The Washington Post and Newsweek are currently pursuing a monumental campaign to whitewash radical Muslims, obfuscate the truth about jihad, and promote the viewpoints of really bad people. The latest example was on Sunday, when they published an article by Muzzamil Siddiqi, the imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County: Washington Post Continues the Parade of Whitewash.

Steven Emerson has a post at Counterterrorism Blog that adds to the information in my link above, and shows how incredibly disgraceful the Post/Newsweek campaign really is; if we’re going to call people like Siddiqi “moderate,” the term has no meaning: Counterterrorism Blog: Muzammil the ‘Moderate’.

Read the whole thing; here’s a short excerpt:

In a September 2002 speech at an ISNA convention, Siddiqi stated of 9/11, well after Osama Bin Laden took credit for the attacks:

It is, the point is that we said, whosoever did it, we condemn it. We did not say it is Muslims who did it. We did not say this and that. But the point is that whosoever did it, it was wrong. And this is a basic point … We cannot say in surety whoever did it or not. But the point is that if the name of Islam is taken, we have to clarify the name of Islam.

Yet Siddiqi’s radicalism is not limited to his own statements, but also to the company he keeps. In January of this year, the New Yorker published an article profiling a famous former congregant at Siddiqi’s mosque, Adam Gadahn (a.k.a. Azzam the American), which included the fact that Siddiqi had hosted the notorious Blind Sheikh to speak about jihad:

In December, 1992, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a prominent Egyptian cleric and Islamic radical also known as the Blind Sheikh, visited the Islamic Society to lecture about jihad, and Siddiqi sat beside him to translate. Abdel Rahman dismissed nonviolent definitions of jihad as weak. He stressed that a number of unspecified enemies had “united themselves against Muslims” and that fighting them was obligatory. “If you are not going to the jihad, then you are neglecting the rules of Allah,” he said. The opportunities for jihad were virtually everywhere, ranging from apostate Middle Eastern regimes to “those who are taking the wealth of Muslims from petrol or from oil.” As he spoke, a red toolbox, with a slit cut into its lid for donations, was passed around the room. Videotapes of the lecture were later offered for sale at the society’s bookstore. (emphasis added)

Several months afterward, Abdel Rahman was indicted for helping to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. One of his fatwas, issued from prison in 1998, became central to Al Qaeda’s justification of mass violence. (When I asked J. Stephen Tidwell, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles division, about Siddiqi’s association with Abdel Rahman, he said, “We have a very strong relationship with Dr. Siddiqi. You do have to put it into the context of back then.” Siddiqi told me that Abdel Rahman “was touring, and some people insisted that he should be there.”

Also of note is the FBI’s insistence, despite copious evidence of his radicalism, of partnering with Siddiqi. This problem of legitimizing radical Muslims goes far beyond the media’s involvement: it extends right up through the highest levels of our top law enforcement agency.

Once again, sadly, we are left to come to the same conclusion: one must be very suspicious when the media and the FBI tell you they have found, or are dealing with, mainstream Muslim leaders, involved in “inter-faith” activities. They are often suckers for polite smiles and Western business suits, but pull back the covers, and the truth is, all too often, much more sinister.