This is, unsurprisingly, not quite true. Emerson did withdraw the lawsuit, but not because he couldn’t prove that what Sugg had written about him was false. Emerson explains: “My attorney showed in court that the allegations made by Sugg were demonstrably false. But in a post 9/11 environment, it was not worth my time and effort to pursue this any longer.”  

But Sugg’s allegations, which form the most substantive portion of MPAC’s report, are simply false; the fact that they are featured so prominently in the MPAC report speaks volumes about the organization. That MPAC relies on Sugg, a discredited writer for a mall give-away weekly who has consistently claimed that the government’s investigations and prosecutions of Islamic terrorists in the United States are part of a racist conspiracy, reveals more about MPAC that it does about Emerson.  

Sugg’s first charge is that Emerson misrepresented his own work as an FBI document and sold it under these false pretenses to two Associated Press reporters. However, no less an authority than former CIA Director James Woolsey has affirmed that Emerson did not write the document in question. In a statement, Woolsey said that he was personally acquainted with the actual author and had discussed the document with him — and “this individual is not Steven Emerson.”  

As if that weren’t enough, Sugg also claimed (you can see why Emerson felt compelled to sue) that Emerson lied to a Senate subcommittee in 1998 when he testified that he had been informed by authorities that Islamic jihadists had sent out a hit squad to kill him.  MPAC, however, relied on Sugg’s claim that John Russell, a Justice Department spokesman, responded “No, none at all” to Sugg’s question “Is there any truth to the allegation of the assassination team?”  

But here again, in relying on Sugg, MPAC has omitted the part that verified Emerson’s claim. Bert Brandenburg of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs wrote a letter to the editor of the Weekly Planet on June 1, 1998 . (Not surprisingly, that paragon of journalistic luminosity didn’t find it fit to print.) In it, Brandenburg notes that Russell, when responding to Sugg’s inquiries, made it clear to Sugg that his answers were “based on his conversation with someone in the Terrorism Section and that he did not have any knowledge of what statements other law enforcement officials may have made.” When Russell was deposed in Emerson’s case against Sugg, Emerson’s attorney asked him: “Did you make a statement to Mr. Sugg that there was no truth to the allegation” of the death threat? Russell answered, “No, I didn’t.” Russell explained that what he told Sugg was based on his checking with DOJ’s Criminal Division, and that he was not commenting on what other government agencies knew about the threat. But Sugg did not choose to share this information with his readers. In fact, Emerson revealed in American Jihad that the agencies involved in conveying the threat to him were the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the FBI, not the Department of Justice.  

Brandenburg adds the coup de grace in his letter: “We have checked with the FBI and determined that the FBI did in fact receive information concerning a threat in 1995 and that they advised Mr. Emerson of the danger to his life.” And Sugg knew it. During the defamation suit, Sugg’s notes on his conversation with Brandenburg came to light. Sugg wrote: “threat is accurate, did establish, Bureau seemed satisfied.” Sugg thus clearly understood that Brandenburg had told him that the FBI knew the threat to Emerson was genuine.  

What’s more, the former head of FBI Domestic Counterterrorism, Robert Blitzer, declared in a 1999 statement: “While I served as Special Agent-Section Chief of the Domestic Terrorism/Counterterrorism Planning Section, National Security Division, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters, Mr. John Sugg telephonically contacted me. I believe this call was in the summer or fall of 1998. Mr. Sugg, among other questions, asked if journalist Steven Emerson had been the subject of a death threat. I confirmed to Mr. Sugg that a couple of years ago Mr. Emerson had been the subject of a death threat by a foreign terrorist group.”  

