Though Democrats in Virginia are generally more fiscally conservative than their brethren in such tax-and-spend environs as Massachusetts or New York, some issues require them to adopt the boilerplate liberal platitudes and positions.  Immigration is one of them.  Islam is another.  Together, the two are a ticking time bomb, perhaps literally.  The governor of Virginia is a Catholic named Tim Kaine, and, in September, those issues blew up in his face.

The commonwealth had concocted a useless something called the Commission on Immigration.  You’d think such a panel might comprise native-born Americans, given that they, after all, have the most to lose when the teeming horde of foreigners washing over the state finally takes over.  Instead, Kaine went dumpster diving into the immigrant community and found a treasure to appoint in Dr. Esam Omeish, a Muslim.  It was all in the name of “diversity” and “inclusion,” of course.

Well, it wasn’t long before Kaine’s appointment went kaboom, and Omeish was forced to resign.  It seems the good doctor is an extremist who showed up in a video on YouTube ranting, in typical Muslim fashion, about Zionists and jihad.  He is the president of the Muslim American Society, which, like all good American Muslim societies, burbles the usual banalities about tolerance and democracy and respect for the rule of law.  Unhappily for Omeish, Del. Todd Gilbert of Virginia’s 15th District dug up some information about him and his connections.  It turns out that the Muslim American Society is an offshoot of the infamous Muslim Brotherhood, whose most famous members include Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the notorious blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman.

Gilbert sent Kaine a dossier on Omeish, but Kaine claimed he knew nothing of the doctor’s radicalism until someone asked him about it on a radio call-in program the next day.  “That is news to me, what you say, and it’s something we will check out.”

Forced off the commission in late September, Omeish took great pains to observe that he was among the first responders after his coreligionists hit the Pentagon with American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11.  Naturally, we were supposed to believe the good doctor is no jihadist but a leading physician and a good American.

Maybe so.  As far as anyone knows, he has never committed a crime.  But these facts are irrelevant to the question of whether Omeish and his coreligionists can take an honest oath as American citizens, and no one accused the man of being an incompetent or heartless doctor.  His affiliations, not his medical skills, were the problem, and they raise the question of what Kaine was thinking when he appointed a devout Muslim to an immigration panel.  Truth is, he wasn’t thinking—at all.

In April, about six months before Omeish was forced to quit the panel, Paul Sperry, the author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington, disclosed a few malodorous facts about the doctor at FrontPageMagazine.com.  Omeish’s office was

right next door to the old office of one of Al-Qaida’s top fund raisers in America, Abdurahman Alamoudi, before he was jailed a few years ago.  And it’s located in the same Alexandria, Va., business park as the former office of Osama bin Laden’s nephew, before he hightailed it back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.

The feds collared Alamoudi for funneling money to terrorists via Libya.  In exchange for his guilty plea, he received a 23-year prison sentence.

According to Sperry, Omeish’s brother, Mohamed, “headed the U.S. branch of one of bin Laden’s favorite Saudi charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, which was raided after 9/11,” and federal court records show that Mohamed was tight as a tick with Alamoudi, in several Muslim organizations.

Esam Omeish also

sits on the board of the 9/11-tied mosque in Washington that helped the hijackers get licenses and housing, and whose imam prepared them for martyrdom operations in private closed-door sessions.  Omeish personally hired the imam, Anwar Aulaqi, who fled the country on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11 (the FBI now wants another crack at questioning him).

The September 11 mosque is the “Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which tax records show has received large donations from the Islamic Relief Organization, is a Muslim Brotherhood bastion . . .” and

a turnstile for terrorists and terror suspects.  A prayer leader, Sheikh Mohammed al-Hanooti, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing.  Other dubious mosque members have included: Alamoudi, Abdullah bin Laden, Osama’s nephew; Hamas leader and fugitive Mousa Abu Marzook and his partners Ismail Elbarasse and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in February; convicted Virginia Jihad Network leader Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former CAIR official; and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an al-Qaida operative recently convicted of plotting to assassinate President Bush. . . .

What’s more, the phone number to the mosque was found in the German apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, roommate of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta.  Atta’s deputy “emir” in the “raid” on America, Nawaf al-Hazmi, worshipped at Dar al-Hijrah, along with the pilot who crashed the plane into the Pentagon.

Back to mosque leader Esam Omeish, the “American patriot.”  Court records [Sperry] obtained show he put his home up for bond collateral in 2004 to help spring from jail a terrorist suspect who was caught allegedly casing the Chesapeake bridge for attack.  His dubious pal Ismail Elbarasse is a founding member of Dar al-Hijrah.

In 1998, Elbarasse was in jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about his associations with and fundraising for Hamas.  A federal judge freed him.  That was Michael B. Mukasey, the Bush administration’s new attorney general.

So it seems that Omeish’s background contained a few more worrisome elements than simply the inflammatory speech that appeared on YouTube.  Moreover, what most Virginians—including, perhaps, Kaine—don’t know is how successfully the religion of the Crescent has penetrated Northern Virginia’s suburbs around Washington, D.C.  Sperry calls it the “Wahhabi Corridor,” and not surprisingly, it is full of interesting addresses and Muslim landmarks.

Aside from this, Chronicles readers will recall that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, convicted in the assassination plot against President George W. Bush, was a sterling student at the Saudi Islamic Academy.  Like the “Wahhabi Corridor,” it is just a stone’s throw from the federal city.  A few well-placed bombs—or, better yet, a few car bombs, rigged to detonate on the 14th Street, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson bridges—and the city is paralyzed.

A Catholic who is personally opposed to but at peace with the “right to choose,” Kaine is also pro-choice on immigration.  One wonders what has happened to the mother of presidents, which once produced such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Lee, and Henry, Mason, and Randolph.  Not to mention war hero Jim Webb.

What happened is this: Its new masters are deracinated cosmopolitans such as Kaine, who, like the neocons, believe our country isn’t a place with a religion, language, culture, and people.  “America” is a mere idea, an abstraction to which anyone can pledge allegiance, regardless of creed.  With Omeish, Kaine was given a hard lesson about how dangerous that idea is, but it was lost on him.  A true multiculturalist, he was unrepentant.

Problem is, Kaine isn’t the only Virginian who will pay the bloody bill when immigration and Islam hand it to him.