A Troubling Influence cont'd....
Hence, in addition to the seed money from Alamoudi, the Islamic Institute has also received funding from organizations described by the Washington Post as a “secretive group of tightly connected Muslim charities, think tanks and businesses based in Northern Virginia [and] used to funnel millions of dollars to terrorists and launder millions more” – a number of whom are currently part of the “largest federal investigation of terrorism financing in the world.”14
Point Man: Khaled Saffuri
The founding director of Grover Norquist’s Islamic Institute, Khaled Saffuri, is a Muslim Palestinian by birth. Prior to joining Alamoudi’s group (where he served for almost three years15), Saffuri was active in Muslim-support operations in Bosnia,16 a hot-bed for Islamic radicals from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere anxious to establish a beachhead on the continent of Europe. In recent years, he has acknowledged personally supporting the families of suicide bombers – even though, in public settings, he strenuously denies having done so.17 He denounced President Bush for shutting down the Holy Land Foundation, a Saudi charity that the U.S. government determined was funneling American Muslims’ donations to terrorist organizations overseas.18
I first had occasion to observe Saffuri in the late 1990s, when I became a regular attendee of Grover Norquist’s “Wednesday Group” meetings, weekly gatherings of conservative movement activists and libertarians. Troubled that many of the participants rarely, if ever, addressed national security matters – certainly before 9/11 and, arguably, even afterwards – I viewed these conclaves as an opportunity to promote awareness of and renewed support for robust foreign and defense policies. With a view to doing that on a routine basis, I accepted Norquist’s invitation to move my Center for Security Policy into new office space he had acquired. In the summer of 1999, I relocated to the space which was also occupied by his primary organization, Americans for Tax Reform, which also housed the Wednesday Group meetings and the Saffuri-headed Islamic Institute.
Since the Institute was located inside the ATR suite next to ours, we wound up sharing a large conference room, Xerox room, bathrooms, elevator bank and hallway. Consequently, I had a ring-side seat as Saffuri and his colleagues became ever more prominent fixtures at the Wednesday Group meetings, usually underscoring their close relationship with the host by sitting next to Norquist (or near him) in the center of the room.
From time to time, one or another of the Islamic Institute’s associates would make a presentation to the generally standing-room-only crowds of influential Washington conservatives, would-be politicians, think-tank denizens, journalists, and an increasing number of lobbyists. Over the years, topics they addressed included: the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation; the much-maligned and badly misunderstood Islamist government of Sudan (in fact, a designated state-sponsor of terrorism); the innocent nature of the process whereby Muslim chaplains have been selected for the armed forces; the honored status of women in the Muslim world; and efforts to promote Islamic causes and candidates in Republican circles.
Whenever possible, I tried to interject or make presentations to counter what I considered to be an ill-concealed and ominous influence operation. On one occasion, which occurred a few weeks after 9/11, I made an intervention to decry the fact that Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council was among the groups invited to the White House. I observed that on the same day its representatives were meeting with the President and his senior subordinates to talk about how Muslims could help with the war on terror, the AMC’s website featured a box headlined “Know Your Rights.” A click on the proferred hyperlink took you to a joint statement urging Muslims not to talk to the FBI. The statement was issued in the name of an organization of which the AMC was a member: the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) – a virtual legal aid office for terrorists. At the time, a South Florida University professor named Sami al-Arian was the NCPPF’s president. As will be discussed below, he was also Secretary of the worldwide governing council of a terrorist organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), responsible for 99 suicide-bombing victims.
I suggested to the Wednesday Group that the White House would surely have been astonished to discover that it was dignifying so-called Muslim leaders who were urging their co-religionists not to cooperate with law enforcement. I also pointedly observed – without mentioning names – that those responsible for facilitating the President’s Muslim outreach, who profess to support him and wish him success, should take pains to avoid including such groups in the future. I circulated a column I had written making similar points and that had been published the day before in the Washington Times.19
No sooner had I finished speaking than Norquist left his seat to consult with Saffuri’s deputy and successor as director of the Islamic Institute, Abdulwahab Alkebsi (another former Deputy Director of Alamoudi’s AMC).20 After the consultation, Norquist came over to me and whispered that he had checked and that there was no such box on the AMC website. I, in turn, consulted with one of my colleagues, who produced a copy of the webpage in question and sequential images as it was removed from the site in the wake of my column’s publication. (This was not an isolated phenomenon; in fact, in the post-9/11 period, webmasters for a number of pro-Islamist organizations evidently were directed to sanitize their internet sites.)
