In The American Thinker this morning, Pamela Geller exposes the dark side of conservative hero and power-broker Grover Norquist:
The Freedom Defense Initiative, a new organization I started with author and scholar Robert Spencer, hosted its inaugural event to an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 19. But this event was at CPAC, not of CPAC. Could this be because of the influence of conservative kingmaker and power-broker Grover Norquist, who is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC? The only event concerning the war on America at CPAC was worse than nothing at all: It was an Islamic propaganda (taqiyya) presentation entitled “You’ve Been Lied To: Why Real Conservatives are Against the War on Terror.” Its message was that “real conservatives” don’t support the war on terror because it is a creation of the “Israeli lobby.”
How did CPAC come to this?
Grover Norquist’s ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. He and his Palestinian wife, Samah Alrayyes — who was director of communications for his Islamic Free Market Institute until they married in 2005 — are very active in “Muslim outreach.” Just six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an exposé explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 — to show how Muslims rejected terrorism. Wrote TNR author Franklin Foer:
On the afternoon of September 26, George W. Bush gathered 15 prominent Muslim- and Arab-Americans at the White House. With cameras rolling, the president proclaimed that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important moment, a statement to the world that America’s Muslim leaders unambiguously reject the terror committed in Islam’s name.
Unfortunately, many of the leaders present hadn’t unambiguously rejected it. To the president’s left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas “freedom fighters.” Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who last fall told a Washington crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans that “America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.”
It was Norquist who ushered these silver-tongued jihadists into the Oval Office of an incurious president after the worst attack ever on American soil. Instead of Hamas, Hezb’allah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, and Wafa Sultan should have been advising the president. Instead, at that September 26 meeting, Bush declared that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important, historic incident. What should have been the most important teaching moment of the long war became a propaganda tool for Islam. A singular opportunity was squandered, and the resulting harm is incalculable.
Bush did this because he trusted Norquist, who vouched for these Muslim leaders. Yet “the record suggests,” wrote Foer, “that [Norquist] has spent quite a lot of time promoting people openly sympathetic to Islamist terrorists.” And this continued for years. In December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist,
… has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover’s part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.
There is much more. Read it all.