This weekend’s Florida Tea Party Convention failed to draw many of the GOP candidates invited to participate: Out of the eight GOP presidential candidates, only Rick Santorum showed up to speak.

Convention organizers invited a slew of speakers to talk about tea party-favored topics, such as Agenda 21 and the supposed “radicalization of Islam” in the U.S., and had scheduled a discussion among GOP presidential candidates. However, only one candidate showed up.

According to the Huffington Post:

Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich all called in and were patched into the venue’s speakers. Portraits of the candidates who called in were splashed on a large screen while they answered questions.

During his question-and-answer session, Santorum made light of his opponents’ absence.

“Since I’m the only one that’s going to be here, I’ll fill up the glass of water so no one else has to take it,” he said in reference to a glass and pitcher laid out only for him. The line elicited laughter and applause from the audience. “You’re welcome,” a happy Santorum said in response.

In a swipe at candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, who neither telephoned in nor appeared in person, cardboard cutouts of the two men were placed on stage and asked questions by the town hall’s moderator.

Ron Paul and Rick Perry did not address the convention in person, over the phone, or in cardboard form.

There was also a low turnout among GOP U.S. Senate candidates, who earlier in the year all made it to a conservative town hall hosted by the Florida Family Policy Council and others.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that Deon Long, Mike McCalister, Ron McNeil, Craig Miller and Marielena Stuart all showed up to speak at the convention. Adam Hasner, Connie Mack and George LeMieux were no-shows.

Other big Florida conservative names were also absent from the convention. Both Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., declined invitations to the event.

Among the right-wing speakers invited to address the crowd were former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, anti-Islam blogger Pam Geller and G. Edward Griffin. Griffin is an anti-Federal Reserve, anti-United Nations and anti-communist conspiracy theorist who describes himself as a “life member” of the John Birch Society — a historically infamous anti-communist group. Geller is best known for her blog Atlas Shrugs, which has been described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.”

The attendance of Geller, and other anti-Islam activists, caught the attention of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-FL), which said the event would “feature a presentation by anti-Islam extremist Pamela Geller and another Islamophobe.” Bill Warner, CAIR said in a statement, was another featured “anti-Islam activist.” This eventually resulted in a feud between members of CAIR and tea party organizers.

Some are saying the retreat of big names was due the inclusion of speakers such as Geller. On her blog this weekend, Geller claimed that such claims were an example of the media “taking their talking points and their cues from the Muslim Brotherhood, pimping their anti-American hate and spinning it into ‘news reportage.’”

Geller did, though, criticize the GOP candidates who did not show up to the event.

She wrote:

I told the convention, “You dance with the one what brung ya,” and that applies to a lot of the politicians who were absent yesterday: the Tea Party elected them, and if they had any sense of honor, any sense of gratitude to the ones who elected them, they should have been there. Those politicians have the Tea Party to thank for their offices.

The convention was sponsored by Freedom Works, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Craig Miller’s U.S. Senate Campaign and the Oath Keepers.

According to Politico, McKalip is set to host a fundraiser tonight night for Hasner:

Dr. David McKalip was forced to resign his position as president of the county medical association in 2009 after circulating an emailed image showing Obama as a witch doctor in a loin cloth and headdress with bones in his noes.

A fundraising invitation sent to POLITICO shows that McKalip is hosting a $500-a-person fundraiser for Hasner Tuesday night at Bascom’s Chop House in Clearwater.

Hasner has also been connected to a slew of anti-Islam activists, as well — among them Pam Geller and Tom Trento. Geller is an anti-Islamic blogger based out of New York City. Her blog, Atlas Shrugs, was described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.”

In 2008, Trento and Hasner joined to form the Florida Security Council, an organization created to deal with the threats posed by “radical Islam” and “Sharia law.”

In his campaign for the GOP nomination in the race to unseat Sen. Bill Nelson, Adam Hasner has been positioning himself as a tea party favorite on a slew of issues, but none seem as close to his heart as his long-time crusade against the supposed threat of Sharia in the U.S.

