WASHINGTON, June 19 (IslamOnline) - After a number of recent editorials questioning the decision of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller to speak at the upcoming American Muslim Council (AMC) conference, Council officials are responding to what they call a smear campaign against their organization. 

“What we hope is that people who really see this crusade against AMC and character assassination of whoever is associated with AMC [will] stand up and say what they know about us,” said board member Abdurahman Alamoudi. “Because if today it’s AMC, tomorrow it will be somebody else.” 

One of the editorials, written for U.S. daily newspaper, the New York Post, on Tuesday, June 17, by Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, decries the “blunder” that Mueller would be making by agreeing to speak at AMC’s annual convention, set for June 28. 

“Far from being ‘the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States,’ the AMC is among their most extreme,” Pipes, a self-declared Middle East expert who is widely seen in the American Muslim community as anti-Islam, says in his article. 

“Rather than endorse AMC by his presence, Robert Mueller should find other lunch companions next Friday. Then he should put the organization under surveillance, ascertain its funding sources, look over its books, and check its staff’s visa status.” 

Pipes accuses AMC of apologizing for terrorists, and even suggests ties to “other terrorists” including a well-respected scholar, Jamal Barzinji, vice president of the International Institute for Islamic Thought, whose home and organization were raided by the federal government in March. 

He also accuses the group of “hostility to law enforcement” - because its website links to a page advising Muslims not to talk to the FBI without a lawyer present - and “hostility to the United States,’ because of a statement made by a speaker at an AMC event. 

Another editorial, written by Matt Continetti as a guest commentary for the National Review Online on June 12, also accused AMC of having sympathy for terrorism, and criticized Mueller’s speaking engagement as a mistake. 

"Mueller’s appearance is yet another example of how the Bush administration, in its attempt to assuage fear and anger in the Muslim-American community, works with groups that sympathize with Islamic extremism,” Continetti said. 

“Though the American Muslim Council publicly denies support of suicide bombings and other terrorist operations, and is one of the few Muslim lobby organizations to support last year’s bombing of Afghanistan, it nevertheless has a history of sympathy and support for radical Islam, as terrorism expert Steven Emerson reveals in American Jihad.” 

Emerson’s book American Jihad was released in February of this year; he is highly regarded, and disregarded, by many in Congress for his purported “knowledge” of terrorist groups, but is denounced by Muslims across the country for his part in associating Islam with terrorism over the years. 

And in the Washington Times on Tuesday editorial writer Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., calls the FBI’s labeling of AMC as a mainstream group an “intelligence failure.” 

Gaffney quotes Emerson generously in his article in reference to AMC’s supposed support for terrorism and says that “confusing organizations like the AMC with mainstream Muslims - let alone dignifying the former by affording them repeated access not only to the FBI director but to the president and his Cabinet - serves to legitimate the radicals while disenfranchising those who genuinely adhere to moderate Islamic teachings.” 

Alamoudi, who is lambasted in the first two editorials as an unabashed supporter of terrorism, said that people like Pipes are setting the idea of exactly who fits the description of “moderate Muslim”. 

“Daniel Pipes is livid because anybody who speaks about Islam and doesn’t speak about Daniel Pipes’ Islam is on the wrong side,” he said, adding that “Daniel Pipes’ Islam is [that] we have to sit in our mosques and pray, and when we go out, we have to behave like non-Muslims.” 

Alamoudi believes that Pipes seems to want to quell any kind of Muslim activism. 

“Very unfortunately we are all in his eyes like people who carry guns,” he said. “I don’t know why he has this hatred of activist Muslims.”

He defended his own record of “asking Muslims to be in the system,” and had words of praise for Mueller for keeping the speaking engagement. 

“We are grateful at least that Director Mueller is sticking to his commitment,” he said. “I am very pleased that at least there are some people who are in the administration who call people by their names - yes, the American Muslim Council, whether Pipes [likes it] or not, we are a mainstream organization, and we are the senior mainstream [Muslim] political organization in Washington, D.C.” 

In response to what AMC has called a “smear campaign,” AMC Executive Director Eric Erfan Vickers will be appearing on MSNBC’s Alan Keys show Tuesday night and on Wednesday, June 19, on FoxNews Live with Linda Wester, according to a press release by the organization.