Category Archives: Muslim Outreach

Anatomy of a Coverup

Posted on by
3

Dereliction-of-Duty-Five

We now have whistle blowers set to testify that what happened in Benghazi is very different than what the Obama administration has told us. We also have the proof that the Benghazi talking points were scrubbed. The question being asked now is why did Hillary Clinton and so many top administration officials, including General Petraeus, go to such extraordinary lengths to present a false narrative?

Daniel Greenfield has written a very good explanation of the Obama administration’s foreign policy towards the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in his piece, “Obama’s Big Brotherhood Bet” at Front Page that helps answer this question:

In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. He skipped the gaming tables at the Omar Khayyam Casino at the Cairo Marriott and instead went over to the Islamist baccarat tables at Cairo University and bet big on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama had insisted on Muslim Brotherhood attendance at a speech that was part apology and part abandonment. The apology was for American power and the abandonment was of American allies.

The text of the speech was largely inconsequential in the same way that most of the words that scroll across the teleprompters of politicians are. In politics, the speech is often the medium while the timing, the audience and the location are the message. And the message was that the Brotherhood’s hour had come.

Obama was following through on an idea that had long been an article of faith on the left. The idea was that the United States had invested in a defunct status quo and that our biggest problems were our allies. The only way out was to toss them all overboard.

Generations of diplomats had griped from their walled compounds in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Doha that many of our problems in the region would go away if Israel somehow went away. But this was bigger. It involved dumping every single allied government in the region to start fresh with new governments elected through popular democracy and enjoying popular support. It would be a new beginning. And a new beginning was also the title of the Cairo speech.

The idea wasn’t new, but it was right up there with proposals to unilaterally abandon our nuclear arsenal or dedicate ten percent of the budget to foreign aid; ideas that a lot of diplomats liked, but that they knew no one would ever be crazy enough to pull the trigger on.

And then Obama tried to pull the trigger on two out of three. What he wanted was for the Brotherhood to win so that it could make the War on Terror irrelevant.

As much as the advocates of smart and soft power insisted that Islamic terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, they knew better. They knew that Al Qaeda wanted to create Islamic states that would form into a Caliphate. Central to its thinking was that it would have to fight to create these states. But what if the Caliphate could be created without a war?

To make it happen, all America had to do was surrender the Middle East.

Read more

The Obama administration, with it’s cultural relativist world view, believes that BOTH Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda can be moderated by making a  transition to democracy with our help. There has been an Orwellian re-branding of the word terrorism in order to sell this idea to the public as well as a denial of the so called al Qaeda “franchise’s” ideological links to “core” al Qaeda. So when the al Qaeda militia we were partnering with (Feb. 17th Martyrs Brigade) to protect the embassy actually assisted al Qaeda members from Yemen and possibly Egypt to attack and kill our people in Benghazi, they had to cover that up or risk Obama losing the election. Hillary Clinton went to extraordinary measures to change the Benghazi talking points in order to protect her political future as well as Obama’s. As a bonus, she managed to insert the lie of the “offensive” video tape in order to advance the campaign to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Walid Phares: ” These forces were not on the map as a threat to US national security because of a political determination that they were on the right side of history, and they were perceived as in transition to integration.”

Clare Lopez: “The real issue — which is what the CIA, the State Department or anyone in the U.S. government has been doing backing regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa region in the company of and for the benefit of Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood jihadis — never gets addressed, much less explained by the ARB or anyone else.”

Related articles

History of the Muslim Brotherhood Penetration of the U.S. Government

Posted on by
2

20110630_gmbdrmedium (1)by Clare M. Lopez:

Given the long history of Muslim Brotherhood activity in this country, its declared objective to “destroy the Western civilization from within,” and the extensive evidence of successful influence operations at the highest levels of the U.S. government, it is urgent that we recognize this clear and present danger that threatens not only our Republic but the values of Western civilization.

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.”

– Motto of the Muslim Brotherhood

The upheavals of 2011-2012 across the Middle East and North Africa swept aside secular rulers and the established political order with startling speed, and continue to focus world attention on the revolutionary forces driving these far-reaching events. Poverty, oppression, inequality, and lack of individual freedom are all hallmarks of the societal stagnation that has gripped the Islamic world for the better part of fourteen centuries, but the driving force of the so-called “Arab Spring” is a resurgent Islam, dominated by the forces of al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Energized as Islam may be at this time, however, without the active involvement of the United States to help arm[1], fund[2], support[3], and train[4] the region’s Islamic rebels, it is questionable whether they could have gotten this far, this fast.

This report describes how the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist, whether knowingly or not, the mission of its grand jihad. Its hard-won position at the forefront of the 21stcentury Islamic Awakening is possible only because of decades of patient infiltration and political indoctrination (Da’wa) in the West, and especially the United States of America, even as the grassroots work of building an organizational structure advanced steadily in the land of its origin as well. It is important to recognize the sophistication of the Brotherhood’s international strategy and how the takedown of U.S. national security defenses from within was critical to the current Middle East-North Africa (MENA) campaign to re-establish the Caliphate and enforce Islamic Law (shariah).

Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood

To understand the Brotherhood and how it operates, especially inside Western societies such as America’s, a brief overview of where it came from and why it was established is in order. Following the early years of blindingly fast military conquests, Islam began to falter as European Christendom doggedly kept pushing back, eventually surpassing an increasingly corrupt empire that had run out of lands to conquer, people to enslave, and riches to plunder. Yoked by consensus of the scholars (ijma) to an ideology that rejected critical thought, innovation, and scientific inquiry in favor of blind obedience to revelation, the Islamic world remained largely untouched by the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and eventual Industrial and Technological revolutions that catapulted the West to global power status.[5] Eventual European colonization of the Arab and Muslim world and the stunningly successful re-establishment of the Jewish nation in the modern State of Israel brought humiliation to people raised on tales of historical supremacism over these, its traditional dhimmi victims.

Aside from Israel, which came later, this was the world into which Hassan al-Banna was born in the early 20thcentury. An Egyptian Cairene, al-Banna seethed with frustration at Islam’s diminished status in the world; in particular he resented the presence and power of the British colonial administration in Egypt. The abolishment of the last Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924 was perhaps the worst indignity, one that left al-Banna and his young Muslim university contemporaries apparently feeling unmoored. They joined together in 1928, determined (as we know from their statements and writing) to rectify things; “rectifying things,” for them, seems to have meant re-establishment of the Caliphate and global enforcement of Islamic Law (shariah). The organization they founded to return Egypt, the Middle East, and eventually the world to “proper” subservience to Islam as ordained by Allah would be the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic).

Global Jihad

Since its inception in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood consistently has championed the cause of global jihad to “mobilize the entire Umma into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength…to jihad, to warfare…”[6]Until early 2011, its original bylaws could be found on the Brotherhood’s English language website, Ikhwanweb, established in 2005 by senior Brotherhood official Khairat al-Shater. Since then, they have been preserved by Steven Emerson at The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)[7]. Article (2) makes clear that the Brotherhood conceives of itself as “an international Muslim Body, which seeks to establish Allah’s law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion…establishing the Islamic State” and “…building a new basis of human civilization as is ensured by the overall teachings of Islam.”[8]

In case that sounds relatively benign, Article (3) E gets more to the point: “The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state.”[9] This is exactly what the Brotherhood did in Egypt in the violent years before and after the 1949 death of al-Banna, until it was forcibly suppressed, only to rise again in 2011-2012 when circumstances permitted.

The story of how those circumstances shifted to permit (even compel) the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power not only in Egypt, but also Libya, Tunisia, and perhaps soon, Syria and elsewhere, spans 20th century world history. World War II and the Brotherhood’s close alliance with Adolf Hitler and his genocidal antisemitic Nazis provided the perfect opportunity for Islam’s latest expansion into Europe, where dozens of Brotherhood branches were established. Upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, its clandestine networks of Muslim operatives were picked up by the western Allies and naively turned to the same purpose as the Nazis had pursued: to counter the influence of atheist communist Soviets.[10] So it was that Sa’id Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna, and a delegation of Muslim Brothers, found themselves in the Oval Office on 23 September 1953 meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[11]

There is much more at Gatestone Institute

Clare M. Lopez, a strategic policy and intelligence expert, is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund. She was formerly a career operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

Checks link 9/11 hijacker to Anwar al-Awlaki

Posted on by
3

WEB-ONLY-AnwarAlAwlaki001crp_1317412621-600x350Money Jihad:

A newly released FBI report indicates that an unnamed male once received a check from radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki for $280 and gave a check for $175 to Nawaf Al-Hamzi, a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.  The transactions suggest that al-Awlaki funded Al-Hamzi through this unnamed intermediary.

This is the third report in the last two months of a U.S.-based imam having helped to finance terrorism.

Hat tip to El Grillo for tweeting this press release from Judicial Watch on Mar. 28:

JW Obtains FBI Records Detailing Banking Activity and Purchases Linking Anwar al-Aulaqi and 9/11 Hijackers

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received documents on March 4, 2013 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that raise new questions about close ties between Anwar al Aulaqi, the U.S.-born terrorist assassinated by a U.S. drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011, and Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, two of the five hijackers who attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the documents the FBI describes al Aulaqi as “The Spiritual Leader of the Hijackers.”

Judicial Watch received the documents in response to a June, 2012, Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI and the U.S. Department of State (DOS) (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State and Federal Bureau of Investigations (No. 1:12-cv-00893). They are part of Judicial Watch’s ongoing investigation of al Qaeda in the United States, including its current operations and support network.

Materials received by Judicial Watch reveal the following information the FBI regarded as worthy of investigation in its probe of ties between al Aulaqi and the 9/11 hijackers:

  • An undated FBI report indicates an individual received a check for $281.50 from al Aulaqi and wrote a check for $175 to al Hazmi on July 7, 2001.  There is no additional information about the transactions. The FBI apparently found the transaction to be of investigative interest because, depending on the identity of the intermediary party, it could indicate direct assistance from al Aulaqi to al Hazmi.
  • On 9/13/2001, FBI agents took possession of and searched the vehicle al Aulaqi rented in San Diego on 9/8/2001 (which he kept for one day and drove only 37 miles).  While there is no report regarding the results of the search, the action highlights the FBI’s interest in al Aulaqi and suspicions about his trip to San Diego, home to both al Hazmi and al Mihdhar leading up to the attacks.
  • An FBI report dated 10/24/2001 indicates that the Bureau became aware three days after the 9/11 attacks (9/14/2001) that al Aulaqi had rented a Mailboxes Etc. mail drop in Falls Church, VA.  The mail box was the subject of a federal grand jury subpoena.

