What happened to the Gingrich campaign? What was it that led the 2012 Republican presidential hopeful to right out of the gate break with party orthodoxy and say what he genuinely thought of the GOP Ryan budget plan and then to wander away from the campaign trail in a way that spurred his staff to band together and jump ship. Maybe it was the phone call Gingrich took a couple months ago from Dr. Malik Hasan, of the Colorado Hasans, longtime major GOP financial backers.

As Salon’s Justin Elliott reports, Hasan made the call this spring because he was upset with Gingrich, whom he had supported for years to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. He told Gingrich to lay off the Muslim bashing and reminded him of the specific leadership qualities that had inspired Hasan and others in the past who thought they saw them in the former Speaker of the House. Hasan said he believes Gingrich had been successful because he was the kind of politician who “recognizes the necessity that we start out from a non-ideological viewpoint to make the government efficient.”

On the phone, he told Gingrich that “the president is the president of all Americans. He’s not the president of a narrow group of people.”

Hasan told Elliott that Gingrich seemed “receptive” on the call and so Hasan was hopeful that the tone of the Gingrich campaign would change.

Yesterday, when Gingrich addressed questions about the amazing mass defection of his staff, there did seem to be some toning down taking place. The candidate struck a kind of cotton-headed Buddha posture with reporters.

Fresh off a cruise to Greece, the near-eastern birthplace of democracy now ringed by the Muslim Mediterranean world, Gingrich said he was going to go his own way. He said his consultants were old-school and that he no longer wants to run a traditional confrontational kind of campaign.

“I want to campaign on ideas and on solutions and I want to do it in a way that brings Americans together into a large movement,” he said.

ABC News reports:

Newt Gingrich wanting to bring Americans together with his politics would be a change.

Gingrich began attacking Islam with a vengeance last year when the “ground zero mosque” controversy broke and Islamophobia spread like wildfire on the talk-radio right. Gingrich seemed determined to lead the broad-stroke discussion on the threat shariah law and Muslims as a group pose to U.S. security and American culture.

The new anti-Muslim Gingrich may have come as a surprise to Malik Hasan but it wasn’t a surprise to many other Newt watchers.

As Salon editor Steve Kornacki writes today, Gingrich’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s was marked by similarly devious confrontationalism.

Early on in his congressional career, Gingrich formed the Conservative Opportunity Society with fellow far-right lawmakers and pushed party leaders to engage in harsh personal attacks on their Democratic colleagues.

In 1984, he made a low-water-mark Joe McCarthy-style speech on the House floor in which he read off the names of ten Democratic members who had sent a letter to Daniel Ortega, the socialist Sandinista leader of Nicaragua, urging him to hold fair elections. Gingrich said the letter-writers should be brought up on charges for undermining U.S. foreign policy. They were, in effect, traitors and, like Muslims today, posed a threat.

Ten years later, he used the tragic story of deranged South Carolinan Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons, to suggest that Democratic leadership had eroded U.S. social values. He said shocked Americans should vote Republican. The theme was that degenerate Democrats posed a threat.

In 1998, he led the crusade to impeach President Clinton for conducting and covering up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich was conducting and covering up his own extra-marital affair at the time, but he said Clinton had to go because, as president, he threatened to lead the nation into moral bankruptcy.

In his talk yesterday with reporters, the old broad-brush alarmist Gingrich peeked out at America through the hazy bromides about his plan to energetically bring us together.

“We live in a time when Americans are genuinely frightened for their country’s future,” he said.

“I am a candidate for president of the United States because I think we are in the early stages of the Obama Depression,” he said.

He told ABC that he’s committed to bringing what’s left of his campaign to planned events in Los Angeles on Sunday and that he’ll attend the New Hampshire debate on Monday.

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House Minority Leader Eric Cantor defended the hearings, making them sound like a friendly extended hand from Capitol Hill to American Muslims.

“The purpose [of the hearing] is, if you ask Chairman King, to try and assess how we can better work with the Muslim community in America to stop the spread of radical Islam,” he said.

That description will likely pale when set beside the hearings themselves.

As Greg Sargent at the Washington Post reports, King’s re-working of the testimony schedule has all but guaranteed Americans will be treated to a “three ring circus.”

[T]he committee has quietly divided its plan for the hearings into three separate panels — separating Republicans from Democrats who might disagree with them on the issues in question.

For instance, the first panel features as a witness Dem Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, while the second features GOP Rep. Frank Wolf. Dems expect Wolf, who has a long history of doing battle with the Council of American-Islamic Relations, to support King’s views of the threat of Muslim radicalization. Previously, Dems say, the plan was for Ellison to be on the same panel as Wolf, but now the two have been separated — meaning that Dems won’t be able to ask Ellison to rebut Wolf during hearings that are expected to attract national attention.

“This type of division based on party and ideology is curious. especially when the hearing is supposed to be combining thoughts to combat radicalization,” one Dem staffer on the committee tells me. “Now, if Representative Wolf says something negative about Muslims, Mr. Ellison will not have the opportunity to rebut it. There is no rationale for this decision.”

Forbes magazine blogger Osha Gray Davidson has called on King to resign. He notes that, presented with his past stance on the IRA, King hasn’t flinched.

Hypocrisy? Rep. King reacts indignantly to the charge. His terrorists, he explains, “never attacked the United States.” Only British civilians, a distinction which, in King’s moral universe, makes his support acceptable.

It is not.

The man who has a history of supporting terrorism abroad, a man who, let’s not mince words, who has the blood of innocents on his hands, has no place in the U.S. Congress. He should resign.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart had a predictable field day lampooning King and his “Islamic radicalization in America” hearings.

