Who is with President Bush?

President Bush has characterized the choice to be made in this war on terror: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” A new op-ed by Center President Frank Gaffney makes the case that in the months since September 11, 2001, people who have made no secret of their sympathy for terrorists, provided them financial support, excused their murderous attacks and/or sought to impede the prosecution of the war against them have repeatedly been put in the company of the president. In other words, individuals and organizations who appear to be “with the terrorists” have time and again been allowed to be with the president in the White House and elsewhere.

For example, President Bush met a Muslim imam named Muzammil H. Siddiqi. Mr. Siddiqi is a long-time board member of several organizations in the United States funded by, and closely tied to, Saudi Arabia’s radical state religion known as Wahhabism. Two of these groups, including one where Siddiqi still sits on the board, were raided in March 2002 by federal authorities in pursuit of terrorist financing.

On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush paid a visit to the mosque in Washington. There he was photographed flanked by Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has personally declared, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”

Also with President Bush at the mosque was Khaled Saffuri, currently chairman of the Islamic Institute, which has attacked the Bush administration’s investigations of radical Muslim groups and closures of organizations suspected of funding terrorists. The Institute has been funded by groups raided in the above-mentioned terrorist financing investigations.

It is very much in the president’s interest — and the nation’s — that moderate, law-abiding, peace-loving and patriotic American Muslims be embraced and empowered by the Bush administration and all those who support it in waging a war on terror, not on Islam. To do so, however, the administration must not allow those who are with its enemies in that struggle to continue being with the president and his team.