Fight on the Right: 'Muslim outreach' and a feud between activists

National Review, April 7, 2003 by Byron York

In February, a long-simmering and mostly behind-the-scenes feud between two prominent conservatives, tax-reform advocate Grover Norquist and national-security expert Frank Gaffney, burst into the open. At issue was the conduct of Norquist's energetic campaign to bring Muslims into the Republican party. While Norquist argues that Muslim political participation will be a key part of the GOP's electoral strategy in coming years, Gaffney charges that aggressive outreach efforts to Muslim leaders have brought the party, and in particular the Bush White House, dangerously close to organizations that have in the past endorsed or, at the least, declined to condemn international terrorism. Among them are the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America, the American Muslim Council, and others whose representatives have been invited to meetings in the White House and with officials across the Bush administration.

The feud has now escalated into a full-scale battle. Gaffney and others at his organization, the Center for Security Policy, have distributed thick packets of information to reporters and conservative activists outlining the case against the Islamic organizations. Norquist has responded angrily, barring Gaffney from conservative strategy meetings and accusing him of racism and bigotry. The fight has spread bad feelings on all sides, and has left more than a few conservatives worried that it might do serious damage to the conservative movement.

But the argument between Norquist and Gaffney is about much more than two men, or even the conservative movement. At its heart, it is about the Bush White House and whether its contacts with some Muslim groups might someday make the administration vulnerable to charges that it cultivated close relations with groups tied to radical Islam -- even as it conducted a war on terror around the world. The Norquist-Gaffney feud, some conservatives fear, might be just the first act of a very long play.

The conflict began to emerge on January 31, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Arlington, Va., when Gaffney participated in a panel discussion entitled "Safeguarding Civil Liberties in a Time of War." He discussed the threat posed by recruitment programs run by radical Wahhabi Islamists inside U.S. prisons, on military bases, and on college campuses. And there's more, Gaffney said: "I'm sorry to say there is an active and, to a considerable degree successful, [Wahhabi] political operation aimed not least at the Bush White House."

Later, during a question period, Gaffney said he had recently received a press release from the American Muslim Council -- which he called "one of the leading Wahhabist sympathizers, and, I believe, [Wahhabi-] funded organizations in this country" -- announcing that a top AMC official had been invited to the White House. Gaffney continued: "And in this press release, they credited one Ali Tulbah [a Bush administration official] for having gotten them into the White House. It turns out that Ali Tulbah's father is one Hasan Tulbah, the treasurer of the Islamist Da'wah Center, a prominent Wahhabi mosque in Houston. But the reason he was able to influence whether [former AMC executive director] Eric Vickers and the AMC were present in this White House meeting was because he is also, I believe, the associate director for cabinet affairs in the Bush White House, responsible in his portfolio, if you can believe it, for the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department. This is not how we win the hearts and minds of peace-loving, pro-American Muslims. It is a perilous path, and I hope that it will be corrected."

Gaffney's remarks were startling, not because he was wrong about Islamist recruitment efforts -- he in fact appears to be right on target -- but because he singled out Tulbah, and suggested that the low-level White House aide played a role in the Islamist political operation. In the weeks since, Gaffney has not offered any evidence to back up his charges. Instead, he now says the problem he was addressing was not Tulbah specifically, but the issue of poor political judgment at the White House. Nor have several experts on Islam and terrorism who are generally allied with Gaffney been able to point to any problems with Tulbah.

Gaffney's remarks enraged Norquist, who responded in an open letter to conservative activists. "There is no place in the conservative movement for racial prejudice, religious bigotry or ethnic hatred," Norquist wrote. "We have come too far in the last 30 years in our efforts to broaden our coalition to allow anyone to smear an entire group of people. . . . The conservative movement cannot be associated with racism or bigotry."

The reaction was explosive. Even if Gaffney had been wrong to mention Tulbah by name, some conservatives felt, Norquist's reaction was over the top. To make matters worse, Norquist used a standard rhetorical device of the Left: If you can't win an argument with a conservative, call him a racist. "I, for one, don't see it," says David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union and an organizer of the CPAC conference. "If you read the transcript [of the panel], you can see if Frank was right or wrong, but there was nothing racist or bigoted about it."