David Frum: The Secret History of the Gaffney-Norquist Feud

The feud between Frank Gaffney and David Horowitz, on the one side, and Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, on the other, has erupted into spectacular public view this month. But there’s a major back story to the Khan-Gaffney fight, a back story of the secret political history of the past decade.

The feud between Frank Gaffney and David Horowitz, on the one side, and Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, on the other, has erupted into spectacular public view this month.

Gaffney and Horowitz damn Suhail Khan as a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America – and Norquist as his witting or unwitting sponsor.

Khan and Norquist denounce Gaffney and Horowitz as demented bigots.

In recent weeks, the debate has erupted at CPAC (from which Gaffney was banned by Norquist’s influence), onto the Anderson Cooper 360 show on CNN, and yesterday in a 30-minute radio debate on the Sean Hannity program. (Andrew Sullivan has the clip.)

More crazy paranoia on the right?

Yes and no. Or should I say, No and yes? There’s a major back story to the Khan-Gaffney story, a back story of the secret political history of the past decade. Over the next hours, I’ll post that story in blog pieces here, as neutrally as I can. Then you make up your own mind.

The story of the Gaffney-Norquist feud opens in the mid- and late 1990s, when some radical Islamist groups commenced a serious campaign to influence US institutions and American party politics.

Perhaps the most successful of these “influencers” was Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a Yemen-born immigrant to the US who founded the American Muslim Council. Al-Amoudi – who made no secret of his support for Hamas and Hezbollah – got himself hired as a consultant to the Pentagon, helping to select Muslim chaplains for the US army.

But there were others: the former Hamas supporters who created the Holy Land Foundation and then helped to create the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

And Sami al-Arian, a fundraiser for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who became active in Florida politics.

Through the 1990s, an investigator named Steve Emerson worked tirelessly to document and publicize the radical beliefs of these increasingly active and powerful Muslim radicals. Emerson’s work had an effect, especially on Democrats. In the summer of 2000, then-Senate candidate Hillary Clinton returned a $1,000 campaign contribution from al-Amoudi.

As Democrats locked their doors against Islamic radicals, these would-be influencers switched focus to the other party, the Republican party. Their way was opened by one of the most powerful conservatives in Washington, Grover Norquist.

In the summer of 2000, Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi got a meeting with Texas governor George Bush. Al-Amoudi promised Bush that he, al-Amoudi, could deliver Muslim support for Bush if Bush would oppose “secret evidence” in immigration hearings.

At the time, US immigration authorities were attempting to deport terrorism-connected Muslim immigrants to the United States. Immigration authorities did not want to reveal the sources and methods that had confirmed the terrorist connections, for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, al-Amoudi and his friends took the opposite view.

How did al-Amoudi get his meeting? After all, presumptive candidates for president who also happen to be serving governors are not accessible on a walk-in basis.

The answer is that sometime in the 1990s, Grover Norquist had decided that Muslim American voters would make a great target market for Republican recruitment. And few conservative activists had as much sway with Karl Rove as Norquist.

You can see why Rove would be interested. He knew that Florida was a must-win state for George W. Bush. Florida had a rapidly growing Muslim community concentrated in the state’s swing I-4 corridor. If they could be persuaded to vote Republican, it might help compensate for the GOP’s decline among younger Cuban-American voters, a very complicating factor in that year’s election.

But what was Norquist’s angle? Norquist and I talked about his outreach to US Muslims on a DC streetcorner in the late 1990s. He argued that Muslim immigrants were entrepreneurial, family-oriented, culturally conservative. At a time of massive immigration to the United States, here was a fertile opportunity to offset what some were already calling the “emerging Democratic majority.”

Others who knew Norquist hypothesized other motives.

At the time, Norquist was involved in a lobbying firm that did business with state enterprises in Qatar and Malaysia. Did this affect his thinking somehow?

We can’t know, and I won’t guess.

But here’s what we do know: among the most prominent targets of “secret evidence” deportation hearings were two prominent South Florida Muslim immigrants, Sami al-Arian and his brother-in-law Mazzan al-Najjar. To the dismay of many of his political allies, Norquist had developed a political relationship with these two fundraisers and activists for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Bush-Cheney campaign tilted far to win the Muslim-American vote.

