Grover Norquist is no Reagan

In his wonderfully readable and thoroughly inspiring new book, former presidential speechwriter Peter Robinson lets readers know “How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life.” His moving depiction of the man he served sheds new light on what made our 40th president not only a larger-than-life figure in his own time, but an enduring inspiration for millions around the world nearly 15 years after he left office.

For those whose lives were changed by President Reagan – and most especially for those of us who, like Peter Robinson, had the privilege of working in his administration – preserving and sharing the memory of this extraordinary man is more than a passion. It is a sacred trust.

Consequently, when the life and legacy of Ronald Reagan are in danger of being sullied or misappropriated, one feels obliged to object publicly – and forcefully. Regrettably, such an objection must be expressed to the bestowing upon Grover Norquist of the “Ronald Reagan Award” by a Washington-based organization called Frontiers of Freedom next Wednesday night.

The painful irony is that Mr. Norquist has done as much as anyone to promote the Reagan legacy. Among other tributes, he has campaigned across the country for each state to name a landmark for the former president. All of us who enjoy using Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport have Grover to thank for catalyzing its renaming.

Similarly, Mr. Norquist’s tireless advocacy of tax reduction – a life’s work begun at the behest of President Reagan – has helped to lighten the fiscal burden on millions of Americans, limited the growth of government and contributed to the latest, promising economic recovery.

Despite his profound and genuine modesty, one would hope President Reagan would have been pleased by the expression of public esteem reflected in myriad designations of public buildings, parks and other sites in his name. Although taxes were raised as well as lowered on his watch, he surely would have applauded efforts to discourage new levies and to reduce those already on the books.

Yet, it seems equally clear that President Reagan would have been appalled by Mr. Norquist’s astonishingly cavalier attitude, not to say indifference, toward national security – a well-established tendency in certain libertarian circles. Protecting our civil liberties against unwarranted government encroachment was central to Ronald Reagan’s conservative convictions. Yet his public life – both in and out of government – was devoted to safeguarding the national security and to rejecting the idea that we could safely hope that foreign foes would, as Mr. Norquist likes to say, “leave us alone.”

In particular, Mr. Reagan and, those who understand and honor his true legacy, could only be deeply troubled by the following:

Mr. Norquist has energetically campaigned against the USA PATRIOT Act, legislation indispensable to the incumbent president’s efforts to secure the American home front in the war on terror. An indication of the sort of contribution this act has made can be found in the indictment last spring of a prominent Muslim-American activist named Sami al-Arian.

U.S. intelligence had for years been amassing evidence of al-Arian’s involvement in the financing and operations of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization. Until the PATRIOT Act removed the artificial “firewall” that prohibited such information from being shared with law-enforcement authorities, however, criminal charges could not be brought against him.

Mr. Norquist’s antipathy to the act most recently led him to appear as a featured speaker at an Oct. 19 conference organized by the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) to rail against the PATRIOT Act and to organize a “movement” to undo it. Byron York, who covered the event for National Review Online, recalled with ill-concealed revulsion the scene of Grover Norquist and one other prominent conservative, David Keene, engaged in a “love fest” with the likes of actor Alec Baldwin and Democratic activist Ralph Neas.

That revulsion would likely have been shared by President Reagan since the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom’s membership reads like a Who’s Who of terrorist sympathizers, apologists and front organizations. As of the time of his arrest last February on 40 terrorism-related and other counts, al-Arian was the NCPPF’s president.

The NCPPF conference was a further affront to President Reagan’s legacy in a very direct way. The sponsors, facilitators and “Friends of the Conference” included virtually every group involved in opposing, deriding or otherwise impeding Reagan initiatives critical to his victory in the Cold War. These included: his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and his determination not just to contain that monstrosity, but to destroy it; aid to the anti-communist resistance in Central America; the Reagan nuclear force modernization and deployment programs; and, last but not least, the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Today, the anti-Reagan coalition and its successors are no less determined to disarm the incumbent president – and the U.S. government more generally, in the present global struggle. This would be the certain effect of dismantling Mr. Bush’s top domestic counter-terrorism accomplishment – the USA PATRIOT Act – and, if possible, of driving from office its chief architect, Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The old Reagan haters make no secret of this agenda. Yet they are being given invaluable political cover in pursuing these ends by the “center-right” coloration that Grover Norquist’s association is intended to lend to their cause.

Principled conservatives can object to aspects of the PATRIOT Act, and some do. But most have wisely declined from allowing themselves or their criticism to be so shamefully and profitably exploited by President Bush’s political foes.

