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

National Review, April 7, 2003 by Byron York

Nevertheless, Norquist maintains that Muslims played a key role in the Bush victory. In the Spectator article, he gave much of the credit to Khaled Saffuri, his chief adviser in Muslim matters, who in 1998 helped found an organization called the Islamic Institute. The Institute's mission is to "build relationships between American Muslims and policy makers in the United States," and it has in the past promoted conservative positions on such issues as free trade, school choice, and tort reform.

While those matters are important, Norquist reserved his highest praise for Saffuri's work in having "brought to the GOP's attention the most important issue for the Muslim community -- the misuse of 'secret evidence' in immigration cases." Urged on by Norquist, Saffuri, and others, Candidate Bush denounced secret evidence during the 2000 campaign. In his second debate with Gore, he brought the subject up when asked a question about racial profiling: "There's other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that."

In connection with the secret-evidence issue, Saffuri and Norquist made common cause with Sami al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer-science professor who had made a crusade of the issue. (Al- Arian's brother-in-law had been jailed and later deported in a terrorist investigation that made use of secret evidence.) Al-Arian headed the far-left activist group National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, and made secret evidence its primary concern. Saffuri and Norquist shared a position with al-Arian's group on matters concerning secret evidence, and Bush was photographed with al-Arian during the campaign. Al-Arian also visited the White House in June 2001, a year and a half before he was indicted on conspiracy charges as the alleged head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in America. The indictment charged that al-Arian and his allies, "while concealing their association with the [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], would and did seek to obtain support from influential individuals, in the United States, under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights." During all this time, al-Arian's alleged terrorist ties were public knowledge, having been the subject of press reports and congressional testimony.

The GOP's Muslim connections attracted relatively little attention in the pre-September 11 world. But after 9/11, when the White House began a very public effort to reach out to Muslims, its choices of Muslim contacts -- made with input from, among others, the Islamic Institute - - became quite controversial. One particular meeting on September 26, 2001, sparked criticism that the White House had not taken care to screen out groups that have supported terrorism, in word or deed. Groups invited included CAIR, which, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, serves as "an ideological support group for militants"; the American Muslim Council, whose leaders (again according to Emerson) "have openly championed Hamas terrorists, defended Middle Eastern terrorist regimes, and issued anti-Semitic and anti-American statements"; and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, whose "rallies and sponsored events reveal implicit support of terrorist activities." (Gaffney refers to these and other groups as the "Wahhabi lobby.")