If Cantor really believes King’s hearings will result in increased cooperation with the Muslim community in America, former Colorado Republican politician and founder of Muslims for Bush Ali Hasan might disabuse him of that notion.

A hard-core fiscal conservative and outspoken supporter of Republican causes and candidates for years, Hasan fled the party last year. He told the Colorado Independent demagogic bigotry against Muslims and gays and Latinos had taken over as a core Republican Party message. He said the policy proposals springing from the message mocked the Constitution.

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Anti-illegal immigration warrior and former Colorado GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo ran for governor as an American Constitution Party candidate, but now he’s back in the fold and talking about the future of his Republican party. He sent an email to supporters this morning on the rift between the moderate and conservative wings of the Colorado GOP. Just so readers know where he stands, he linked to a hard-line provocative Jihad Watch article on the threat posed to America by Muslim immigrants.

In the email sent to supporters of his Rocky Mountain Foundation think tank he reports on a recent meeting he attended of Republicans in Littleton.

“During the question and answer portion I was asked to comment on the continuing internet feud that is the manifestation of lingering resentments emanating out of the gubernatorial campaign. The person asking went on to say that there are deep divisions in the Republican Party that need to be healed and wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I explained that my hope would be to have a unified Republican Party committed to conservative principles but that the division between conservatives and moderates within the Party has been there as long as I can remember. However, in the past it did not keep us from winning elections.”

The email links to the Jihad Watch article titled “If thy cojones cause thee to sin” by Roland Shirk.

From the article:

The Muslim subjugation of women, and the Western death-cult of feminism, combine to give Muslim immigrants a huge reproductive advantage over the natives of almost any country which they inhabit. Even conservative Catholics who reject contraception are unlikely to match the Muslim birth rate, for the simple reason that Christianity views women (like men) as ends in themselves, not means to the reproduction of sons.

…

The Muslims aren’t the only problem. There are weaknesses in our own societies that make us uniquely vulnerable at this historical moment to the dangers of mass immigration on the part of culturally self-confident minorities. (Can you think of a group which better fits that definition than Muslims?) Granting that Islamic intolerance tends to function like a deadly virus, there are situations where our own immune system is compromised, and we are less able to deal with and suppress its toxic effects.

…

Modern liberalism, in both its secular and Christian variety, is the civilizational equivalent of AIDS–a force that suppresses our collective will to defend ourselves through guilt, false compassion, and a weirdly self-congratulatory self-loathing that recalls the sexual frenzy of late Medieval flagellants.

Is Shirk an Islamaphobe? Is Tancredo?

Shirk answers that question in a posting at IslamTodayOregon:

I answer people who call me an Islamophobe by saying something like this: “Afraid of Islam and sharia? You’re damned right I’m afraid. So are the Iraqi Christians who get gunned down in their churches, and the Pakistani Christians facing execution for blasphemy. I’m sure the victims of terrorism in New York and London were frightened, too. When you have to take off your shoes and belt at the airport, and get your whole body x-rayed before you can board a plane, who do you think the airlines are ‘afraid’ will blow up the plane–the Amish? The Mormons? The Hindus? If that’s what it means to be an Islamophobe, then I guess you could call FBI agents ‘crime-aphobes.’ If Muslims want us to stop being scared of them, maybe they could–I dunno, stop oppressing and killing people around the world. That would make a really nice start.”

The Tancredo-Jihad Watch wing of the party will fail to win over increasing numbers of conservative minorities, including prominent former Colorado Republican Ali Hasan. After running twice for election as a Republican in the state, Hasan last year announced he was leaving the party.

“[T]he [GOP] is starting to stand for everything against liberty,” he told the Colorado Independent “– against gays, against Muslims, against immigrants, and most sadly, against fiscal conservatism. Quite frankly, I think all the GOP stands for is a pro-security agenda of high taxes and massive regulation, where the government’s biggest job will be to keep Muslims and immigrants out of America.”

—
Additional writing and reporting by John Tomasic.

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As the nation’s political class wrestles with the violence in Arizona that killed and injured more than 20 people and landed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the hospital with a bullet through the brain, leading national Latino conservative organization Somos Republicans is spotlighting the harsh backlash it drew from members of the Colorado GOP to a campaign it launched last week lauding former state Republican Muhammad Ali Hasan for speaking out about growing bigotry in the party.

The group’s Arizona-based national director DeeDee Garcia Blase sees the reaction in Colorado as a tremor rising from a fault line running through the contemporary Republican Party. She told the Independent that she was aghast but not surprised by the angry messages from Colorado that filled her email inbox and the Somos Facebook page.

“I mean, wow,” she said. “What’s in the water up there? The same thing that’s in the water down here, I guess.”

‘Are you people crazy???’

Garcia Blase posted the emails she received this week at the group’s website. She sees them as an example of the way discussion about immigration and national security even among some party leaders slides easily into fear of certain kinds of people.

Since 9/11 in particular, the risk on the right has been that aggressive anti-terror and anti-illegal immigrant messaging would open the door for racists and, more significant, that the messaging would work to move Americans who would never call themselves racists to succumb to bias along the lines of religion and ethnicity. As Garcia Blase points out in light of the messages directed at Somos this week, immigration becomes detached from economics and free-market ideology and is hooked instead on rough talk about punishing “illegals.” Terrorism is replaced with Islam, reducing debate about national security to attacks on one of the world’s most popular religions — attacks bolstered by interpretations of the Koran that suggest no follower of the faith can be trusted.

Patricia Nohavec-Fink has been active in Douglas County Republican politics for years. A GOP district captain in Castle Rock, she was elected vice chair of the Douglas County Republican Party in 2010 by a wide margin. She resigned shortly after, citing internal politics, but said she continues to host fundraisers and work with top elected local and state officials. She told the Independent that news of the Somos campaign asking Hasan to return to the party rocketed around her Republican circle, where strong feelings about Hasan and Islam and immigration predominate. Nohavec-Fink joined with local politicos such as repeat candidate for office Cleve Tidwell, former Rebuild the [Republican] Party founder Guy Pacot and small-time strategist Bill Sparkman in writing emails to Garcia Blase rejecting the Somos campaign.

In her exchange with Somos, Nohavec-Fink makes dark assertions about Hasan’s character and allegiances. She sees his career as a filmmaker as a sign of degeneracy and repeats the rumor that it was Hasan’s father who leaked the information that 2010 Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis plagiarized articles the Hasan Family foundation paid him $300,000 to write — information that ultimately sank the McInnis campaign.

Garcia Blase said she thought Nohavec-Fink’s emails — angry and conspiracy-laden — exemplified the kind of thinking that is alienating minorities in the party, and so she pushed Nohavec-Fink to explain herself. The full exchange is available here as a pdf.

Excerpts from the thread:

From: Patricia Nohavec-Fink
To: DeeDee Garcia Blase (Somos Republicans)
Subject: RE: Hispanic Republicans Invite Hassan [sic] Back to GOP

Are you people crazy???
Ali Hassan [sic] is a trader [sic] not just to our party but to our country.

I know him personally – he doesn’t stand for one thing that the Republican party does. He has always been a liberal but ran Republican hoping to get voted in.

[…]

Do you believe in same sex marriage? Do you believe in the Muslims taking over America? Do you think after bringing terror to our nation that their [sic] should be a Muslim temple at Ground Zero? Do you believe that women should be covered and have no voice, be treated like animals? Not to mention his movie making…

His mouth has two sides – one of what a person wants to hear and one that is what he truly believes.

I highly suggest you do some research and find out the truths about this guy. Because of his Daddy and money we now have another socialist for Governor and 4 more years of liberal governing.

I can’t believe this – who is responsible for this action?????? This isn’t going to set well with any Republican I know, that’s for sure.

——-
From: DeeDee Garcia Blase (Somos Republicans)
To: Patricia Nohavec-Fink
Subject: RE: Hispanic Republicans Invite Hassan [sic] Back to GOP

Patricia,

You really think Hassan [sic] is a Muslim trying to take over America? Whatever happened to FREEDOM OF RELIGION?

——-
From: Patricia Nohavec-Fink

Freedom of Religion is our country’s asset, not taking over the country.

[…]

Ali is not a Republican and I hope he stays where he is, with the liberals…

——-
From: DeeDee Garcia Blase (Somos Republicans)

How is Hassan [sic], a Muslim, taking over the country? You still have not articulated on why you believe he “taking over”. You sound like a xenophobe.

——-
From: Patricia Nohavec-Fink

Have you read the koran [sic]? You would then know the answer to the question….

——-
From: DeeDee Garcia Blase (Somos Republicans)

Of course I read the Koran, but it doesn’t mean that all Muslims are out to bomb Americans. Judas Priest….

At some point, GOPers like you need to snap out of your fear, and love your “neighbor”. Hassan [sic] is no terrorist… You give the GOP a bad name. I hope you leave the Party while we restore it to the Party of Abe Lincoln, because your comments are making him roll in his grave right now.

Nohavec-Fink was mortified that her emails might be published and said she was sure her thoughts would be taken out of context. She told the Independent that as a candidate for treasurer Hasan had presented information on investing that was dubious and that that’s what she was referring to when she said he was untrustworthy. She said she is not biased against Muslims but she doesn’t think Islam is compatible with U.S. democracy. She said that, in effect, Islamic teachings in the end lead to political control that would infringe on constitutional rights.

Hasan told the Independent that Somos shared Nohavec-Fink’s emails with him and that the emails shocked him. He said he had long counted Nohavec-Fink among his friends, that she was extremely popular among Douglas County Republicans and surely had a lot of influence. In fact, he said, he had won a GOP fundraiser bid for dinner at her house last fall that he guessed he wouldn’t be cashing in now.

“That Pat is criticizing me for supporting … gay marriage and the right of Muslims in New York to worship, basically tells me that I made the right decision to leave the GOP,” Hasan wrote in an email. “As seen through Pat, the [party] is starting to stand for everything against liberty — against gays, against Muslims, against immigrants, and most sadly, against fiscal conservatism. Quite frankly, I think all the GOP stands for is a pro-security agenda of high taxes and massive regulation, where the government’s biggest job will be to keep Muslims and immigrants out of America.”

The underbelly on display in Loveland

The Independent broke news last month that Hasan, whose wealthy family has supported Republican politicians and causes for decades, was leaving the GOP. Hasan ran as a Republican candidate for a state House seat in 2008 and for treasurer in 2010. He was a strong supporter during his treasurer’s bid for three failed tax-slashing ballot initiatives authored by Colorado small-government crusader Douglas Bruce. Hasan remains a strong fiscal conservative. He said it was his experience with biased voters on the right as a candidate and the heated rhetoric led by top national Republican figures against gays and immigrants and Muslims this year that made up his mind to switch parties.

Hasan has since said that he thinks the controversy raging over the annual Conservative Political Action Conference speaks to these same tensions on the right that the party seems unwilling or unable to adequately address.

Social conservative groups and and anti-terrorist/anti-Muslim groups led by right-wing national security pundit Joseph Farah are threatening to boycott the conference and to “purge” CPAC-host American Conservative Union from the conservative movement if it doesn’t exclude conservative gay and Muslim groups from the conference. Hasan said he spoke at CPAC in 2009 and saw the same fault line opening then.

“2009 was the year where you saw the most emphasis on minority outreach and letting go of the social issues,” he wrote at Colorado Pols last week. “However, there was also a vacuum…. None of us knew which side would win: (a) the ‘liberal’ Constitutionalists (like myself) who were socially liberal and ultra fiscal conservative; (b) the Christian Coalition; (c) the anti-immigrant factions?”

Hasan believes the liberal Constitutionalists lost that battle. Somos Republicans, in asking Hasan to return to the party, doesn’t believe the battle is over. Yet the group’s experience with its pro-Hasan anti-bigotry campaign this week suggests the intensity of the fight Somos and its supporters face.

Former Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes also weighed in tangentially on the Somos campaign. In a Facebook post and email to supporters, he said that during the 2010 campaign, racism tied to immigration and terrorism colored the primary races. Although he said nothing about it at the time, he believes race-based bigotry torpedoed Hasan’s treasurer bid and that it was also a palpable factor in his contest against anti-immigration crusader and Republican-turned-American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo.

I was sickened when I was leaving the state assembly last May when someone from the Hassan [sic] campaign, I do not remember if it was Ali himself or not, advised us that the word “Muslim” was written on the back of some of their yard signs placed outside. This came up as part of the conversation we were having as we exited the Budweiser Arena in the context of how much of a blow out the Treasurer’s race had been between Ali and JJ Amment [sic]. The large spread of high seventy’s by JJ to Ali’s low 20′s shocked the hall.  Ali had worked too hard to get that low of a vote.  Race had to play a part.

I had not heard much about race in the campaigns up until that point. I had certainly benefited from some Latinos warming up to me as a result of their affinity to the last name Maes.  Many recognized the name as Latino in Colorado and whether I was or not did not seem to matter to them.  That was enough for some.  But it all changed when the third party candidate [Tancredo] got closer to jumping into the race.  I started to get phone calls… from people asking about my ethnicity.  Hostile voices accused me of being Mexican, as if that were a crime in itself.  A couple of my supporters who were past supporters of the third party candidate specifically asked me what my ethnicity was before they tentatively supported me only to leave me when the new arrival came to the race.  

Not giving up

Somos Republicans Colorado State Director Steve Rodriguez told the Independent that he has experienced serious push-back in response to the group’s Hasan campaign. Republicans are reportedly telling him to ease off the message because it will only damage the party. He won’t be dissuaded. He ran for a state House seat in 2010 and felt the sting of bigotry. He argued against a biased roster of experts put together for a hearing on immigration reform by Colorado Republican lawmakers in the fall. And he believes now is the time to act, when the heated immigration debate is set to start again in Colorado with the opening of the legislative session this week. He said there is still plenty of room for good policy proposals on the right and that his group is determined to place them onto the table.

“We want a complete immigration overhaul,” Garcia Blase said. “Democratic leadership told Hispanic Democrats not even to bring up immigration reform until 2013. They told the DREAM Act advocates, don’t bring it up anymore. There’s nothing coming on that side of the aisle.

“[Somos Republicans] wants to handle immigration reform in a free-market way. We’re not for the restrictionist, isolationist approach. The American economy relies on immigrant labor. Let’s look at it seriously. Let’s secure the borders and let’s ask industries — the construction industry, the agricultural industry, the dairy farms — let’s get an honest count of the immigrant labor they need and set up guest-worker programs that work. We’re for a path to citizenship. Let’s have people who are here to work acknowledge that they’re here illegally and pay a fine for committing a civil misdemeanor offense and let’s get them out of the shadows.”

Somos is looking for Republican leaders to take up the case and stand strong against bigotry, but major Colorado Republican Party and conservative politics backer Seeme Hasan, Ali’s mother, seems doubtful that those kind of leaders will emerge anytime soon.

On guard against Trojan Horses

At the Facebook comments thread snaking off of Maes’s entry on racism and the 2010 election, Seeme Hasan felt compelled to weigh in with three posts that suggest how difficult she thinks it is for minority candidates to gain support from Republican voters in the state. Complaints always come in that minority candidates haven’t been fully vetted, she writes, based primarily on the fact that they’re not Christian or have brown skin.

Ali has been interacting with Republicans from the day he was born. First Pueblo County and then Eagle County and for the last three years he had spoken at almost every Republican Breakfast or Lunch club and most County Central Committees. How much more can you vet a person? Steven [Rodriguez] who ran in Pueblo for a House District Seat as a Republican has been involved in the County forever and yet he was prejudiced against. How much more vetting did he need? Mark Hotlzman who was running for Governor, same thing, the moment people found out he was Jewish, they started attacking him. He had worked harder than anyone for the party. How much vetting did he need?

It’s not vetting. Problem is when you are a minority the Republican leadership does not want you to win an election. They start rumors, which people … believe.

If the Republican Party alienates longtime hardcore supporters like Seeme Hasan, it’s tough to see how it will ever win over and retain rank-and-file minority voters.

“Let me tell you it was a humiliating experience as a Muslim to walk out of that [state GOP] Convention in Loveland Colorado,” Seeme Hasan writes in another comment. Ali Hasan told the Independent that the Loveland convention was the site of a whisper campaign that argued the Koran instructs Muslims to lie and so he couldn’t be trusted to be treasurer or even to explain his own religious views. The passage in question apparently concerns a Shia tenet, , taqqiya, that allows believers to hide their faith if they feel threatened.

Seeme Hasan continued:

It was made clear to us that, as Muslims, we are not accepted. That is why I told Ali, leave this party because you have no future here, they will not even listen to you. I could not believe how Republicans were behaving.

