by Jeff Sharlet
Kiera Feldman and I tried to ask Fatfat if that was true. He’s a hard man to track down, so we started with a contact Agha put us in touch with, Rami Majzoub, the DCL’s “secretary general,” listed as the center’s contact person in its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) applications. Were they teaching Muslim children “the principles of Jesus?” “Where appropriate,” Majzoub stammered. Call Fatfat, he said, signing off. “He’ll know the answers to your questions.”
We couldn’t call Fatfat; we didn’t have his number. But an hour later, Fatfat called us from his American home, near Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, he gave us no answers, only more questions: his. Who had told us about the center? How had we “put the pieces together?” What business was it of ours? Fatfat grew increasingly paranoid, his words running together breathlessly. “How do I know you’re who you say you are? I mean I could call you and say I’m President Bush and impersonate his voice.”
Interesting idea. When we called Tim Coe to ask him about the Family’s work in Lebanon, at a number at which I’d interviewed him before, that was exactly his strategy. He answered to “Mr. Coe,” but as soon as Kiera Feldman mentioned Samir Kreidie, he told her she had the wrong number and hung up. When she tried back, he said wrong number again—only this time, he pretended to be a middle-aged Indian woman. Or maybe German. It was hard to guess what accent he was trying to pass off. “Nooo, sorrrrrry, you haff wrong num-ber!”
So we tried Coburn and Doyle. We never got past Doyle’s press secretary, but one night we managed to get the senator on the line. The only thing he had to say was that he hadn’t been to Syr. He hung up before we could offer to send him a picture of himself with the “orphans.”
“Senator Coburn, I had the honor of his visit,” Misbah Ahdab, the Muslim MP from Tripoli, told us. He was the only one left, it seemed, who’d talk to us. Maybe he hadn’t gotten the word to go dark on the Family’s work in Lebanon. Through the National Prayer Breakfast, Ahdab had come to see Jesus not as part of his tradition but as the very heart of it. “I can see light around some people. There are very few. Definitely, Doug Coe is one of them.” Since Coburn came as an emissary of Coe, Ahdab thought, his mission must be of God. “We had a very interesting discussion. I think that his initiative is a very positive one. I know that there are lots of people trying to move in this direction, trying to listen, and trying to pass a certain message. I know that the contact that I had with him, it’s probably a part of a big puzzle that he has.”
What’s the puzzle? A PowerPoint presentation called “Reconciliation” offers an answer. “Reconciliation” is the product of a nonprofit corporation called International Peace Organization, “operating under the name” Bridges to Common Ground. Ostensibly, the double-named outfit is an independent organization, but it has close ties to the Family. At least three of its four directors overlap with the Fellowship Foundation or a related organization: President Eric Fellman; Secretary-Treasurer Robert Aramony, the “Ambassador of Reconciliation” who ran the outfit that his corrupt father—also an Ambassador—quietly spun off from United Way; and Director Nassim Matar, former ministry coordinator for the Fellowship Foundation. The International Peace Organization takes its inspiration, meanwhile, from a 2008 book by another Family man, former congressman Mark Siljander: A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide. It’s a book that encapsulates the sanctimony and the seediness, the self-declared humility and the barely veiled vanity of the fundamentalist threat to democracy. It may well also be the clearest statement of the C Street ethos available, the most definitive declaration of the Family’s worldview—the beliefs that drive men such as Coburn and Fatfat, Sanford and Ensign.
It’s true that Siljander was a congressman once, serving six years in the 1980s, but the Michigan Republican found his calling in the “advocacy” business. When Siljander was elected at age twenty-nine, in 1981, he wasn’t just a conservative, he was an ideologue so zealous that he made the Reagan White House uneasy. He was red-haired, red-faced, and obnoxious enough to make his extranasal Michiganese heard even as a freshman. His positions made for a long list of antis—equal rights for women, abortion, school busing, and Nelson Mandela—and a short, sharp list of pros: the neutron bomb, MX missiles, and prayer in schools. He claimed to be the boldest voice against homosexuality in Congress, and to prove it the bachelor congressman announced through his pastor that he was seeking a God-fearing woman. Siljander’s standards, the pastor warned the ladies, “are very high.” His greatest success in Congress was legislation restricting American foreign aid from funding abortions, which should have made him popular in his deeply conservative district. But he went too far: his constituents primaried him out of office in response to his request, in 1986, that they “break the back of Satan” by reelecting Mark Siljander.
