So Muhammad Ali Hasan,twice an unsuccessful Republican candidate (treasurer this year, legislature in 2008) says he is done with the GOP and now getting chummy with Nancy Pelosi. "GOP Loses Hasan," the headline says. No, I would say a better term would be the GOP has finally gotten rid of the man!
In light of world-wide Islamic Jihadist violence, Mr Hasan's continual whining about Muslim "persecution and discrimination" has worn a little thin. To disagree with him in any way is to trigger shrieks of "racism", which is no more than meaningless name calling. After all, Islam is a belief attribute, NOT a biological one.
He says the GOP doesn't "work for immigrants and Muslims". If he means we object to flooding our country with illegal immigrants, and fail to continually kow tow to "Muslim sensibilities", which means the implementation of their Shari'ah Law to our own detriment, then Mr Hasan is correct.
For him to say he has no knowledge of Muslim persecution of gays or the Qur'anic concept of Taqqiya (permissible lying) is beyond belief! Does Mr. Hasan really think that if he ignores it, it will go away?
The release of the information about Mr McInnis' business dealings with the Hasan family was precisely timed to destroy Mr McInnis' bid for Governor and throw the race to the Democrats. It's hard to see how the Hasan family has been much of a Republican asset.
Here is the story in full:
Colorado GOP loses Hasan
Colorado Independent by John Tomasic on 12/9/10
http://coloradoindependent.com/69449/colorado-gop-loses-hasan
Muhammad Ali Hasan, a member of the wealthy and influential Colorado
Republican Hasan family and a past state House and treasurer candidate,
said he is switching parties. Speaking at the University of
Colorado-Boulder on his experience growing up Muslim in the American
West and later in conversation with the Colorado Independent, Hasan
said he is ending his affiliation with the party for the bigotry he
believes has shaped Republican politics over the last year. The FOX
News regular and founder of Muslims for Bush said he met recently with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the controversial Democratic leader won
him over.
“I met her in Los Angeles. For a Republican that’s like He-Man [meeting
with] Skeletor,” he said, referencing the Masters of the Universe
cartoon arch-enemies. “I am impressed by her vision. She convinced me
that the Democrats will work to protect and further the interests and
opportunities of minority Americans. That matched with the politics of
Reagan for me. He was a champion of the American dream, the idea of
America as a shining city on a hill. He expanded opportunities through
small business credits and amnesty for immigrants. It was all about
opportunity.
“I have three top political heroes: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and
now Nancy Pelosi. She has such a spine, like Reagan and Bush, they all
have that in common: a spine of steel that comes from conviction.”
Major financial backers of conservative causes and candidates in the
state and friends to national GOP leaders and successive Republican
presidential administrations, the Hasans have publicly struggled with
the post-Bush Palin-era GOP. Matriarch Seeme Hasan during the “Ground
Zero Mosque” debate said she didn’t recognize the party. Ali Hasan’s
defection comes in the wake of news that state GOP lawmakers will
introduce tough Arizona-style immigration legislation and held a high
profile hearing on the topic with a slanted roster of experts that
featured almost no immigrant rights groups but several with ties to
white supremecist organizations.
A hardline fiscal conservative and champion of Constitutional equality,
Hasan says Republicans have merely paid lip service to the former and
have effectively come to oppose the latter.
“Look at what the state Republican party thinks of Doug Bruce,” he said
referring to the controversial anti-tax crusading author of Colorado’s
Taxpayer Bill of Rights. “And there is no record of fiscal
conservativism on the federal level. So that’s one side and then I
think ‘I believe in the American dream for everyone and which party is
fighting for immigrants, gays, Muslims?’ The GOP has attacked them.
Democrats want to work for them. ”
State convention whisper campaign
Hasan said he felt alienated between national Republican leaders on one
side railing against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and gays and
illegal immigrants and, on the other, state Republican delegates
convinced that as a candidate for treasurer he was angling to install
sharia finance laws. He said the GOP convention in May was a low point.
“You experience bigotry sometimes but I often just think it’s probably
my personality that the person doesn’t like. At the convention, though,
that was the first time I felt the real thing. It was the worst
experience of my life.”
Hasan suspects a whisper campaign swept the convention, sounding a
warning against placing a Muslim in charge of investing the state’s
revenues.
“Some goons were telling people that there’s a passage in the Koran
that encourages Muslims to lie, that lying is considered a good thing
in the service of advancing a Muslim or sharia agenda. I don’t know who
was behind the rumor, but I’ve read the Koran, and I don’t know what
they were talking about.”
Hasan said in the run up to the convention he personally called the
3,500 delegates and talked to roughly 1,500 who said he could count on
their vote.
He said he ran this “informal survey” through his pollster and the
numbers made sense because Hasan was getting heavy support from the
Western Slope where he lives and has been active while his opponent,
J.J. Ament, was pulling well from the eastern Front Range districts.
“In the end, we guessed we’d get 40 percent support at the convention
as a basement estimate.”
That didn’t happen. Hasan drew roughly 20 percent of delegate support,
missing the cut off to make the ballot by 10 percent.
He said the weekend of the convention he watched hundreds of supporters
fall away. Delegate after delegate approached him and mentioned the
Koran and said in so many words that they weren’t sure they could trust
him.
“It hurt. People who had said they were voting for me were now coming
up to me and saying ‘You know, I hear you could be lying to us.’ I was
shocked. I got the courage to approach some of them, people I had
talked to and who said they were voting for me. Here they were wearing
J.J. Ament stickers. I was like, you know, wow, and they said ‘But how
do I know you’re not going to assert some form of sharia law against
Colorado?’”