I noticed when I gave over Three Million Dollars to make the Malik and Seeme Hasan School of Business, no one complained. When I gave more than a million dollars during the eight years of Bush to both national and state candidates, no one fussed. When I paid for free concerts all over Eagle County every summer for the last fifteen years, there was no protest. When I gave thousands of dollars in contributions to my Eagle County Republican party, no one protested. The moment my son ran for an election, suddenly there was howling and protesting from every County. Tell me this was not prejudiced. Colorado Republicans don’t want Muslims, don’t want Jews, don’t want Latinos? What do you want? Let’s be honest and up-front…

The very next comment, a response penned by a Connie Mason Bennett, asked readers if they had “ever heard of a trojan horse.” She later expanded on the idea by adding that “everyone needs to read the Koran … Then you will know a little more than what you have been told. Then do a little research on something called taqiyya. Open your eyes…”

Nohavec-Fink told the Independent that she doesn’t really believe Hasan was ever a Republican, not in his heart, despite his strong fiscal-conservative views, his standing up for the Bush administration policy on terrorism and in the Middle East and the long support of his family for conservative causes.

“I’ve watched him,” she told the Independent. “I gave Ali a fair chance but when you watch someone for a long time, you can see how they act, you can tell where they really stand.”

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Conservative Latino organization Somos Republicans, which has battled the rise of what it sees as bigoted, big-government positions on immigration among Republican leaders, is courting high-profile Colorado Republican Party defector Muhammad Ali Hasan. The group Monday asked Hasan not to become a Democrat, as he announced he would do last month, but to work with Somos Republicans and its supporters to “change the Republican Party from within.”

“We can identify with Hasan on many levels with regard to attacks launched by extremists who are attempting to hijack our Party,” the group said in a release. “These segregationist thinkers have launched attacks on immigrants, minorities, Muslims…  [W]e must all pull together and thwart these restrictionists from our Party – and we hope to begin this movement with Muhammad Ali Hasan.”

The Colorado Independent broke news last month that Hasan, who was raised in Pueblo and who has now added “Miguel” to his name to signal identification with Latino Americans, has grown increasingly disenchanted with the Republican party his wealthy family has famously supported over the last several decades.

Hasan ran as a Republican for a state House seat in 2008 and for state treasurer in 2010. He said anti-Muslim bigotry among Republican voters and party delegates colored each of the races on some level and that the rhetoric employed by GOP leaders in discussing gay rights, immigration reform and the proposed lower Manhattan Cordoba Center or “Ground Zero Mosque” last year suggested the party had moved away from the ideals of liberty, equality and opportunity that inspire him and continue to shape his politics. In November, Hasan met with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and she won him over. Hasan said he thought Pelosi was steely in her convictions and recalled that she called for investigations of the people opposed to the Cordoba group’s right to build its community center in New York. When so many national Republican figures were all falling like dominos behind the hate rhetoric, Pelosi stood up for the Constitution. “She was a total gangster,” he said.

Steve Rodriguez, Colorado director for Somos Republicans, said Hasan’s story struck a chord among Conservative Latinos. Rodriguez told the Colorado Independent that he has been personally battling GOP leaders recently for letting bigotry shape the debate over immigration reform in the state.

“Let’s just say people involved in the party here have told me to leave the party. They don’t like my views on the rhetoric they’re using. They see me as being soft on immigration. But across the country we’ve had GOP officials call Hispanics rabbits and cockroaches… I’m not going to be bashful about being opposed to that… Our group wants to root out that kind of rhetoric and the people behind it. We want to root them out of the party and not let them root us out of the party.”

Hasan sent a response in Spanish and English to Somos soon after the group brought out its release.

“This is a bitter sweet invitation,” he wrote at the group’s Facebook page. “My decision was never easy. In my heart and my blood, I believe in a government that is very small, and a United States that gives liberty to all. These were the promises of Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton ( my favor Founder).

“I will always hope that the GOP will [work] towards a destiny of liberty—liberty for immigrants, Muslims, gays, for everyone. For now, it is more important, for me, to work for causes that will benefit the liberties of the immigrants and gays, in addition to a fiscal conservatism. To me, these causes are more important than saving the GOP. For me, the most important cause is to save the GOP. **

I love my brothers and sisters of Somos Republicans—I, Miguel Ali, am your brother forever!”

The Republican Study Committee immigration meeting

Rodriguez said tensions escalated between himself and state party leaders this fall when the Republican Study Committee announced that GOP legislators in Colorado intended to introduce Arizona SB 1070-style immigration laws here. Study Committee lawmakers such as Sen. Kevin Lundberg organized a public meeting at the state capitol in November to discuss immigration in advance of drafting the legislation. As the Colorado Independent reported at the time, the so-called experts tapped to speak at the meeting, however, were all supporters of new more punitive Arizona-style laws. Two of the eight speakers at the meeting represented groups founded by white supremacist John Tanton, including the controversial Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Rodriguez said he voiced his concerns at the time about the meeting’s proposed roster of speakers but that those concerns went unheeded.

“I refused to go to the meeting. The agenda was clear. They said they were trying to be fair,” Rodriguez laughed. “I said there was nothing fair about what they were doing. FAIR is not the kind of group you call to lead a genuine discussion in Colorado. We want people to have a balanced view. [Colorado Republican leaders] don’t want to have that conversation.”

Rodirguez said his group doesn’t want to leave immigration reform to the Democrats but that it can’t leave it to extremist Republicans either. “We’re letting Tom Tancredo– who is not even a Republican– define who is Republican,” he said.

“They just want us to keep our mouths shut and vote,” national Somos Republicans Director Dee Dee Garcia Blase told the Independent. She said her group is encouraging Latinos to become GOP party precinct captains and delegates.

The Somos release today described a strategy that would seek to, in effect, marginalize the marginalizers.

