Sarah Posner: Religious War Comes to CPAC

CPAC really isn’t the friendliest place for Muslims to be.

Religious War Comes to CPAC

by Sarah Posner

(Nation)

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual three-day parade of GOP presidential hopefuls delivering paeans to God, country and capitalism, was this year embroiled in a full-scale, intra-party religious war. The conservative movement, according to a group of Islamophobic activists, has been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, which they claim supports Sharia, “a supremacist program that justifies the destruction of Christian churches and parishioners” and “the replacement of our constitutional republic…with a theocratic Islamic caliphate governing according to shari’ah.”

That charge came straight out of a flyer handed to me by Krista Hughes, an employee of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), whose president Frank Gaffney is one of the principal ringleaders in the rightwing propaganda campaign to strike fear in Americans’ hearts that a fifth column of Muslim extremists seeks to subvert America from within.

At CPAC, Gaffney’s chief target is Suhail Khan, a former Republican House staffer, Bush administration political appointee and current Senior Fellow at an evangelical think tank focused on religious freedom. Khan, a self-described devout Muslim who serves on the board of the American Conservative Union, CPAC’s organizer, is a conservative through and through. Raised in the San Francisco Bay area, he told me the atmosphere at UC Berkeley, where he attended college, turned him off and led him to his current political persuasion. But Khan’s conservative cred is of no moment to Gaffney, who has waged war against him as well as conservative movement icon Grover Norquist, also an ACU board member, because, Gaffney insists, they are both in league with anti-American Islamists.

Khan, who told me earlier this year that CPAC had shunned Gaffney because he is a “crazy bigot,” has withstood a barrage of Gaffney’s conspiratorial histrionics, which are reminiscent of the charge by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch that Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist agent.

 

Crazy Frank Gaffney in Ultra Fear-mongering Mode

Frank Gaffney

Even loyal Bush aides are not free from the Islamophobic machine. Suhail Khan debates Frank Gaffney on Anderson Cooper’s 360 and makes Gaffney look like a wacko.

 

Anti-Muslim Agenda at Conservative Conference

CPAC is beset by anti-Muslim goons. Are we going to see a repeat of the Pamela Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s, “Jihad: The Third Rail” event with a cameo from Frank Gaffney?

Conservative Conference Beset By Accusations of Pro-Gay Takeover, Muslim Agenda

If the controversy over GOProud weren’t enough, another complaint gaining traction among right wing blogs is the charge that ACU board member and CPAC organizer Suhail Khan is connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S government, and is trying to inject some sort of “Islamic supremacy” into the event.

Critics like Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Pamela Geller from the website Atlas Shrugs and Robert Spencer from Jihad Watch are among critics who accuse Americans for Tax Reform chief Grover Norquist, who is also on the CPAC board and an ally of Khan, of being too biased in favor of radical Muslim activists.

They say Norquist and Khan are unduly influencing the CPAC agenda, proving the organization is not serious about the threat of Muslim extremism.

“I have long been aware of the stealth Islamization of CPAC leadership, but held my events there in the hopes that we might snatch back leadership,” Geller recently wrote on her website. “David Keene has stacked the board with Islamic supremacists, and their chief diabolical Islamic apologist is none other than the infamous Grover Norquist.”

Norquist did not return calls or e-mails for comment, but Khan, a former White House staffer and Republican congressional aide, told FOXNews.com that he is used to the attacks. He said the unsubstantiated accusations against him first emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks when he was working in the Bush White House.

Khan is now a fellow at the Center for Global Engagement working on religious outreach. He said he is the only board member that was elected by the wider ACU membership and enjoys strong support from fellow conservatives.

“The (accusations) are completely false, there is no merit to them,” Khan said. “I’m just grateful that the vast majority of conservatives at-large know me as a life-long Reagan conservative who has dedicated his life to individual liberty, limited government and a strong defense. This has not been a controversy internally.”

According to CPAC organizers, at least one panel is scheduled on Islamic Sharia law and the debate over its creeping influence in Western societies, including the United States.

 

Frank Gaffney Thinks Some Conservatives are Muslim Brotherhood

Frank Gaffney

More wackiness from Gaffney.

Conservatives claim anti-tax crusader secretly leading Muslim indoctrination

(RAWstory)

Are a growing cross-section of American conservatives really secret Muslims bent on destroying western civilization?

Answer: No.

But that’s not stopping right-wing activist Frank Gaffney from claiming the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) had been infiltrated by radical Muslims because of the inclusion of Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist and former Bush staffer Suhail Khan.

American Conservative Union (ACU), the oldest conservative lobbying organization in the country which hosts CPAC, is involved in a “stealthy effort to bring Shariah” to the United States, according to Gaffney.

“This is a ticking time bomb for the conservative community,” he told the conservative conspiracy website WorldNetDaily. “An influence operation is contributing materially to the defeat of our country.”

 

 

Gaffney alleges that Norquist and Khan are secretly working for the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group, and trying to influence conservative groups in a plot to “Islamize” America. Both Khan and Norquist are ACU board members.

Khan, a conservative activist who previously worked for the Bush administration, allegedly has ties to the radical Islamists from his time as consultant for The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He has also served on committees at the Islamic Society of North America, according to Gaffney.

Gaffney also claimed that Khan’s father was a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. In a report by Talking Points Memo, Khan called the allegation “laughable” and said his father was from India, noting that the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt.

He is now a senior fellow for Christian-Muslim Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement.

Norquist, founder of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, was also accused of secretly providing the Muslim Brotherhood with access into the highest reaches of the conservative movement.

“Grover Norquist is credentialing the perpetrators of this Muslim Brotherhood influence operation,” Gaffney said. “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.”

Gaffney is no stranger to making wildly unsubstantiated claims. He said in 2009 that there was mounting evidence that President Barack Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”

“The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich,” he added.

CPAC was facing a boycott from a number of conservative groups for inviting the conservative gay Republican group GOProud to the conference. The Family Research Council, Concerned Women For America, American Values, the American Principles Project, the Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and Liberty University have said they will not attend the conference in February.