At least they admit it. The bio tag for this Washington Post article reads: “Ismail Royer is an American convert to Islam and a research and program associate at the Religious Freedom Institute, a D.C. nonprofit organization. He served 13 years in federal prison for terrorism-related charges. Since his release, he has worked in the nonprofit sector developing strategies to promote religious liberty and undermine extremist ideology.”
Which “extremist ideology”? Why not “…to promote religious liberty and undermine the jihad ideology”? Probably because what is meant by “extremist ideology” is “right-wing extremism,” a label often attached to resistance to jihad terror.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Interestingly, the Washington Post bio for Royer doesn’t note that before his incarceration, he worked for Hamas-linked CAIR.
Meanwhile, the title of the piece is “Muslims like me don’t have theological beef with evangelicals. It’s the prejudice against us that’s the problem.” Note that Royer is taking that ever-familiar stance we see again and again, on a drearily regular basis, from Muslim spokesmen: victimhood. Poor, poor Muslims are victimized by everyone else in 1000 ways — as the jihad body count rises ever higher. One would think that any man would be embarrassed to make his living as a professional whiner, but Islamic spokesmen seem to have a never-ending supply of chutzpah and no capacity for embarrassment at all.
And “Muslims like me”? What kind of Muslim is like Ismail Royer? Let’s review what the Post blandly reports as “13 years in federal prison for terrorism-related charges.” From the Investigative Project on Terrorism:
According to a biography posted on IslamOnline.net, Royer began working as a CAIR communication specialist in 1997. According to media reports, he continued to work for CAIR at least through the beginning of October 2001.
When police stopped Royer for a traffic violation in September 2001, they found in his automobile an AK-47-style rifle and 219 rounds of ammunition. He was indicted in June 2003, with 10 others, on a variety of charges stemming from participation in the ongoing jihad in Kashmir. Specifically, the indictment charged that Royer engaged in propaganda work for Lashkar-e-Taiba and “fired at Indian positions in Kashmir.”
Lashkar-e-Taiba was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization on December 26, 2001. Thus, while news reports indicated he still worked for CAIR, according to a federal indictment, Royer purchased an AK-47 assault rifle and 219 rounds of ammunition, distributed newsletters for a group later designated as a foreign terrorist organization, and fired at Indian targets in Kashmir.
Again, Awad has minimized CAIR’s ties to Royer, noting Royer was also “a former employee of Starbucks Coffee.”
In January 2007, in response to Senator Boxer’s withdrawal of the award to Elkarra, Awad claimed that “CAIR had no knowledge of Royer’s travels and activities before he joined CAIR.”
Additional charges listed in a superseding indictment against Royer and his 10 co-conspirators included conspiracy to levy war against the United States and conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda.
On January 16, 2004, Royer pleaded guilty to weapons and explosives charges and agreed to cooperate fully with the government.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Royer got out early, of course, and now proclaims that he has rejected his previous “extremism.” And so the Washington Post publishes him as if he were a legitimate spokesmen for Muslims in the United States. This is all part of the normalization of Islamic supremacism, of a piece with politicians appearing at Hamas-linked CAIR events (as we have seen recently in Ohio and Illinois).
The Washington Post is trying to condition the public into thinking that someone who used to work for Hamas-linked CAIR and served time in prison for jihad plotting is a perfectly reasonable fellow, while the real “extremists” are the foes of jihad terror.
Can you imagine the Washington Post publishing an article by me or anyone else who is defamed by the hard-Left smear machine the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “anti-Muslim extremist”? They wouldn’t be caught dead. But a Muslim who worked for Hamas-linked CAIR and did propaganda work for a jihad terror work? Now, that’s someone who is perfectly within the bounds of reasonable discourse.
Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer
