Weigel

Are Radical Islamists Infilitrating the GOP?

That was the subject of a piece I filed before heading to Wisconsin. I focused on the case of Faisal Gill , a Muslim Republican whose career was permanently tarred because of his three-month affiliation with a man who later was convicted on terror charges.

“It’s on the Internet,” Gill says. “It makes me look like I’ve done something wrong. I get involved in politics,” he says—he lost by only 499 votes in his 2007 campaign for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates—”it comes up again.” He points out that he has a letter from the inspector general, dated 2005, announcing that he “found no evidence to suggest you falsified or intentionally omitted” information in his DHS documents.

“You think that’d be enough,” says Gill.

Gill has largely left politics, but his story’s relevant again because of the latest skirmish in an intra-conservative feud that started shortly after 9/11. At this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, David Horowitz used his time at the podium to announce that there had been an infiltration—American Conservative Union board members Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist had “carried water” for terrorists. Khan’s father, Mahboob, had “held a fund-raiser for Ayman al-Zawahiri” at his mosque in 1995.