“The more we learn about Anwar al Aulaqi, the more questions arise not only about his activities before and after 9/11, but also about the al Qaeda operational and support network still active in the United States,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is now even more concerning that al Aulaqi was invited to the Pentagon after 9/11 and then let go by the FBI despite warrants for his arrest.”

An earlier release of FBI documents obtained by a Judicial Watch FOIA and reported by Fox News suggest that the FBI was aware on September 27, 2001, that al Aulaqi had purchased airplane tickets for three of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers, including mastermind Mohammed Atta. Subsequent to the FBI’s discovery, al Aulaqi was detained and released by authorities at least twice and had been invited to dine at the Pentagon…

Previous evidence showed that Al-Hamzi and fellow future hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar regarded their San Diego neighbor Al-Awlaki as a spiritual adviser, but the extent of Awlaki’s concrete support for the duo had not been firmly established.

Related articles

Watch Webinar: ‘Hitler’s Islamist Allies and the War Today”

Posted on by
Reply

 

Haj Iman al Husseini and Adolf Hitler

Haj Iman al Husseini and Adolf Hitler

RadicalIslam.org‘s latest live webinar, “Hitler’s Islamist Allies and the War Today: The History Lesson That Wasn’t in Your School Textbook,” is now available on the above video.

The webinar’s presenter is RadicalIslam.org‘s National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro, who delves into the past and present history of the Muslim Brotherhood to prepare us to confront this alarmingly powerful and growing movement today.

The Brotherhood is dedicated to the establishment of a worlwide Islamic caliphate, which will subjugate every nation to Sharia (Islamic) law. The Brotherhood is a brutal movement, which hides it’s ideology in the guise of “moderation” in order to infiltrate Western society in a non-threatening way, as explicited stated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum on their strategic goals.

In the U.S., the Brotherhood has set up a series front organizations which present themselves as Muslim rights groups dedicated to fighting so-called “Islamophobia.” But their stated goal “to wage a grand jihad” to bring America down from within.

National Security Experts Warn: Reject Brennan

Posted on by
2

-348707709

Center For Security Policy:

Washington, D.C.: With the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence scheduled to vote tomorrow on John Brennan’s nomination to become the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it has become clear that Senators simply do not have all the information necessary for an informed decision on so sensitive an appointment. In an effort to illuminate the nominee’s shortcomings that demand – but have yet to receive – close scrutiny, the Center for Security Policy convened avirtual press conference featuring video-taped comments by six of the country’s preeminent experts on, among other things, the threat of Islamism and Brennan’s blindness to it.

The video includes powerful statements by Steve Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism; Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy;Chris Farrell, Vice President for Investigations and Research for Judicial Watch; Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, USA Ret., former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and author of The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever; andStephen Coughlin, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and author of the forthcoming book, Catastrophic Failure.

The video, National Security Experts Warn: Reject Brennan, compliments the Center’s other efforts to educate the public, media and policymakers about the dangers of a possible Brennan tenure at the CIA, including a collection of Brennan-related resources and several investigative pieces.

Andrew McCarthy–who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh who, twenty years ago yesterday, conspired to blow up the World Trade Center–said:

Making John Brennan the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the most monumental mismatch of man and mission that I can imagine. The point of having our intelligence agencies is to make sure that we have a coherent, accurate idea of the threats that confront the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Brennan’s career, and certainly the signature that he has put on the national security component of the Obama administration has been to blind the United States to the threats against us.

Steve Emerson, one of the country’s preeminent counter-terrorism experts added:

John Brennan, CIA director nominee, is uniquely unqualified to be the CIA director as evidenced by him being the architect of the outreach program to the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States as well as in the Middle East. In the course of the investigation conducted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, we discovered that there were at least four hundred visits in the three years between 2009 and 2012 to the White House of radical Islamic groups, some of whom were unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism trials, but all of whom had been involved in establishing radical Islamic rhetoric, including support for Hamas, Hezbollah, denigrating the US, calling this a war against Islam by the United States.

Zuhdi Jasser, a leader of anti-Islamist Muslims in America, warned that:

…The reports put out from [John Brennan's] counter-terrorism office at the White House…did not recognize the [Islamist] ideology. They noted a “radical ideology,” but didn’t name what it was — even though the word ‘ideology’ was mentioned twenty times. Our American-Islamic Leadership Coalition, that includes over 20 different reform-based organizations that are anti-Islamist, were not consulted. And, you can see from the report, that it seems to be very similar to things put out by groups like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Unfortunately, John Brennan has had a very cozy relationship to these groups and has often used their talking points when speaking out about Islam, Islamism, jihad, and the threat…. In every position Brennan has been it, he has been more a facilitator of Islamist groups rather than a counterweight to them, in order to oppose them and confront them.

