Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Obama campaign said it was a mistake for an outreach coordinator to join a meeting last month attended by leaders of two controversial Muslim groups....

Minha Husaini, newly named as head of the campaign's outreach coordinator to Muslims, attended a discussion session Sept. 15 with about 30 Muslim leaders and community members in suburban Washington.... Participants included leaders of the Council of American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] and the Muslim American Society, which have been cited by the government in the past for ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

In August, the campaign's previous coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, resigned.... after questions arose about his brief tenure on the board of an Islamic investment fund along with a controversial Illinois imam....

Thursday, campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, responding to questions about the September session in Springfield, Va., said Ms. Husaini wouldn't have attended had she known that Council of American-Islamic Relations and Muslim American Society leaders were going to be there....

One attendee at the Springfield meeting was Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation. The Justice Department has asserted in court proceedings that the society's organizers were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global group promoting political Islam.

Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, also attended the session, as did the group's legislative director. The government named CAIR an unindicted coconspirator in the Justice Department's racketeering prosecution last year of alleged Hamas fund-raisers.

It would be fun, wouldn't it, to see how this three-degrees-of-separation anxiety about "controversial" groups would work out if it were applied to other religious contexts -- Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu -- or hell, Buddhist, if it comes to that.