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Islamists’ White House gatekeeper
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

One of the hardiest perennials in the Washington political scene is the spectacle of conservatives publicly disagreeing with one another. The vicious personal attacks launched against me last week by Grover Norquist, however, went way beyond the kind of dispute that so often enlivens policy discourse, usually to the delight — and advantage — of liberals who agree with neither camp.

So why would Mr. Norquist, a colleague well-known and widely admired for his work on tax reduction and conservative activism with whom I have often worked collaboratively over the years, publish a letter and take to the airwaves to accuse me of "racism," "bigotry" and "lying"?

The reason given in a letter Mr. Norquist circulated last Wednesday, that was subsequently quoted at length in articles in Friday's editions of The Washington Times and The Washington Post, was comments I made at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on January 31. During a panel discussion about the balance to be struck in time of war between preserving our civil liberties and safeguarding our country and lives, I mentioned several factors that are compelling the Bush administration, properly in my view, to infringe in relatively minor ways on traditional American freedoms to save the country from terrorist destruction.

Preeminent among these is the threat posed by "Islamists" — adherents to radical, violent Muslim sects like the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia — not only in remote places like Indonesia, Pakistan and Bosnia but in the United States, itself. I made an express distinction between such Islamists and what is, I believe, the majority of Muslims in this country whom the former are determined to recruit, intimidate and dominate through a variety of techniques.

Wahhabi-Saudi funding appears to have been instrumental in creating and sustaining a large number of organizations involved in such troubling activities as: prison recruitment of American felons, indoctrination of U.S. military personnel, proselytizing on more than 500 college campuses across the United States, charitable fund-raising for terrorists and, of course, underwriting — and, therefore, controlling — as many as 70-80 percent of the nation's mosques.

Posted by: kanji 2003-02-11
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=10141