Conservatives Discover Jihadist Infiltration Late
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In July 2001, Grover Norquist accepted an award at a fundraising dinner for Sami al-Arian's group. Norquist had previously accepted a donation of $10,000 from future convict Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi to establish an "Islamic free enterprise" institute. Norquist also accepted an award from al-Amoudi's American Muslim Council.
After 9/11, Norquist dug in deep in defense of his past actions - and lashed out at Gaffney as a target for his discomfort. From a piece by Frank Foer in The New Republic in November 2001:
Even Norquist's weekly confab has become the scene of internecine fighting. At a session earlier this month, Frank Gaffney questioned the presence of terrorist sympathizers at the White House. Norquist exploded, accusing Gaffney of smearing Muslims. Later he choked up as he addressed the meeting and asked Gaffney to stand up and join him in condemning anti-Muslim bigotry. One conservative who witnessed Norquist's tirade says, "His response is powered in part by a sense that this whole edifice he's created is in danger of coming unraveled because of [these groups'] stated and abiding positions."
When I visited Norquist, he was in a similarly embattled frame of mind. He asked me to turn off my tape recorder. Any quote I wanted to use, he told me, would require his approval. There were none of his usual passionate ideological perorations. He just sat in his chair, seething. "There are some people who spit on Muslims and wouldn't like to see them have any role in American politics," he told me in a near scream.
In the decade since these events, the American political community and the American media have become a good deal more sophisticated about goings-on inside the American Islamic community.
Groups like CAIR do not find its so easy to pass themselves off as "civil rights organizations."
Hamas and Hezbollah fundraising fronts like the Holy Land Foundation have been shut down.
The leading terror supporters inside the US have been jailed or deported.
The state of discussion inside the US Muslim community has matured and changed: Muzzamil Siddiqui, the imam who delivered an invocation at the National Cathedral service after 9/11, had called for the banning of The Satanic Verses back in 1989. He and his counterparts would know better than to do such a thing now.
It would be naive to assume that terrorist fundraising inside the United States has ceased, or that incitement and anti-semitism have ceased to be preached in mosques or taught in Muslim religious schools. It's equally true that it's much more difficult for an American Muslim with a record of support for extremism and violence to play a part in public life today than in the 1990s.
In that sense, Gaffney won. Yet that's not how it must feel to Gaffney. While individual conservatives have taken Gaffney's side (Michelle Malkin for example), institutional conservatism continued to align with Norquist. I remember well a radio interview with a conservative host during my Bush book tour in 2003. I was asked a series of anodyne questions about Bush and life in his White House. When the interview ended, the host switched off the mike and asked, "So what the hell is going on with Grover?" But the point is - the mike was off.
With the controversy over the lower Manhattan mosque, with Glenn Beck on the air, and with the troubling events in Egypt, there is at last a mass conservative audience for warnings about radical Islamic infiltration into US institutions. The trouble is, that the infiltrators are already dealt with. Gaffney was left in the position of the guard dog who manages to tear the seat out of the trespasser's pants, without preventing the trespasser from escaping. And so the frustrated guard dogs end by (mis)representing some very minor personalities as central figures in a giant continuing conspiracy: like getting excited over Irving Peress after the Rosenbergs have already been executed.
But the unimportance of Irving Peress does not invalidate the existence of the Rosenbergs - or the seriousness of the lapses that invited the Rosenbergs into some of the high places of the land.
Like so many Washington stories, this one does not have an obvious hero. Or a final resolution. But if at least we bring the backstory to the front, people can more intelligently decide for themselves how to assess a scandal that only fully came into public view after it was all over.
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