Originally posted at WorldNetDaily.
Conservative leader raises questions about host of popular, annual event
By Brian Fitzpatrick
 Suhail Khan |
WASHINGTON – Another headache has emerged for the largest annual gathering of conservatives slated for next month.
With the Conservative Political Action Conference under fire for allowing participation by a homosexual activist group called GOProud and for a financial scandal in which some $400,000 was misappropriated under the watch of current leadership, Frank Gaffney, a leader of the conservative movement for the last 30 years, charges that CPAC has come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law.
Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-author of the new book “Shariah: The Threat to America.” He told WND that Islamism has infiltrated the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, in the person of Washington attorney and political activist Suhail Khan and a group called Muslims for America.
Gaffney told WND that Norquist got Khan into the Bush White House.
Paul Sperry, author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington” and “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” says Khan is running “an influence operation on Capitol Hill that’s quite sophisticated and slick.”
“Suhail is the firstborn son of the late Mahboob Khan, a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in America,” said Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow. “Suhail has been a consultant to CAIR [The Council on American-Islamic Relations] and served on committees at ISNA [the Islamic Society of North America], both of which the government says are fronts for Hamas and its parent the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamist revivalist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 to establish Muslim theocracies around the world, by means both violent and non-violent. The group is banned in Egypt, where its members have a long history of political violence capped by the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who signed a peace agreement with Israel.
Sperry says some members of Congress and their staffs have no idea Khan is “a Muslim activist with direct connections to Muslim Brotherhood groups implicated by the government in a conspiracy to raise millions of dollars for terrorism right here in America.”
“The Brotherhood’s stated mission,” says Gaffney, “is to destroy Western civilization from within. Their agenda for the U.S. and the world is the triumph of Shariah law worldwide under a ruler known as a caliph.”
Gaffney describes Norquist, who, ironically also serves on the board of the controversial GOProud, as the enabler for Muslim Brotherhood associates, providing them with access into the highest reaches of the conservative movement and the Republican Party through his many contacts. Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform, hosts a weekly political organizing meeting attended by many of the leading conservatives in Washington.
 Frank Gaffney |
“This is a ticking time bomb for the conservative community,” said Gaffney. Using language reminiscent of the Cold War, Gaffney declared, “An influence operation is contributing materially to the defeat of our country, supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here.
“Grover Norquist is credentialing the perpetrators of this Muslim Brotherood influence operation,” he adds. “This is part of tradecraft, to get people who have standing in a community to give it to people who lack it, so they can do what they’re assigned to do in terms of subversion. We are in a war, and he has been working with the enemy for over a decade.”
Norquist declined to respond to WND requests for comment.
Said Gaffney, “What’s going on in conservative circles should give everyone real cause for concern. What it bespeaks is an effort to penetrate and influence conservatives, who are the most likely and perhaps only community in America who will stand up to and ultimately help ensure the defeat of this seditious totalitarian political program.”
CPAC officials declined to speak with WND, which broke the stories about seven conservative organizations dropping out over GOProud’s participation and the scandal over misappropriation of funds.
Norquist has been involved with Islamic organizations for more than a decade. In 1998, Norquist created the Islamic Free Market Institute (also known as the Islamic Institute or II) with Khaled Saffuri, a Palestinian who formerly worked for a now-defunct organization, the American Muslim Council, a Muslim Brotherhood front.
The Islamic Institute was funded in part by AMC founder Abdurahman Alamoudi, a top Brotherhood operative and al-Qaida financier now serving a 23-year sentence on terrorism charges. Gaffney has been sounding the alarm about Norquist’s links to Islam since 2000 when he became aware of the true nature of the II and its role in introducing presidential candidate George W. Bush to Brotherhood operatives like CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian and Alamoudi.
“It seems unlikely that even in Alamoudi’s wildest dreams he could have imagined the extent of the access, influence and legitimacy the American Muslim Council and allied Islamist organizations would be able to secure in Republican circles, thanks to the investment they began in 1998 in a relationship with Norquist,” wrote Gaffney.
According to Gaffney, Islamists in the United States are implementing a doctrine called “dawa,” which he describes as a “pre-violent” form of jihad intended to advance the process of Islamizing a non-Muslim country.
