GAFFNEY: The jihadist vote

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By Frank Gaffney

COMMENTARY:

Last week, Barack Obama's campaign was burned yet again for its dalliance with Islamists - those who embrace Islam's repressive theo-political-legal code known as Shariah and who are working for its triumph in the West in general and the United States in particular. The episode is but the latest indication that the Democratic candidate hopes to win the White House by relying, in part, on the Jihadist vote.

NBC reported Thursday that the Obama campaign's latest radical "Muslim outreach coordinator," Mouha Husaini, met last month in one of Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs - the heart of what has been dubbed the "Wahhabi Corridor" - with her predecessor, Mazen Asbahi (who had to resign this summer due to his own associations with Shariah). Even more problematic was the presence at the Springfield event of two prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives: Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society (MAS) and Nihad Awad of the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

As I pointed out in a debate on Tuesday (for a transcript, go to http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1447/pub_detail.asp) with a man associated with both organizations and arguably the Bush administration's senior Muslim official, Suhail Khan, the Brotherhood is an instrument the Islamists have been using to foster a Fifth Column in America. Its stated purpose in this country is to "destroy Western civilization from within."

According to NBC, even other attendees expressed concern that the Obama campaign was reaching out to such "politically radioactive" individuals as Messrs. Bray and Awad.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only association of this type. Others include the following:

-- A Federal Election Commission (FEC) employee has reportedly been warning for months about evidence that the Obama campaign has received as much as $200 million almost half of his total donations, in amounts less than $200. That is below the threshold for donor information Mr. Obama has chose to report to the FEC - unlike the Clinton and McCain campaigns which have reported all donor information.

Of the $200 million, between $30 million and $100 million are from the Mideast, Africa and other places Islamists are active. It is unclear whether - as seems likely - these funds come not only from Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood types and jihadists of other stripes but from non-U.S. citizens. Such contributions would be not only worrying but illegal.

Although the FEC has studiously ignored the problem to date, the matter finally appears to be the subject of a formal complaint by the Republican National Committee. Unfortunately, even if the commission finally bestirs itself to investigate the facts, it seems unlikely to render a finding before the jihadists' and others' votes are counted.

-- Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii. There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian. If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.

-- Then there is the Democratic candidate's get-out-the-vote effort. In addition to the prospect that its "Arab-Americans for Obama" effort is recruiting Muslim Brotherhood elements to enhance turnout, the Obama campaign is trolling for voters in problematic places. Some are felons in prison systems long used by Islamists as centers for recruiting converts to their causes.

Some - thanks to a radical group known as ACORN with which Barack Obama has had ties for many years and that has a serial problem with vote-registration fraud - are homeless. Their attitude toward the Islamist agenda, or for that matter any other aspect of national policy, can only be surmised.

-- Finally, there are the various well-known Islamists with whom Barack Obama has long had ties and/or who are actively promoting his campaign. These include: a former Black Panther convert to radical Islam who calls himself Khalid al-Mansour; an aggressive promoter of Wahhabi influence operations, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; a virulently anti-Israel and pro-suicide bomber Palestinian professor named Rashid Khalidi; and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who in a speech last February called Sen. Obama "the messiah" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OowxMcVTjTE).

Even Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has got into the act, describing Mr. Obama in a videotaped speech transcribed by MEMRI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7xjcuCuCtI) as "a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim" (Philip Berg's contention) and declares ominously that "people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa ... may even have been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to Obama."

The next three weeks afford the American people - and the media, the courts and the FEC - an opportunity to get to the bottom of Barack Obama's ties to and affinity for jihadists who have their own reasons for relishing his promise of "change" for this country. Unfortunately, the change his Islamists supporters have in mind is for global theocratic rule under Shariah, and the end of our constitutional, democratic government.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.