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by Tom Hamburger and
Glenn R. Simpson
June 11, 2003
Norquist, Famed Tax Foe, Offers
Washington Access, Draws Flak
By TOM HAMBURGER and GLENN R. SIMPSON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In early 1997, Grover Norquist, a
prominent conservative activist, met with Republican political
consultant Karl Rove at an awkward time. Mr. Norquist had been
criticizing the tax policies of Mr. Rove's client, then-Texas Gov.
George W. Bush. But the two old acquaintances found something to agree
on: the need for Republicans to embrace Muslim Americans and other
nontraditional constituencies.
That brief conversation in
Austin, Texas, helped start a new chapter in Mr. Norquist's career --
and in the political lives of Muslims in this country. The following
year, Mr. Norquist started the nonprofit Islamic Free Market Institute.
In collaboration with Mr. Rove, now Mr. Bush's chief political adviser,
he and other institute leaders courted Muslim voters for the Bush 2000
presidential campaign. Mr. Norquist even credits gains among Muslims
with putting Mr. Bush in a position to win the critical Florida contest.
Today, Mr. Norquist, 46 years
old, has become the leading conduit between Muslim Americans and the
Bush administration. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks hurt that relationship
and sparked charges from some conservatives that Mr. Norquist has
provided Washington access and legitimacy to Muslim militants. Norquist
critics cite his occasional past contacts with Sami al-Arian, a Florida
college professor and Bush supporter who has since been indicted for
alleged terrorist activities. The institute has also taken contributions
from an Islamic charity in northern Virginia that is under investigation
as a possible front for financing terrorism.
Paul Weyrich, head of the Free
Congress Foundation, a conservative Washington lobbying group, calls Mr.
Norquist's dealings with Muslims "very dangerous." Mr. Weyrich adds, "We
have to acknowledge we're at war and that it's very possible some of the
Muslims want to establish a fifth column in this country."
Mr. Norquist and his allies in
the White House, including Mr. Rove, dismiss such attacks. Mr. Norquist
says he had very limited contact with Mr. Arian and the donations from
the Virginia charity were made before any questions were raised about
that group. Such criticism, he says, smacks of guilt by association and
anti-Muslim bigotry.
Still, Muslim activism is an
unlikely career turn for a top Republican antitax strategist who helped
engineer the party's historic takeover of Congress in 1994. Mr. Norquist
is famous in the capital for his frenetic devotion to getting
conservative interests -- from gun-rights proponents to conservative
Christians -- to work together.
Part of his pitch to observant
Muslims and Republicans is that they share conservative social values:
opposition to abortion and gay marriage and support for religious
schooling and free-market capitalism (although Islam forbids paying or
collecting interest). Mr. Norquist and his allies "helped us make real
inroads in New Jersey, to be able to participate with the Republican
party and its leaders at a very high level," says Hamdi Rifai, a
Clifton, N.J., attorney who represents Islamic schools.
Mr. Norquist helped secure a
promise from presidential candidate Bush to moderate federal policy on
investigating suspected illegal immigrants. In a nationally televised
debate on Oct. 11, 2000, Mr. Bush said: "Arab-Americans are racially
profiled in what's called secret evidence ... . We've got to do
something about that."
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the
White House has abandoned that promise, as the Justice Department has
aggressively pursued prosecutions of Muslims allegedly supporting
terrorism. But Mr. Norquist hasn't backed down from his campaign to
improve Muslim ties to the administration.
Mr. Norquist, a well known
personality in Washington, speaks avidly of interests ranging from
history to murder mysteries to the mechanics of grass-roots politics. A
poster of Janis Joplin hangs on his office wall. He regularly hosts
takeout-food dinner parties for eclectic groups at his Capitol Hill
townhouse.
In the 1980s, Mr. Norquist, a
Harvard-educated former national executive director of the College
Republicans, helped rally support for Ronald Reagan's tax plan.