Of course, when the MPAC report charges that “Emerson’s lack of precision leads him to conflate legitimate organizations that can help America and secure the homeland with others that are neither genuinely American nor transparent,” it becomes clear why MPAC is in such a froth about Emerson: because of what he knows about MPAC itself. In American Jihad, Emerson notes that when Abdurrahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council, who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence for a terrorism financing conviction, encouraged the Muslim crowd at an October 2000 rally cosponsored by MPAC to declare their support of the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah, “MPAC’s Political Advisor, Mahdi Bray, stood directly behind Alamoudi and was seen jubilantly exclaiming his support for these two deadly terrorist organizations.” This was just three weeks after Bray “coordinated and led a rally where approximately 2,000 people congregated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington , D.C. ” Emerson reports that “at one point during the rally, Mahdi Bray played the tambourine as one of the speakers sang, while the crowd repeated: ‘Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is calling us, let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones at the face of the Jews [sic].’”[1]  

There is much more. Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to the war on terror; its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key anti-terror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.”[2] Emerson has called attention to the fact that in a book called In Fraternity: A Message to Muslims in America, coauthor Hassan Hathout, who has served as MPAC’s President, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt .”[3] MPAC’s magazine The Minaret spoke of Hassan Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article: “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna…Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”[4]  

This is noteworthy because Hassan al-Banna founded the prototypical Muslim radical group of the modern age, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood is the direct ancestor of both Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Al-Banna wrote in 1934 that “it is a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]! This is not parochialism, nor is it racial arrogance or usurpation of land.”^[5] He told his followers: “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.”^[6]  

Do Hassan Hathout and MPAC also believe in “a Qur’an and a sword”? What Emerson and the Investigative Project have uncovered about them suggests at very least that the group should receive serious scrutiny. The fact that MPAC has singled out Emerson for such a focused and singular attack only lends credence to these suspicions. For how better to obscure the message than to discredit the messenger?  

In 1995, Emerson wrote in response to critics of his statement about the Oklahoma City bombing: “The reason why these groups have singled me out is that they are trying to deny the existence of an Islamic terrorist network in the United States .”[7] That is no less true today, and clearly appears to be part of MPAC’s agenda in publishing this report: witness the classing as one of Emerson’s “wild accusations” the “declaration that Muslim terrorist sympathizers were hanging out at the White House.” It is hard to see this as a “wild accusation” given the fact that the now-jailed Abdurrahman Alamoudi, according to Daniel Pipes, “was a Washington fixture. He had many meetings with both Clintons in the White House and once joined George W. Bush at a prayer service. He arranged a Ramadan fast-breaking dinner for congressional leaders. He six times lectured abroad for the State Department and founded an organization to provide Muslim chaplains for the Department of Defense.”[8] Nor was Alamoudi the only one: Sami Al-Arian, who is now on trial on charges of being the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States , attended a White House briefing by a senior Bush Administration official in June 2001.[9] In fact, in 1996 Emerson authored a series of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal that revealed that the Clinton Administration had repeatedly invited terrorist supporters, including Alamoudi, to events and receptions.  

This is why MPAC’s attack on Emerson has much larger implications than the work of Emerson himself. MPAC excoriates Emerson for asserting that “political correctness enforced by American Muslim groups has limited the public’s knowledge about the spread of radical Islam in the U.S. ,” but their anti-Emerson report is an example of just that. MPAC pines for a world in which the critics of radical Islam are silenced, and groups with shadowy ties to the global jihad will be able again to operate unimpeded. We can be thankful that the voices that have consistently warned us of the threat posed by militant Islam will not cower under MPAC’s pressure. But it is crucial to understand the real agenda underlying MPAC’s attack on Steve Emerson: MPAC’s agenda is to make  the world safe — safe for terrorists.  

Of course, MPAC is entitled, under our freedoms, to deceive — as any self-respecting militant Islamic group would if it wanted to acquire political influence. But the real danger lies in the consequences of falling for that deception. Do all those elected officials, law enforcement agents and journalists who dutifully attended MPAC’s most recent conferences, touting MPAC’s “moderation,” really understand that they are granting legitimacy to a group whose agenda is exactly the opposite of “countering religious and political extremism?” 

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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).