This is not the first time Mr. Norquist has made common cause with the NCPPF. In the 2000 election cycle, he championed the prohibition of “secret evidence” – a personal priority of Sami al-Arian, among others in radical Muslim (or “Islamist”) circles. Doing so would deny prosecutors the ability, under extraordinary circumstances, to withhold from defendants incriminating information gleaned by classified means. Specifically, they would be precluded from doing so even when there are grounds for believing the disclosure of such information would compromise sensitive intelligence sources and methods. A case in point happened to be al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, who was held and ultimately deported on the basis of secret evidence.

Thanks in no small measure to Grover Norquist’s efforts, in one of the 2000 presidential campaign debates with Al Gore, then-Gov. Bush pledged, if elected, to prohibit the use of secret evidence. The following year, Sami al-Arian bestowed on Norquist an award from the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom for his work against secret evidence.

Mr. Norquist’s connections with Islamists have not been confined to al-Arian. Another prominent Muslim-American activist with whom he has been involved for at least five years is Abdurahman Alamoudi. Alamoudi – a self-described “supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah” – has recently been arrested in connection with illegal ties to and dealings with terrorist-sponsoring Libya. According to the indictment, he has admitted to trying to move hundreds of thousands of dollars from Libya, via Syria, to Saudi bank accounts – upon which he intended to draw funds to support like-minded organizations in the United States.

At this writing, it is unclear whether such funding schemes were used to provide seed money to an organization Norquist founded and chaired in 1998 called the Islamic Free Market Institute (Islamic Institute or II, for short). What is known, though, is that Alamoudi wrote two $10,000 checks to help start II, and his deputy at the radical American Muslim Council, Khalid Saffuri, became the new institute’s first staff director. Alamoudi is believed to have given a total of $35,000 to the Islamic Institute and to have provided another $40,000 in 2000 and 2001 to Janus-Merritt, a consulting firm with which Norquist was associated at the time.

The Islamic Institute also received $35,000 from the SAFA Trust, a Virginia-based Saudi charity raided in the U.S. government’s March 2002 counter-terrorism raid dubbed Operation Green Quest. It was subsequently shut down after surreptitiously moving offshore over a billion dollars in assets.

The trouble with Mr. Norquist’s ties to the likes of al-Arian, Alamoudi and the SAFA Trust is not that they are Muslim. Rather, it is that they – and most of the other Arab- and Muslim-American organizations that Norquist and his institute have been closely associated with and assiduously helped to promote – are on the wrong side in the war on terror. Many have been harshly critical of President Bush’s policies and his initiatives for waging that war, both at home and abroad. In particular, the pro-Islamists among them have actively campaigned against the President’s liberation of Iraq, denounced his efforts to make our transportation systems, cities and borders more secure, and promised to work to defeat him at the polls next year.

Of course, Ronald Reagan would be the first to recognize that Americans of the Muslim faith and those of Arab extraction can, and do, contribute in myriad ways to our country, its economy and its security. With his keen appreciation of the nature of “evil” in the world and the threat it poses to our country, however, it seems unlikely that President Reagan would either fail to recognize or refuse to declare that some within that community are radicals, bent on the destruction of our nation and its values. It seems even less likely that he would portray such Islamists – or permit them to portray themselves – as mainstream members of the Muslim/Arab community in the United States, let alone as its legitimate leaders. Mr. Norquist, by his actions and his words, has made all these errors.

Of perhaps greatest concern is the fact, in so doing, Grover Norquist has facilitated the Islamists’ effort to gain access to and influence with the Bush White House, other senior administration officials and top legislators. This access and influence has contributed to giving them ominous opportunities to recruit, train and certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military, to proselytize in the federal prison system and to provide “sensitivity training” to Transportation Security Administration personnel and FBI agents.

Meetings arranged for Islamist-sympathizers with the president and his Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers, particularly those convened since 9-11, have had another untoward effect: They have helped powerfully to legitimate the oft-stated claims of those individuals and groups to be “leaders” of their community.

President Reagan would have appreciated intuitively the folly of such a step. He would have worked instead, as he did with Solidarity in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua, to establish relationships with and otherwise to empower those who share our values – i.e., the majority of moderate Muslims who do not subscribe to the radicals’ intolerant, virulently anti-American and often violent creed.

For all those whose lives were touched and forever changed by Ronald Reagan, a time to choose is at hand. We can ignore the seriously misguided, and possibly dangerous, conduct of a man long appreciated for his good works on taxes, coalition-building and honoring our president. Or we can do as I believe Mr. Reagan himself would do – gently, but firmly and unequivocally, reject such conduct and, by example and word, lead in a direction consistent with both our conservative principles and the national security of this country that enshrines them.