Eventually, he formed the nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform, which has
been involved in antitax organizing in nearly every state.
In the early 1990s, he expanded
to the health-care debate, aligning himself with business and other
groups opposing President Clinton's overhaul plan. The weekly meetings
he organized, bringing together small-business lobbyists, antiabortion
activists, gun boosters and tax foes, played an important role in
mobilizing Republican foot soldiers. In 1994, he received a measure of
credit for helping the party shatter the Democrats' 40-year grip on
Congress. Along the way, Mr. Norquist began to urge Republicans to reach
out to nontraditional constituencies, from Muslims to Orthodox Jews.
In 1998, he helped found the
Islamic Free Market Institute. He says the group is nonpartisan, but its
top officers became active in Republican campaigns.
To run the nonprofit's day-to-day
operations, Mr. Norquist turned to Khalid Saffuri, a
Palestinian-American raised in Kuwait who had been an official of the
American Muslim Council, a political group in Washington. The
institute's founding chairman was a Palestinian American, Talat Othman,
who had served with Mr. Bush on the board of Harken Energy Corp. and
later visited the president in the White House, according to records
obtained by the National Security News Service.
The institute, which maintains a
small staff that works out of offices in downtown Washington housing
several Norquist-related organizations, has been dependent from its
start on foreign donations. Its main supporter has been the Persian Gulf
state of Qatar, from which it has received hundreds of thousands of
dollars since 1998. In 2001, the last year for which complete records
are available, roughly 80% of the institute's $641,000 in contributions
came from foreign governments, companies and individuals writing checks
on foreign banks.
Mr. Saffuri says the foreign
donations are all legitimate and that most of the money from Qatar, an
American ally, pays for an annual meeting the institute co-sponsors in
that country on capitalism and democracy in the Middle East. Foreign
donors such as Qatar can count on Mr. Norquist and the institute to help
open doors to members of Congress and others in official Washington. Mr.
Norquist stresses, however, that the institute doesn't engage in
political-campaign activity and thus isn't covered by federal law
barring use of foreign donations in U.S. campaigns.
Mr. Norquist says he draws no pay
from the institute. His primary source of income is a $120,000 annual
salary from Americans for Tax Reform, he says.
In the spring of 2000, the
institute's director, Mr. Saffuri, brought prominent American Muslims to
Austin to meet presidential candidate Bush at the Texas governor's
mansion. Later, Mr. Saffuri introduced the candidate and Mr. Rove to
Muslims in the battleground state of Michigan, home to the nation's
largest Arab-American population. Messrs. Saffuri and Norquist urged the
Bush campaign to embrace issues important to Muslims -- and,
specifically, to denounce the Justice Department's use of undisclosed
evidence against suspected terrorists in deportation proceedings.
Mr. Bush did just that in the
debate on Oct. 11, 2000. Twice during the debate, Mr. Norquist says, Mr.
Rove phoned him at home to draw his attention to the remark and urge him
to "put the word out" among Muslims. Mr. Rove says he doesn't remember
making such calls.
It's difficult to find reliable
measures of Muslim-American voting patterns. But most analysts agree
that 2000 marked a significant shift toward the Republican Party.
After Sept. 11, however, the
institute's efforts began to raise questions from some of Mr. Norquist's
fellow conservatives. Skeptics pointed out that one institute
contributor is the Safa Trust, a charity that is part of a cluster of
groups in northern Virginia raided in March 2002 by Customs agents
trying to determine whether they have financially aided terrorists. Mr.
Saffuri says donations from Safa -- which total $20,000 -- were accepted
by the institute before any question had been raised about the northern
Virginia groups. He notes that no charges have been filed in the case --
a point underlined by Safa's attorney, Nancy Luque. "Neither Safa nor
anyone connected with Safa has ever aided or knowingly funded
terrorism," Ms. Luque adds. "The fact that 15 months have gone by with
no action, let alone charges, underscores that fact."
