What do the Clinton State Department, Republican activist Grover
Norquist, Bush FBI director William Mueller, Senator Joseph
Lieberman, the Washington Post, and the National Conference of
Catholic Bishops have in common?
They all fell, in one way or another, for Abdurahman Alamoudi, a
Muslim-American leader who turns out, according to a federal
indictment, to have been in league with the terrorists. Call him
the fifth-columnist who duped the Beltway establishment.
Alamoudi was an invited guest at a 1998 State Department
religious freedom event. He gave $10,000 in 1999 to an Islamic
free-market institute on whose board Norquist sat. Mueller spoke
last year at a conference of the Muslim group Alamoudi founded.
Sen. Lieberman hosted an Islamic holiday celebration for Alamoudi
on Capitol Hill in 1996. The Washington Post has quoted
Alamoudi defending the civil rights of Muslim Americans against
attack from Congress. And when Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council
came under attack for its public expressions of sympathy for
terrorists, the Catholic bishops rushed to Alamoudi’s defense,
signing a statement praising what it described as the American
Muslim Council’s “consistent opposition to the use of terrorism”
and denouncing criticism of the group as “Muslim bashing.” The
statement from the bishops called Alamoudi’s AMC “the premier,
mainstream Muslim group in Washington.”
All of this looks more than a little embarrassing in light of
the 29-page government affidavit in support of a criminal complaint
filed September 30 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia in the case of United States of America v.
Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi. In the affidavit, a special
agent of the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Brett
Gentrup, tells of British customs officials stopping Alamoudi at
Heathrow airport in London, where they discovered $340,000 in cash
— sequentially numbered $100 bills.
Gentrup says told Scotland Yard he’d received the money from
what the affidavit describes as a “jihad fund” set up by the Libyan
dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Alamoudi repeatedly traveled to Libya on
a Yemeni passport and made phone calls to officials at the Libyan
U.N. mission in New York, the affidavit says. A letter on
Alamoudi’s computer to an official at the Libyan U.N. Mission asked
for $7,000 in reimbursements for trips Alamoudi made to meet with
Libyan officials in Tripoli and London. Bank records and IRS
records show the Libyan government gave an additional $7,000 to
another Muslim group controlled by Alamoudi, the American Muslim
Foundation, in violation of the American economic sanctions on
Libya imposed because of its support for terrorism.
As if the financial ties to the Libyans don’t sound bad enough
for Alamoudi, Gentrup testified in court about a wiretapped
conversation in which Alamoudi praised the 1994 bombing of a Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which 86 people
were killed. “The Jewish Community Center. It is a worthy
operation,” Alamoudi told an unidentified man, according to the
English translation of a conversation, which was read by Gentrup.
“I think that the attacks that are being executed by [Osama] Bin
Laden and other Islamic groups are wrong, especially hitting the
civilian targets,” he allegedly said, referring to the bombing of
the American embassy in Kenya. “Many African Muslims have died and
not a single American died. I prefer to hit a Zionist target in
America or Europe.”
He then held up the 1994 attack as a standard. “I prefer
honestly like what happened in Argentina,” Alamoudi said, according
to the wiretap.
Stunning stuff. But it’s gone widely unnoticed. With the
exception of the New York Sun, American newspapers have
tended to bury the story of Abdurahman Alamoudi. And some of the
characters you might expect to be red-facedly apologizing in light
of the recent disclosures aren’t exactly rushing to acknowledge
they were duped.
The usually press-accessible Mr. Norquist, for instance, didn’t
return a phone call seeking comment. Likewise, the president of the
Arab American Institute, James Zogby, who back in 1999 defended
Alamoudi as the victim of “a shameful hysteria campaign of
McCarthyism,” now doesn’t have time to discuss the Alamoudi case, a
spokeswoman said. As for the Catholic bishops, one of its
interfaith-dialogue officials who in 1996 circulated a memo
defending Alamoudi, Eugene Fisher, now says, “I don’t know anything
about it. I can’t really comment.” He referred calls to a
colleague, John Borelli, who wrote in a 1996 memo about his
“friendship” and “regular contact” with Alamoudi. That friendship
resulted in William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore accepting from
Alamoudi the “Mahmoud Abu-Saud Award for Excellence” at a banquet
hosted by the American Muslim Council in December 1995. Borelli
didn’t return a call for comment.
At least that’s better than several hard-core Muslim groups that
are still making excuses for Alamoudi. The Muslim Public Affairs
Council, for instance, issued a statement saying it was “disturbed
by the arrest,” leaving unclear whether it was disturbed by what
Alamoudi had done or by the fact that the government had acted
against him. The statement also claimed arrest “was not connected
to charges of terrorism,” seeming to ignore the fact that the crime
Alamoudi was accused of is traveling to and taking money from a
state that is under American sanctions because of its support for
terrorism.
Were any of Alamoudi’s old cronies brave enough to come to the
phone, they could make several arguments. The first is that
Alamoudi has not yet been proven guilty in court, which, in all
fairness, is absolutely correct — but which fact rarely prevents
the same groups from issuing scathing denunciations of, say,
Israelis involved in “massacres” of Palestinian Arabs.
The Alamoudi cronies could also claim that they could not have
known about Alamoudi’s Libya ties and feelings about the 1994
Argentina bombing at the time they were working with him. Here they
are on thinner ground. After all, there was a small but vocal
chorus of those who warned against Alamoudi all along — not
because they knew of his financial dealings with Libya, but because
they knew of his public statements defending terrorists groups like
Hamas and terrorist states like Sudan. The counterterrorism expert
Steven Emerson made the case in a March 1996 op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal. The Hudson Institute’s Michael
Horowitz embarked on an indefatigable letter-writing campaign with
officials of the State Department and with Alamoudi’s friends in
the Roman Catholic church. The Zionist Organization of America
issued press releases denouncing American officials who met with
Alamoudi for lending him legitimacy. Other think-tank denizens —
Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum and Frank Gaffney of the
Center for Security Policy — made their anti-Alamoudi sentiments
clear. In response, they’ve been denounced as anti-Muslim
bigots.
Even Hillary Clinton had the good sense to return a contribution
by Alamoudi to her Senate campaign after it came to light in the
press.
Perhaps the best defense of Alamoudi’s dupes outside of
government was that the FBI and the State Department, even the
White House, were meeting with the Muslim leader. Should the
Catholic bishops have been expected to be holier than the pope when
it came to American counterterrorism? Here, perhaps the message is
starting to sink in. The FBI recently canceled plans to bestow an
“Exceptional Public Service Award” on October 9 to Imad Hamad, the
Midwest regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee, another group that, like Alamoudi’s American Muslim
Council, has been a public apologist for the terrorists. It’s hard
to expect Catholic bishops or Republican activists to take a hard
line against American terrorist-sympathizers if the American
government is busy meeting with them or giving them awards.
