[Editor’s note: Below is Robert Spencer’s analysis of the recent debate between David Horowitz and Suhail Khan on Hannity – which Spencer shows successfully smoked out Khan as an Islamic supremacist. See also Frank Gaffney’s memorandum for members of the board of directors of the American Conservative Union about Khan. Gaffney has also written previous pieces on Frontpagemag.com exposing Grover Norquist’s and Suhail Khan’s troubling connections. Paul Sperry has produced a recent Frontpage piece as well: Who is Suhail Khan?]

A sidelight, but a momentous one, of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was the ongoing controversy over the connections of CPAC Board members Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the Muslim Brotherhood. David Horowitz detailed many of the troubling connections between Khan and the Brotherhood during his CPAC address; when challenged directly about this, Khan declared flatly: “There is no Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.” Sean Hannity had both Horowitz and Khan on his radio show Monday for a contentious half-hour of charge and counter-charge that often generated more heat than light; however, when the dust settled it was clear that Khan had not answered many of Horowitz’s most serious charges – and that CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, have a formidable problem in the Islamic supremacists and Islamic supremacist enablers in their midst.

Horowitz began by pointing out that Khan’s stentorian assertion that there is no Muslim Brotherhood in the United States was mere “hair-splitting.” He pointed out that a captured internal Brotherhood document detailing its strategy for the United States and its goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house” also listed its allied organizations in the U.S. – including the leading Islamic groups in this country, such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the Muslim Students Association (MSA).

One of the founders of the Muslim Students Association was Mahboob Khan, Suhail Khan’s father. ISNA in turn emerged from the MSA, and Mahboob Khan worked with ISNA as well before his sudden death in 1999. Suhail Khan’s mother, Malika Khan, meanwhile, is to this day a Board member of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another Brotherhood-linked group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007. The Holy Land Foundation was once the largest Islamic charity in the United States; it was shut down, however, after federal agents discovered that it was funneling charitable contributions to the jihad terror group Hamas. Several CAIR officials have been convicted of terror-related activities and are now serving time in prison.

Of course, a son doesn’t necessarily hold the same belief-system as that of his parents, but in this case there is abundant evidence that Suhail Khan does. He has spoken at MSA, ISNA, and CAIR events, and when Horowitz and Hannity asked him Monday to explain why he would do so if he really opposed the Brotherhood and its agenda in the U.S., he temporized and bloviated, saying ultimately that if CAIR really did have any connection to terror, then he would denounce it. Asked then why he hadn’t asked his mother to resign from the CAIR-California Board, he replied that he had done so – but he did not volunteer this information when the fact that his mother was on the CAIR Board first came up, and only did so when cornered.

On the Hannity Show, Suhail Khan hotly denied that a California mosque that his father had founded had hosted a fundraiser for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman (who is now in prison for his role in plotting the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993), as well as for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now the number-two man in Al-Qaeda. While invoking Horowitz’s Communist past, Khan charged Horowitz with making baseless ad hominem attacks that had been repeatedly debunked both by several law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the National Security Agency, and by a considerable number of media outlets. He also challenged the veracity of several other charges Horowitz was able to make when Khan wasn’t talking over him. There were notable aspects of Horowitz’s case, however, that Khan never addressed – although he did his best to hold the floor for as long as he could and allow Horowitz (and Hannity) as little time as possible to challenge his assertions.

Amid all his fog of verbiage, Khan never denied that his father had been a founder of the MSA and was also involved in ISNA. He never denied that those groups were linked to the Brotherhood, or that the Brotherhood’s goal in the U.S. was “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” He never denied that he had spoken at CAIR events, and came up with no convincing explanation when asked why he would have done so if he really shunned groups with any connections to jihad terror and the stealth jihad agenda of Islamic supremacism.

Consequently it is difficult, if not impossible, for any objective observer to take Khan’s protestations that he is simply an ordinary American conservative, working for small government and fiscal responsibility. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, and a prominent American public figure, while active in the conservative movement, spoke at events sponsored by genuinely racist, white supremacist organizations (as opposed to those falsely characterized as such by a Leftist media bent on destroying its conservative opponents). Imagine further that when asked about these speaking engagements, this public figure grew indignant, charged that his interlocutors were engaging in a witchhunt, and claimed ignorance of the unsavory links of his associates.

How long would such a man last in the public arena without being called to account? How long would he be allowed to get away with dissembling, obfuscating, confusing the issue, and making counter-charges, instead of honestly addressing his associations and their implications? The Hannity Show featuring David Horowitz and Suhail Khan, if the mainstream media retained even a shred of the objectivity to which it pretends, would be the final nail in the coffin of Suhail Khan’s reputation as a solid conservative and loyal American committed to Constitutional values. But Khan continues to be given a free pass, doubtless because of the thoughtless multiculturalism of today’s mainstream journalists: he is a Muslim being challenged by non-Muslims? Then he is right and they are wrong, and he must be protected from their ignorant, racist, bigoted, hateful attacks.

Such is the state of journalism, and of the country, in this third year of the reign of Barack Obama.