The Muslim assassination plot and President Bush

CAIR's Affad Shaikh

Don’t let the headline fool you. The only assassination attempt is on Affad Shaikh’s character.

You’ve probably never heard of Shaikh; he’s not mentioned on Wikipedia. He is an American Muslim about my age, born in Pakistan and living in Orange County, where he serves as civil rights coordinator for the regional chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Some CAIR employees and affiliates have been accused of terrorist activity, and this has led the whole organization to be labeled by some as a terrorist front.

One of the crusaders against CAIR has been Joe Kaufman, the founder of CAIR Watch. And yesterday Kaufman wrote this baseless hit piece about Shaikh for FrontPage Magazine. It begins:

Last month, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stationed at the U.S./Mexico border held the Civil Rights Coordinator of CAIR-California, Affad Shaikh, and others whom he was with for questioning. The agents suspected that the group had the intention of coming to the United States to assassinate President Bush. The following will provide a detailed context for why the CBP would believe such a thing and will make the case as to why the U.S. government should not drop the issue.

From there, Kaufman rattles through a bunch of reasons why Shaikh is a terrorist in hiding and why President Bush should watch his back. Kaufman’s evidence comes entirely from this blog post, in which Shaikh recalls the ordeal.

As an American Muslim, I can tell you that I had one of the most atrocious and harrowing experiences, being treated like a second class citizen, while with and due to a Dutch citizen who wanted to go across the border to Ensenada for horse back riding on the beach and some of the best seafood one could possibly find.

This individual was subjugated to the most ignorant, incompetent and inhuman CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) agents. (They basically didn’t know where Holland was) To make matters worse, they felt that we- the group of us- were coming to the US to “kill the President” in one agents own words.