Legislative Assistant Elizabeth O’Bagy – doesn’t end with those connections. Consider a Panel discussion on September 23, 2013, that was sponsored by the Brookings Institute. Moustafa was one of three panelists. The other two were Abed Ayoub, President of Islamic Relief USA and Maria Stephan, a U.S. State Department bureaucrat who works with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in her role as a Strategic Planner with the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department. After Ayoub was finished speaking, Moustafa began by stating:

“You know, first of all, thank you for having me here, and it’s really an honor to be here with this distinguished panel.” {emphasis ours}

For the record, “distinguished” means “made conspicuous by excellence”. This was also not the first time Ayoub and Moustafa shared a panel together. Last year, the Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro wrote the following about Ayoub:

Abed Ayoub, the CEO of Islamic Relief USA, a powerful charity with links to Hamas is an official advisor to the State Department and USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), a RadicalIslam.org investigation has found. Ayoub has been advising the Obama Administration since at least April 2010. He and his organization have been publicly embraced by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

Joe Biden with Abed Ayoub.

How about Ayoub’s connection to the Islamic Society of Boston mosque founded by convicted terrorist fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi and attended by the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Writes Mauro:

IRUSA will be holding its First Annual Change the World Banquet on December 1 in Anaheim, California with Imam Zaid Shakir… Also scheduled to speak is Imam Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston, a mosque linked to Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, an influential terrorism-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric. The mosque was founded by Abdurahman Alamoudi, a highly successful Brotherhood operative that is now in prison on terrorism-related charges.

Under the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California’s banner on a Constant Contact page, the December 1, 2012 event Mauro seems to be referencing is announced:

IRUSA Event at the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.

The page lists a slew of Muslim Brotherhood groups as being “Member Organizations” but if that isn’t enough, consider that the Chairman of the Shura Council is Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, who used to be the President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front group in the U.S. Just last month, Moustafa referred to Ayoub as a “distinguished” panelist. As CEO of Islamic Relief USA, Ayoub has underneath him a Public Relations Director by the name of Omar Shahin. Shahin was at the center of controversy in 2006 as one of six Muslims in the “flying imams” case in Minneapolis.

Abed Ayoub and Omar Shahin in 2010.

Check out what Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) had to say about Shahin back in 2006, during the flying imams controversy:

Consider this next excerpt from Mauro’s 2012 piece:

According to his bio, Ayoub was appointed to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid in April 2010, where he “provides advice, analysis and recommendations to USAID on the most pressing development issues in the world today.” He was reappointed to another two-year term in May. {emphasis ours}

That leads us to a photo that appeared on the Blaze website, one day after Moustafa and Ayoub sat on that Brookings Institute panel together. It shows an al-Qaeda linked terrorist posing with an RPG and a USAID backdrop:

Terrorists receiving “USAID” in Syria.

Here is John McCain from August assuring people that he knows who the Syrian rebels are and that they are “freedom fighters” who warrant U.S. support. Said McCain:

“I know who they are (freedom fighters). I’ve met with them. I’ve been in Syria with them and anybody who tells you that they’re taken over by extremists, they are not. There are plenty of extremists in the area but we would know who to get these weapons to.”

McCain has turned against his country. Period.