See, if you haven’t yet, Daniel Pipes’ extremely interesting article about Abdurahman Alamoudi’s guilty plea on terrorism charges.

Alamoudi, founder of the American Muslim Council, was for a time a considerable Washington power broker: a donor to presidential campaigns, a man received at the White House. He has now confessed to illegally taking money from Libya to organize an assassination attempt on Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

Pipes’ conclusion:

“Alamoudi is hardly the only high-profile, seemingly non-violent leader of an Islamist organization to associate with terrorists. At the Council on American-Islamic Relations, five staffers and board members have been accused or convicted of terrorism-related charges and the same has happened with leaders of the Islamic Center of Greater Cleveland, Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, and the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom.

“The Alamoudi story points to the urgent need that the FBI, White House, Congress, State Department, Pentagon, and Homeland Security – as well as other institutions, public and private, throughout the West – not continue guilelessly to assume that smooth-talking Islamists are free of criminal, extremist, or terrorist ties. Or, as I put it in late 2001: ‘Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers.’”

The mighty question for the coming months is this: Will the arrest and discrediting of extremist leaders like Alamoudi open the way for patriotic American Muslims to step forward and speak out?