A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday on charges of working for an alleged terrorist fundraising ring that sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.
Mark Deli Siljander, a Michigan Republican when he was in the House, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about being hired to lobby senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.
It gets weirder:
Siljander was elected to Congress initially with the support of fundamentalist Christian groups, and said at the time he won because "God wanted me in." In 1983, he claimed that "Arab terrorists" planned to kill him during a pro-Jewish rally; the FBI and Secret Service said they knew of no such plot. Siljander attended the rally wearing a bulletproof vest.
After leaving the government, he founded the Washington-area consulting group Global Strategies Inc. and, according to the indictment, was hired by IARA in March 2004 to lobby the Senate Finance Committee to remove the charity from the panel's list of suspected terror fundraisers.
I post this story not because I think it reflects upon the GOP's general involvement with terrorist groups—obviously, it doesn't. I post it because I think it might make for an interesting test case for how the national media reacts to a Republican official engaged in openly supporting illegal terrorist activity.
Keep your eyes and ears open over the next few days for how not only the mainstream print and tv media outlets report on this story, but also how the right-wing media covers it—if they bother to at all.
It goes without saying that they would treat a former Democratic congressman quite differently than they will this guy. I just want to see how egregiously they downplay or ignore the story of a Christian conservative who turned to the dark side of "Islamofascism".
(BTW, Spell Check didn't know what the hell "Islamofascism" was. Good for you, Spell Check. Good for you.)
