Posted on 02/24/2003 8:06:59 AM PST by TLBSHOW
Terrorist arrest shows holes in White House's Muslim outreach program; warnings ignored
People are asking: Who is responsible for getting terrorist figures into the White House? Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian, arrested this week by the FBI as an alleged mastermind and funder of suicide bombings, was part of the White House's controversial outreach plan to Muslims and Arab-Americans, the Washington Post reports.
According to Newsweek, White House political officials disregarded warnings from the Secret Service that Al-Arian was a potential terrorist, and let him in anyway.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the alleged terrorists were running influence operations to penetrate the US political system and influence policy.
The news confirms what the Center for Security Policy has warned the Bush administration - first privately and later publicly - for nearly two years: That the architects of the White House's well-meaning Muslim outreach program paid little or no regard to national security issues, and ignored information about alleged extremists, including supporters of terrorism, who had hijacked the administration's initiative.
According to the Post, Al-Arian was invited to the White House as part of an American Muslim Council (AMC) delegation on June 22, 2001: "The meeting was controversial within the White House even before it took place. The group that included Al-Arian was scheduled to be briefed by Vice President Cheney, but Cheney canceled. That morning, the Jerusalem Post had run a front-page article headlined, 'Cheney to host pro-terrorist Muslim group.'"
Al-Arian's arrest under a 50-count federal grand jury indictment is sure to prompt the Secret Service and others to revisit the issue, and to investigate just who has manipulated the White House to allow extremists and terrorists into the presidential compound where they have been treated as legitimate representatives of moderate, non-violent causes.
On Friday, February 21, the Wall Street Journal reported that Al-Arian's arrest "likely will inflame a debate embroiling the Republican Party over efforts to court Muslim Americans." The battle, according to the Journal, is led by conservative activist Grover Norquist, "a close ally of the Bush White House who spent years wooing Muslims through a group he founded called the Islamic Institute," against national security-minded critics who include Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney and American Conservative Union President David Keene.
Norquist's Islamic Institute, the Wall Street Journal continued, has received money from "a network of Islamic organizations in Virginia under investigation by federal authorities for suspected ties to terrorism." Meanwhile, Norquist has been a vocal attacker of key provisions of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism legislation proposals, and has led an effort from the right to discredit and undermine Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Insight magazine is reporting that Al-Arian and Norquist have worked together, and that Norquist has gone on record saying he is "proud" to have accepted an award in July 2001 from Al-Arian's National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), which is described as a legal and political support group for international terrorist organizations.
Keene alluded to the problem in his column for The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper. "Make no mistake about it," wrote Keene, "these people are our enemies. To deny this would be foolish and to empower them in any way is a mistake of the first order because doing so legitimizes their claim to speak for all Muslims." Keene added that twice in the last six months, "fellow travelers" and "zealots" have tried to prevent critics of Islamist terrorism from addressing conservative audiences: "In both instances they sought veto power over who should or should not be allowed to discuss the extremist Muslim connection to world terrorism and in both instances they were rebuffed. Having failed to keep the objects of their enmity from speaking, they then proceeded to denounce publicly in the press and on the Internet the sponsors of the events at which they spoke as, you guessed it, 'bigots and racists.'"
Islamic Institute Chairman Khaled Saffuri claims to be shocked at the arrest of Al-Arian, telling Newsweek, "If these charges are true, then he’s betrayed me—and a whole lot of others in the Muslim community." Nevertheless, Norquist has continued to rail against critics of Islamist terrorist fronts, calling them "bigots and racists."
Is another shoe about to drop? According to the federal grand jury indictment, Al-Arian and his confederates tried to penetrate the mainstream political system to influence U.S. government counterterrorism policy. The Wall Street Journal states, "the indictment alludes to efforts by the defendants to gain political clout, alleging that they sought 'to obtain support from influential individuals in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights."
Again, the question must be answered: Who invited and cleared Al-Arian and other suspected terrorist supporters into the White House?
They have warned them privately.
This is happening because Norquist publicly attacked Gaffney, playing the race card.
Sure we could. Drop the moderators. Toss out the obvious statist agitprop posters, and relegate the wine and cheese crowd to their corner on picture threads.
What about the obvious non-statist agitprop posters?
Ummm... perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the mission statement of FR.
Very good, then.
David Keene's column: Muslim Extremists seeking to foster One Islamic World
Hence my reputation in this forum as a dewy-eyed naïf.
I was having a conversation about the information I was posting. You flamed the person with whom I was having a dialogue. She left this thread as a result. What, precisely, has your "awareness" accomplished?
"No living thing, could possibly survive in this Sargasso Sea choked with pretention, narcissism, self-absorption, fulsome back-slapping, mawkish self-congratlatoriness, arrogance, condescension, snobbery, hubris, elitism, self-righteousness, sanctimony, hypocrisy, sophistry, demagoguery, provincialism, phillistinism, reactionarism, anti-intellectualism, retrogressivism and pure hate.
The only way to bring this effluent-suffused, moribund biosphere back to life is the administration of copious quantities of (to use vcarducci's term) "consumerist propaganda", i.e. CAPITALISM and FREE ENTERPRISE, LIBERTARIANISM.
I've flipped through the posts here and quickly became overawed by the sheer volume of Statist-authoritarian collectivist-socialist-conformist-paternalist-totalitarian dogma, doggerel, rodomontade, agitprop and transparent propaganda. Such shopworn cliches, threadbare arguments, stale ideology, virtually every awkward, inapposite, solecistic word of it utterly vacuous. Post after post are nothing but mindless concatenations of empty epithets and turgid, non-cognitive rhetoric. For the defender of liberty, reason, rationality, truth, morality, dignity, enlightenment, culture, civilization, peace, progress and prosperity, this "forum" is positively GHASTLY destination in Cyberspace, an Auschwitz for the mind, heart and soul.
God, I feel MUCH better now... sort of cleansed my 'Statist Soul'... ;0)
Hey, I realize you are a relative newbie here but you have no idea what a "flame" is!
Reread my initial post to Miss Marple in reply #166.
The irony is that you still don't get it. I am on your side in this debate.
Miss Marple is not.
She leaves in a fit of pique after intimating that I am in league with some clique (I am not) and subscribe to another poster's calling her a "stay at home, soap opera soccer mom" (I do not)
You jump into something that doesn't concern you and start defending Miss Marple and go after me.
Miss Marple succeeded in cleaving two Freepers who agree with each other.
She rides off into the sunset after initiating the whole thing and you still defend her.
Incredible!
Only yours, man... that 'statist' kind get's soggy in milk...
I figured you would get a kick out of it ;0)
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