Alamoudi and His Defenders
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Back in 2000, then-Senate-candidate Hillary Clinton had the good sense to return a $1,000 campaign contribution from a founder of the American Muslim Council, Abdurahman Alamoudi. At the time, the president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, was quoted by the Daily News calling the flap “a shameful hysteria campaign of McCarthyism.”
Now Mr. Alamoudi has been charged with a federal crime. He was nabbed with $340,000 in sequentially numbered bills, which federal authorities say apparently came from Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya. He’s further been taped praising the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that killed 86 people. “The Jewish Community Center. It is a worthy operation,” federal authorities quoted him as saying. “I prefer honestly like what happened in Argentina.”
So it will be interesting to see what Mr. Zogby makes of the federal charges being pressed against Mr. Alamoudi. More “hysteria”? More “McCarthyism”? The national press corps and the nation’s political elite will get a chance to ask this question at Dearborn, Michigan, from October 17 to 19, when all the top-tier Democratic presidential candidates — Senators Lieberman, Edwards, and Kerry, Governor Dean, Congressman Gephardt, and General Clark — appear at the “national leadership conference” of Mr. Zogby’s institute. It’s not just the Democrats who will be participating; also expected to be in attendance will be the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie.
Mr. Lieberman will have a special responsibility to check Mr. Zogby’s bona fides. The senator from the Nutmeg state, after all, was one of six sponsors of the American Muslim Council’s February 1996 Iftar dinner on Capitol Hill to mark the breaking of the fast of Ramadan. According to a report of the event in the anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Representing the American Muslim Council was Executive Director Abdurahman Alamoudi, who spoke of the importance of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in American culture and the significance of fasting for each of the three