In June, Hasner spoke before members of Tea Party Fort Lauderdale about what he considers threats posed by “radical Islam” and “Sharia law.” (You can see video of the talk below.) That same month, he told a Sarasota radio host that Florida is in the midst of a “civilizational jihad.”

“This isn’t just a threat on foreign soil,” Hasner said in his speech to the Fort Lauderdale group. “This is also a threat from those who seek to destroy us from within.” He warned the audience that the threat exists “right here within our community.”

The issue goes beyond just rhetoric for Hasner. In that same Fort Lauderdale talk, he said he helped “form” the Florida Security Council, an organization dedicated to combating the growing Islamic menace, with his “good friend,” Tom Trento.

Trento filed the paperwork (.pdf) to create the nonprofit Florida Security Council on April 2, 2008, listing himself, Michael Tranchina and Jeff Rubinoff as the group’s board of directors. The Council’s stated goal was to “educate on contemporary issues related to the security of our state and nation, particularly the threat of terrorism.”

Florida Security Council Director Tom Trento (Pic via Facebook) 

In an interview given to the New English Review in March 2010, Trento described the mission of the Florida Security Council as “the defense of the U.S. Constitution, the State of Israel, and the defeat of Supremacist Islam. Our mission is to expose the agenda and methods of the Muslim Brotherhood – affiliated groups in America, such as CAIR, ISNA, MAS and MSA and to highlight their ‘unholy alliance’ with the extremists of Supremacist Islam.”

Trento told the interviewer that Florida’s Muslim Capitol Day — an annual event that introduces “Muslim Americans to F[l]orida politics and the democratic process” that organizers write is “NOT a religious or Islamic event” — is “the Stealth Jihad coming to Tallahassee.”

“It is all about gaining political legitimacy and media credibility in order to infiltrate government and civic institutions for the purpose of furthering the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in America,” Trento said. “The grand scheme is to slowly introduce special Sharia-friendly concepts into official public life. … If this agenda is successful in Florida, it will become the model for all other States. This would truly represent the end of America as we know it.”

In the interview, Trento credited Hasner with helping raise awareness of the issue.

In a video introduction he recorded for a website he created in order to inform people about a civil case involving a young girl named Rifqa Bary, Trento called the issue part of a “battle between Islam and Christianity,” a “battle between American constitutional jurisprudence and Islamic Sharia law.” (You can watch the video in full below.)

Bary, a minor, separated herself from her Muslim parents in Ohio when she converted to Christianity. According to Bary’s attorneys, she moved to Florida in an effort to practice Christianity away from her disapproving parents. Another website created about the case claims that Bary left “after her father threatened to kill her for apostasy, a crime under Islamic Sharia law.”

Hasner has mentioned Bary’s case on the campaign trail.

“Pamela [Geller] and I were on the front lines of that together, fighting to make sure that we kept her safe here in this state and not send her back to Ohio,” Hasner said in his Fort Lauderdale speech. “I was on the phone with the department of children affairs every single day fighting to make sure she stayed here, to make sure she stayed alive, because no one believed us that if she went back to Ohio she would die.”

Hasner with Atlas Shrugs blogger Pamela Geller (Pic via atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com) 

Geller is an anti-Islamic blogger based out of New York City. Her website, Atlas Shrugs, was described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.”

According to the Times, Geller “has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by ‘Islamic supremacists’; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.”

Today, the Florida Security Council’s URL directs browsers to a Trento site called The United West.

According to the site, “in mid-2010 it became apparent that the national and international activity of ‘Team Trento,’ had expanded beyond the borders of Florida. Therefore, extensive effort went into developing an organization The United West (TUW) functioning as an ‘umbrella entity,’ overseeing and managing coordinated divisions, all based upon unifying principles but lean and efficient in its implementation.”

Despite the name change, the Florida Security Council remains active, according to Florida Division of Corporations paperwork filed (.pdf) by Trento and the board on April 21, 2011. There is no organization yet registered as The United West in Florida. The IRS lists neither group as a tax-exempt organization.

