Pamela Geller: Jihad-accommodating CPAC

For the first time in five years, I won’t be at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

This year I wanted to hold an event entitled, “The War on Free Speech.” After the historic free-speech legal wins in Washington, D.C., and New York, the bus ads and the ongoing fight to run our counter-jihad campaign, what could be more timely? I applied to CPAC and met with their signature wall of silence. I tried to partner with the tea party (as I had done last year), but no dice.

It has always been a challenge to hold an event at CPAC, which is sponsored by the American Conservative Union (ACU). The CPAC events that we organized were always fraught with difficulty. Most folks didn’t understand why I worked so hard to hold an event there. A number of people have questioned my choice of venue for our historical counter-jihad events. Many feel, and rightly so, that the ACU – the political right’s largest and most influential grass-roots umbrella organization – has abandoned conservative principles and morphed into some fleshy, ambiguous, compromised political machine doling out money and favors for cronies, when it is doing anything at all.

I agree. Wholeheartedly. It has been co-opted. Jihadist operatives Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, board members of the ACU, made sure jihad and related topics were omitted from the program, year in and year out. But that is exactly why I held the event at CPAC, and in the early years held my tongue over the difficulties I experienced in bringing my events to CPAC. It was too important that the presentation be made in order to educate everyone. Years ago, when I first met the great historian Bat Ye’or, I asked her, “What can I do?” She answered, “Learn everything first.” That was the purpose of our CPAC presentations. Many people were shocked by them, but Americans needed to know, and need to know, what we are up against.

There’s nothing conservative about soft-pedaling jihad. CPAC 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 had little in the way of addressing the war we are engaged in and the enemy threat doctrine. That again was why I held my event there. Every year CPAC gets progressively worse. Silly, even. CPAC chief Cardenas said: “This year we decided not to invite Pamela Geller for comments she made at CPAC critical of our officers. In each of these cases, their ad hominem attacks denigrate the debate and distract from the real point of CPAC.”

What I exposed about Norquist was not “ad hominem.” Norquist and Khan seem to be in charge at CPAC – no CPAC event goes on that doesn’t reflect their perspective. Norquist and Khan are serving the purposes of the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamic organization that has infiltrated the U.S. government and media to such an extent (as Stephen Coughlin explained at our CPAC event) that it controls the information and dissemination of everything you see, hear and read on Islam – unless you do your own research, your own study and frequent blogs like mine and Robert Spencer’s.

Journalist Paul Sperry says that Norquist’s strategy has been to “dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government.” According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Grover Norquist hoped to … harness votes from the country’s growing Muslim population by creating the Islamic Free Market Institute in 1998. He did so with significant financial help from Abdurahman Alamoudi, then one of America’s most influential Muslim activists and head of the American Muslim Council. Today, Alamoudi is serving a 23-year prison sentence after admitting to illegal transactions with Libya and being part of a plot to assassinate the then-Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Alamoudi was also found to be a long-time secret financial courier for al-Qaida while at the same time being routinely invited to the Clinton White House for receptions and meetings.

But the 10,000 great Americans who attend CPAC are not Shariah-compliant. The patriots attending CPAC are not pro-jihad. They were not willing to hand America over to Shariah (Islamic) law. We needed to reach them. We needed to educate them. They know they are being deceived. They look around their towns and cities and see the unremitting capitulation to Islamic supremacism....