After he lost the favor of even his far Right district, he learned the advocacy trade—he’s not a registered lobbyist—by flacking against the “homosexual agenda” for an outfit called the Alliance Defense Fund. Then he created his own firm, Global Strategies Inc., to add “value by creating strategic alliances” in the service of “effectively penetrating new overseas markets” and finessing government obstacles. His areas of specialty include oil, telecom, and aerospace. Also, perplexingly, salad bars. He draws on a “list of references” at least half made up of Family men, including Inhofe, Doyle, Aderholt, Wolf, Rep. Tony Hall, Ed Meese, and David Laux, a National Security Council veteran and longtime board member of the Fellowship Foundation. Siljander’s “gallery” features a photograph of himself with General Kicklighter.
Siljander has mellowed in the years since he left office, on one issue more than any other: Islam. Credit goes to the Family. “As the humiliating final days of my last term were whimpering to a close,” he writes, Doug Coe came to him with a way out of the angry fundamentalism of his past. It doesn’t have to be like this, Coe said. Let me show you. In time, Siljander writes, he’d come to realize that this oddly compelling man, otherworldly and yet humble, was a messenger from God. Siljander describes him as one of “the three visiting spirits” God would send him, the three hinges on which the door of Mark Siljander’s destiny hung. And his destiny was love. He’d been confused, consumed by hate; Coe taught him love. “Love doesn’t mean I like you,” Siljander would explain years later, when he had become a visiting spirit himself, traveling the world on behalf of the Family, a Coe protégé bringing the sheep—congressmen, dictators, businessmen—together. Love doesn’t equal like; it’s more powerful. Like makes friends, hate makes enemies, but love? Love seduces. Look at the world through the lens of love, Coe said. There are no enemies, just opportunities.
Siljander looked, saw, and took. In 2008, the same year he published A Deadly Misunderstanding, the Justice Department indicted him on counts of money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction. The government said that in the pursuit of profit, Siljander helped redirect stolen USAID money toward support of one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” on behalf of a banned front organization, the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA). Siljander’s defense? The terrorist allegedly supported by the IARA, a drug-dealing Afghani warlord dubbed Mr. Blowback, was really working for the CIA (which may explain why Hekmatyar dropped out of the case); and the $75,000 that Siljander received from the IARA to try to get the organization off the government’s terrorism list didn’t constitute payments but “charitable donations” to support the writing of Siljander’s A Deadly Misunderstanding.
By then, the Family had already led Siljander away from his knee-jerk antagonism to Islam and toward a more sophisticated response. Not ecumenicism; stealth evangelism. The head-on approach of traditional fundamentalism—a crude but honest argument for one faith over another—was a dead end, at least when it came to the “kings,” the powerful leaders, whom the Family considers its specialty. For them to convert would be suicide. Besides, Siljander learned, the very term �
�convert” was a mistranslation of an Aramaic word, shalem, better rendered as “submit,” or “surrender,” or “be restored.”
That’s what the Family wanted for its Muslim friends: restoration, by way of submission. They could keep the label Muslim so long as they bowed before Jesus. “They make every effort to be as normal as possible and not stand out,” writes Siljander, the idea being that these “Messianic Muslims,” as he calls them, similar to Jews for Jesus, will be able to pass as Muslim Muslims and thus win the support of their Muslim countrymen. The Family doesn’t require public loyalty; it wants back-channel connections. “Anything can happen,” reads a planning document for the Prayer Breakfast, which Siljander came to understand in a new light, “the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there! He is infiltrating the world.” In fact, Siljander would conclude, Jesus had already infiltrated Islamic scripture. “Jesus,” he declares, “is mentioned in the Qur’an more than 110 times,” an irrelevancy he began repeating as he traveled the world for his advocacy business. (“Being an ex-congressman opened all sorts of doors.”)