In Trento’s “executive summary” for The United West, he writes:

The United West exemplifies itself as, unique, distinct and “like no others” when it comes to developing the complete, modern-day information warrior. If the Muslim Brotherhood is true to its manifesto, engaging in a “civilization jihad,” against the West, then it is the height of foolishness to think as though we are not engaged in a knock-down drag-out, battle for the American way of life.

They are at war.

We better be too.

Yet this war, against shariah Islam, whether propagated by the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, the local Imam at the “peaceful” mosque, or a writer at the New York Times, is not fought with bombs and bullets, but with brains and courage, as it is, above all else an information war. Stated simply, the information in conflict is whether America is better off sticking with that man-made, fallible, intellectually dusty, U.S. Constitution, or whether America ought to experience a divine epiphany (often at the business end of the scimitar) and bow to the infallibility of Allah’s directly spoken word, a word that provides all rules for all life for all time, the Qur’an.

…

To fight and win on this asymmetric battlefield takes an individual who is grounded in doctrine and directed by principle. No newcomers at The United West. We are seasoned activists with a mastery of the academics and a passion for confrontational engagement. Yep, you heard me right. A passion for a lawful confrontation with an ideological enemy who is brazen enough to “assault” the essence of what unites the many into the one, the US Constitution.

Hasner campaign spokesman Rick Wilson tells The Florida Independent the candidate “is no longer involved in [the] day-to-day” work of the Florida Security Council or The United West.

Wilson says that “clearly Hasner has been part of this movement to inform people about the threat of Sharia law,” calling Hasner’s work on the topic “no secret.” Now that Hasner is running for Senate, though, Wilson says the candidate is not as actively engaged in the issue as in years past.

Watch Hasner’s address to Tea Party Fort Lauderdale:

Watch Tom Trento discuss the case of Rifqa Bary:

We the undersigned believe that the National Republican Senatorial Committee should be committed to serving ALL the members of the Republican Party.

Additionally, the NRSC should be focused on defeating Democrats, not Republicans. Towards that end, we believe it was completely inappropriate for the NRSC to endorse a candidate in the Florida primary race.

Therefore, we request that both you and the NRSC alter your position on the Florida Senate race, maintain neutrality, and promise to spend no money directly or indirectly in that race.

Among the signatories: Tea Party leader Eric Odom, controversial “anti-jihadist” blogger Pamela Geller, frequent Blogginghead and TV pundit Matt Lewis, and RedState’s Erick Erickson, who has been blistering in his criticism of Republican moderates.

Charles Johnson (YouTube)

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (“an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (“anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left’ and militant Islam”).

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right — including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson’s fellow travelers.

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.” In response to the news that the Department of Homeland Security was watching for increased right-wing extremism — something that most of the conservative blogosphere, like most Republicans, responded to with angry ridicule — Johnson pointed to the recent arrests of right-wing terrorists and criticized bloggers for buying into “distorted claims” about the DHS report. When Obama genuflected before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Johnson found archival video of President Bush bowing to take a medal from the King and urged conservatives to turn down their “hyperventilating nonsense.”

This has the blogger’s peers asking themselves the same question, over and over: What the heck happened to Charles Johnson?

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” Johnson said. “I’ve always been pretty independent. This is something I’ve really tried to put out there on my blog. I don’t consider myself right-wing.”

It sounds strange coming from a blogger who played an underrated role in forcing CBS News to back down from its 2004 story on President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and whose first reaction to Obama’s election in November — after a quick post congratulating him — was to note that the Muslim Brotherhood, “the world’s largest jihadist organization,” was pleased.

Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists, and he rejected the idea   designs were malicious, rather than merely naive. Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Johnson’s disgust with the terrorism-focused conservative blogosphere has had a traumatic effect on a dogged and dogmatic community of bloggers and scholars. When Johnson began blogging about Islam and terrorism after 9/11, he inspired untold other supporters of an aggressive war on terror to start their own Websites, link up, and push back against “Dhimmitude” — organizations and foreign policy decision makers that were “soft” on terrorism. Now, some of his followers have started blogs that track Johnson’s “madness,” while a video that portrays Johnson as Adolf Hitler going mad in his bunker makes the rounds.