The Center today also released a letter signed by fifteen conservative leaders – many of whom have extensive experience with national security policymaking and practice – calling on congressional leaders to launch a bicameral select committee to investigate the Benghazigate scandal. John Brennan’s involvement in the run-up to the murderous attack on September 11, 2012, his conduct during that seven-hour engagement and his role in the subsequent cover-up must be addressed before he is allowed, as Rep. Trent Franks recently put it “anywhere near the CIA, let alone running it.”

 

You can view the transcript at Center For Security Policy

 

South American & Mexican Hezbollah Jihadis Threaten the United States

Posted on by
4

20130220_hezbollah_south_americaby ALAN KORNMAN:

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid” – Gen. Eisenhower.

The Iranians and their terrorist proxy Hezbollah has been building forward operating bases in the Tri-Border area of South America and Mexico for the last three decades.  Venezuela’s uranium deposits have been an important and rarely reported on component fueling Iran’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people in Latin America and Mexico.

Iranian Press Expose the Hispanic Insurgency

Sending young Iranian clerics to Latin American countries to spread Iranian-style radical Shi’ite Islam: To prepare for such missions, clerics train for three years, and study a variety of subjects to help them in their activity in Latin America: Spanish, religions and cultures of Latin America, and skills for converting Spanish speakers to Islam. In February 2012 Hojjat-ol-Eslam Ruhollah Maheri, the deputy director of the institute, announced that registration was open for the eighth course. Those interested were asked to call the institute or send an application form by email (AmuzehSpanish@gmail.com). (Rasa News Agency, 2/15/2012)(ITIC)

U.S. Congress Alerts The Nation

Congressman Michael McCaul, Chairman Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Management, in a 2012 report report titled, “A Line  In The Sand: Countering Crime, Violence and Terror At The Southwest Border“,  is alerting Americans to a very serious problem that we must all become aware.

Of growing concern are Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force, partnering with Mexican and South American drug syndicates, joining in  lucrative drug, gun running, counterfeiting, and human trafficking operations.  Out of these associations, Islamic terrorist groups are making hundreds of millions of dollars while exploiting our Mexican border and entering the United States at any time of their choosing, often cloaked as illegal immigrants.

Wikileaks Exposes U.S. Brazilian Counterterrorism Recommendations (2011)

CONFIDENTIAL SÃO PAULO 000653

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR SR FARAH PANDITH, KAREN CHANDLER AMEMBASSY BRASILIA PASS TO AMCONSUL RECIFE

E.O. 12958: DECL: 2019/11/20

TAGS: PGOV OEXC OIIP PHUM PINR PINS PROP SCUL PTER BR

SUBJECT: Scenesetter for SR Farah Pandith’s Visit to Brazil: São Paulo’s Muslims

REF: São PAULO 433 São PAULO 421 BRASILIA 709 2008 São PAULO 542

Classified By: David C. Brooks, State POL; Reason: 1.4 (d)

The U.S. government also wishes to develop relations between U.S. Muslim community leaders and the Muslim communities in Brazil. They hope that by fostering a connection they will “bolster mainstream Islam in Brazil, highlight the importance of freedom of religion in America, the diversity of Islam in America, and debunk the myths that exist about Islam in America.” Additionally it would further the Sao Paulo Muslim community’s effort to spread its “interfaith relations… with other Muslim communities around the World.”

“Post, Karen Chandler, has suggested several possible programs, including a campaign to provide consular information to Muslim contacts, a series of outreach presentations on President Obama, and, most important, our desire to bring down a visiting U.S. Sheik who can explain how Islam is now a vital part of American society and build ties with local religious leaders. Given its size, diversity and traditions of cultural tolerance, Brazil could be an excellent testing ground for programs that might be useful to other WHA posts with similar Muslim minority populations.”

Obama and State Department Arrogance and Idiocy Towards Political Islam

The United States is an Infidel nation, following man made laws, in direct violation of Islamic Law.  For President Obama’s Foreign Policy team to think we can “influence Hezbollah Islam in Brazil by promoting the diversity of Islam in America” as a force multiplier across the South America region to counter the Hezbollah power base in the tri-border area, is patently absurd and quite dangerous.

Our State Department articulates they will achieve this naive objective above by doing a “series of outreach presentations on President Obama and bringing down a U.S. Sheik to say how important Islam is to American Society.”

The WikiLeaks memo above focuses a neon light on how utterly ignorant our State Department officials are about the Islamic Threat Doctrine, Hezbollah, Al-Queda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.  American policy makers believe this mythical form of Infidel U.S. friendly Islam will out Islam the truer Islam of Iran is like the Keystone Cops giving tactical training to the Navy SEAL’s.

Hezbollah is currently sending Jihadis through the porous Mexican / U.S. Border creating a national security risk which The Obama Administration refuses to name, much less address and counter.

