IS GROVER NORQUIST CONSORTING WITH TERRORISTS?….FrontPage magazine is not normally the place you go to read denunciations of fellow conservatives for being insufficiently patriotic, but today’s an exception, with David Horowitz taking the pulpit to introduce a long article accusing movement conservative capo Grover Norquist of being in league with terrorists. Is it true?
This stuff has been making the rounds for a while, and today’s article by Frank Gaffney is the longest and most detailed yet. Unfortunately, the article is so poorly written that it’s almost impossible to follow, and the gist of it seems to be that Norquist is associated with people who are associated with organizations that are associated with radical Islamists. That’s a pretty long chain of association.
As near as I can tell, the key groups here are the American Muslim Council (AMC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with supporting roles played by several organizations that are funded by the Saudi government. So the question is: are these organizations moderate mainstream Muslim groups, as they claim, or are they apologists for terrorism and fronts for Saudi Wahhabism? And does Norquist’s Islamic Institute actually have a strong relationship with any of them?
We’re hardly going to resolve those longstanding questions here, but my initial take is that Gaffney’s article is fairly weak. Still, I could be wrong, and Norquist certainly strikes me as the kind of loony fanatic who might very well overlook a sympathy for recreational terrorism in his colleagues as long as they supported lower taxes. Stay tuned.