“We call upon the Colorado State Party Chair, Dick Wadhams, to invite Muhammad Ali Hasan back to our Party as a signal that bigotry should have no place within the GOP.  The vile rhetoric espoused by Tom Tancredo caused a massive exodus of Hispanics and the loss of the Gubernatorial and Senate races as they voted overwhelmingly against him during the 2010 Mid-term elections.  In 2008, Tancredo’s anti-immigrant rhetoric propelled over 200,000 brand new Hispanic voters to vote Democrat. As a result, we believe that a serious effort to box these extremists into a corner is the first and right direction to prevent more exoduses of all minorities to the Democrat Party.”

On rooting out bigotry

Hasan agrees with Somos that bigotry has no place in the party and he has accordingly made gay rights a major platform in his politics. It’s a subject area that will have to be hashed out between Hasan and Somos before they join forces to box out the Tancredoists.

Rodriguez and Garcia Blase agreed that, while the group favors full civil rights for gay people, it also strongly supports “traditional” views of marriage.

“We fully support civil unions,” Garcia Blase told the Independent. “We believe gay people should have full rights… But right now, we’re not tackling the gay issue.”

 Rodriguez said he thinks gay rights and immigration rights are “different matters.”

“I’m a conservative Christian,” he said. “I’m for equal rights but not for special rights. I don’t put [bigotry against gays] in the same category as bigotry against people of color.”

He said he very much looked forward to debating the points with Hasan.

“Democrats don’t agree on anything. Republicans can disagree and still be Republicans. What we’re looking for is officials who will take our interests to heart. They’re not doing that.”

**NOTE: Ali Hasan wrote to clarify the message he sent to Somos Republicans. (See his note in the comment thread below.) Saving the GOP, he writes, is less important to him than working to advance the causes he is backing. Hasan reports that he sent the note in Spanish and Somos Republicans provided the English-language translation.

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Scanlan, a Dillon resident, last month won the HD56 seat she was first appointed to in 2007, but resigned to serve as Governor-elect John Hickenlooper’s director of legislative affairs and strategic initiatives. On Sunday a 15-member vacancy committee appointed Summit School District superintendent Millie Hamner to fill the seat.

Hasan, who beat Scanlan in his home Eagle County in 2008 but lost to her in Summit and Lake County and ultimately overall, recently told The Colorado Independent (TCI) he is leaving the Republican Party because of the bigotry he believes has shaped GOP politics over the last year.

Asked if he’ll try again in HD56, this time as a Democrat, Hasan said he has other plans.

“I will definitely not be running for House District 56,” Hasan said in an email. “My film career is going well, and I plan to register to vote, in the coming months, either in California or New Mexico. I really don’t know what my political future holds. All I know is that I’ll be helping the Democrats in New Mexico and California, as well as promoting my new group, Constitutionalists For Gays & Immigrants.”

Hasan said Republicans don’t have much of a shot in the formerly conservative Eagle County area, where he said he would have a much better chance as a Democrat.

“I was proud to carry the Republican flag in 2008 and I would never change a thing about the past,” Hasan wrote. “That said, HD56 is a very blue district. Yes, it is fiscal conservative, but Republicans, like with many districts, have alienated the voters of HD56 with their social issues. Personally, I don’t know of many Republicans who could win HD56.”

Scanlan was a potential speaker of the House candidate until the Republicans took back the state House last month. She was picked to replace former state Rep. Dan Gibbs in 2007 when he was named to the state Senate District 16 seat vacated by former state Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, who quit to unsuccessfully run against U.S. Rep. Jared Polis. Democrat Jeanne Nicholson narrowly beat back arch-conservative Tea Party favorite Tim Leonard in SD16 last month.

“I learned everything from Dan and we’ll pass it on to Millie,” Scanlan told the Summit Daily News. Hasan clearly holds no lingering ill will after his hard-fought 2008 battle with Scanlan. He says there’s no chance she knew she’d be offered a cabinet post with Hickenlooper and ran for re-election anyway.

“First off, Hickenlooper’s victory was not a guarantee, as many polls showed [American Constitution Party candidate Tom] Tancredo rising. Second, I am convinced that Scanlan was offered the job after Hickenlooper starting putting his transition team together,” Hasan said.

“Christine Scanlan is an honorable person and I would never imagine her accepting a job while knowingly running for office. That’s not like her, and any characterization of that would be unfair, in my opinion.”

In other State Legislature news, the Denver Post today reported primary care Dr. Irene Aguilar was appointed by a vacancy committee Monday night to fill the seat of outgoing state Sen. Chris Romer, a Denver Democrat and the son of former Gov. Roy Romer. Chris Romer, who is running for the Denver mayoral seat being vacated by Hickenlooper, recently did a sit-down interview with TCI.

Aguilar, according to the Post, beat out state Rep. Beth McCann by a 2-to-1 margin in the final vote.

Also Monday, Hickenlooper named Ken Lund as his Chief Legal Counsel. In a release from Hickenlooper’s office, Lund is described as “the firm-wide Managing Partner of Holme Roberts & Owen in Denver … responsible for the articulation, development and implementation of the law firm’s client service and engagement strategy.”

“While leaving a great organization like HRO is bittersweet, the opportunity to work with John Hickenlooper and the team he is building is very compelling,” Lund said in the release.

Ali Hasan

Against this backdrop, you want reporters to cover the story about a pastor threatening to burn a Quran. I know it becomes a spectacle when you see the small-time religious figure hopping from one national media appearance to another, but I’d rather see stories like that overplayed than ignored.

Denver’s media should take extra steps to air out signs of bigotry toward Muslims in our own community. The stories are out there, I’m sure. They just have to be told.

Here’s the kind of story I mean.

