As Miranda noted earlier, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Bobby Jindal are all scheduled to make an appearance this weekend at “The Awakening,” an event organized by Liberty Counsel featuring a myriad of radical anti-gay and anti-Islam activists.
Among the participants will be Kamal Saleem, who has carved out a career for himself as an anti-Islam expert, supposedly based on his years as a leading Islamic terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda, Moammar Gadhafi, and Saddam Hussein before finally converting to Christianity.
The “insights” that Saleem provides in his capacity are generally nonsense and his entire tale of a previous life as a terrorist is highly suspect and filled with unbelievable tales such as how, at eight years old, he outran Israeli military fire while carrying a dead friend on his back after a botched weapons smuggling operation.
The inconsistencies and outright implausibility of many of his claims has not, in any way, damaged Saleem’s reputation among Religious Right activists, as evidenced by the fact that he will be among those participating in “The Awakening,” along with various GOP presidential hopefuls.
Earlier this week, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver spoke to a local Tea Party group in Orlando, Florida, where he pitched the upcoming event by specifically citing Saleem’s participation in it as a reason for people to attend. In selling Saleem’s life story as a vicious terrorist who was saved through Christ, Staver made a rather startling claim when he asserted that, in his terrorist past, Saleem had thrown Jews off the tops of building in Lebanon.
“Kamal Saleem was a terrorist,” Staver said. “He was actually engaged in terrorist activity from a young boy and he knew all the top terrorist leaders from … the head of Libya, the head of Syria, he knew all these different people. And he actually killed Jews, threw people off the tops of buildings during the Lebanon crisis and in the Green Zone, he was involved in active terrorism. Brutal stuff”:
If we ignore everything we know about Saleem and his past and just accept for a minute that Staver’s claim is true, it creates a situation in which three leading Republican presidential hopefuls will be speaking at an event alongside an anti-Semitic murderer who was never tried or punished for any his crimes … but that is apparently not a big deal because that murderous terrorist has since found Christ and repented.
