Though CPAC ruffled some feathers by bringing pro-gay GOProud into the tent, such social inclusiveness didn’t extend very far. Taking center stage on immigration were the Republicans’ biggest flamethrowers, who issued dire warnings about the evils that immigrants could inflict upon the US. “I’m worried, because most of them are lawbreakers – in fact, most of them are criminals,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told conference-goers on Thursday. But former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo upped the ante even further. Speaking to Mother Jones on Friday after his CPAC speech, he warned that Muslim immigrants would never be able to assimilate and posed a perilous threat by bringing Sharia law to America:

Then you got the issue of Muslim immigration. In every other case I’ve described, you can assimilate. If you come here as an atheist or a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu – there’s no inherent … conflict between that person and what it means to be an American, because the Constitution is the kind of document that wraps up all up.

But what do you do with people coming for the purpose of advancing sharia law, which is not compatible in any way with the constitution of the United States? How do you deal with that? That’s another very scary thing because demographically the numbers are on their side.

Tancredo’s warnings echoed recent efforts by right-wingers to ban sharia law in states like Oklahoma, and he drove home the link between immigrants, deadly crime, and terrorism in his CPAC speech as well – going so far as to equate open borders with treason. “Plenty of people coming across that border want to do very bad things to us – we know it’s been an entry point for terrorists. Why would that not be a cause for impeachment? I think it’s treasonous to not secure your border,” he told the crowd, to wild applause. Tancredo also denounced multiculturalism and ethnic enclaves as “the dagger pointed at the heart of Western civilization.”

Mother Jones, 12 February 2011

You’d think that US Islamophobes would all be enthusiastically supporting CPAC, but you’d be wrong. Frank Gaffney has alreadymade the bizarre claim that CPAC has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and now he has been joined by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer.