Dark Days for North American Islamist Organizations?

The Islamist establishment in the United States and Canada must be wishing that September 2003 never happened.

Evan McCormick shows in "A Bad Day for CAIR" how on a single day, Sept. 10, the Council on American-Islamic Relations took three blows: "It ran away from testifying before an influential Senate panel that heard a barrage of incriminating evidence about the group and its connections. It saw one of its former officials plead guilty to terrorist-related crimes in Federal Court. And, it was stood up by two Department of Justice officials at an immigration symposium in Florida."

September also witnessed the likely collapse of long-standing efforts to infiltrate Islamist chaplains into the military, thanks to the arrest of James ("Yousef") Yee. The American Muslim Council and its affiliates may have suffered a mortal blow with the arrest of Abdurahman Alamoudi; that Soliman Biheiri of AMC's advisory board was accused of being "the Muslim Brotherhood's financial toehold" in the United States did not help either.

And September was a time for anti-Islamists to answer back. In Canada, Irshad Manji did so from a Muslim perspective in her iconoclastic book, The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change. In the United States, Robert Spencer exposed their ideology in Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West.

For those of us worried about militant Islam, these could be signs that a corner has been turned for the better. (September 30, 2003)

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