Robert Spencer on The Elusive Moderate Muslim:

Imam Siraj Wahaj is in great demand. Last week he was a featured speaker at the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury, Massachusetts. A few days before that, he addressed four hundred people at a Muslim Students Association gathering at Western Michigan University. His star has shone for years: in 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. And why not? Not long after 9/11, he said just what jittery Americans wanted to hear from Muslims: “I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad against extremism.”

But what he thinks actually constitutes extremism is somewhat unclear; after all, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has lamented that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” In the early 1990s he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey; Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahaj was designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator.”

The fact that someone who would like to see the Constitution replaced has led a prayer for those sworn to uphold it is just a symptom a larger, ongoing problem: the government and media are avid to find moderate Muslims — and as their desperation has increased, their standards have lowered. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to find Muslim leaders who have genuinely renounced violent jihad and any intention, now or in the future, to impose Sharia on non-Muslim countries.

There is also a more detailed, must-read exploration of this thorny problem at Jihad Watch, by Hugh Fitzgerald.