Read more: Family Security Matters 

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Alan Kornman is the regional coordinator of The United West-Uniting Western Civilization for Freedom and Liberty. His email is: alan@theunitedwest.org

 

Update: Creeping Sharia has extensive coverage of Hezbollah in Belize:

Hezbollah getting passports in Belize to travel from Mexico to U.S.

 

Previous CJR posts on the growing terrorist threat from Hezbollah in South America:

Our Old Grand Fantasies About Radical Islam

Posted on by
1

 

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last" Winston Churchill

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last” Winston Churchill

By Victor Davis Hanson

Most things that we read in the popular media about radical Islam are fantasies. They are promulgated in the mistaken belief that such dogmas will appease terrorists, or at least direct their ire elsewhere. But given the recent news — murdering in Algeria, war in Mali, the Syrian mess, and Libyan chaos — let us reexamine some of these more common heresies. Such a review is especially timely, given that Mr. Brennan believed [1] that jihad is largely a personal quest for spiritual perfection; Mr. Kerry believed [2] that Bashar Assad was a potentially moderating reformer; and Mr. Hagel believed [3] that Iran was not worthy of sanctions, Hezbollah was not deserving of ostracism, and Israel is equally culpable for the Middle East mess.

1. Contact with the West Moderates Radical Muslims

In theory, residence in the West could instruct young Muslim immigrants on the advantages of free markets, constitutional government, and legally protected freedoms. But as we saw with many of the 9/11 hijackers, for a large subset of Muslim expatriates, a strange schizophrenia ensues: they enjoy — indeed, seek out — the material bounty of the West. But in the abstract, far too many either despise what wealth and affluence do to the citizenry (e.g., gay marriage, feminism, religious tolerance, secularism, etc.) or try to dream up conspiracy theories to explain why their adopted home is better off than the native one that they abandoned.

Finally, foreign students, journalists, and religious expatriates tend to congregate around American campuses and in liberal big cities. There, they are more often nursed on [4] American race/class/gender critiques of America, and so apparently believe that their own anti-Americanism must naturally be shared by millions of Americans from Bakersfield to Nashville. Take Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new theocratic president. He should appreciate the U.S. It gave him refuge from persecution in Egypt. It allowed unfettered expression of his radical anti-American views. It schooled him in meritocratic fashion and offered him secure employment at the CSU system, despite his foreign national status. It gave citizenship to two of his daughters (apparently retained). But the result is that Mr. Morsi is an abject anti-Semite (“apes and pigs” [5]) and anti-American. He does not believe [6] terrorists caused 9/11. He wants the imprisoned, murderous blind sheik, who was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, sent home to Egypt. And he is pushing Egypt into a Sunni version of Iran.

2. The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior

I have noted elsewhere [7] both the fantasies found in Barack Obama’s Cairo speech [8] and their general irrelevance to the Muslim world. Polls from Pakistan to Palestine — both recipients of massive U.S. aid — show that the U.S. is as unpopular under Obama as it was under Bush. All small nations have writs against large ones, especially the globally ubiquitous U.S. But America must be seen in comparison to … what? Russia’s artillery and missile barrage that leveled Muslim Grozny (which the UN declared the most destroyed city in the world)? China, which outlaws free expression of Islam and persecutes Muslim minorities? Both are largely left alone by al-Qaeda, due to their unapologetic attitudes, possible unpredictable response, and inability to offer attackers a globalized media forum.

In contrast, no single nation lets in more Muslim immigrants than does the U.S. No non-Muslim nation gives more foreign aid than does the U.S. to the Muslim world — Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. No nation has so sought to save Muslims from dictatorial violence — whether bombing European Christians to save Muslims in the Balkans; jawboning Kuwaitis to spare Palestinian turncoats in 1991; trying to feed starving Somalis; aiding Muslims fighting Russians in Afghanistan; freeing Kuwaitis from Saddam; rebuilding Iraq; rebuilding Afghanistan from Taliban terror; trying to free Libyans from Gadhafi; and on and on.

The sources of radical Islam rage are thus not past U.S. actions. Read The Al Qaeda Reader [9] to chart all the bizarre excuses that bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri alleged were the roots of their anger at the U.S. So why exactly does radical Islam hate us? Mostly because of the age-old wages [10] of insecurity, envy, and a sense of inferiority — and the hunch that such gripes win apologies, attention, and sometimes money. In a globalized world, Muslims see daily that everyone from South Koreans to North Americans are better off. Why? In their view, not because of market economies, meritocracies, gender equality, religious pluralism, consensual government, and the Western menu of personal freedom. To draw that conclusion would mean to reject tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, statism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theory — and to admit indigenous rather than foreign causation. Instead, it is far easier to blame “them” for turning the majestic Islamic empire of old into the chaos of modern Islam — as well as to fault Arab secularists whose lack of religious zealotry allowed the West to move ahead. All antidotes to these deductive beliefs — foreign aid, democratization, outreach, better communications — have so far proved ambiguous at best.

3. Israel Is the Source of Muslim Rage

Note two facts about the current mass killing in the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and Yemen. First, it has nothing to do with Israel. Second, the Muslim world is largely silent about the carnage that dwarfs the toll of an Israeli response to missiles from Gaza. The Muslim world cannot do anything about Muslim-on-Muslim violence, but apparently thinks others can do a great deal about Israeli-on-Muslim violence, which is sporadic at best.

