The Conservative Political Action Conference panel “Islamic Law in America: How the Obama Justice Department Is Selling Us Out,” featured numerous anti-Muslim speakers including Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Ilaria Pantano and James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force. Lafferty, whose wife Andrea runs the Traditional Values Coalition, dedicated his speech to his activism against mosques in his community and a Muslim Republican’s candidacy for the state House of Delegates.
Lafferty told the guests that “we are being outgunned by them, literally and figuratively” and claimed, “This is a spiritual war we are fighting.” At one point in his talk, Lafferty described a Justice Department “hate crimes summit” he attended. He expressed pride in the fact that most of the mosques that had been attacked were in the South:
Well with what the gentleman was saying about the Justice Department, I went to the briefing, the hate crimes summit, and I went there and it was all Muslim officials speaking and they had all these pictures of some mosque somewhere, and it was usually in the South I’m proud to say where a guy would drive a pickup truck right into the mosque. They had I bet 20—it looked like the same picture after a while because they just kept showing these same pictures, and each Muslim speaker got up, and remember this is a Justice Department meeting, and really ragged on two groups: the FBI and the NYPD. So whatever they’re doing they’re doing something good.