Posted on 02/24/2003 7:59:19 AM PST by Calpernia
Conservative Feud Grows Over Muslims White House Staffers
It is a little-known fact that one or more Muslims have been on the White House staff continuously for the past 10 years, working behind the scenes in various capacities. All of these people worked their way up the ladder, overcoming suspicion and doubt and getting various security clearances along the way. Especially after 9/11, Muslims in the White House have had to prove themselves time and time again, as if being Muslim and a loyal American was an oxymoron. This week, conservative strategist Grover Norquist, who has worked to integrate Muslims into the Republican party, slammed conservative pundit Frank Gaffney, accusing him of smearing the names of two Muslim White House staffers and unfairly charging Norquist with giving White House access to "radical Muslims." Gaffney, who has long been a critic of Muslim contacts with the White House, offered no specific charges against the two staffers, but did try to link them (six-degrees-of-separation style) to Hamas & Hezbollah. Norquist sent a letter to Gaffney accusing him of questioning the loyalty of Ali Tulbah, an associate director of Cabinet affairs in the White House, and former public liason officer Suhail Khan. "This is the second time that a Muslim working for President George W. Bush has been subjected to an attack by you because of his faith," wrote Mr. Norquist. "You have made similarly dishonest allegations against Suhail Khan while he worked inside the White House." While at the White House, Khan served as a liason between the White House and Muslim communities, helping recruit Muslim support for the war on terror. He also helped honor Muslim police and firefighter heroes of 9/11. Tulbah has helped put together "best practices" guidelines for Muslim charities to insure no money goes to support terrorism. Norquist scoffed at suggestions that Muslim staffers would be conduits for terror, saying that they have "a higher security clearance than Frank Gaffney will ever have."
The Christian period of persecution was limited to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trial. The Muslim period of violence and intolerance began in 600 AD and continues to the present. Has history ever known a happy, peaceful Muslim society?
Roman Catholics, and phony huckster televangelists all claim to follow the Bible. An equally wide range of beliefs and practices fall under the umbrella of followers of Allah and the Quran. Certainly, the current period in Muslim history is marked by a strong current of violence and intolerance in the name of the religion. But Christianity has gone through such periods in its history as well.Bingo.
One thing to keep in mind is the fact that "fundamentalism" is quite rare among American Muslims, even the devout. Many in fact came here to get away from the "sharia" fanatics.
Norquist is doing what he is doing because he's smart and he can do math. Look at the Muslims of Middle Eastern descent in the US. They tend to be hard working, they blow off welfare and take care of their own, and they are for the most part socially conservative. These are natural GOP voters, and they have begun to come around. Look at Florida, by all accounts Bush got a huge majority of the Islamic vote there and it made the difference.
As for the people on Bush's staff....Please!. Do we distrust the man so much that we think he clintoned their security clearances? He knows these people better than anyone here, and apparently he trusts them. To say they can't be trusted simply because they are Muslims is no less ignorant than saying that staffers of Russian, Polish, or Cuban descent couldn't be trusted during the Cold War, or saying that Catholics couldn't be trusted....which indeed happened quite a bit during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
-Eric
-The "Know Nothing" Party, 19th century USA.
-Eric
The Christian period of persecution was limited to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trial.And the "Thirty Years War", and the Irish conflict, and various Russian pogroms against Jews.....
There are people in this nation today, called "Reconstructionists", who advocate turning America into a "Biblical Nation" where any deviation from their desired behaviors will be punished, often by death. Does their existence mean that all Christians are dangerous? Of course not.
-Eric
The problem is: vetted by whom?
Remember Gary Aldrich's book Unlimited Access in which he describes the Clintons' systematically dismantling the security system in the WH. FBI agents who actually tried to preserve security were booted. (The Rats seized on the story of Clinton sneaking out of the WH to various hotels to visit various bimbos to discredit the whole book and the national security threat was completely ignored.)
Remember good ole Louis Freeh focusing exclusively on white, Christian, constitution supporting males as the only terrorist threat. Remember the many atrocities that led to and which could never have been committed without complicit, compromised agents of the FBI.
Remember that Muslim FBI agent who refused to wear a wire while speaking to a fellow Muslim. "Muslims don't record other Muslims." (Pre 911.)
So who vetted these guys (or anybody else for that matter)? Was it one of the many honest and diligent FBI or SS agents, or was it one of the Clintonian models or worse?
My point is NOT that there cannot be such thoroughly vetted people who would be safe to be in the WH. I just think the job has to be done again and by people with no obvious compromising characteristics such as Clintonian contamination and/or a religious bias one way or the other.
Joe Kennedy, Sr.? OK, never mind that part.
You are on the money about the constitutional vs. invitational aspect. It's the same as the "innocent until proven guilty" basis of our judicial system. You can't lock 'em up or shoot 'em without due process, but that doesn't mean that you trust 'em or take 'em home to dinner either.
We are free to believe that OJ, Condit, Peterson, etc. are dangerous people; we just can't send them to jail without proving it in a court of law. I still wouldn't date one of them, and I don't have to trust ANYBODY....
Because they do it all the time. Even the 9/11 terrorists were drinking in a strip club.They seemed to intentionally avoid Islamic communities. This was probably because they talked fundamentalist but didn't walk the talk (perhaps because they felt "martyrdom" would cleanse their sins). This would have stuck out like a sore thumb in American Islamic communities. Remember that it was Buffalo area Muslims that turned in the Al Qaeda cell there.
-Eric
Why do you always post anti-conservative and anti-Christian? I'm just curious.What was either about post #45? It was strictly factual. Those historical events happened, and the "Reconstructionsists" exist and believe in a Christian version of Sharia.
I dislike religious bigotry and that includes bigotry against Muslims which is based solely on their faith.
-Eric
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