Prosecutors say they remain
interested in the Safa Trust, in part because its other beneficiaries
included a network of Muslim groups in Florida run by Mr. Arian, the
Palestinian-American professor. In February, Mr. Arian was charged with
helping lead the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group.
In 2000, Mr. Arian campaigned
actively for Mr. Bush in Florida. In June 2001, Mr. Arian and some 130
other Muslims attended a White House meeting on issues of concern to
Muslims that was also attended by Mr. Rove. White House officials have
characterized the gathering as a standard political-outreach event and
said Mr. Rove wasn't aware Mr. Arian was in the room.
In 2002, Mr. Arian visited the
Islamic Institute in Washington. Institute officials say his purpose was
simply to drop off literature. Mr. Norquist adds that he himself has
never worked with Mr. Arian and has met him only briefly at various
events before Mr. Arian was indicted. Calling attention to Mr. Arian is
unfair, he says. "Since I started working with Muslims, a handful of
bigots have been trying to smear the president, Rove and me for working
with them," he adds.
The push to change the Justice
Department's secret-evidence policy collapsed after Sept. 11, 2001, but
the Islamic Institute continued to lobby the Bush administration on
Muslim civil rights. The institute has arranged or participated in more
than half a dozen meetings since Sept. 11 for Muslim leaders to convey
their concerns to Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top
administration officials about investigations, arrests and detentions of
Muslims.
Frank Gaffney, a former senior
Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, faults Mr. Norquist and
his associates for their involvement in arranging such meetings. Mr.
Gaffney, who was once close to Mr. Norquist, notes that the 2000
campaign meeting with Mr. Bush in Austin -- to which Mr. Saffuri brought
prominent American Muslims -- included a Muslim activist who later
publicly expressed sympathy with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations
Hamas and Hezbollah. Abdurahman Alamoudi, a founder of the American
Muslim Council, was recorded at a Washington rally later in 2000 saying,
"We are all supporters of Hamas," and, "I am also a supporter of
Hezbollah." He has since apologized for those remarks and said he wishes
to retract them. When the institute became aware of Mr. Alamoudi's
comments, officials there demanded an apology and ceased working with
him.
"Allowing these sorts of
organizations to meet with the president and his senior subordinates is
a very bad idea," says Mr. Gaffney. While the administration now is
cracking down on terrorism abroad and at home, Mr. Gaffney says Mr.
Norquist's Muslim-related activities could still lend legitimacy and
"undesirable influence over policy" to individuals and groups hostile to
American interests.
"This is nonsense," Mr. Norquist
responds. He says such objections reflect "an ongoing campaign to try
and attack the Islamic Institute and Muslim participation in politics."
Mr. Rove rejects the criticism
with equal vehemence. "What's the evidence" of undesirable influence? he
says. "There's no there there." Mr. Norquist's standing at the White
House remains good, and a weekly Wednesday breakfast meeting he hosts
for conservatives still draws 100 or more activists.
Despite the criticism, the
Islamic Institute has continued to put socially conservative Muslims in
touch with Republican activists. Mr. Rifai, the Muslim lawyer in New
Jersey who represents Islamic schools, says that in the late 1990s, the
institute introduced him to conservatives in that state seeking more
government financial support for religious schools. One of those
conservatives, Larry Cirignano, chairman of a group called Catholics.Org,
says that the Islamic Institute helped him and other Catholic activists
recruit Muslims to join antiabortion demonstrations in New Jersey,
Washington and elsewhere.
In Washington, the Islamic
Institute has helped furnish Muslim support for various Bush
administration causes. After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Saffuri, wrote a paper
justifying U.S. military action during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Mr. Norquist passed along the document to the White House National
Security Council. A senior administration official says it was used in
developing talking points by U.S. officials defending the U.S. attack on
Afghanistan.
Write to Tom Hamburger at
tom.hamburger@wsj.com1 and Glenn R. Simpson at glenn.simpson@wsj.com2
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