not a joke
was Palin palling around him too, or was Ryan warming up the audience for the keynoter?
On Friday afternoon, just a few hours after GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan had addressed the Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, attendees of the annual social conservative confab heard from a speaker by the name of Kamal Saleem. A self-described "former terrorist," Saleem came onstaging waving a miniature American flag and whipped the crowd into a frenzy, warning of creeping Shariah and appeasement—if not outright sympathy—from the Obama administration.This is standard fare. 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."
crowd whipped into a frenzy wow thought they hated terrorist?
Saleem refused to respond to a detailed set of questions for that story, though. In fact, he almost never talks to reporters. And so, after sticking around for a 30-minute book-signing, I, along with Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast, decided to ask him about his past.
He'd mentioned being interrogated by intelligence agencies after confessing to his life of terror. Did any criminal investigations come out of that?
"Not in America. Not one thing in the United States. I have not done one thing in the United States."*But what about the people he recruited?
"The investigation was all over, and they validated everything. There was not one thing wrong that I did against this nation to kill, to harass, to destroy, to bomb, to butcher."
Who, Goldberg asked, was arrested abroad as a result of the information he gave to American intelligence?
"I could not tell you because that would map who I was, what I am, where my family—my family can be killed if I put all this. So I hope you don't jeopardize my Lebanese family." He looked up, incredulously. "You're writing that down, what I just said?!"
and the right wing gullible's loved it, telling you anything about the party who would be "in charge"?
