The usually perfunctory approval process for BREC membership was changed at the meeting in order to publicly vet Hamze and to then vote on his application using a secret ballot. He was the only one of 11 candidates rejected.

The Miami Herald was there:

At times, when he addressed the packed room at the Sheraton Suites in Fort Lauderdale, a few members shouted out among the crowd of about 300.

“Terrorist!” said one man.

“Let him speak!” said another. …

“I don’t have a positive impression of Mr. Hamze. I don’t think he will be an asset to our party,” said Scott Spages, who is involved in programs concerning radical Islam at his church, Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale. …

A new litmus test was then born: Do you support Rep. Allen West? The tea-party Republican has repeatedly denounced Islam and clashed with Hamze. So has Joe Kaufman, chairman of the group Americans Against Hate and former vice-chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition of South Florida. “Are you willing to support Congressman Allen West… as a Republican?” Kaufman said loudly in the microphone. “Will you denounce terrorism?”

Some Republicans told the Herald they objected to the fact that Hamze is the director of the Florida branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, citing the fact that CAIR was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a material support for terrorism case in Texas several years ago. The list of “co-conspirators” in that case — which involved sending money to the Palestinian organization Hamas — ran to more than 300 groups and individuals, none of whom were charged with breaking the law.

Joe Kaufman, who Hamze told me today appeared to be the leader of the effort to vote down his candidacy, is a former Republican Jewish Coalition official who now leads a group called Americans Against Hate. His ideology is perhaps best captured in a eulogy he wrote for the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane.

Hamze, for his part, told me he rose at the meeting to respond to his critics, telling the crowd, “All of this terrorism stuff is garbage. I’m a law-abiding citizen. I follow the Constitution. I love my children. I love this country.”

He plans to attend Broward Republican meetings as a member of the public.

“They can’t stop me from attending the meetings. I believe I can accomplish my goals of helping the party and introducing a Muslim Republican to candidates so they know Muslim Republicans are out there,” he said.

In August, Hamze, 35, submitted an application to become a voting member of the Broward Republican Executive Committee, a body within which he would like to organize the Muslim Republican club.

“A lot of Muslims I know, their values really line up with the conservative values of the Republican party,” Hamze says. “I’m a strict social conservative, a fiscal conservative, a very strict constitutionalist. The protection of civil liberties for all Americans is supreme.”

He was not exactly welcomed with open arms. Following a report on Hamze’s plans on Shark Tank, a right-leaning Florida politics website, he was attacked as un-American by some commentators.

Sarasota-based blogger and radio host Rich Swier dismissed Hamze’s religious convictions. In a post published on Tea Party Nation and picked up on several other sites, Swier wrote:

Mr. Hamze, if he is a true believer, would not embrace the U.S. Constitution as supreme because it is accepted Islamic doctrine, under shariah, that the Qur’an must supersede any document written by man.

The Jacksonville branch of the anti-Muslim group ACT! for America responded to the news of Hamze’s plans with this un-Welcome Mat.

CAIR / HAMAS will start Islamic Republican Club in S. Florida? REALLY? As a CAIR leader his is in fact a HAMAS operative and one who is a Devout adherent to SHARIA Law with is Diametrically opposed to the Constitution.”

In fact, Hamze has spoken out against all forms of terrorism in unequivocal terms.

“Any organization, any person who take it upon themselves to take an innocent life, and an innocent life meaning someone standing on the side of the street, not doing anything and they get  killed — that person has lost their path, that person has lost the straight way, and it is against Islam to take an innocent life,” he said earlier this year. “Anybody that takes an innocent life, any organization, any government has lost their path, and we cannot be with them, we are not with them, as far as Islamically standing, we are not with them.”

Hamze’s foreign policy views are no more radical than favoring the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.

One local Republican blogger wondered aloud if the man behind if Shark Tank, might be “a Hamas sympathizer and organizer” because of their fairly straightforward report on Hamze.

Hamze, in fact, has nothing to do with Hamas, the Islamist party/militia that is battling Israel in Gaza.  His father came to the United States from Lebanon during the civil war there; Hamze himself was born in Michigan and grew up in south Florida.

Hamze called the idea that he does not believe in the Constitution because he is Muslim “baseless garbage.”

There seems little doubt that Hamze is spoiling for a fight.