Hasan said he was deflated after talking to one woman at length.
“I told her I started Muslims for Bush. I’m proud of that. I told her I
have been a vocal fiscal conservative for years. I said I’ve given to
Republican candidates on the federal and state level. I helped get
Republican candidates elected to House seats in 2008 when Democrats
were winning everything… Finally I asked her ‘There’s nothing I can say
to win your vote because my name is Muhammad, am I right?’ and she said
‘Yeah, that’s probably right.’”
Hasan said he met time and again with Republican voters and leaders
across the state in campaigning for treasurer and that “in groups of
20, the fact that my name is Muhammad was never a bad thing, but at the
convention, there were 5,000 people who were all suddenly suspicious of
Muslims.”
As the Colorado Independent reported at the time, the Ament campaign
clearly traded on anti-muslim sentiment or at least on domestic fears
of Muslim rule in the Mahgreb. Ament claimed in campaign literature,
for instance, that Hasan would lift Colorado overseas invest
restrictions and put taxpayer cash to work for the “genocidal regime in
Sudan” and to further Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Yet Hasan said he doesn’t blame Ament for what happened at the
convention. The thing that got him, he said, was that GOP delegates
were so willing to believe the ridiculous rumors.
In fact, he said, he shouldn’t have been surprised.
Muslim cowboy
Hasan said that when he was considering running for House District
56three years ago, an adviser told him that his being Muslim was much
less an issue than the fact that he was a filmmaker and not a rancher.
“You gotta go work on a ranch to be able to relate to these people,”
the adviser told him. So Hasan did. Dressed in a suit, cowboy boots and
matching turquoise bolo tie and enormous belt buckle, Hasan said he is
proud of the work he did just bringing salt licks out to the animals
and watching the weather.
“What I learned is that a cowboy is a person who says the same thing no
matter the setting. I also learned that nature is the same way, honest.”
In 2008, Muhammad Ali the Rancher won the support of lots of voters on
the Western Slope. He lost to Democrat Christine Scanlan by a few
percentage points, and the problem, he said, was Republicans.
“I would have won if not for Republicans. Polling was through the roof
with independents and we made huge inroads with Democrats. But we never
broke 65 percent with Republicans, who cast between 90 percent and 95
percent for [U.S. Senate candidate Bob] Schaffer and [presidential
candidate John] McCain. You need that 90 percent to win.
“Republican voters cost us 56. I should have learned from that.”
The “Ground Zero Mosque”
Hasan said that although his experience at the convention was
dispiriting, it wasn’t actually a turning point. He said he’s forever
grateful to the 20 percent delegates who voted for him and who wore
HASAN tee-shirts around the convention and notes that in the weeks
after the convention he enthusiastically endorsed GOP primary winner
Walker Stapleton and gave generously to GOP candidates across the state.
It was national politics that set him over the edge.
“When Bush left, it seems like a vacuum opened up and into it rushed
bigotry.”
He ticks off topics that have shaped national GOP politics this year:
Support for anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California; Arizona’s
tough SB1070 immigration law; support for repealing the naturalized
citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment; and what he calls “the
Mosque issue.”
He said he couldn’t believe the way the plans to build the Cordoba
Center Mosque escalated.
“I dismissed it as a joke. It was crazy people. Then it was one
Republican leader after another looking to strip Constitutional rights
out of just bigotry.”
He pointed out the change that had come over leaders like Newt Gingrich
and Sarah Palin, onetime Muslim defenders, he said, whom he now sees on
this topic as the worst kind of pandering politicians.
“The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ was never about the mosque, which was really
just a health club, a swimming pool…. That was all about rallying the
base.”
He eventually wrote a popular blog on the topic for the Huffington Post
comparing the move to ban the mosque to so-called red-lining racist
zoning laws in the pre-Civil Rights era.
“I was okay after the convention. I decided all that was just an
aberration and that I would just let it fade. But the 14th Amendment
debate, the ugly mosque politics, that just killed my hopes.”
The Polis-Pelosi connection
In the wake of the mosque flap, Hasan said he emailed his friend
Congressman Jared Polis, a man he said he has admired for years.
“If you want to convince me to become a Democrat, you have your chance.”
Polis said he had someone he wanted Hasan to talk to and then he set up
the meeting with Pelosi.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’m not a socialist, so I don’t think I
can be a Democrat,’” Hasan said, joking. “But Nancy Pelosi’s people
called me up and said she wanted to meet with me and I talked about it
with my mom. She said ‘Baby, when the third most powerful person in the
world asks you to join her party, you better think about it.’”
Hasan said his mother said she was committed to the Republican party
because she wants to work to change it but she told Hasan that his
opportunities lie with the Democrats. “You can’t win office as a
Republican,” she told him. “You deserve a chance to win.”
Hasan said he knows he has to put in the same “blood and sweat” for the
Democratic party now that he has put into the Republican party over the
years. He’s looking at running again for office in six to eight years.
He said he’s “thinking in election cycles.” His first step is going to
be to form a group to fight to protect the rights of and expand
opportunities for minorities.
“If we fight on a Constitutional basis and not on emotion, we will
win,” he said. “I don’t defend Muslims because I’m Muslim. I’m not even
a good Muslim. I’m a sinner. I’m a political hack and an interfaith
practitioner…. I defend Muslims because I stand against bigotry,
because I don’t want bigotry to exist.”
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