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)