George W. Bush denounced “secret evidence” and ethnic profiling in the Oct. 11 Wake Forest University debate against Vice President Gore.

Bush raised significant funds from the Arab-American community. Important Muslim-American groups endorsed Bush. If you believe the exit polls, Bush won almost three-quarters of the Muslim vote. (Al Gore’s selection of Joe Lieberman as a running mate may have been a significant driver of Arab and Muslim votes away from the Democratic party.)

Post-election, Bush moved to pay his political debts. Sami al-Arian was invited into the White House complex to participate in talks on the faith-based initiative. When an al-Arian nephew was refused entry to the White House complex because his name showed up on a Secret Service watch list, the deputy director of the Secret Service called the al-Arian family to apologize.

But the real pay-off came after 9/11. Despite its pro-Hamas antecedents, the Council on American Islamic Relations was accepted as a respected partner in the US Muslim community. CAIR representatives were invited to the White House, and joined President Bush’s post-9/11 to the Washington mosque on Massachusetts Avenue.

And when these people and others came to the White House, the person who usually met them at the gate was the White House liaison to the Muslim community, a very well-dressed young Californian named Suhail Khan, the person now the flashpoint of the Gaffney-Norquist clash.

The next time a Republican friend tells you that Democrats are the more ruthless party, ask him this:

“Suppose in 2004 there had been a photo of John Kerry smiling at a campaign appearance with the American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

“Suppose John Kerry had ordered the deputy director of the Secret Service to apologize for excluding the nephew of the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the White House complex.

“Suppose John Kerry had had meetings and accepted campaign donations from a man sentenced by a US court to 23 years in prison for accepting $340,000 from Moammar Qaddafi in a plot to murder the King of Saudi Arabia.

“Do you think that Republicans might have made a campaign issue out of that?”

I am not inventing these hypotheticals. There was a photo of Bush with al-Arian, taken while campaigning in Florida. The Bush White House did apologize to al-Arian’s nephew*, who was then working as an aide to (Democratic) Congressman David Bonior. And in October 2004, Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi – the man who persuaded George Bush to campaign against secret evidence – was duly sentenced to 23 years in prison for his part in an assassination plot.

Al-Arian was indicted in 2003, has spent time in jail on terrorism and contempt charges, and is currently awaiting another trial followed by deportation.

Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazzen al-Najjar, was deported in 2003 after 6 years in jail.

Embarrassing, you might think. Can’t you see the Democratic campaign ad: “President Bush says he is fighting terrorism in Iraq. But he wouldn’t keep terrorists out of his own White House”?

But no, the Democrats never did make an issue out of it.

Yet some conservatives and Republicans did. Between 9/11 and 2004, there erupted a furious behind-the-scenes battle to separate President Bush from the now radioactive personalities introduced by Grover Norquist.

CAIR was excluded from White House meetings. The promise to end secret evidence was forgotten. The Muslim outreach of 2000 was shelved.

And yet, this struggle had a very unexpected outcome. At the same time as the Bush administration severed its connections to radical Islamists, it rejected as enemies the people (like Frank Gaffney) who had tried to warn the Bush team away from these dangerous connections. Meanwhile the person who had more than anyone else urged this connection on the Bush team – Norquist – remained as cherished, valued, respected, and influential as ever.

As al-Amoudi, al-Arian and al-Najjer met justice, the greeter at the White House door – Suhail Khan – was rising to greater eminence in the conservative world. He moved to the Department of Transportation after the 2004 election. After leaving government, Khan joined the board of the American Conservative Union: a remarkable recognition for a junior political operative. He now writes a column for the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s website: a visible symbol of the rapprochement which terminated the once epic Norquist-Carlson feud.

Who is Suhail Khan? He is the son of immigrants from India. His late father Mahboob Khan was a founder of the Muslim Students Association. Like a lot of US Islamic groups, MSA is a mix of the perfectly harmless and the seriously violent. Some Muslim Student Association members have been convicted of terrorist crimes. Others have gone on to placid careers as doctors and dentists.

Suhail Khan’s own career has placed itself on the placid side of the ledger. If he’s the mastermind of the Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy in the United States, it’s hard to see what he has master-minded. He certainly seems to know some dubious characters. But that’s not quite the same thing as being a dubious character himself. In the absence of evidence, the accusations against Suhail Khan sound like unfounded vilification.

