“Grover Norquist’s Jihad” by Pamela Geller; Amer­i­can Thinker; 3/4/2010.

Com­ment: Crit­i­cism of GOP king­pins Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, archi­tects of the Islamic Insti­tute (a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood adjunct to the GOP), has been sparse. A con­tin­u­ing tragedy is that much of that sparse crit­i­cism comes from mem­bers of the con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­nity who have retained enough integrity to man­i­fest out­rage against the GOP’s alliance with the very Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ele­ments against which the Repub­li­cans’ amen cho­rus rails.

One con­ser­v­a­tive will­ing to break with her milieu is Pamela Geller, a for­mer edi­tor of the “New York Observer” and edi­tor of the “Atlas Shrugs” web­site. She recently noted Grover Norquist’s con­tin­u­ing activ­i­ties on behalf of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’ jihadists.

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. . . .

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. . . .

So it is no sur­prise that CPAC 2009, like CPAC 2010, had noth­ing address­ing the war we are actu­ally engaged in. This is due to the influ­ence of Norquist, Keene, and Suhail Khan, a CPAC board mem­ber. Accord­ing to Dis­cover the Net­works, Khan “has repeat­edly been a fea­tured speaker at MSA, ISNA and CAIR events” — that is, the Mus­lim Stu­dents Asso­ci­a­tion, Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica, and Coun­cil on American-Islamic Rela­tions, three groups linked to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the inter­na­tional Islamic orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to estab­lish­ing the rule of Islamic law and the sub­ju­ga­tion of infi­dels worldwide.

Grover Norquist almost sin­gle­hand­edly ush­ered Islamic suprema­cist lead­ers into America’s high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment — sub­ver­sives, the Islamic fifth col­umn. He gave them unpar­al­leled access. Why didn’t Gaffney’s rev­e­la­tions, and those that pre­ceded and fol­lowed his exposé, end Norquist’s influ­ence among con­ser­v­a­tives? Why does he still have so much power? . . .