Pat Dollard

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The Daily Caller:

Top Justice Department officials convened a meeting Wednesday where invited Islamist advocates lobbied them for cutbacks in anti-terror funding, changes in agents’ training manuals, additional curbs on investigators and a legal declaration that U.S. citizens’ criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination.

The department’s “civil rights lawyers are top of the line — I say this with utter honesty — I know they can come up with a way” to redefine criticism as discrimination, said Sahar Aziz, a female, Egyptian-American lawyer.

“I’d be willing to give a shot at it,” said Aziz, who is a fellow at the Michigan-based Muslim advocacy group, the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding.

The audience of Islamist advocates and department officials included Tom Perez, who heads the department’s division of civil rights.

“We must continue to have the open and honest and critical dialogue that you saw in the robust debate,” Perez responded in an enthusiastic closing speech a few minutes after Aziz made her demands at the event.

“I sat here the entire time, taking notes,” Perez said. “I have some very concrete thoughts … in the aftermath of this.”

The meeting at George Washington University showcased the expanding alliance between American progressives and Islamists, said Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in New York.

Progressives “are making these Islamist groups into the [political] representatives of Muslims in the United States,” he told The Daily Caller. That elevation of Islamists to a leadership role sidelines the majority of American Muslims who don’t want Islamist leaders, as well as American Muslims who are female or gay, he said.

McCarthy investigated and prosecuted Egyptian-born Imam Omar Abdel-Rahman, dubbed “the blind sheik,” for urging Muslims to kill New Yorkers. Abdel-Rahman was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996.

Progressives ally with the Islamic lobby because “they think it will be a political voting bloc that will be reliably Democratic,” said Robert Spencer, an author and expert on Islam