Good comment by David Frum in his "National Review" column.
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The Alamoudi Indictment
Another prominent American Muslim has just been indicted on charges arising out of the war on terror. Unlike Sami al-Arian, Abdurahman Alamoudi has not been charged with direct support for terrorism.
But the charges against him are more than serious enough. A charity he managed gave $160,000 to a group implicated in the plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport and Seattle’s Space Needle in January 2000. Alamoudi himself was caught attempting to smuggle $340,000 in Libyan cash – a violation both of U.S. sanctions against the Libyan terror regime and also of rules against money-laundering.
And in one way, at least, the parallels to Sami al-Arian are clear: Both men had been welcomed as honored guests into the Bush White House. Alamoudi was invited to meet with candidate Bush in Austin, Texas, in 2000, and was invited to join President Bush at prayer services for the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.
At the time of these invitations, Alamoudi’s extremist views and associations were widely known - just as al-Arian’s had been when he was invited to campaign for Bush in Florida and to attend political briefings in the White House in the summer of 2001. Yet there he was, all the same.
This access had real-world consequences. Al-Arian’s political connections may have helped protect him from prosecution for seven years – during which time, if the allegations against him are true, he raised money for the murder of dozens of Israelis and Americans. Institutions founded by Alamoudi were entrusted with the job of selecting and training Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed forces, one of whom is now accused of espionage and treason.
Is this not a first-class scandal? Yet nobody seems much concerned by it – or much interested, either, in the question of how it happened that some of America’s most notorious Islamic extremists were invited into the highest circles of government.
Our lack of curiosity about these stories is a telling indicator that despite everything, we remain troublingly unserious about the war on terror.
nationalreview.com |