He met with the leaders of a West Saharan independence movement fighting the Moroccans. Give up, Siljander told them; Jesus wanted their surrender. In Beirut, he visited with Samir Kreidie. With Coe, he went to see the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum, later indicted by the International Criminal Court for the genocide he was then carrying out in Darfur. Did they speak truth to power? Offer even a hiccup for human rights? No. They told the dictator they wanted to be friends. “He’s my prayer partner, by the way,” Siljander boasted on a Trinity Broadcasting Network Christian program. “I love Bashir, his heart was changed, and it sure wasn’t by my good looks. The Holy Spirit came into the conversation we had with the king”—he meant the dictator—“and melted his heart.”
Siljander claims the dictator was so “flabbergasted” by Siljander’s assimilation of Islam into Christianity that, like nearly everyone else whom Siljander meets, al-Bashir said, “This is revolutionary.” And that melted Siljander’s heart; he became an advocate for lifting sanctions on the oil-rich regime. “They realize it got away from them,” Siljander said of the genocide, arguing that business deals with the dictatorship would “incentivize” al-Bashir to stop the killing.
“If Jesus were to have adopted the philosophy of the Family,” observes Chuck Warnock, a Baptist pastor critical of the organization, “he would have been working with Herod, and he would have taken Pontius Pilate to lunch.”
In 1999, President Mathieu Kérékou’ of Benin—a former Marxist military dictator born again to Christ and American sponsorship after the Soviet Union collapsed—set up a meeting for Siljander with Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi. “ ‘I told the Colonel he needs to sit down and talk with you, Mark,’ ” said Kérékou’. Siljander invited Coe, but the U.S. State Department scotched the meeting, so they had to settle for Gaddafi’s foreign minister. Writes Siljander: “It has been my experience that the U.S. Department of State… universally rejects the idea of building personal relationships as a means toward reconciliation.” Either that, or it rejects the idea of surrendering U.S. foreign policy to Christian proselytization and whatever business benefits might accrue to God’s chosen ones on the side.
Benin’s President Kérékou’, whose government Siljander’s Global Strategies Inc. has advised, is a case in point. “I would like to run my country the way Jesus would, if he were running it,” the president told Siljander and Sen. Inhofe, his traveling companion on that visit. “Do you any have suggestions for me?” Siljander tells Kérékou’ he’s doing an amazing job. “Mr. President, from what I can see, I think you have a pretty good sense of exactly what Jesus would do.” Two years later, Kérékou’ stole an election with the help of $2.1 million secretly funneled in by Titan, an American defense and telecommunications company. Inhofe, coincidentally, pocketed $2,000 from the company that year, but there was no other evidence linking him to Titan’s interests. Following the reelection, Kérékou’ quadrupled Titan’s contracts with his desperately poor African nation. But there was no evidence linking him to Titan’s cash infusion. In 2005, Titan admitted a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and agreed to pay $28.5 million in penalties.
Siljander’s years of experience at Coe’s side became the basis of A Deadly Misunderstanding, and the book, in turn, became the basis for the “Reconciliation” PowerPoint promoted by the International Peace Organization, a summary, in effect, of the Family’s soft-sell evangelism; a distillation of the C Street approach to religious harmony. “Reconciliation” warns against so-called Words that Confront, such as crusade and convert, illustrating the difference between them and dialogue—the right approach—by juxtaposing a picture of an enraged Adam Sandler, from his movie Anger Management, and a puzzling image seemingly lifted from a warm-up scene for a 1970s porno film: a bearded man with a wedding ring putting the moves on a feathered blonde in gold lamé and pearls, a visualization of the crass seduction the Family calls reconciliation.
