Grover Norquist

Anti-Islam activist Robert Spencer was supposed to receive the "People's Choice Blog Award" at CPAC this year for his efforts at Jihad Watch, but the whole thing fell apart when Spencer refused a request not to attack Grover Norquist or Suhail Khan for being Muslim Brotherhood facilitators at the ceremony. 

Today, Spencer appeared on Bryan Fischer's radio program where, just like his colleague Pamela Geller, he proclaimed that the fact that anti-Islam activists are unwelcome at the event is evidence that Norquist and Kahn have managed to turn CPAC into a "sharia-compliant conference" where Islamic law has been implemented:

Many right-wing extremists loathe Grover Norquist because they think he is a secret Muslim and Muslim Brotherhood operative and argue that his strict opposition to any and all tax increases doesn’t excuse his supposed support for “jihadists undermining our Republic with Sharia.” WorldNetDaily columnist Erik Rush, apparently trying to find new ways to top his other hilariously ridiculous columns, now asserts that Norquist is using his strict focus on tax issues to keep “rank-and-file Republicans distracted” as Democrats turn the U.S. into a socialist “oligarchical collective,” with the help of the Council on Foreign Relations and possibly even the New World Order.

Lately, some of our long-respected conservative commentators have also shown themselves to be … well, not nearly as smart as we thought they were, or else complicit in this elitist subjugation of the republic. Whether they have always been of these sentiments or if they’ve developed a different view of socialism now that their nests are well-feathered is unknown to me; such knowledge would be of no practical use to us in any event. We’ve seen an election that speaks to a dangerous shift in the worldview of our electorate, widespread election fraud, or both, and these fools continue their attempts to wax profound in their nightly analyses. As the country crumbles around us, they cavalierly pontificate, overcomplicating something that is very simple: a Marxist thug installing an oligarchical collective where a republic once stood.

…

Norquist is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which qualifies him for a place in Satan’s pantheon of arch-devils, in the view of many hard-line conservatives and libertarians. The CFR, one of several politically eclectic organizations wherein there is a queer overlap between Democratic and Republican power players, is considered to be instrumental in many “New World Order” conspiracy theories, some of which appear much less theoretical these days. So, Norquist is either doing an abysmal job of “really running” the GOP, or he is – as I charge many Republican leaders are doing – simply keeping rank-and-file Republicans distracted while the socialists go their merry unmolested way.

I would suggest that conservatives prepare to employ uncompromising and brutal honesty when discerning the character of those who sell themselves as conservatives. This will not be easy. There is a large crop of politicians and commentators whom many of us have heretofore admired who may need to go under the bus with all due speed.

Anti-Muslim activists on the Right have consistently warned that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the Obama administration. But if their unhinged McCarthyism is to be believed, then Mitt Romney’s campaign has been penetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood as well, as Romney’s campaign has named George Salem, Samah Norquist and David Ramadan “National Co-Chairs of Arab Americans for Romney.”

Pamela Geller labeled George Salem’s Arab American Institute a “nototrious anti-Israel Israel [sic] organization” composed of “Islamic supremacists” and led by a “Jew hater.” She even suggested that the AAI seeks “Jewish annihilation” by backing Mideast peace efforts.

Geller, Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, William Murray, Andrea and James Lafferty and others sent a letter to Edwin Meese demanding he withdraw his endorsement of Virginia Del. David Ramadan because of his purported ties to Muammar Gadaffi and “radical views,” including his support for the right to build the Park 51 Islamic Community Center. James Lafferty said Ramadan is an “extremist” who should not even “be allowed to continue to live in the United States,” and Geller said he is a “stealth jihadist” and a “Muslim Brotherhood plant.”

Perhaps no chair of Romney’s committee is despised more than Samah Norquist, wife of conservative leader Grover Norquist. Glenn Beck and Jerry Boykin have said that Norquist is a lackey for the Muslim Brotherhood and according to anti-Muslim activists like Gaffney and David Horowitz, Norquist secretly converted to Islam and joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the behest of his wife. Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell wrote in a report for the American Conservative Union that she is “certain that Mr. Gaffney’s hatred [for Norquist] is further fueled by the fact that Grover is married to a Muslim-American woman (who also has worked for the United States government in very responsible positions, I might add!).”

Of course, these spurious claims against Ramadan, Norquist and Salem are just as baseless and wrong as their attacks against the Obama administration and the Muslim-Americans serving in it.

But while extremists like Geller, Gaffney, Horowitz and others are quick to attack Obama with such bogus charges, for some reason it seems unlikely Romney will receive similar treatment.

Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, who recently led the “Lenin and Sharia” conference on the supposed links between Communism and radical Islamists, today joined Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio to once again defend Michele Bachmann’s anti-Muslim witch hunt. But before they could get to that, the two attacked conservative activist Grover Norquist, whom Gaffney has consistently demonized as a Muslim Brotherhood agent. Gaffney said that his ten part “Muslim Brotherhood in America” course proves that Norquist and his Brotherhood allies are copying the “kind of subversive, clandestine operations that the Communists ran in their heyday in this country”:

Gaffney: Cliff Kincaid, one of the things that jumps out at you as you look at this material in the course and Grover’s friends in the Islamist Brotherhood infrastructure in the United States is how closely it seems to track, almost maps perfectly really, to the kind of subversive, clandestine operations that the Communists ran in their heyday in this country. You’ve developed a tremendous expertise on that subject and I wonder what particularly in your own program about Lenin and Sharia, did you find much evidence of the connection being more than coincidental there?

Kincaid: We did, Frank. This is where Grover’s conduct leaves me almost speechless. I mean here’s a guy who did recognize during the Reagan years the Communist threat and who now seemingly can’t see that we’re up against a global Islamic terrorist threat operating through front groups. That’s exactly what the Communists did.

Later, Gaffney claimed that John McCain and John Boehner, who along with many other Republicans denounced Bachmann’s witch hunt, were “sort of parroting the Muslim Brotherhood line” by defending Huma Abedin from Bachmann’s attacks. Kincaid recommended the House restore the Internal Security Committee, which was originally called the House Un-American Activities Committee, and said that neither Abedin nor President Obama could pass a background check:

Gaffney: They’re not simply imitating what the Communists did, the Communists trained them in how to run what the Brotherhood calls civilization jihad. As you know this is not necessarily terrorism, at least at the moment it’s a pre-violent form of creating the conditions of the battlefield that will enable the violent kind of jihad ultimately to be very successful. Cliff, one other thing that I’m struck by that seems to be an important parallel and it brings us back to the Grover Norquist element here; we’ve also been hearing of course from John McCain and Speaker of the House John Boehner lately, among others, sort of parroting the Muslim Brotherhood line on a number of issues, notably the revelations that the deputy chief of staff to the Secretary of State, Huma Abedin, has extensive personal as well as family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Give us a sense of how this is a throwback to the earlier revelations, among others, by J. Edgar Hoover of what the Communists have done on the other side.

Kincaid: You would think that somebody like a McCain who is of course a war hero who came out of the Hanoi Hilton would understand the similarities between what the Communists have tried to do to us and now what the global Islamists are effectively doing to us. Yet we noticed, Frank, a couple years ago that he seemed to go haywire on this whole thing, after warning about the Muslim Brotherhood he suddenly shows in Washington at an event honoring Al Jazeera and then he shows up making these comments on the Senate Floor in criticism of the conservative members of the House who have raised concerns about security problems at the State Department and other agencies.

This is something that requires frankly the Congress to take a harder look; I wish we could go beyond just asking the inspectors general to look at this problem. We have long at America’s Survival advocated the return of the House and the Senate, but they can do it in the House, of the House Internal Security Committee to issue subpoenas, to bring in and require testimony from these people, to get to the bottom of it in public hearings as to the security problems in the State Department. Who gave Huma Abedin a security clearance? Does she in fact have one? We don’t even know that. I do know that I’ve taken a look at the standard form 86, 127 pages long that she was supposed to fill out and if she had filled it out, and let’s face it even the President couldn’t pass a basic background check, but if she had filled it out truthfully she wouldn’t be in that position today.

Gaffney: Amen, Cliff Kincaid, you are as always a great, great authority on these issues.

For the last year or so, there has been an effort among anti-Islam activists to convince the conservative movement that Grover Norquist is a "one-man fifth column" and front for the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Yesterday, Glenn Beck and Jerry Boykin added their voices to the chorus:

Beck: Grover Norquist, some people say, was a big problem on this very topic in the Bush Administration.

Boykin: Well, Grover Norquist, and it is hard for the Republicans to accept this, but Grover Norquist is a Muslim Brotherhood facilitator. Now, he's very popular because of his tax position and the influence that he has over taxes. But the fact of the matter is Grover is the one who brought in Suhail Khan into the conservative movement and has staunchly defended Suhail Khan, who is the son of a very radical Islamic cleric who had [Ayman al-Zawahiri] in his mosque in San Diego a decade ago raising funds, essentially to support terrorism. And Gover has a very checkered background and, let me say Glenn, that even now members of Congress are starting to recognize that Grover has been involved with some very questionable insurgent elements from the Muslim Brotherhood here in America.