Why, then, do Westerners so often scapegoat Israel? A number of very human considerations, apart from the most obvious of anti-Semitism, the Arab world’s oil wealth, and the vast demographic fact of 1 billion persons versus 7 million. We have influence with Westernized and liberal Israel, none with Mr. Morsi or the Libyan assassins or the Algerian hostage-killers. Symbolic pressure is a psychological mechanism to excuse factual impotence. The Arab world is so complex and so torn by tribalism, religious schisms, and embedded pathologies that the Western mind seeks a simple sword stroke to Israel to cut such a complex Gordian knot. For now the problem is supposed to be Mr. Netanyahu, who in appearance and speech seems like an easily demonized American neocon. Yet every writ against Israel is elsewhere in the world commonplace and mostly ignored: our drone killings trump their targeted assassinations; a divided Nicosia trumps Jerusalem; occupied islands off Japan or Tibet trump the West Bank; a million ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab capitals or 13 million Germans cleansed from Eastern Europe trump the Arab flight from Palestine. For a displaced German now to speak of a right of return to “Danzig” is creepy; for a Palestinian to demand residence in Haifa after a similar seven decades of absence is appropriate.

4. The U.S. Can Solve the Muslim World’s Problems.

I supported the war in Iraq as a way of getting rid of a long-term enemy of the U.S., Saddam Hussein, in accordance with the 23 writs of action approved by the U.S. Congress. We did that, ended the 12-year containment and no-fly-zones, and defeated a huge Islamist coalition that flocked to Iraq to wage jihad. That said, Iraq is more stable than Syria or Libya largely because a U.S. presence baby-sat democratic change. To the degree that Iraq will revert to the usual Arab paradigm is probably contingent on the fact that the U.S. refused to leave even a small garrison and simply pulled out lock, stock, and barrel.

Elsewhere, I don’t think the Western intervention in Libya led to much of an improvement over Gadhafi’s nightmarish dictatorship. Morsi may make the kleptocratic Mubarak look good in another year. Take your pick in Syria: the murderous security of the Assad secret police or the murderous chaos of Islamist gangs. I am sure that there are Google execs among all the dissidents, but I am also sure that none will come to power — and most will soon flee their respective countries. No one now is pressuring 8th century Saudi Arabia to become a 21st century “democratic” Egypt. Eastern Europe — warped by a half-century of Soviet-imposed communism, torn by past wars between Russia and Europe, with a baleful legacy of Ottoman occupation in the southeast, and distant from the Renaissance, Reformation, and New World exploration — was saved by its Western heritage and its incorporation into Europe, at least for now. As far as the Muslim world, I see no such heritage or possible likeminded interventions from the West. Perhaps some day globalization or Westernized oil-fed elites in the manner of a Dubai may make a difference — or perhaps not.

In this regard, the Obama administration’s therapeutic approach [11] — jihad is a personal journey; Major Hasan committed workplace violence and endangered the Army’s diversity program; terrorism is a man-caused disaster; anti-terrorism is an overseas contingency operation; there is no war on Islamic terror; trying KSM in a civilian court; loud talk of shutting down Guantanamo; reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects; loudly inventing underappreciated Islamic discoveries and inventions — is not just silly and embarrassing, but dangerous. The therapeutic approach sends the message to the young terrorist that we are in some way culpable for the violence that he intends to commit, that there may not be dangerous repercussions to his terrorist acts, or that we do not believe in the values of our culture as much as he does in his own.

Read more at PJ Media

Obama Administration Legitimizing Philadelphia Islamists

Posted on by
2

Islamist Watch:

by Hillel Zaremba  •  Jan 8, 2013

State Dept. Promotes Philly Supremacist Groups as Model For Muslim World

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports on a State Department-sponsored visit to America by a Bulgarian Muslim delegation, to “learn about the environment of religious tolerance in the U.S. and how religious groups function in a democratic society with a separation of church and state.”

A laudable goal, perhaps. But maddeningly, American taxpayers paid for the Bulgarians to meet representatives from Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups like the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and terror apologist Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), while groups upholding American values like the American Islamic Forum for Democracy or American Islamic Leadership Coalition were ignored.

Perhaps equally disturbing are some of the lesser known groups with whom the delegation met on the Philadelphia leg of the tour.

Al Aqsa Islamic Society (AAIS).

The AAIS’ self-described mission is to “maintain the Islamic Identity and to protect Muslim people, children and students from the adversities of the surrounding non-Islamic environments.” Apparently, no one at the aptly named Foggy Bottom sees a problem with arranging a meeting with a group possessing such a hostile view of the surrounding American culture.

The Obama Administration brought a delegation of Bulgarian Muslims to the Al Aqsa Islamic Society in Philadelphia (left), holding AAIS’ supremacist, intolerant version of Islam as a model for Muslims worldwide. At right, a taxpayer funded women-only class inside the AAIS.

 

The name of this mosque should have been State’s first clue as to the “Islamic Identity” which the AAIS fosters. In a typical Islamic supremacist gesture, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem was built by conquering Muslims on top of the site of the Jewish Temple. Many American Muslims use the name for their houses of worship to indicate Muslim supremacy, as well as Palestinian solidarity.

