An Ex-Terrorist Walks Into a Conservative Conference…

Saleem, a Lebanese-born evangelist, has made a career out of speaking to Christian groups about his experiences with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and ’80s. He claims to have been worked, at various points, for Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Yasser Arafat, not to mention Saudi terrorists in Afghanistan. In 1979, he says he traveled to the United States on the terrorists’ dime to build sleeper cells for the inevitable jihadist takeover, before—miraculously—finding the light and converting to Christianity.

But as I reported in a piece for the magazine last spring, much of Saleem’s story doesn’t add up. California police have no record of an incident he describes vividly in the first chapter of his book; the FBI says it has no record of meeting with him. And those who knew him before he began traveling the country under a stage name say they have serious doubts about huge portions of his narrative. Wally Winter, a former roommate during the period Saleem purports to have been grooming terrorists, told me, “He could sell swampland in Louisiana. I really do not believe the story about the terrorism.”