The American Spectator

“The objective was to put Alamoudi in a permanent political freeze,” Yousef wrote. “If he spoke at public rallies or other occasions in protest of certain American foreign policies, his words were reported and the meaning distorted.”

BUT IN AMERICA, WHERE IT COUNTS, ALAMOUDI is now very much the dying man even the friendliest patients in the ward avoid. As he sits in jail, very few of his old friends are standing by him. Days after his arrest, one of Alamoudi’s old compatriots, Kamal Nawash, claimed he was Alamoudi’s lawyer and wrote on Islam Online: “[Alamoudi] has no links whatsoever to violence or terrorism. On the contrary, he supported the U.S. war on terrorism.” Days later, however, Nawash announced he was not representing Alamoudi. Nawash, a Republican candidate for the Virginia state senate (he would lose in November), returned two campaign donation checks of $5,000 to Alamoudi and his wife, Shifa, according to the Washington Post.

Support for Alamoudi is predicated upon the belief that there is a difference between words and action. And indeed there is. But how could Washington establishment types have been duped by Alamoudi? The man’s tenure in Washington had been like the blinding lights and blaring horn of a cargo train rumbling down the tracks. Alamoudi spent years openly celebrating terrorism in speeches and writings. Is it too much to ask of politicians that they put two and two together? Should it shock that someone who supported terrorism rhetorically would support it financially? Does siding with Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist states for a decade not raise eyebrows, even among the admittedly slow-witted, self-serving politicos in our nation’s capital?

In the end, Alamoudi will be tried in an American court. There will be no arguing Zionist conspiracy theories. He will have to answer for what he has done.