Tag Archives: US foreign policy

Former US Ambassador: “Benghazi Was Not Just a Mid-level Bureaucratic Failure. It Was a Failure of Leadership.”

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Obama.Benghazi1-450x348By Daniel Greenfield:

That’s the conclusion of  Ambassador Richard S. Williamson writing about Benghazi.

“Thirty years ago, I assumed post as chief of mission in my first ambassadorship. One thing I learned from the able foreign service officers with whom I served was that if there was a legitimate security issue, all I needed to do was send a cable to the State Department’s undersecretary for management and the problem would be addressed promptly, professionally, and effectively. We now know that did not happen in Benghazi. America’s full arsenal of security assets was not deployed to protect Ambassador Stevens. Why not? How has the culture changed where legitimate security requests from a U.S. ambassador go unheeded by the State Department?” Williamson asks.

That’s one of the important questions to ask about Hillary’s time there. Under her watch, US diplomatic facilities were helpless as they came under siege and major abuses were covered up.

The State Department was run like Hillary’s campaign, instead of a professional organization dedicated to achieving serious national goals.

I’ve served four secretaries of State in a variety of positions in the State Department and in various ambassadorships. I’ve seen how the building works. Benghazi was not just a mid-level bureaucratic failure. It was a failure of leadership. The secretary of State sets the tone and the bureaucracy responds. If the secretary makes a priority of keeping American diplomats safe and secure, then the bureaucracy responds by doing the same. I know and have worked with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy; he is an able man. But I also know that if the secretary of State had made security for our diplomats a priority, more would have been done.

And that’s the bottom line. The buck stops with the leadership. Leaders set goals and priorities. Their people carry them out. Hillary’s goals and priorities did not involve keeping diplomats safe. Whatever those goals really were, they treated people on the ground as disposable.

From the moment the Obama administration brought up the video, it was self-evidently a MacGuffin. The ugly video had been out on the Internet for months. Why had this little-seen and little-noted video launched spontaneous demonstrations around and attacks on U.S. diplomatic posts throughout the Middle East? Oh yes, it was September 11th! Now, what exactly is the significance of September 11th? And is it remotely credible that spontaneous demonstrators bring along missile launchers? As Albert Camus once wrote, we should set “ideological reflexes aside for a moment and just think.”

Why were the president and his political operatives so anxious to divert the attention of the media and the American people? Just think. It was the final phase of a hard-fought election campaign and these events pulled back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, revealing that a pillar of the president’s reelection campaign was smoke and mirrors.

GM was alive and government subsidized, but in Syria, so was Al Qaeda.

The president and his campaign were desperate to keep a lid on Benghazi because it fundamentally challenged their narrative. It simply could not withstand close scrutiny. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. And the facts were that Islamic extremists willing to engage in terrorism were on the march across North Africa. Benghazi was but one of the developments that revealed this fact for anyone willing to look. The president’s statements about Benghazi during the foreign policy debate revealed a lawyerly slipperiness and a contortionist’s ability to bend the truth to his immediate political advantage.

There is a significant difference of opinion on how to best prosecute the war on terror. There are good people of experience and sound judgment on both sides of this debate, and it is a debate that must be joined. But it was not a debate the Obama campaign wanted to have during the 2012 presidential campaign. By all indications, it is not a debate the Obama administration ever wants to have.

No it doesn’t. Obama has reverted to Clinton era terror policies while burying the rise of Al Qaeda beneath the occasional drone strike and Bin Laden’s corpse.

Read more at Front Page

 

The Cognitive Dissonance of the Progressive World View on Islam

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images (60)Mark Durie explains the Progressive world view of “Universalism” and “Relativism” and way it shapes the Obama administration’s policy regarding Islam. The cognitive dissonance created by this world view and the coping mechanisms employed to maintain it are explored. This is how we have ended up with an insane foreign policy that not only tolerates but values the Islamic culture over our own. This is how we end up with rules of engagement in Afghanistan that value the lives of our enemy over our own soldiers. This is how we end up with a foreign policy that has aligned us with the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.This is how we end up with a dead Ambassador in Benghazi. And this is why the Obama administration thinks it’s a good thing to help usher in the rise of the modern Islamic Caliphate.

Wilders in Australia and the “Islamic Problem” – Part II, by Mark Durie, May 29, 2013

This is the second in a four part series of posts written in response to Geert Wilders’ visit to Australia in early 2013.
In a previous post I contrasted Geert Wilders’ view that ‘Islam is the problem’ with the claims of many Muslims who preach with equal conviction that ‘Islam is the solution’, and examined evidence of the negative characteristics associated with belief in Islam, including disadvantaged human development outcomes.

These days many leaders in the West find it convenient to sweep the ‘problem’ of Islam under the carpet. Long gone are the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilders’ hero, who declared  in Fear God and take your own part that values such as freedom and equality only existed in Europe because it had the military capacity to ‘beat back the Moslem invader’.

However, given the negative outcomes associated with Islam, one of which is Geert Wilders’ need for constant armed guards (some others were enumerated in the previous post), the question whether Islam is the problem or the solution is not something to be just swept under the carpet.

In the fourth and final post of this series we will consider Wilders’ policies for managing ‘the problem’.  The third post, the next after this, will review an on-going dispute between critics of Islam as to whether there can be a moderate, tolerable form of Islam. On one side stand those, like Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer, who consider Islam to be essentially irredeemable.  On the other side stand those, like Daniel Pipes and Barry Rubin, who argue that there are different Islams and the ‘solution’ to radical Islam is moderate Islam.

