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For the fourth year in a row, I am doing what the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) refuses to do: covering the central issues of our time, the issues that ought to be center-stage, prime time at CPAC.
Once again, CPAC is avoiding and ignoring the greatest national security threat to our country: jihad. Year in, year out, the puppetmasters, Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, have managed to keep jihad and sharia off the CPAC schedule. The American Conservative Union, the political right’s largest and most influential grassroots umbrella organization — and sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — has abandoned conservative principles and morphed into some fleshy, ambiguous, compromised political machine doling out money and favors for cronies, when it is doing anything at all.
Anti-sharia legislation has already been passed into law in three states — Tennessee (April 2010), Louisiana (June 2010), and Arizona (May 2011) — and is either scheduled to be introduced or under consideration in over 25 additional states for the coming legislative session. Half the country is deeply concerned about this issue, and yet it is nowhere on the CPAC schedule — except, of course, when it comes to yours truly.
The people care about this issue. Conservatives care about this issue. CPAC should feature this issue.
This is why I organize an event every year at CPAC to educate the upwards of twelve thousand conservatives who come to D.C. to get activated. Do you think that they know that CPAC has been utterly corrupted by the likes of Grover Norquist, the most powerful Muslim Brotherhood-linked influence-peddler in the country? Hardly. Has it been easy going up against the most corrupt and powerful conservative in America? Hardly. I lost my Newsmax column because of it, as I have repeatedly called for an insurgency at CPAC.
And to all the old establishment bulls who know about but sanction this infiltration with their silence: shame on you. It is no accident that Grover is featured in a fawning cover story at Newsmax as we enter CPAC week.
Doing our events at CPAC is always a challenge. This is just the latest of my battles to bring the truth about jihad to CPAC. At CPAC 2009, I brought Geert Wilders to CPAC to introduce him and his fight for free speech to conservatives. It was standing room only. We had to turn away hundreds. And what a battle I had just getting Wilders there. I fought fiercely for months trying to get Wilders on the official CPAC roster. They should have been clamoring to have him. He represented the fight for the idea of American freedom, free speech.
After many a discussion, I was advised that David Keene, then-head of the ACU and also of CPAC, would be giving the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award to Geert Wilders for his fight for free speech (the very bedrock of conservative principles, as I chided and reminded Keene). Yet within 24 hours of the decision to give Wilders the award, the award itself was withdrawn. Heston would not have been pleased. Keene canceled the decision to honor Wilders because of an article in Newsweek in which David Horowitz and Robert Spencer criticized CPAC for its Grover Norquist-mandated refusal to deal with the jihad or Islamic supremacism in any meaningful or effective way. Paul Jacob, president of Citizens in Charge Foundation, was instead given the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award. Who's that again?
Imagine battling with the American Conservative Union to have a very likely future prime minister of the Netherlands, who was being persecuted for speaking the truth, address an audience at CPAC.
The following year, at CPAC 2010, Robert Spencer and I organized “Jihad: The Political Third Rail” and brought freedom fighters from across the nation, including Allen West, Steve Coughlin, and Wafa Sultan, and from around the world, such as Simon Deng, Anders Gravers, and Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. The conference was designed to educate Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government, as well as its war on free speech — its attempt to silence and discredit those who speak up against the jihad and sharia encroachment in the West. Emphasis was on the international character of the jihad against the West and on how the Islamic war on free speech (and the media's self-imposed blackout on this issue, as in the Fort Hood massacre) was part and parcel of the same jihad against the West that terrorists are pursuing by violent means.
Last year, we again attracted an SRO crowd when I brought the Ground Zero mosque issue and a host of 9/11 family members to CPAC to discuss the proposed 15-story mega-mosque in a building destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. And as always, the left’s heads exploded.
And this year is shaping up no differently. Our event this year is generating plenty of heat. My organization, AFDI/SIOA, has put together the most critical and essential event at CPAC: “Islamic Law in America: How Obama’s Department of Justice is Selling us Out.” Our keynote speaker, J. Christian Adams, has been scheduled to speak at our event for months. Yet CPAC (under the leadership of Al Cardenas) scheduled Adams to speak at another event at the exact same time. It is on their agenda: Adams at both places at the same time. Further, our co-sponsor, the Tea Party, is under increasing pressure to cancel our “controversial” event.
Freedom is controversial.
Let's watch and see how this shakes out. What don't they want you to hear? Come and listen for yourself. You'll find us at CPAC in the McKinley Room on Friday, February 10, at 3:30pm.