When the five House Republicans rose up to call for scrutiny of enemy efforts to  influence our government, they were not speaking hypothetically. The effort is  very real. And the enemy is now so brazen, so confident about the inroads it has  made, that it publicly closes ranks around its operatives even after their  treachery has been laid bare.

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

I’m a big fan of the 1 percent. No, not the dastardly 1 percent of Occupy    Wall Street myth; I’m partial, instead, to the 1 percent of Congress that takes  seriously the threat of Islamic-supremacist influence operations against our  government.

The people have 435 representatives serving in the House and another hundred  in the Senate. Of these 535, a total of 288 are Republicans – 241 and 47 in the  lower and upper chambers, respectively. Of these, only five House conservatives  – five – have had the fortitude to raise concerns about the Islamist  connections of government officials entrusted with positions enabling them to  shape U.S. policy.

Think about that. Republicans purport to be the national-security party. For  decades this claim was well founded, starting with Ronald Reagan’s clarity in  seeing the Soviets as enemies to be defeated, not accommodated. President  Reagan’s plan for the Cold War was, “We win, they lose,” and he pulled it off  because he was not under any illusions about who “they” were.

But something happened to the GOP in the Bush years. For all the welcome  understanding that Bill Clinton was wrong – that the jihad could not be indicted  into submission – the Bush administration never learned a fundamental truth that  Reagan knew only too well: You cannot defeat your enemies unless you understand  them, and you cannot even begin to understand them if you are too craven to name  them.

As they gather in Tampa for their quadrennial showcase, Republicans, but for  the 1 percent, remain timorous on the subject of America’s enemies. Oh, they’ll  tell you that we must confront “terrorism” and crack down on the “terrorists.”  But that’s not much different from claiming to be against “burglary” and  “burglars.” Terrorism is a vicious crime, but it becomes a national-security  threat only when it is an instrument of an ideology that aims to destroy our  country. What made the terrorist organizations armed and trained by the Soviets  in the Sixties and Seventies a threat was the Soviets, not the  terrorism.

America’s enemies are Islamic supremacists: Muslims adherent to a  totalitarian interpretation of Islam who, like Soviet Communists, seek to impose  their ideology throughout the world, very much including the United States.  Terrorism is an offensive strategy they use, but it is only one arrow in the  quiver. Its chief utility, moreover, is not that it will coerce surrender on its  own; it is the atmosphere of intimidation it creates. That dramatically  increases the effectiveness of the enemy’s several other offensive strategies -  legal demands for concessions, media campaigns, infiltration of society’s major  institutions, and influence operations against government.

The most disheartening thing about the modern Republican party’s dereliction  – about its accommodation and empowerment of our enemies under the delusional  guise of “Muslim outreach” – is that it flies in the face of the Bush Justice  Department’s signal counterterrorism achievement.

That was the 2007-08 Holy Land Foundation case. For once, political  correctness and the fear of being smeared as “Islamophobic” were shelved. In the  course of convicting several Hamas operatives, prosecutors proved that the  Muslim Brotherhood is engaged in a far-flung enterprise aimed, in the Brothers’  own words, at “eliminating and destroying” our way of life “from within” by  means of “sabotage.” The Bush Justice Department not only showed that what the  Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad” (or “civilization jihad”) is real; Justice  shed light on the ideology that fuels this enterprise, and expressly identified  many of the global Brotherhood’s accomplices.

Alas, this achievement is one today’s Republicans prefer to ignore. The party  of Ronald Reagan would have worn it like a badge of honor. Today’s GOP would  rather engage our enemies and call them our friends – not understand them, call  them what they are, and defeat them. Today’s Beltway Republicans save their  wrath for the occasional conservative – the messengers who embarrass them by  illustrating how small the big time has made them.

Did you know, for example, that when the Republican establishment had its  hissy fit over the inconvenient 1 percent – when John McCain and John Boehner  led the shrieking over their five conservative colleagues’ purported  scaremongering over Islamist influence-peddling – the fact that this  influence-peddling effort exists had just been proved in court?

As Patrick Poole, one of few to cover the  case, has observed,  it is the biggest spy scandal you’ve never heard about. Right around the time  McCain and Boehner were dressing down the 1 percent last month, Ghulam Nabi Fai  was finally heading off to prison. He had pled guilty last December to acting as  a secret foreign agent against our government.

In sum, Fai was paid millions of dollars over two decades by the Pakistani  intelligence service to push its agenda through a D.C.-based front, the Kashmiri  American Council. You haven’t heard much about it because it is a Muslim  Brotherhood operation through and through, one that demonstrates exactly what  the 1 percent is warning about.

Read more at American Thinker

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor  Andrew C. McCarthy is  a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, author ofWillful  Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and blogs at National Review Online’s The  Corner.