“Every Muslim activist is part of dawa,” said Sperry.
The best source about their intentions is the king of dawa, Qaradawi. Yusuf Qaradawi [is] the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, according to Andrew McCarthy, the former lead prosecutor of those responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, and author of “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”
Qaradawi famously boasted: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawa.”
Under dawa, radical Muslims seek to gain positions of influence within the targeted society and routinely lie to non-Muslims about their genuine intentions, said Gaffney.
“It’s a question of legitimizing and otherwise credentialing people who have very distinct ties to, affinities for or, in some cases, direct involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Gaffney. “The fact that it has gone on within conservative circles for this long, and may be further enabled at CPAC this year, is a travesty.”
Gaffney adds: “Taqiyya is the honored practice of lying for the faith. It’s not considered lying, it’s telling non-Muslims what you want them to know in order to protect the faith. Taqiyya is both an authorized and a mandatory part of Shariah law. It fits a pattern of what we have seen various MB organizations and front groups engage in.”
The leader of the Hasan Family Foundation, which runs Muslims for America, one of the groups listed on the ACU’s website as a “participating organization” at CPAC, confirmed for WND that Suhail Khan would be assisting the Muslim organization at CPAC.
“Suhail Khan in Washington, D.C., has agreed to run the [Muslims for America] booth” at CPAC, said Seeme Hasan, chairwoman of the Hasan Family Foundation. But she says Gaffney is off base in his other charges. Khan also called Gaffney’s assertions “hapless.”
“Frank Gaffney knows better and has a history of being less than honest, to say the least, on these issues,” Khan told WND in an e-mail. “Please have Frank put this month’s wild assertions in writing and send it to me by e-mail so that I may read the actual assertions and respond fully. Frank’s hapless assertions change from time to time.”
Hasan said: “Suhail Khan is the most maligned Muslim that I know of. You read that he must be a terrorist or something.” She accused Gaffney, author Robert Spencer and journalist David Horowitz of leading an “anti-Muslim” movement in conservative and Republican circles.
“As long as Frank Gaffney is going to be at CPAC, Muslims for America should be there too,” Hasan told WND.
She insisted the Muslim Brotherhood is being misrepresented by people like Gaffney and Sperry.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is doing some good jobs for Muslims in Egypt,” she said. “They’re trying to fight for democracy and free elections. What’s wrong with that?”
She also acknowledged that “some members have done bad things,” for example, “gotten involved with al-Qaida.”
Hasan offered a totally different picture of herself and her organizations, the Hasan Family Foundation and Muslims for America. Hasan said she and her husband, a health insurance entrepreneur, are the exclusive funders of the organizations.
“I am from Pakistan, I’m a Sufi Muslim,” she said. “We believe in accepting other religions. We believe in karma, you do something bad to somebody else and something bad will happen to you.”
She claimed, “The majority of Muslims in America are south Asians, most are Sufis. We believe in being in harmony with the nation, the rest of the population and ourselves … Muslims are happy to live with other people.”
She also claimed, “There are more stories about Moses and Jesus and Mary in the Quran than about the prophet Muhammad. The best description of Jesus’ birth is in the Quran.”
She characterized the Hasan Family Foundation as one “set up to do educational endeavors to bring better understanding between the religion of Islam and people in America. So we have funded art shows from Pakistan, fashion shows from Pakistan, and a book about Islam in America. After 9/11 we felt our mission had to change a little bit. We sent members of our board to the Democrats’ Renaissance Weekend and to CPAC just to make people aware of who Muslims are in America, that we’re not terrorists, we’re anti-terrorism.”
Hasan said the goal of Muslims for America is to encourage Muslim youth to participate in American society, especially in politics.
“We want to get young Muslims involved in political leadership,” Hasan said. “Most of young Muslims born in America have parents who come from dictatorships and don’t know about participation in politics. We want young Muslims to make their voices felt.”
Hasan added that her own son, Muhammad Ali Hasan, just ran for statewide office in Colorado as a Republican, but switched to the Democratic Party after encountering anti-Muslim “bigotry” at a GOP convention.