In an Aug. 2 column in the Huffington Post, Colorado Republican Ali Hasan asked his “fellow conservatives” to “quit lying.”

“If you are against the mosque,” he wrote, “then call yourself a bigot and give us the gift of an honest dialogue, the kind we carry on so proudly here in America.”

As you might imagine, this wasn’t received very well in GOP circles, and the anger reverberated on talk radio, blogs, and, of course, Facebook.

Writing on her friend Nikki Mata’s Facebook page the day Hasan’s column appeared, prominent 912 activist Virginia Young expressed her view.

Young is the founder of the IN GOD WE TRUST 912 PROJECT and the Broomfield 912 Project , which is apparently one of the most influential 912 groups in Colorado. Tea Party groups like hers had a major impact on the Republican Party this election cycle, producing GOP candidates like Ken Buck and Dan Maes.

“I am bigot,” she wrote. “Latisha I am still waiting after 9 years for American Muslims to take to the streets and denounce the events of 9/11. Why hasn’t that happened? Taqiyya perhaps?”

Latisha’s post, to which Young was responding, stated, “I am a Republican and I do not have a big issue with the mosque being built near Ground Zero. It is simply place of prayer. I DO NOT agree with calling people bigots just because they don’t agree with you…”

Young had a different view, and as a 912 leader in Denver, her opinion means something. Was she serious? Is she a bigot? What did she mean?

I emailed her to find out. I asked to interview her about the mosque issue.

Salzman [Sept 1]: I have a copy of something you apparently wrote on Nikki’s Facebook page. I spoke with Nikki about her comments. I’d like to discuss yours with you.

Young [minutes later]: Please forward a copy to me.

Salzman: [an hour later}: You wrote…“I am a bigot,” and a few other comments. I don’t want to report this without hearing what you have to say about it.

Young [minutes later]: Oh yes, I said I guess I am a bigot then, if that is what Ali Hasan defines us as, if I oppose the Mosque at Ground Zero. What are your thoughts on the Ground Zero Mosque?

Salzman [minutes later]: Where does ground zero mean to you? Do you think mosques should be built anywhere in America?

Young: No response

Salzman [next day]: Did you get this? Thanks.

Young: [no response]

Salzman [a few days later]: Before I publish your “bigot” comment, I hope you’ll give me a more detailed response than you’ve provided below. I want to be fair to you. I also hope you’ll explain the rest of your facebook comment, “Latisha I am still waiting after 9 years for American Muslims to take to the streets and denounce the events of 9/11. Why hasn’t that happened? Taqiyya perhaps?”

If you’d like to talk on the phone, just let me know.

In any case, I hope you’ll have time to drop me a quick explanatory note.

So that was about a week ago, and I haven’t heard back from Young. So I don’t think she wants to converse about it anymore, do you?

But Young’s Facebook friend, Mata, who also wrote in the Facebook conversation that she was a bigot, but with less severe overtones, readily explained herself to me in a phone interview.

“I was being facetious,” she said immediately, explaining that she’s against the mosque personally but doesn’t believe the government should stop it.

“The backers of the mosque say they want to do outreach,” she told me. “If you want to do outreach, that indicates that you want to foster good feelings, but if depending the poll if 60-70 percent are opposed to what your doing, how does that foster positive feelings?”

“If it puts people in such an uproar, aren’t you undermining what you are trying to accomplish?” she said, adding that she does not oppose the construction of mosques elsewhere in America.

But plenty of other Americans do. Even if you don’t follow this issue very closely, you probably remember last month’s Economist poll with these shocking results:

* 14 percent of Americans believe no mosques should be built.
* 80 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Islam.
* 48 percent agree that “there are some places in the United States where it is not appropriate to build mosques, though it would be appropriate for other religions to build houses of worship.”

Commenting on the poll last month, The Denver Post’s Mike Litwin wrote:

There’s bigotry at work — bigotry that needs to be called out — but it’s not exactly old-line religious bigotry. We were attacked by radical Islamists. There are many radical Islamists who say they want to see America destroyed. We have been fighting for nearly a decade against Islamic terrorists but also fighting on the same side as Muslims.

It’s confusing. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Just as obviously, Islam is not a monolith. As far as anyone knows, there are no terrorists involved in the Lower Manhattan mosque/community center/swimming pool. In any case, the hard part of freedom of religion comes when the religion is not popular.

In this blog post, I’m calling out Tea Party leader Virginia Young for being a bigot, until she directly states otherwise. I take Niki Mata at her word that she’s not. I believe her.

Littwin is right that bigotry should be called out. We owe to Muslims and of course we owe it to ourselves and to this country.

It’s also why I called Phil Wolf, who owns the Wheat Ridge car dealership that erected a billboard last year showing President Obama dressed in a turban and stating, “President or Jihad.” His billboard got a lot of attention, as it should have. I had been wanting to call him for a long time to find out if he was a bigot.

I asked Wolf if he supports the construction of mosques in Denver.

“We got to identify who the enemy is,” he said. “If the activity of the enemy is building mosques, they shouldn’t be allowed.”

I asked him if he thinks Islam is the enemy.

“That’s what’s out there,” he said. “That’s the public perception. As far as the public knowledge is concerned, they are. And if they are, there should be zero tolerance. We should go back to what happened during World War II. Look what happened to the Japanese. And guess what? There’s a lot of wonderful Muslim and Japanese people. But we didn’t tolerate the enemy. We just don’t call anybody the enemy anymore.”

Wolf is planning to unveil a new billboard at his dealership along I-70 in the next few months. Its theme will reflect what he told me above in my interview. And he had a lot more to say in a similar vein.

I hope 912 activist Virginia Young and other Tea Party leaders will join me in protesting Wolf’s offensive views, and his new billboard.

