This is because the Islamic Society of North America is a front for the promotion of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi political, doctrinal and theological infrastructure in the United States and Canada. Established by the Saudi-funded Muslim Students Association, ISNA has for years sought to marginalize leaders of the Muslim faith who do not support the Wahhabists’ strain of Islamofascism, and, through sponsorship of propaganda and mosques, is pursuing a strategic goal of eventually dominating Islam in America.

ISNA provides indoctrination materials to about 1,100 of an estimated 2,500 mosques on the North American continent. Through its affiliate, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) – a Saudi government-backed organization created to fund Islamist enterprises in North America – it reportedly holds the mortgages of between 50 and 79 percent of those mosques. Through this device, ISNA exerts ideological as well as theological influence over what is preached and taught in these institutions and their schools.

In December 2003, the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Finance Committee, Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus, respectively, listed ISNA as one of 25 American Muslim organizations that “finance terrorism and perpetuate violence.”

The danger is that, if Karen Hughes attends the ISNA convention, she will not only be endorsing a deeply problematic organization. She will be continuing – and compounding – the Bush Administration’s regrettable past practice of discouraging, if not actually alienating, genuinely non-Islamist Muslims by reaching out to those who aren’t.

Like most other types of combat, a war of ideas requires clarity about who the enemy is. Mrs. Hughes would be well advised to seek the counsel of authentically peaceable, pro-American and anti-Islamist Muslim leaders – like Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, the spiritual leader of the Sufi sect in America – to determine the true nature and ideological alignment of the allies we seek in this war.

As to the ISNA convention, three words of advice are in order for Mrs. Hughes: Don’t go there.