Islamist cause suffers hits in Bush camp

It was a big news weekend for the Wahhabi lobby and its Islamist friends in Washington. In three separate articles, the Washington Post reported:

(1) the Saudi government buckled under pressure and severed its ties with the ‘Islamic Institute,’

(2) the Islamist outreach program that Abdurahman Alamoudi, Khaled Saffuri and Grover Norquist engineered for the Bush Administration has proven a complete failure in building a new Republican voting bloc, and

(3) Norquist, having spent most of his time between Washington and the Persian Gulf states promoting the Islamists, now admits that he let down the president by not having "yet figured out" his main political role, which was to help Bush keep down government spending.

These are tough developments for the libertarian/conservative coalition-builder. His still-not-fully-explained promotion of hard-core terrorist supporters and attacks on the Bush Administration’s domestic counter-terrorism efforts have eclipsed his slash-government-spending work as head of Americans for Tax Reform.

First, a blow to Norquist’s core Muslim constituency: the Wahhabi Lobby. Wounded by exposures of its support for Wahhabi extremism in the United States, the Saudi government is re-thinking its large-scale financing and promotion of its Dark Ages ideology around the world. The Saudi Embassy is cutting off the Virginia-based Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, which the Post shorthanded as the Islamic Institute.

"We are going to shut down the Islamic affairs section in every embassy," a Saudi official said "That’s the objective." Referring to the "Islamic Institute" in Virginia, the official added, "We’re going to sever its ties with the embassy. . . . They will no longer be sponsored by the embassy."

Norquist’s own Islamic Free Market Institute, which also calls itself Islamic Institute for short, has taken its lumps recently, with seed-money donor Alamoudi (Islamic Institute leader Saffuri’s former boss) now in jail awaiting federal terrorism-related charges.

Despite Saffuri and Norquist’s best efforts, American Muslims are running away from Bush in droves, with many having supported him in 2000 only after the two operatives persuaded Bush to do away with domestic anti-terrorist legislation that allowed authorities to use classified intelligence information to hold foreign terror suspects.

With his hug-an-Islamist strategy is a shambles and Bush in hot water with conservatives over bloated government spending, Norquist is admitting that he let down the president. He confesses he’s disappointed in himself for not "yet figured out" how to do what he knows best, which is to cut spending and slash taxes. Norquist’s Islamist advocacy, his placement of terrorist supporters around the president, and his attacks on fellow conservatives who have criticized him, have diverted him from his real skills and talents, much to President Bush’s disadvantage.

The tax-cutter-turned-Islamist-lobbyist acknowledged to the Post that "government spending is growing too rapidly," and added that Bush shouldn’t take the blame alone: "I am disappointed that the movement, starting with me, has not yet figured out how to assign accountability and responsibility for spending."