Deep suspicions about Islam in America — about to take center stage in controversial congressional hearing — are also galvanizing an increasingly organized and professional set of political groups, organizations that may play a role in the looming presidential cycle.

The clearest sign of the new effort to transform anti-Islam crusading into a mainstream lobbying effort came when the group ACT! For America wooed away Rep. Sue Myrick’s (R-N.C.) chief of staff Hal Weatherman to run its communications shop in February. The move helped complete the group’s transformation from a tiny, obscure organization into an ambitious nonprofit with a budget of $1.6 million in 2009, the last year for which figures are available.

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ACT! now has a staff of eight that includes a full-time federal lobbyist, a detailed legislative agenda and a television program – all dedicated to pushing a handful of issues, ranging from keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison camp open to pushing for alternative energies to Middle Eastern oil.

The next step, ACT! founder and CEO Brigitte Gabriel told POLITICO, may be creating a PAC or a 527 organization to get directly involved in campaigns and elections — possibly in time for the 2012 election.

Radical Islam “is the greatest threat facing our country in my lifetime, and Act for America is the only group systematically organizing at the local level to prepare for that future,” Weatherman told POLITICO.

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, the American Muslim community remains splintered and largely politically marginalized. But their opposition has coalesced, and the effort last year to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan demonstrated a popular zeal for what ranged from concerns about propriety to outright anti-Muslim bigotry in some cases.

Even many Republican leaders — including House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.), who is conducting hearings on radicalization that begin on Thursday — have kept the leaders of the new movement at arms’ length, while Muslim community leaders level the charge of outright bias.

The leaders of this new movement include the blogger Pamela Geller and her group Stop Islamization of America, the Clarion Fund, a New York City-based nonprofit — and the controversial Gabriel herself.

“The idea that congressional staffers would agree to meet an organization led by a woman whose agenda is pure unadulterated hatred and whose purported life story is a laughable fiction — it’s sad,” said Hussein Ibish, a former communications director for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee who is now a fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. “She seems to have brought with her a pathological hatred of Muslims and other Arabs.”

Gabriel disputes those charges and the Virginia-based ACT!’s goal is to turn resistance to radical Islam in America into a reputable, Beltway cause that matches what polls suggest is broad appeal among Americans. According to a September ABC News/Washington Post survey, just 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Islam and Muslims — the lowest level of support recorded since the Sept. 11 attacks.