The White House, the American Civil Liberties Union, that "idiot" the British Prime Minister, the United Nations, the FBI, CIA, State Department, New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, and the Internal Revenue Service.

It's not often you hear them - and a lot of other governments and organizations as well - lumped together as part of the same problem.

But they were on Wednesday night when self-made counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson addressed the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center Summer Institute, as the first of their speakers for 2007.

All the above-mentioned parties were, to some degree or other, put forward as dupes of an international Islamic terrorist movement by Mr. Emerson. Titled Defending the Homeland, his talk might equally have been called The End of Hope.

Not everyone he mentioned came out of it badly. He enumerated some half-dozen Islamic leaders around the nation and the world whom he did not consider extremists. But then he said they had no constituencies. And he lauded the Fox News network as intellectually honest.

Given Betsy Sheer's stated intent as the new chairman of the summer institute to bring more controversy to the speaker series, the first night could be counted as a success.

She introduced Mr. Emerson as being neither shy and retiring nor tactful, and he lived up to the billing. He was combative with questioners and unambiguous in his pronouncements.

He also had requested no press coverage.

Mr. Emerson is the executive director of the Investigative Project, a data gathering center on Islamic groups, and the author of several books and documentaries on the threat posed by Islamic extremism.

He said he first got into the business of counterterrorism on Christmas Day 1992, when he happened upon a meeting in downtown Oklahoma City of thousands of Islamic activists.

"What I stumbled into was something the FBI had not even realized was taking place," he told the audience. "It was a radical Islamic conference, boasting representatives of every radical terrorist organization, from Hamas to Islamic Jihad to the precursor to al Qaeda."

But he said he could not interest the FBI, or his employer at the time (CNN), or the Washington Post in his story.

Then after the first World Trade Center bombing, in February 1993, he accessed the telephone records of the conspirators in that attack and came to the realization that there was a web of links between apparently moderate Islamic organizations in America and elsewhere and extremist groups.

These groups, he said had "morphed into legitimacy . . . defining themselves as either charitable fronts or Islamic civil rights groups.

"The very groups I had watched as Hamas or al Qaeda had been able to reconstitute themselves in the heart of the United States as charitable, tax deductible arms or civil rights groups, treated to civil rights status by the media and other religious parties including Jewish and Christian institutions," Mr. Emerson said.

"A great, great fraud was occurring."

He offered a documentary to CNN, but they did not want it. He quit and took the idea to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he got seed money for Jihad in America, which aired in November 1994.

Later, he said, he was effectively blacklisted by National Public Radio and public television, which he called "two bastions of politically correct knowledge, probably the only two places where I approve of the use of nuclear weapons."

He said they remained under the influence of radical Islamic groups. But they weren't the only ones.

"The FBI is also part of the political [sic] correct problem," he said. "The same as the Department of Homeland Security."

Mr. Emerson reserved special venom for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"How is it possible," he said, his voice rising and breaking, "How is it possible that the ACLU which sees itself as the protector of all American rights, comes out and protects the rights of people to destroy this country?"

Asked about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's categorization of those behind the recent bombing attempt there as criminals rather than terrorists, Mr. Emerson said that marked him as an idiot.

"That is the most insane thing to say because it takes away our ability to recognize and define who the enemy is. You need to define your enemy in order to discredit them. You need to actually acknowledge who they are in order to fight a war," he said.

Even the White House had gone soft. He cited the Bush administration's decision last month to send representation to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.

"The OIC is on record as saying Israel is null and void and . . . endorsing destruction of Israel," he said.

"I don't want to sit around the campfire singing Kumbaya and then discover in the morning that they want to slit our throats."

Indeed, Mr. Emerson cited no Muslim organization he thought moderate. The Council on American Islamic Relations, he said "pretends to be moderate and has its hooks into many Jewish organizations. In fact it is anti-Semitic."

Asked about the U.S. Institute for Peace and its support for the Islamic Renewal Movement - generally considered a power for moderations - he condemned both organizations.

And the Islamic society of Boston - which has previously, unsuccessfully sued Mr. Emerson - was condemned as a "hotbed of extremists," created with the assistance of terrorists.

One audience member asked where are the voices of moderation in the Muslim world.

"Either they don't exist or they're afraid to appear," he replied. "The surveys that have been taken of Muslim populations in the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Italy as well as in the Middle East, suggest they don't exist.

"Individual, however, Muslim leaders do exist that are genuine moderates. They don't have constituencies."

Hundreds of millions of Muslims, on the other hand, support extremist ideologies, he said.

"I believe the route to our salvation and to protection of the homeland and indeed the protection of Muslims is the empowerment of genuine moderate Muslims," he said at one point. But later in his conclusion, he took a different tack.

"I bring to you the end of hope," Mr. Emerson said. "Here I am, coming to you, saying there's no hope until they change among themselves."