He lives in Sunrise, and CAIR South Florida is based in Pembroke Pines, both cities in Broward County not far from the congressional district of the most vocal anti-Muslim U.S. representative, Allen West. Last February, Hamze made headlines when he challenged West during a town hall meeting to show him a verse in the Quran that tells Muslims to attack innocent people. His demand prompted an exchange in which West accused Hamze of trying to “blow sunshine up my butt.” Watch:

Last month,  Hamze sent West a letter asking him to cut ties with anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller. West responded with a one-word letter on congressional stationery. “NUTS!” he wrote. Here’s a local press report on the exchange:

Hamze insists he is aligned with West on many issues.

“I can say I’m pretty much lined up with his views — like [on] health care and an issue here about the Everglades. I’m obviously in direct contrast with his beliefs about Islam.”

For now, he’s waiting to hear back from the Broward Republican Executive Committee, which next meets on Sept. 26.

“The Republican Party of Florida has rules and procedures for admission to the executive committees and the creation of Republican clubs across Florida,” BREC Executive Director Richard DeNapoli told Salon. “I can assure you these rules and procedures will be followed.” He declined to comment further on the case.

The report also reveals that a small group of little-known foundations have in the past decade provided more than $40 million to groups promoting Islamophobia.

I spoke to two of the report’s authors, Eli Clifton and Wajahat Ali.

How do you define Islamophobia?

Wajahat Ali: We define it as an exaggerated fear, hatred and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from American social, political and civic life.

For example, the blogger Pamela Geller has written, “Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his Army?” And here is another quote from Brigitte Gabriel, founder of one of the major grass-roots Islamophobic groups, Act for America: “[A] practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”

We’re all for freedom of speech. We’re all for people having the right so say what they believe in America. But, at the same time, these individuals have been promoted as legitimate, neutral experts on Islam and Muslims when they’re anything but that.

You say in the report that you did not find a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to spread Islamophobia. So what did you find?

Eli Clifton: That’s right. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s not an overwhelming sum of money. And this is not something that runs across the entire conservative spectrum. What we’re seeing is a relatively modest amount of money and a relatively small number of people and major donors that make up this echo chamber. It’s a good object lesson in how one influences public opinion and media messaging. As one section of the report explores, how do you get a sound bite turned into a truth accepted by the public?

How does that happen?

Ali: There are five major players who we call the central nervous system of the Islamophobia network. They’re primarily responsible for creating the talking points and manufacturing the messages and memes that get distributed and mainstreamed via the network. The second aspect of it is the grass-roots organizations and the religious right. Examples include Act for America, Eagle Forum and Stop Islamization of America. They take these talking points — such as, “Shariah is a legal-political-military doctrine that will supplant the United States Constitution” — and promote them. Then these ideas — such as “Obama may be a Muslim,” “Shariah is a threat,” “mosques are Trojan Horses” — are mainstreamed through a media megaphone. That’s primarily Fox News but also radio shows like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and websites like WorldNetDaily, FrontPageMag and JihadWatch. Finally, we see how these talking points are used by mainstream politicians, as we’ve seen in the Republican presidential primary this year.

These people are going to say — have said — that they are writing about the very real threat of Islamic terrorism and radicalization in the U.S. How do you distinguish what these people are doing from legitimate discussion of Islamic terrorism?

Ali: We spent time in the report documenting the fact that these people are not legitimate scholars or experts on Islam or Shariah. These are individuals who have an extremist ideology that promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda.

What new information are you reporting about of the funding of these groups?

Clifton: We found that seven primary donors gave about $42 million over 10 years to eight groups promoting Islamophobia. For example, the second biggest donor is Richard Scaife and his foundations in Pittsburgh. He contributed nearly $8 million to the network, including to the Center for Security Policy, which is Frank Gaffney’ group, and to David Horowitz’s Freedom Center. The seven donors are: Donors Capital Fund, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust, the Russell Berrie Foundation, the Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund, and the Fairbrook Foundation.

Are there characteristics that these organizations share?

Clifton: They share a right-wing tilt, but beyond that there is a fair degree of range in terms of where their interests lie. You have to take them on a case-by-case basis to try to figure out where they’re coming from. The Russell Berrie Foundation, for example, actually gives to a wide variety of groups, including some fairly progressive organizations such as the New Israel Fund. But then they also turn around and give $250,000 to Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. It’s very hard to figure out in some cases how aware these foundations even are of what they’re doing. It’s something they should be asked, and something that I hope people reach out to them on. We’ve reached out to all of them and have not gotten any substantive responses.

Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam have a column in today’s New York Times explaining that the Tea Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious ultra-conservative Republican partisans (shocker?), and now that America has caught on to this fact, the Tea Party people are much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind their own business:

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

So it turns out that going around in funny hats screaming at people for a few years is not a great way to endear yourself to the American public, unless you’re Joe Pantoliano.