AAIS has been linked to anti-Israel protests, featuring slogans such as “No justice! No peace! No freedom! No peace!” — presumably not the face of “tolerance” State wanted to show its Bulgarian visitors. And it was at the AAIS that Mohamad Shnewer and the Duka brothers, sentenced to life in prison for planning an attack on Fort Dix, would come to pray, begging the question of what brand of Islam is being preached at this site.

The Foundation for Islamic Education (FIE).

FIE describes itself as a satellite campus of Al-Azhar University of Cairo, whose leaders and faculty have sanctioned suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, called Jews “descendants of apes and pigs,” defended the execution of Muslims who leave their faith and threatened Egyptian Christians (Copts) for questioning the Quran.

The Bulgarians met representatives from FIE to discuss the latter’s “Islamic … after-school and summer programs.” Did FIE officials tell the Bulgarians how before 9/11 they held summer “jihad camp” gatherings at their campus? Or mention that one invited speaker, Siraj Wahhaj, advocated replacing the Constitution with Shari’a? Did FIE bring up its hosting of imam Jamal Badawi, who issued a fatwa listing the conditions under which it is permitted to beat one’s wife; or of banned-from-Canada Riyadh ul Haq, who declared: “The only Muslims who are considered moderates, are those who….forgive me for polluting the masjid’s atmosphere by saying this, … openly advocate lesbianism, those who are publicly declared homosexuals”?

The Obama Administration should not be holding up American Islamist groups who espouse religious intolerance and supremacism as a model for Muslims worldwide.

Obama Gives Cold Shoulder to Egyptian Secular Democrats

Posted on by
Reply
Michael Meunier

Michael Meunier

IPT:

by Michael Meunier

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Egypt last July, she was met with widespread protest from Coptic Christians and secular activists objecting to what they all believed was the Obama administration’s role in helping the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ascend to power in Egypt.

The secretary asked to meet with 10 Christian leaders, myself included. All of those invited refused to meet with her and boycotted her visit. Most of us had been both publically and privately warning members of Congress and the administration of the danger the Muslims Brotherhood poses and about their desire to turn Egypt into a theocratic Islamic fascist country. Yet we were ignored.

Going back to April 2007, Democrats made special efforts to link up with the MB when visiting then-House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., met with Saad el-Katatni, the MB’s parliamentary leader, at former U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone’s home, at a time when then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has publically refused to meet with the Brotherhood.

Mr. Ricciardone, who I can call a friend, once told me that his friendship with another MB leader, Essam El- Erian, extended for close to 30 years. Perhaps that was the catalyst for this meeting and subsequent meetings that took place at his residence.

A stream of meetings, as well as public and private contacts, followed between current U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson and Brotherhood members since her arrival in Egypt shortly after the revolution. The ambassador seemed to favor the Brotherhood and the hard line Salafis over the rest of the secular players in Egypt.

In fact, she has turned down requests for meetings from heads of political parties and other secular politicians, myself included, who oppose the Brotherhood.

Other U.S. officials such as Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Sen. John Kerry made the pilgrimage to MB headquarters and made sure to meet with their shadowy influential leader, Khairat El-Shater, at times even publicly praising him Kerry did. Those visits were made during a time where no political group had emerged as a leader in post-revolution Egypt.

The MB used these high-level meetings to tell the Egyptian people that the U.S. is supporting them and does not object to their rule. Many of us reached out to U.S. officials at the State Department and complained that the U.S. policy regarding the MB was putting the secular forces in Egypt at a disadvantage because it seemed to be propping the MB, but our concerns were dismissed.

We warned of the MB’s desire to impose Sharia law once in power and the grim effect it would have on the rights of the millions of Christians and moderate Muslims, and on women and children, yet all of our warnings were dismissed. It seems that a policy decision was made to bring the MB to power in Egypt at all costs, and it happened.

After less than six months in office, President Mohamed Morsi issued an edict exempting his decrees from judicial review, and he is now forcing Egyptians to vote on a constitution that would impose Sharia law, violate human rights and religious freedom of Christians, degrade women, regulate child labor and kill the tourism industry for violating Islamic Sharia.

Youth and large portions of the Egyptian population responded to the president’s new powers and draft of the constitution by taking to the streets and surrounding the presidential palace in protest.

Morsi then sent his own armed militia to attack the protesters with numerous weapons including shotguns, swords and firebombs.

The Brotherhood militia killed 10 people, wounded hundreds and kidnapped top youth activists, and tortured them inside the presidential palace for two days before turning them over to the police.

As the Supreme Constitutional Court was poised to dissolve the constitutional assembly, Morsi again sent his Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi militias to besiege the courthouse and prevent the judges from entering the building.

Upon arrival, the judges were turned away by the militia after their lives had been threatened, and to this day the militias are still surrounding the courthouse preventing the judges from meeting.

The president wanted to prevent the court from dissolving the assembly until after he pushes the referendum through and the constitution becomes effective.