“He’s the reason I started blogging,” said Atlas Shrugs editor Pamela Geller, a New Yorker who says she was “mugged by Sept. 11″ and started reading LGF for news and fellowship. “I wrote birthday messages to him. I respected and admired him.”

Robert Spencer, the director of JihadWatch and the author of the bestselling, “Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,” had an established career as a critic of militant Islam before he met Johnson. “But right after 9/11, he was the only one out there reporting on this,” Spencer said. “He built my Website. I learned how to blog from reading his stuff.”

Johnson has turned hard against Spencer and Geller, attacking the former for joining a “genocidal Facebook group,” while referring to the latter as a “shrieking lunatic,” and labeling both of them “hatebloggers.” Johnson now points to Geller’s posts about Barack Obama’s heritage and her quest to fund a headstone for the victim of a Muslim honor killing as proof that “the woman is deranged.” Other bloggers in the movement have been purged from Johnson’s blogroll or pilloried on the site, never to be mentioned again. The most successful sites that arose in LGF’s wake, including Gateway Pundit, Gates of Vienna, and Brussels Journal, are also on the outs.

While Johnson’s own blog was a launchpad for the movement and his comment sections have often been a place for anti-Muslim and anti-liberal rage — one Web quiz lets users guess whether a quote comes from “Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists” — Johnson believes that LGF is now policed for fringe activity. “A lot of the people most responsible for causing our bad reputation are now gone,” he said. “I wrote all the backend software, and I have ways of cleaning up the site.”

Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom (now the International Civil Liberties Alliance), an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.

“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law, and had been attacked within the Netherlands for its connections to extremism and racism. Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.

“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU, even those who have no anti-Semitic tendencies.”

“Not only that,” said Bodissey, “he made it harder for certain American anti-jihad groups to raise funds if they failed to repudiate his designated ‘fascist-enablers’ like us.”

Johnson is unapologetic about his actions. While he was attacking the attendees of the Counterjihad Summit, he was also blasting Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for taking money from, and being photographed with, the owner of the extremist Web site Stormfront.org.

“Some people at that summit in Belgium were not people we should have been associated with,” Johnson said, pointing out that since 2007 the terrorism-focused conservative bloggers have become supporters of Dutch politician Geert Wilders , who wants to outlaw Islam in his country. “Some of these people outright want to ban Islam from the United States, which I think is crazy, completely nuts. That’s not something we do in this country. These people will outright defend banning the Koran or deporting Muslims. That’s popular with the Geller/Spencer crowd.”

When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”

Johnson brushes that criticism aside. “A lot of people think I discovered this creationism thing overnight,” he said, “but that’s not true. I was posting about this before 9/11. After 9/11 I had other things on my mind. And now I’ve come back to it.” But Spencer accuses Johnson of losing sight of the threat of extremist Islam by obsessing over the American religious right and equating the two faiths.

“There is no global movement of Christians trying to subjugate the world,” Spencer said. “There is such a movement on the extreme of Islam. I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.”

Some of Johnson’s former allies experienced a decrease in traffic numbers when he started attacking them, but they all now feel they’ve recovered from the break. “LGF tried to destroy my reputation so I wouldn’t have the access I have to my sources in law enforcement and academia,” said Spencer, “but that hasn’t happened.”

Geller has rebounded with increased prominence — she was a guest on the Fox News show “Red Eye” last week — and she said she has survived the “besmirching” of her reputation and she now fills the information-spreading role that Johnson once did. “I get my stuff from people on the inside,” she said, “from people in Europe. I field 800-900 emails a day. We all depend on our readers for these tips. That’s where Charles was getting his stuff. And now he’s cracked and he’s not getting that anymore.”

Johnson brushes off that kind of criticism. LGF is his site, and if it has to name names and shame the people who are debasing the movement against extremist Islam, he’ll do it. “I’ve definitely seen an uptick in craziness since the election,” he sighs. “Well, I don’t know if Geller got crazier. She always was nuts.”