Byron Tau, POLITICO
While a gay rights controversy drew headlines at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, another — and even more bitter — dispute rippled as views varied widely on how to reconcile the conservative movement with Islam in the United States.
At the 38th annual conservative gathering, there was no shortage of accusations of Islamist sympathies, Muslim Brotherhood infiltration and charges of fear-mongering. Republican presidential hopefuls, including Newt Gingrich and John Thune, also drew applause with suggestions that the Obama administration has taken a politically correct blind eye to the connection between radical Islam and terrorism.
Freshman Rep. Allen West also drew thunderous applause in his keynote speech about the threat to America posed by Islam and other security threats. And as Republican candidates define their national security stands in the 2012 elections, conservative discomfort with Islam in America will be a feature of the debate. “We are also faced at home and abroad with a mortal threat in political Islam,” conservative activist David Horowitz said in his address to the conference. “Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means where possible and by terror where necessary and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam.”
CPAC organizers held an official panel on the threat of sharia law, with several other affiliated, but unofficial, events on inclusion, religious liberty and the so-called ground zero mosque controversy, featuring the controversial blogger Pam Geller and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer.
“Sometimes when you hear snide comments about Jews in the ’50s or Muslims today — we’ve been through this. The Republican party chased away the Catholic vote for over a hundred years,” said Grover Norquist, an ACU board member and a tax activist who has tried to bring Muslim voters in to the GOP for more than a decade. “You chase away people politically. The thing about the political effects of bigotry — it can last generations. It’s tough to fix.”
“The answer is some people are and some people aren’t,” Norquist later told POLITICO in response to a question about whether Republicans were making an effort to court Muslim voters. “Certainly, Chris Christie in New Jersey is. George W. Bush was.”
Bush’s outreach to the Muslim community netted him the single largest share of the Muslim vote in 2000, but nearly all Muslim voters drifted back toward Obama in 2008. Relations between the GOP and the Muslim community reached an all-time low when many prominent members of the GOP took public stands against the building of a mosque in Lower Manhattan.
The tensions broke most clearly to the surface in a small panel on religious freedom sponsored by the group Muslims for America and moderated by the American Conservative Union’s only Muslim board member. The discussion was interrupted several times by attendees questioning the moderator, Suhail Khan, about radical ties and sympathies.
Khan faced repeated and hostile questions about his ties and his parents ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as a handful attendees with video cameras and recording devices crowded the rear of the room to pressed him on the terror issues.
“These are smear tactics that have circulated against me for the last 10 years,” said Khan, responding to audience questions by a participant about alleged ties to radical organizations — ties that Khan has ferociously denied, pointing to his service in the Bush administration and his security background vetting by the Department of Justice and the Secret Service for those sensitive political positions.
“My record is clear,” said Khan to the audience. “Pam Geller, Robert Spencer — they’re not part of the conservative movement. Everywhere they turn, the conservative movement is turning their back on them.”
“These are passed-over and warmed-over stale attacks that go back 10 years,” Khan told POLITICO. “I was elected by the ACU membership. I was the highest vote-getter in a popular election. I am confident that the ACU rejects these baseless charges.”
At a well-attended Friday event paid for and sponsored by Geller and Spencer, accusations that the conservative conference has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood were tossed around with abandon — and concerns about Islam itself as a faith were openly voiced by both audience members and panelists.
“For 10 years, people have been asking for moderate Muslims to speak up,” said Spencer. “We’re going to be waiting for those guys until doomsday.”
“Moderate Muslims don’t exist,” said one audience member at the Geller and Spencer event. “Muslims are not able to be moderate — or they are speaking against what is written in the Koran.”
Geller herself attacked CPAC and its organizers — the American Conservative Union, calling for the ouster of several ACU executives.
“This is the problem with CPAC. It’s corrupted and compromised by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Geller told the audience at her panel, saying CPAC’s leaders were either “clueless or complicit” to the threat posed by Islamists.
“There are 12,000 people who come to this event who don’t know they’ve been sold out by CPAC leadership,” said Geller, who said that the event had been taken over by Ron Paul supporters — as well as Islamists. “We have to take CPAC back.”
And at yet another well-attended panel on the threat of sharia law to the West, the prominent critic of Islam, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was greeted with rapturous applause as she retold her story of life in an Islamic country.
Sharia, said Ali, “is a creed of death. You can defeat it only with a creed of life.”
“One of the things we have to do is not let sharia creep into our own legal system,” said Jim Woolsey, former CIA director under President Bill Clinton.
All three events are part of a larger debate within the conservative movement over how the GOP should tackle Islam — a topic that several CPAC speakers compared to the party’s poor treatment of Catholic voters for several generations.
“Unfortunately, there are some voices on the fringe who are very strident in their belief that Muslim-Americans are not part the American community,” said Khan. “Many Muslims feel that the Republican party is not welcoming because of the harsh rhetoric of a few.”
Khan called the concerns over sharia a complete “canard” but insisted that CPAC is about bringing conservatives together to have an honest discussion.
“It’s like when a little kid learned a dirty word and just keeps repeating it,” said Khan about the sharia. “It was ‘Wahhabi’ a few years ago.”
“The Republican party is continually missing allies,” said Jennifer Bryson, an expert in Islamic studies with the Witherspoon Institute. Bryson argued that many young Muslims do not feel particularly welcome by the GOP even as they share many of the party’s core political and social values.
“The conclusion I came to last year was that the American public is not ready for an honest conversation,” said Mohamed Elibiary, a Department of Homeland Security adviser and Dallas-based community activist. “The discourse right now is just throwing mud back and forth.”
Geller seemed to disagree that the broader argument was about religion or faith at all.
“Religion or no religion — you can worship a stone, just don’t stone me with it,” said Geller in closing her panel.
Thanks Ted Belman
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