I reported this to Grover and showed him the original item. Shortly thereafter, I had to leave the meeting. Only later did I discover that he had taken advantage of my absence to disinform the group by announcing that what I had told them about the AMC website was wrong and that it featured no such encouragement to obstruct justice.
Penetrating The Bush Campaign
In 2000, thanks to Grover Norquist’s influence with the White House political operation, Khaled Saffuri was named the George W. Bush presidential campaign’s National Advisor on Arab and Muslim Affairs.21 Holding out the promise of votes and donations in key battleground states with significant Muslim populations (notably, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey), Saffuri and Norquist were able to persuade the Bush campaign’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, essentially to contract-out to them responsibility for identifying the groups and individuals upon whom the Governor should rely to elicit such support. Insight Magazine reported in February 2001:
[In September 2000], on [Karl Rove’s] way to the airport to catch his flight back to Texas, Khaled Saffuri, executive director of the Islamic Institute, joined Rove in his car. Saffuri explained to him that the vote of the Arab-American community, which includes both Muslims and Christians, still was up for grabs. The community is prosperous and could be the source of considerable campaign contributions. If Bush would mention in public just a few of the issues that concern Arab-Americans, Saffuri told Rove, he would win their hearts, their minds and their support.22
While the thrust of this report sounds right, the evidence suggests Saffuri’s car ride with Rove was by no means the first time such a proposition had been discussed with the Bush campaign. Indeed, the lure of such political dividends induced Governor Bush to hold a meeting in his mansion in Austin on May 1, 2000, not only with Alamoudi and Saffuri, but with other, immoderate Muslims, as well. As the National Journal reported:
It was the summer of 2000, and for George W. Bush, the meeting held the promise of an unusual but important endorsement for his presidential bid. Conservative activist Grover Norquist had persuaded the Republican nominee to sit down with leaders of the Muslim American Political Coordinating Committee, a confederation of four Muslim community groups.23
In addition to Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council, the group included the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad is another self-professed Hamas-supporter and, as will be discussed further below, its radical agenda and ties have recently been the focus of sharp, bipartisan criticism in Sen. Kyl’s Judiciary subcommittee.
Saffuri had also arranged for the Bush campaign to enlist Sami al-Arian, a well-known Florida-based activist – despite the fact that the professor made little secret of his radical Islamist sympathies – to help engender Muslim support in his state.24 A photograph of Mr. Bush taken with al-Arian in March 2000 subsequently received considerable attention after the professor was arrested last February on 40 terrorism-related counts. Of particular concern are those alleging his functional direction over the past 19 years of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in the Middle East.25
Obstructing Justice
Al-Arian’s arrest was made possible by the USA-PATRIOT Act. With this legislation’s enactment after 9/11, it became possible for the first time in decades, for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to share sensitive information – such as the voluminous wiretaps of Sami al-Arian coordinating Palestinian Islamic Jihad operations from his professor’s office in Tampa.
Not surprisingly, the Islamist front recognizes the threat this and other provisions of the PATRIOT Act represent to their operations in America. They are determined to rescind it and, if possible, remove its principal architect and most effective defender, Attorney General John Ashcroft. Accordingly, they have become an integral part of the left-wing coalition, which includes the ACLU, the pro-Castro National Lawyers Guild and many Islamic “solidarity” groups, in waging a national campaign against the PATRIOT Act. It seems hardly coincidental that the preeminent conservative figure to join the campaign and lead the recruitment of other conservatives is Grover Norquist.
In fact, Norquist was also a prime-mover behind efforts to secure one of the Islamists’ top pre-9/11 agenda items: the abolition of a section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that permits authorities to use what critics call “secret evidence.” This is a rarely employed practice whereby prosecutors can withhold classified information from foreign suspects. To do so, however, the authorities must have reason to believe the disclosure of such information could compromise – and, thereby, eliminate – the sensitive intelligence “sources and methods” by which it was obtained.
cont'd |
