The casual observer might think nothing of the candidacy of a fellow named Suhail Khan for election to one of two open seats on the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union – the political Right’s largest and most influential grassroots umbrella organization. Certainly, for most Americans, the man’s faith would be of no interest. If the fact that Khan is an adherent to Islam were even known, it probably would be seen as an asset ¬– another Muslim-American seeking to become more involved in the political process just like, for example, Rep. Keith Ellison, the Muslim convert who recently won a Minnesota seat in the House of Representatives.

Something else appears to be at work here, however. The tip-off is the fact that anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who sits on the ACU Board, is promoting Khan’s candidacy. Even that association, however, could be construed as nothing more than a calculated effort by a skillful conservative operative to insinuate a reliable ally into a useful post as the former struggles to overcome the damage done to his reputation and influence – and that of the Republican Party – by his scandalous collaboration with convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

Unfortunately, there seems to be another and more insidious motivation for the Khan candidacy – one of a piece with a longstanding, if largely hidden, Norquist agenda that I first documented in these pages over three years ago. In a 12,000-word report titled "A Troubling Influence," published on December 9, 2003 with a validating introduction by David Horowitz, I described the nature and extent of Norquist’s involvement in a political influence operation in the service of a number of Mr. Ellison’s co-religionists. Most, like Suhail Khan, have troubling ties to individuals and organizations with well-established sympathies for the ideologues known as Islamists. Some of the latter have been directly tied to terrorism.

An Incomplete Resume

How many ACU members will be aware of this background as they cast their votes for the two open Board of Director seats – a process that is supposed to be concluded today – is unclear. After all, most will probably be voting on the basis of nothing more than the highly sanitized resumé supplied together with the ACU’s on-line poll:

SUHAIL A. KHAN

A lifelong conservative activist, Suhail Khan is presently serving as Counselor under U.S. Secretary Mary Peters at the U.S. Department of Transportation where he was awarded the Secretary’s Team Award in 2005. Previously Suhail served as Policy Director and Press Secretary for U.S. Congressman Tom Campbell (R-CA) where he worked closely on legislation relating to health antitrust reform, religious freedom, the preservation of the Second Amendment, tort reform, the reform of race-based affirmative action, and the 1998 impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.

After the 2000 elections, he aided the White House Office of Public Liaison in outreach efforts. In a volunteer capacity, Suhail is an active participant in the Republican National Committee’s 72-hour program and has been deployed to key races in states including Colorado, Washington, Iowa, Louisiana, Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Born in Boulder, Colorado, to parents who emigrated to Wyoming and Colorado from southern India, Suhail grew up in California and earned his B.A. in political science from University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and his J.D. from University of Iowa in 1995.

Khan’s Other Credentials

The foregoing account of Suhail Khan’s personal history omits a number of details that ACU members – and, more importantly, the rest of us – should know. Khan has contested the thrust of the following, inconvenient details about his family’s Islamist connections. He has denounced those like me who have called attention to them.

Khan has tried with some success to secure retractions from publications that ran articles referring to unsettling aspects of his background and associations – but without providing the evidence that they are wrong. When "A Troubling Influence" appeared three years ago, David Horowitz offered Norquist and Kahn an opportunity to respond. Norquist, a first seemed ready to respond, then begged off saying he had a "revolution to run" and no time for such matters. Suhail Kahn submitted a letter challenging the specific claims in my article which were most damning – that his father, as head of a Wahabbi mosque in California, had hosted Osama bin Laden’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and raised money for him, and that as a member of the White House staff – a position Norquist engineered for him – he had authorized radical Islamists to meet with President Bush. Kahn’s denials were submitted to me and I rebutted them. But when Kahn was invited to respond, he went silent. Then, three years later, he challenged the same points when I repeated them in an article for Frontpage.

In other words, for three years Suhail Khan has attempted to challenge the information I supplied in 2003 but without actually refuting it. For the record, and as a public service in particular to members of the American Conservative Union, I reprise here the most troubling parts of the Khan clan background:

Mahboob Khan

The Khan family did not simply settle into its adopted country after emigrating from southern India. Over their years in the United States, the parents and to some degree their eldest son, Suhail, played prominent roles in several organizations associated with the Wahhabi strain of Islamism – a particularly virulent ideology that has this country in its cross-hairs.

