The friends of Khaled Saffuri

Today’s FrontPage republishes Kenneth Timmerman’s Insight article on Khaled Saffuri: “Islamists’ front man.” Khaled Saffuri is Grover Norquist’s point man at the Islamic Institute and the linchpin to the concerns raised by Frank Gaffney about Grover Norquist’s activities on behalf of Arab clients. During the 2000 campaign Karl Rove named Saffuri the Bush campaign’s point man for Muslim outreach.
The friends of Khaled Saffuri are indicted terrorist funders such as the University of South Florida’s professor of terrorism Sami al-Arian. Saffuri and his supporters claim he has been given a bum rap by critics who point to the alleged terrorist ties as a reason why the White House should distance itself from Saffuri and his friends.
Norquist habitually insists that any attempt to tie Saffuri to terrorist supporters is “guilt by association.” Those who make such accusations, Norquist tells reporters, are “racists and bigots.” After a two-year investigation, however, Timmerman reports that Saffuri’s ties to radical Islamists and apologists for terror are neither superficial nor coincidental.
Timmerman finds a consistent pattern of fund-raising and influence operations in which Saffuri played a prominent role side by side with Abdurahman Alamoudi, a well-known Muslim activist who was Saffuri’s employer at the American Muslim Council (AMC). Alamoudi was arrested last September on charges of illegally taking cash payments from the government of Libya in exchange for lobbying the Bush administration to lift sanctions against the Qaddafi regime.
We have previously covered some of this ground in “The friends of Grover Norquist,” “Gaffney versus Norquist,” and “The lies of Grover Norquist.”