And I hope Wolf’s story, and other signs of bigotry in America, get the media

Yet an actual real-life high-profile Colorado Muslim, Seeme Hasan, the major Republican donor and friend to Republican leaders for years, said she thinks Obama is anti-Muslim, which is one of the few reasons she’s not defecting from what she sees as the knee-jerk opportunistic bigotry of the new Palin-Gingrich GOP.

This is what Seeme Hasan told TPM Thursday:

Hasan says at this point, Republican politicians [like Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck] have little choice but to join the GOP in opposing Cordoba House, and she understands that.

“I would tell him to go ahead and be against it. I did not support it when the top people started this. I did not support that,” Hasan said. “Newt and Sarah Palin and all the others made it so the rest of the Republicans have no choice.”

[...]

Though she called into question whether or not she’ll remain in the Republican party, Hasan said that in any case it will be difficult, if not impossible, for her to be as supportive of the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012 as she was of George W. Bush in 2000. She says she has only one reason to suspect she’ll put a great deal of effort into defeating Barack Obama: His policies are perhaps more anti-Muslim, Hasan says, as Bush’s were. “It’s like my son says, he’s been more hawkish than Dick Cheney.”

Seeme’s son Ali–screenwriter, comedian and former candidate for Colorado Treasurer– has been similarly frustrated by the “Ground Zero mosque” debate. He recently blogged at the Huffington Post that government leaders in New York are practicing a form of illegal racist “redlining” in preparing to offer developers of the Park 51 Cordoba House or “Ground Zero Mosque” project a free parcel of land in Manhattan far away from the World Trade Center area.

In the 1960s and 70s, he writes, the government built new housing projects where rent was cheap and effectively pushed nonwhites into certain parts of the city by encouraging them to live in the projects and surrounding neighborhoods:

Documented cases show mortgage and loan companies often steering African-Americans and minorities into housing projects, concentrating them far from “white” neighborhoods. Once placed in such projects, minority populations were aggressively redlined, with banks denying mortgage and business loans that would help minorities leave, sometimes only on the basis of geography.

[...]

So allow us to review – [Congressman] Peter King and [Governor] David Paterson are suddenly offering a group of minorities (Muslims) a free piece of land – a ‘sweetheart’ deal of compassion – in exchange for their permanently leaving a major business section of Manhattan and never coming back?

America, we have seen this before.

Many predicted this was the year Republicans were going to take back seats in swing-state Colorado, but any gains may be short term, at least from a demographic perspective. The leading conservative Hasans have nearly had enough, and the political leadership on the right– including gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo and the members of the Republican Study Committee this week gaining press for traveling to Arizona together to celebrate that state’s new controversial immigration law – are surely giving even conservative Latinos reason to vote Democrat.

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Hasan is talking about Park Place, the famous three-block-long lower Manhattan stretch that will now give the proposed Cordoba community center and mosque its name: 51 Park Place. That address is blocks from Ground Zero and, as some have pointed out, two blocks in Manhattan is the equivalent of whole miles anywhere else in the country.

Other active Colorado Republican tweeters, like state Senator Greg Brophy, are just plain offended by the mosque proposal and tweet that the designation “hallowed ground” is all the legal protection required to guard against the offending proposal.

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But there are no tax cuts. There are only Doug Bruce-backed anti-tax proposals– Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101– that are strongly opposed by the vast majority of lawmakers and politicians on all sides of the political spectrum.

Doug Bruce

“Just one of these initiatives would alter state government,” said Gov. Bill Ritter last December. “We’re talking about an estimated $1.2 billion drop in revenue after years already of cutting services. The amount the initiatives propose to cut would slice into our higher education budget by a factor of two. Something would have to simply go away.”

Defeated GOP candidate for governor Scott McInnis broke a long silence on the initiatives in the spring to agree with Ritter, saying that the “math simply doesn’t add up.”

The members of the official coalition created in opposition to the three initiatives, Coloradans for Responsible Reform, are all on record and have been open about the money they are giving to the cause. They are, as Hoover reports, “heavy hitters in the business community, nonprofit world and organized-labor sector.” The coalition has raised more than $4 million.

The other side has been less open by a long shot. Proponents of the measures were reportedly steered by Bruce, the controversial anti-government father of the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Bruce likely authored the initiatives without putting his name on them and he appears to have paid petition circulators without disclosing the payments. He also seems to have tampered with witnesses called to testify about the initiatives in a campaign finance trial this spring.

At the end of July, the political issue committee that supports the initiatives, CO Tax Reform, reported only $12,000 in contributions, of which the conservative Hasan family donated $10,000. Ali Hasan contributed $5,000 and his mother, Seeme Hasan, contributed $5,000.

“[Doug Bruce] is one of the finest conservatives since Ronald Reagan,” Ali Hasan told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “I love him like a family member and he loves me very much.”

Opposing the initiatives, as Hoover reports, there are plenty of state employee unions but there are also bond dealers, bankers, the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Southeast Business Partnership. Those businesses and business leaders aren’t looking to “defeat tax cuts.” They’re looking to “maintain the status quo,” they told Hoover, which means paying already low taxes to support basic public services essential to thriving business, services that include roads and schools and police and fire protection.

Kate Horle, spokeswoman for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, said the businesses she represents were frustrated at having to help beat back the anti-tax initiatives but they clearly found the fight essential.

“Would we rather be spending half a million dollars on boosting Colorado’s economy? Absolutely,” she said. “You can employ people for that. You can give people raises for that. It’s unfortunate.”

Suggested alternative headlines for Hoover’s story: “Business leaders join coalition to defeat tax-slashing ballot initiatives.” Or: “Business leaders say proposed anti-tax initiatives have already cost Colorado jobs.”

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