Suhail Khan’s father was the late Mahboob Khan, a PhD in solid-state physics. His biography claims that he helped establish the Muslim Student Association (MSA) while a student in Boulder (presumably, this refers to the MSA chapter at the university as the parent organization was established in 1963). The MSA is present on scores of American campuses and serves to recruit, proselytize and indoctrinate on behalf of Saudi-backed Islamists.[1][1] It is pro-Hamas – the MSA at UC Irvine even demanded that its members be allowed to wear Hamas armbands at graduation – and openly sympathizes with terrorists. Dr. Khan held the post of MSA vice president and Western Zone representative.

The elder Khan also served as member of Majlis a’Shura (the governing council) of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which was created by the Muslim Student Association (MSA) in 1977 to promote the Islamist agenda among Muslims and the general population. Another MSA arm is the North American Islamic Trust, the Saudis’ vehicle for providing the financing of, by some estimates, as many as 80% of the mosques in America. That financing, and the control arising from holding title for the mosques’ real estate, affords the Saudis and their proxies the ability to determine: who will serve as imams in their American mosques; what materials are distributed to the congregations[1][2] and taught in the madrassas (mosque schools)[1][3]; to what purpose are the members’ obligatory tithes applied; which congregants will be eligible to make the haj pilgrimage to Mecca; etc.

Mahboob Khan founded one such mosque after he moved the family from Colorado to southern California in 1975. The mosque, together with an Islamic center and an elementary school, comprises the Islamic Society of Orange County (ISOC), of which Dr. Khan served as president before moving on to San Jose in 1980.

The Islamist character of the ISOC was evident in a visit there in December 1992, by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – better known as the Blind Sheikh, who was later convicted in connection with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. On the occasion of his fundraising visit to Orange County, Rahman “dismissed nonviolent definitions of jihad as weak. He stressed that a number of unspecified enemies had ‘united themselves against Muslims’ and that fighting them was obligatory. ‘If you are not going to the jihad, then you are neglecting the rules of Allah.’”[1][4]

The Blind Sheikh's remarks were translated by Dr. Khan’s successor as the ISOC's director: a fellow Indian expatriate and former president of the Islamic Society of North America, Imam Muzammil Siddiqi. Press reports credit Siddiqi with converting American jihadi Adam Gadahn to Islam. Gadahn now sports the nom de guerre "Azzam the American" and serves as a kind of Tokyo Rose for al Qaeda, producing propaganda videos in which he glories in the prospect of slitting "the throats of infidels." (More on Siddiqi in a moment.)

After Dr. Khan relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, he established in 1983 the Muslim Community Association (MCA), whose Board he chaired. The MCA, which declares its affiliation with the Islamic Society of North America, is made up of not one but two mosques, a cultural center and an elementary school. According to the FBI, one of these institutions – the Masjid An-Noor Mosque – was the site of two fund-raising trips on behalf of the radical Islamist terror group known as Islamic Jihad.[1][5] The solicitation was made by the man who is now Osama bin Laden’s Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who reportedly met with the “leaders of the An-Noor mosque in Santa Clara.”[1][6] If such a meeting did indeed occur, Dr. Khan would presumably have been among the participating MCA leaders, as he did not pass away until April 1999.

Malika Khan

Suhail Khan’s upbringing must have been further shaped by his mother, Malika Khan, who has her own troubling associations with pro-Islamist organizations. She was a founding member and served on the Board of the Muslim Community Association.[1][7] She also has been a Board member of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).[1][8]

The man who successfully put Sheikh Rahman behind bars, Andrew McCarthy, has noted that CAIR was “birthed by a Hamas creation: the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).” [1][9] IAP was started by “high-ranking Hamas operative Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook,” who is wanted on federal terrorism charges. In addition, McCarthy reports that CAIR’s founder and executive director, Nihad Awad – was a “high-ranking IAP officer.” The former federal prosecutor also observes that the Hamas/IAP tie is “so incestuous” that “in 2004 a federal judge found the IAP liable for Hamas’ terrorist murder of an American citizen in Israel.” Finally, four of CAIR’s executives have been successfully prosecuted on terrorism-related charges.[1][10]

In light of all this, even liberal Democrats have taken to distancing themselves from CAIR. New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer has said of CAIR, “we know [it] has ties to terrorism.”[1][11] The Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin has noted that the organization is “unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.”[1][12] And most recently, California Democrat Barbara Boxer rescinded a “certificate of accomplishment” given to the executive director of Mrs. Khan’s chapter of CAIR in Sacramento, Basim Elkarra. According to Newsweek, Boxer’s press spokeswoman said the Senator “‘expressed concern’ about some past statements and actions by the group, as well as assertions by some law enforcement officials that it ‘gives aid to international terrorist groups.’”[1][13]

Khan, Troubling in His Own Right

Continued...