The accusations against Suhail Khan sound even stranger because so much has changed in the US over the past 10 years. A decade ago, a Republican administration invited actual jihadists into the White House. Today Republicans rail against allowing law-abiding Muslims to build a mosque in lower Manhattan.  The pendulum has swung about as far as it can swing.

And with the swing of the pendulum, there’s a chance to settle some old scores.

In July 2001, Grover Norquist accepted an award at a fundraising dinner for Sami al-Arian’s group. Norquist had previously accepted a donation of $10,000 from future convict Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi to establish an “Islamic free enterprise” institute. Norquist also accepted an award from al-Amoudi’s American Muslim Council.

After 9/11, Norquist dug in deep in defense of his past actions – and lashed out at Gaffney as a target for his discomfort. From a piece by Frank Foer in The New Republic in November 2001:

Even Norquist’s weekly confab has become the scene of internecine fighting. At a session earlier this month, Frank Gaffney questioned the presence of terrorist sympathizers at the White House. Norquist exploded, accusing Gaffney of smearing Muslims. Later he choked up as he addressed the meeting and asked Gaffney to stand up and join him in condemning anti-Muslim bigotry. One conservative who witnessed Norquist’s tirade says, “His response is powered in part by a sense that this whole edifice he’s created is in danger of coming unraveled because of [these groups’] stated and abiding positions.”

When I visited Norquist, he was in a similarly embattled frame of mind. He asked me to turn off my tape recorder. Any quote I wanted to use, he told me, would require his approval. There were none of his usual passionate ideological perorations. He just sat in his chair, seething. “There are some people who spit on Muslims and wouldn’t like to see them have any role in American politics,” he told me in a near scream.

In the decade since these events, the American political community and the American media have become a good deal more sophisticated about goings-on inside the American Islamic community.

Groups like CAIR do not find its so easy to pass themselves off as “civil rights organizations.”

Hamas and Hezbollah fundraising fronts like the Holy Land Foundation have been shut down.

The leading terror supporters inside the US have been jailed or deported.

The state of discussion inside the US Muslim community has matured and changed: Muzzamil Siddiqui, the imam who delivered an invocation at the National Cathedral service after 9/11, had called for the banning of The Satanic Verses back in 1989. He and his counterparts would know better than to do such a thing now.

It would be naive to assume that terrorist fundraising inside the United States has ceased, or that incitement and anti-semitism have ceased to be preached in mosques or taught in Muslim religious schools. It’s equally true that it’s much more difficult for an American Muslim with a record of support for extremism and violence to play a part in public life today than in the 1990s.

In that sense, Gaffney won. Yet that’s not how it must feel to Gaffney. While individual conservatives have taken Gaffney’s side (Michelle Malkin for example), institutional conservatism continued to align with Norquist. I remember well a radio interview with a conservative host during my Bush book tour in 2003. I was asked a series of anodyne questions about Bush and life in his White House. When the interview ended, the host switched off the mike and asked, “So what the hell is going on with Grover?” But the point is – the mike was off.

With the controversy over the lower Manhattan mosque, with Glenn Beck on the air, and with the troubling events in Egypt, there is at last a mass conservative audience for warnings about radical Islamic infiltration into US institutions. The trouble is, that the infiltrators are already dealt with. Gaffney was left in the position of the guard dog who manages to tear the seat out of the trespasser’s pants, without preventing the trespasser from escaping. And so the frustrated guard dogs end by (mis)representing some very minor personalities as central figures in a giant continuing conspiracy: like getting excited over Irving Peress after the Rosenbergs have already been executed.

But the unimportance of Irving Peress does not invalidate the existence of the Rosenbergs – or the seriousness of the lapses that invited the Rosenbergs into some of the high places of the land.

Like so many Washington stories, this one does not have an obvious hero. Or a final resolution. But if at least we bring the backstory to the front, people can more intelligently decide for themselves how to assess a scandal that only fully came into public view after it was all over.

*Correction: It was Al-Arian’s son Abdullah who was working for Bonior and was asked to leave a White House function, not nephew.