From Salon.com
Newsmax columnist says she’s not welcome at this year’s conservative confab… and blames Grover Norquist?
March 4, 2013
Anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller has been turned away from the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), despite speaking at the event for the past four years, she says. “This year, I applied to speak and was ignored,” she wrote on her blog. “So, for the first time in five years, I won’t be at CPAC.”
CPAC is the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the country, and one of the few places where conservative politicians, movement leaders, media personalities, and big donors all come together under one roof. But it is no stranger to civil warring and backbiting over snubbed invitations. This year, it barred gay groups and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
And it’s also not the first time the conservative leaders who control CPAC have tried to keep the unseemly anti-Muslim fringe out of view. In 2010, as I reported, the organizationbanned Frank Gaffney, the man behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s anti-Muslim witch hunt, who had accused GOP activists Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan of being agents for the Muslim Brotherhood. A year later, the board of the group that runs CPAC passed a unanimous resolution condemning Gaffney.
Now, it seems to have caught up to Geller. She blamed the snub on “the Grover Norquist/Suhail Khan cabal,” noting she had written several critical stories about Norquist. “As soon as I published my Newsmax column concerning his perfidious influence at CPAC, my Newsmax column was taken down and my name and picture were removed from the Newsmax page… it was two slots away from Grover’s. My weekly column never appeared at Newsmax again. It was axed,” she alleged.
