Check out my interview with Jamie Glazov over at Front Page on stealth jihadist Grover Norquist. Here's an excerpt, but go and read the whole thing.
FP: This is mind-boggling. This is a conservative conference and one would think conservatives are interested in national security and protecting our liberties and American lives. Why do you think this happened?
Geller: I think CPAC’s agenda in 2010, as well as 2009 and before that, reflects the influence of Grover Norquist, the conservative powerhouse and kingmaker. He is a board member of the ACU, and from the looks of CPAC’s covered topics and omission of discussion of jihad, it looks as if he exerts enormous influence over David Keene, the ACU’s nominal leader. Norquist and his ally Suhail Khan seem to be in charge at CPAC — no CPAC event goes on that doesn’t reflect their perspective.
FP: Expand a bit on what perspective Norquist represents.
Geller: Jamie, Grover Norquist’s troubling 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 expose 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. Wrote TNR author Franklin Foer:
Unfortunately, many of the leaders present hadn’t unambiguously rejected it. To the president’s left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas “freedom fighters.” Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who last fall told a Washington crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans, “America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.”
It was Norquist who ushered these silver-tongued jihadists into the Oval Office after the worst attack ever on American soil. Don’t you think that the likes of Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, and Wafa Sultan should have been advising the President instead of Hamas, Hizballah and the Muslim Brotherhood? But that wasn’t to be. So at that September 26 meeting Bush declared that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important, historic moment. What should have been the most important teaching moment of the long war became a propaganda tool for Islam. A singular historic opportunity was squandered, and the harm that has resulted is incalculable.
FP: Why did Bush do that?
Geller: 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. In December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist:
“has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover’s part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.”
Horowitz wrote this in an introduction to a detailed expose by Frank Gaffney here in Frontpage showing how Norquist had given Muslims with jihad terror links access to the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Grover Norquist was on the jihad payroll before and after the carnage and death of September 11. Gaffney revealed Norquist’s close ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving twenty-three years in prison for financing jihad activity. In 2000, Alamoudi said at a rally, “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here?…Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hizballah.” Alamoudi was at that time head of the now defunct “moderate” group known as American Muslim Council (AMC), and was active in other Muslim groups in the U.S. that showed sympathy or support for jihadists. And Alamoudi, according to Gaffney, gave $50,000 to the lobbying group Janus-Merritt Strategies, which Norquist cofounded.
