Yesterday my piece for the front of the magazine talked about how CPAC showed popular opinion in the GOP is with the Islamophobes even as some of the elites, like Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, try to encourage tolerance of Muslims.
The panel was interrupted three times by bloggers and activists demanding to know about Khan's Islamist ties. One determined audience member stood and read a terse summary of the charges against Khan from a worn spiral notebook. "They proved in federal court that organizations that your parents helped found are fronts for the Muslim Brothers," he said. "The Brotherhood's goal is to 'destroy the United States from within by its own hands.'"
Khan replied angrily, "I'm not associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, or anything else. I can tell you about the Republican Party." He told the audience that the people making accusations, anti-Muslim conservative bloggers like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, "are not part of the conservative movement."
But the conservative grass roots voted with their feet. Following Khan's sparsely attended panel, nearly 500 people crammed into a small room in the same hotel, where Geller and Spencer held their own "unofficial CPAC" event, screening a trailer for their "documentary," The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks. Clearly, conservatives were more interested in hearing Geller and Spencer discuss why they should hate Muslims than in listening to establishment Republicans make the case for welcoming Muslims into the party.
Spencer, author of the blog "Jihad Watch," and Geller spun an elaborate tale about Muslims trying to destroy the country from within by building places of worship. "People will say America is weak, America is conquered, America is ripe for the plucking," Spencer told the crowd. "This mosque will be the single most encouraging development for the Islamic jihad since 9/11 itself, and this is why it's the second wave." On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda killed more than 3,000 people. This time, according to Spencer, they'll settle for hurting our feelings.
A comprehensive list of the evidence that Norquist is a secret Muslim Brotherhood operative didn't make it into the piece, but Dave Weigel wrote an underappreciated column a few weeks ago exploring the roots of the accusations. Norquist had introduced a political fixer named Abdul Rahman Alamoudi to George W. Bush as part of his effort to help the administration reach out to the Muslim community after 9/11. Alamoudi was basically the nightmare scenario -- a radical pretending to be a moderate while hiding in plain sight, with strong ties to figures in both parties, he was eventually convicted of conspiracy charges. There's no evidence Norquist had any idea what was going on, but, along with his general tolerance of Muslims, it's become exhibit A in his indictment among this particular crowd of conservatives nonetheless.
The authorities are a lot less naive than they were then, and Muslim groups tend to be more careful about who they associate with. Alamoudi was the real deal, but since then, the Islamophobes have seen Alamoudis around every corner and in every Muslim who enters the public eye. If you're not paranoid, well that probably means you're a fool or a collaborator.