Then it gets sexier. A section on stereotypes allows non-Muslims to see themselves through Muslim eyes. On one side of the screen, there’s an armored knight, swinging his sword from behind a shield emblazoned with a cross, an image of the Christian as brutal conqueror; and on the other, what looks like a film still of two sex bombs behind bars, a blonde and a brunette, both of them stripped down to silver loincloths—evidently meant to be an image of Christians as decadent. Next is a segment, entitled “Jesus in the Qur’an,” about “common ground” shared by Muslims and Christians. It consists of screen after screen of quotations from the 110 instances in which Jesus is mentioned in Islamic scripture. But “Reconciliation” is rough on some of the Family’s friends. The PowerPoint cites candidly anti-Islamic comments by Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson as “Fuel for the Fire.” That won’t help. “What do we want?” is the concluding question. “To Convert Muslims to Christianity,” reads the screen. That’s followed up, Borat-style, with “NOT.” No, what “we” really want is: “A personal relationship with God through Jesus.” And how is it not conversion? The last words of the PowerPoint presentation: “The Qur’an points to Jesus.” All of Islam, it turns out, was just a clever scheme to bring Muslims round about the long way, back to the savior.
As this book went to press, Siljander made a deal. He pled guilty to obstruction of justice and to acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, in exchange for a pass on the money laundering and conspiracy charges. He faces a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison. Was Siljander a secret agent for jihad? Well, technically, yes; but in spirit, that’s no more likely than the notion that he dedicated so many years to “reconciliation” work without believing in his own good intentions. The truth is that he was playing both sides, lobbying for a group linked to Islamic terrorists even as he used his connections to recruit “followers of Jesus” from the leadership of Islamic nations, a strategy that confirms every dark suspicion held by adherents of radicalized Islam. Whether out of greed or naïveté, what Siljander did, with the help of the Family, was to create an almost perfectly antidemocratic strategy.
According to the plea summary, on December 13, 2005, in Arlington, Virginia, Siljander told FBI agents that he hadn’t been hired to lobby for the IARA, that he hadn’t lobbied for the group, and that the money that had made its way to him from the IARA was in support of the book project. Now, “Siljander admits that when he made each of the statements…, he then well knew and believed that each statement was false.” He also confessed that he’d “discussed performing services for IARA, and routing payment for those services through non-profit foundations, on the telephone with Hamed and El-Siddi [sic],” both naturalized citizens from Sudan.
“Hamed” is Mubarak Hamed, the director of the IARA. Just weeks before Siljander’s guilty plea, Hamed admitted that his group had given Siljander money not to help him write a book about how much Muslims love Jesus, but to lobby to have the group removed from a government list
of terrorism supporters. “El-Siddi” is Abdel Azim El-Siddig, a fund-raiser for the organization. On July 7, 2010, El-Siddig pled guilty to conspiracy charges related to the case; he faces a sentence of up to five years and a possible $250,000 fine. His plea agreement is almost as damning as Siljander’s. “El-Siddig admits that he entered into a conspiracy with Siljander and Hamed to hire Siljander to act as an agent of a foreign principal.” In a 2004 phone call with Hamed, Siljander said, “I think we oughta do this number one through foundations and not professionally.” That is, off the books. El-Siddig, by then a personal friend of Siljander’s who’d traveled with him on Family junkets, would be the middleman through whom Siljander passed information on how to get the money to him.
But El-Siddig was not just a conspirator with Siljander, he was also a spiritual collaborator; as “Abdel,” he has a starring role in A Deadly Misunderstanding. El-Siddig and Siljander first met not long after September 11, 2001, at a congressional dining room that Siljander still uses for meetings despite having been out of Congress for more than twenty years. Later, Siljander and El-Siddig would travel together to Khartoum—the headquarters of IARA, a fact the plea agreements say the men agreed to conceal from the United States—to meet President al-Bashir. El-Siddig granted Siljander special status as a “spiritual Muslim,” that is, a Muslim in essence even though he does not practice Islam. It was a theological term of political convenience that differed little from the Family’s usage of the phrase “follower of Jesus.”