Well, heck, its not like the Saudis don't have practice buying American officials;
Posted on 12/11/2003 1:36:25 AM PST by kattracks
Hugh Hewitt kindly invited me on his show this afternoon together with Edward Morrissey of Captain's Quarters to discuss the Frank Gaffney/Grover Norquist controversy. The discussion was occasioned by Gaffney's FrontPage essay on America's Islamist fifth column, "A troubling influence." I flagged Gaffney's essay yesterday morning in this post and gave my impressions of Hugh's one-hour interview with Gaffney and Norquist yesterday in this post.
I reread Gaffney's article to prepare for Hugh, and tracked down a couple of other pieces as well: Franklin Foer's New Republic article "Grover Norquist's strange alliance with radical Islam," and Byron York's National Review Online article "Fight on the right."
Gaffney's article is a tremendous piece of work. It may err in some details, but it portrays the operations of America's Islamist fifth column in the Wahhabi lobby with insight and care. Gaffney relies not only on journalistic sources but also provides his own valuable eyewitness testimony. His criticism of Norquist in the article is impersonal and principled.
Norquist's reponse, on the other hand, is personal and evasive. He attacks Gaffney as racist and bigoted; not a trace of evidence in the public record supports these charges. I heard Norquist respond to Gaffney in this manner at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this past January. He did not deign to respond to Gaffney's remarks in substance.
Hugh replayed his one-hour interview of Gaffney and Norquist on the show tonight and I took the opportunity to listen to it again. Having just reread the materials cited above, I was able to weigh the substance of Norquist's responses to Hugh's questions more carefully than the first time around. One particular exchange struck me as illustrative of Norquist's deceit and evasiveness.
Hugh asked Norquist to respond to the charge that an indicted (indicted as a bagman for Muhammar Khadaffy) Islamist -- Abdurahman Alamoudi -- had contributed $10,000 by personal check to help set up the Islamic Institute under Norquist's auspices. He stated that the check had been returned; he didn't say whether it had been cashed or when it had been returned. (In a footnote, Gaffney cites a source quoting Saffuri to the effect that the check was returned in October 2001.)
Norquist further stated that the institute was founded by Khaled Saffuri, as though that answered Hugh's question regarding Alamoudi's role in funding the institute. The institute is run by Saffuri, who, according to Gaffney, is one of Alamoudi's former deputies; Norquist never responded to Gaffney's charge that Saffuri is Alamoudi's former deputy. In other words, Norquist in effect conceded that Alamoudi in fact contributed substantial funds to Norquist's Islamic Institute and Norquist never disputed Gaffney's point about Saffuri's relationship to Alamoudi.
Norquist's themes are those of the Islamist apologist organizations like CAIR and the American Muslim Council: informed critics of Islamofascism and advocates of American interests like Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney are portrayed as bigots, and key law enforcement tools against domestic terrorism are alleged to be nefarious infringments of civil rights. When Norquist attempted to enlist James Woolsey to his cause on the latter score, Gaffney powerfully established that Norquist was all but lying.
Finally, except when attacking Gaffney personally, the tone of Norquist's remarks is insouciant and unserious. Norquist's response to the merits of Gaffney's charges was by turns evasive, deceitful, and flip. In defending himself from Gaffney's chages, Grover Norquist is an advocate with a fool for a client
You've been fighting the good fight, all through the hard decades before the Internet brought some balance to the Left vs. Right war, and you can justly claim some accomplishment- like Norquist's Angola initiative. And now the scales are finally tipping, and conservative activists are a dime a dozen, suddenly you find yourself being nipped again and again by your lessers- like a marlin, in a piranha tank. In some cases, like Horowitz, the teeth even belong to those who were on the other side of the barricades- back when the barricades were real.
And the piranhas bite faster.
You can't keep one billion people at the point of a bayonet. Cheers, By
And whose pockets? The answer may be quite surprising. It may go to the 'highest levels...'
How do you 'get along' with people who think that Allah has told them to KILL YOU!?! Please let me know, I would love to know, really. In fact, your answer is the key to this entire war! Your wisdom on this subject could save the lives of billions, potentially. After all, the rest of humanity has been trying to figure this out since the 7th century. So, please, elaborate.
Firstly, by showing that they won't get away with it. With Afghanistan and Iraq, that's already been done. The second part is to demonstrate that adopting our principles is the answer to their problems. That's the tough part, because it would require a phoenix-like resurgence of confidence in the American Dream, and an evangelistic willingness to project it, the way the British did with their way of life in the nineteenth century. In an America whose leaders are tearing at their Constitution and culture, I'll admit it's difficult to imagine how that might be inspired.
It does deal with the root cause, my friend. You Americans have to start using the two greatest weapons you've got. Not B-2s and F-16s, but the New Testament, and the Constitution. The two documents that gave you your preeminence. Think every Muslim doesn't harbour doubt, about those who tell them how to interpret the will of God? They do, and in their hearts they want to deal direct. Of course, to make this work, America has to believe in those documents herself.
That's the hard part.
Norquist appears to be WAY off on this. I haven't read the article, and will do so later today, but it is deeply troubling, they way Newt's treatment of his wife/ex-wife was deeply troubling.
In my experience of reading the Koran AND the Hadith (which I doubt more than a handful of non-Muslims have) it is clear that the impetus of Islam is toward violence, slavery, and oppression. Now, that certainly doesn't mean all Muslims favor such things---nor do all Catholics practice birth control and all Baptists refrain from drinking. But it does say that we can really only deal with those who have either become sufficiently "secularized" or "westernized" so the Koran means no more to them than a Bible does to a Unitarian (and there are many such people) or those Muslims who are fundamentally ignorant of their own holy books (as are, perhaps, a majority of "Christians").
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