Morsi again sent his armed militia to burn down the opposition Al-Wafd Party headquarters in response to the opposition and media stepping up their protests and criticism of the constitution, which large numbers of Egyptians reject and view as a setback for freedom.

They demolished cars and fired shots at the Al-Wafd Party, which is the oldest secular party in Egypt. Another set of Morsi’s militia besieged “Media City” where most of the independent TV channels are located. The militia attacked TV anchors known to disagree with Morsi and prevented TV guests who are known to oppose Morsi from entering the city, so they could not appear on TV and criticize the referendum.

Simultaneously, another group of the Morsi’s militia attacked the headquarters of newspapers knowing to oppose Morsi and the referendum. The Al-Watan newspaper was among the newspapers whose editor-in-chief went on TV to appeal to the president to stop his militia from attacking reporters and the newspaper building.

Through this all, President Obama’s position amounts to, “This is an internal matter and we leave to the Egyptian people to sort out!!”

What the Brotherhood is doing in Egypt is holding a gun to the head of its opposition trying to pass a constitution that so far failed to garner a greater support among Egyptians.

Once that becomes the law of the land, the race is on to turn Egypt into another theocracy headed by an Islamist fascist regime that soon after will threaten the security of the free world. At the heart of it is the Obama administration and its failed foreign policy, and what I see as the desire to destroy moderate Egypt and turn it over to the fanatic elements of the society, creating a monster that will turn on its creator.

Michael Meunier is the President of Al Haya Party in Egypt. He is the founder of the U.S. Copts Association and a democracy, human rights and religious freedom activist.

State Department’s Continued Outreach to Radicals

Posted on by
1

788_largeby Abha Shankar

The Obama administration’s efforts to conquer hearts and minds in the Muslim world as part of its broader strategy to battle Islamist terrorism may be a laudable goal. But the administration’s continued pandering to radical Islamists both at home and abroad continues to baffle and frustrate opponents of political Islam and Islamist organizations.

The administration has been swift to embrace newly-elected Islamist regimes in the Middle-East despite their violent and pro-jihadi rhetoric. Last month for example, it heaped praise on Egypt’s new Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi for helping broker a truce between Israel and Hamas after eight days of fighting. In lauding Morsi, the U.S. government overlooked statements supporting Hamas issued by Morsi’s colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood and their celebration of rocket attacks on Israel. Morsi was a senior Brotherhood official for years before seeking office.

This international outreach to authoritarian Islamist regimes bestows undue legitimacy on Islamists and renders democratic and secular opposition and dissident groups voiceless. The same flawed outreach is being pursued domestically.

The latest example comes from a State Department-sponsored delegation last year of five Bulgarian Muslims who came to discuss the role of religion in the United States. Details of the trip, funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs under its International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), were obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The delegation hoped to “learn about the environment of religious tolerance in the U.S. and how religious groups function in a democratic society with a separation of church and state,” records in the 379-page FOIA release show. It described meetings the delegation had with leading Islamist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and individuals in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and Chicago from Sept. 26-Oct. 14, 2011.

This is a problem that has been detailed before. Rather than seeking views from the broader, more diverse Muslim American community, government officials grab at “the lowest hanging fruit,” said Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-based doctor who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. “But they ignore ideological diversity and instead take the shortcut of generally allowing those Muslims who are part of a national and global political Islamist movement to represent our faith community.”

“When confronted the White House and State Department will say that the ideological positions of Muslim groups is not their concern,” added Jasser, whose appointment this year to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom sparked ire among Islamists.

Jasser also blamed political correctness for the government’s flawed outreach policy:

“In part this also happens out of an absurd degree of political correctness and in part because these organizations have been very successful at branding themselves as the ‘voice of the Muslims.’ Even our National Strategy on Counterterrorism has been hijacked by this behavior, where it references the word ideology over 20 times but never names the ideology. The truth is that there is not and will never be one Muslim voice. We are a very diverse community….”

Jasser’s views were echoed by Qanta Ahmed, a New York-based physician and ardent critic of radical Islam.

The government’s failure to distinguish “Islam” from “political Islam” and its “willful engagement with non-violent Islamists” has resulted in the Islamists “owning the narrative,” she said. In congressional testimony given in June, she also highlighted the threat Islamist ideology poses to the American democracy:

“While we have been pursuing conventional international warfare and in fact have assassinated the leader of Al Qaida for instance, we have remained dangerously vulnerable because of our delayed realization of the political science aspects of Islamist ideology and the very serious threat this poses to our democracy,” Ahmed said. She described threats to free speech in the debate over radical Islam due to threats of litigation and false claims of bigotry that are used to stifle other points of view. Already, due to Islamist influence, the U.S. government has stopped using words like “Islamist” and “radical Islam.”

“This sanitization of our lexicon reveals a shocking and perhaps specious reluctance to engage with the problem or worse, a foolhardy embrace, unintentional or otherwise, with the Islamist stance,” Ahmed said.

“These are vulnerabilities which cannot be safeguarded by drones, or gunships but instead must be secured by counter ideological warfare which begins here, by widening the debate, discussion and scholarship in the area.”

Read more at IPT

See also:

Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood (counterjihadreport.com)