Better luck with next election cycle’s rebranding campaign that fools everyone in the political press for a year or so, ultra-conservative Republicans!

Like clockwork, two anti-Shariah figures have now penned columns attacking Perry on exactly these grounds. But one anti-Shariah group, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, has dissented and says it has no problem with Perry’s relationship with the Ismailis. The group’s spokesman, Dave Reaboi, emailed Commentary’s Alana Goodman:

Politico’s Ben Smith amplified a Salon report about Perry’s relationship with Aga Khan of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam. As Salon’s in-house apologist for Islamism and crusader against conservatives, Justin Elliott clearly believed such a story, breathlessly told, would cause a great deal of friction between the Texas governor and the GOP base—who are rightfully concerned about the anti-Constitutional aspects of Shariah law in our own country, and are watching as Shariah is the rallying-cry of jihadists around the globe. That said, Perry’s relationship to Khan and the Ismaili’s, I predict, will not cause much of a stir. The Islamailis are a persecuted Shia minority in Saudia Arabia; indeed, Perry’s meeting with Khan could not have won him many friends there. Rather than reaching out– as both presidents Bush and Obama mistakenly did—to problematic organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s expressly political agenda, Perry’s choice to engage with a more ‘progressive’ group is a good sign.

And:

This story tells us more about Salon, Politico and other left-of-center media outlets than about Perry. Rather than engage on the substantive issues as regards to Islamism and the extent of the threat of groups with political motivations and histories of terrorist links, Elliott and Smith refuse to take their opponents seriously, thinking they’re ‘poking the cage’ of a Republican base too unsophisticated to know the difference between the Ismaili sect and, say, the Muslim Brotherhood.

As it turns out, Reaboi’s predictions — that Perry’s associations “will not cause much of a stir” and that anti-Shariah activists are too sophisticated to demonize the Ismailis — have already been proven wrong.

The blogger and activist Pamela Geller wrote a column for the American Thinker today declaring that “Rick Perry must not be President. Have we not had enough of this systemic sedition?”

But Perry has been sucked into the propaganda vortex, and is now wielding his enormous power to influence changes in the schoolrooms and in the curricula to reflect a sharia compliant version of Islam.  He is a friend of the Aga Khan, the multimillionaire head of the Ismailis, a Shi’ite sect of Islam that today proclaims its nonviolence but in ages past was the sect that gave rise to the Assassins.

Commentary’s Goodman suggests that, compared to Gaffney’s think tank, Geller is a fringe figure in the anti-Shariah movement. In fact, Geller is one of the primary ideological and organizational leaders of the movement: she devotes numerous posts to the issue on her influential blog; she regularly gives speeches on Shariah and discusses it on TV; and she founded a group, Stop Islamization of America, that names stopping Shariah as one of its primary goals.

And it gets better: Both Geller and Gaffney are apparently on the eight-member steering committee of a coalition called the “Sharia Awareness Action Network.”

Another sponsor of that coalition is WorldNetDaily, which yesterday published an attack on Perry by Joel Richardson, author of “The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth About the Real Nature of the Beast” (WND Books). He argues that Perry has been fooled by the Aga Khan, who is part of the relentless Islamic quest to conquer “the West”:

It should also be mentioned that one of the doctrines espoused by Ismaili Muslims is the doctrine of Taqiyya. In simple terms, the doctrine of Taqiyya allows Muslims to purposefully hide or lie about their true religious beliefs to “unbelievers” or even Muslims of different sects. Of course, it is doubtful that the children of Texas will learn anything of Taqiyya in their Perry-sponsored education concerning Islam.

Of course, while lying in the name of religion may seem like a foreign concept to most, it is the principle of “the ends justify the means” that underscores many aspects of the Islamic approach to win the West.

One can only hope that such is not the principle driving Gov. Perry’s campaign for the presidency.

None of this is particularly surprising. As I noted in my original piece, the Muslim education program previously generated a bit of controversy in a state board of education campaign in Texas. (“I think Islamic curriculum is about the furthest thing that we need to be introducing into Texas classrooms,” said the Republican candidate in that race.)

To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with the Aga Khan-Perry partnership, and the effort to educate Texas schoolchildren about Muslim culture and history is to all appearances a positive and constructive thing. I think Perry’s relationship with the Ismailis in Texas makes for an interesting and relevant contrast to the Santorums and Cains of the GOP field.

But here’s the bottom line: My prediction that anti-Shariah activists would be troubled by Perry’s associations was borne out in the space of just a few days.