Of course there are many opinions about Islam.  In this, the second post in this series, we consider two widely-held secular – and positive – perspectives on Islam which have been influential in shaping the response of secular-minded westerners to Islam.  These are universalism and relativism.

Relativism holds that no one religion is true, but as different as they are, all religions are equally valid in their own way, and the differences deserve respect.

Universalism — in the sense used here — holds that the core of religions consists of a set of positive ethical values shared by all people and all faiths.

For many western secular people, universalism and relativism are so deeply embedded in their world view that they have no choice but to process Islam through the grid of these belief systems. This means they pre-judge Islam by limiting their understanding only to what their frame permits them to see.  What they observe is not Islam as it really is, but as it appears through the window frame of their own beliefs. They see Islam as their world view tells them it must be.

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Clinton’s answer to the evils of extremists — defined as those who believe in religious truth — is respect.  If we extend respect to the beliefs of others, treating them as worthy and valid and allowing their beliefs and practices breathing space, she believes these others are more likely to act moderately, and not adopt extremist positions:

“I think the more respect there is for the freedom of religion, the more people will find useful ways to participate in their societies. If they feel suppressed, if there is not that safety valve that they can exercise their own religion, they then oftentimes feel such anger, despair that they turn to violence. They become extremists.”

For Clinton extremism is a vicious circle.  The extremist A disrespects the beliefs of B, with the result that B feels such ‘anger’ and ‘despair’ that they become extremists in their turn, disrespecting the beliefs of others.  This vicious circle can be broken and turned into a virtuous circle if A chooses to respect B’s beliefs.  This respect will help B feel good about themselves, with the result that they become happy and self-confident, renounce extremist ways, and extend respect to others in their turn.

One problem with Clinton’s approach is that it is underpinned by a naive view of human nature.  Some oppressive religious ideologies command respect, but are allergic to reciprocating it.  If you offer one hand to a hungry lion, there is no guarantee he won’t like the taste of it and devour your other hand as well.

A deeper issue is that ideas do matter.  Truth is not only the prerogative of science.  Good ideas deserve vigorous support, including theological ideas. Conversely, bad ideas equally deserve to be rejected and refuted.  False ideas should be opposed. Some religious beliefs do not deserve respect and it is reasonable to judge some religious beliefs to be true or false.  For example, it is not ‘extremism’ to reject or even condemn the religious belief that Usama Bin Ladin is in paradise enjoying his virgins.  It is not ‘extremism’ to be certain that the Koran is not the word of God.

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The unspoken thesis woven throughout Clinton’s whole message is that the content of Islamic belief is not the problem. For Clinton, ‘tolerance’ means respecting the beliefs of others as valid, including and especially Islam. Renouncing belief in any ultimate truth, while embracing respect for all ‘legitimate religious differences’ is to her the real solution to the problem of religious freedom, and the yardstick of valid religious belief and practice.

Clinton embodies her own recipe for coexistence.  She manifests respect for Islam by not criticizing it, apparently in the hope that this will move persecuting Islamic governments towards a less ‘extreme’ — i.e. more relativistic — position like her own.

Clinton’s remedy for religious intolerance is also official US policy.  The Obama administration chooses to respect, tolerate and protect Islam as an official tactic to encourage Muslims to be more tolerant and less ‘extreme’.

The risk of this strategy is that it can minimize instances of Islamic persecution and conceal its causes. This all too easily ends up becoming collusion.  For example, one of the most disappointing features of Clinton’s 2012 religious freedom speech was that the US Government’s 2011 Religious Freedom Report failed to identify Egypt and Pakistan as a ‘countries of particular concern’ for religious freedom, despite all the evidence. The most plausible explanation is that the Obama Administration did not want to ‘humiliate’ their Islamist allies – inciting them to ‘anger’ and ‘despair’ – so it downplayed their prevailing patterns of religious persecution deeply rooted in Islamic dogma.

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President Obama also looks at the world through universalist eyes.  This was reflected in his 2009 Cairo speech in which he stated that Islam’s values are American values:

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Universalism comes under pressure from the cognitive dissonance caused by the fact that people of sincere faith actually promote and live out vastly diverse values, many of which certainly would not agree with Fraser’s personal conception of universal ‘human values’.  One true believer divests themselves of all their possessions to devote their life to helping the poor.  Another flies a plane into a skyscraper to kill thousands. Both believers are equally sincere.  They differ, not in the intensity of their beliefs, but in what their beliefs consist of.  It is their contrasting, not held-in-common values which cause them to act in completely opposite ways.

(The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ was coined in 1957 by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter in When Prophecy Fails, a study of a UFO cult’s coping mechanisms when an expected apocalypse failed to eventuate.)

Managing Cognitive Dissonance: Coping Strategies
There is a cost in retaining a belief which cannot be easily reconciled with reality. The relativist and the universalist need to deploy a range of coping strategies to help them hang on to their failing world views.

One strategy is to avoid being confronted with information which could make the feelings of dissonance worse. One does not expect Malcolm Fraser spends much time browing the hadiths of Muhammad.

Another coping strategy is to demonize a bearer of bad news.  Thus it can be reassuring and self-comforting for Geert Wilders to be vilified as ‘extreme right wing’.  The passion of the accusation is a reflection of the depth of the anxiety standing behind it.

Another strategy is to shift blame. I have many times given addresses on the Koranic motivation for violence, after which someone in the audience has stood up and asked “What about the crusades: Christians have been violent too!”  So true, but this is quite irrelevant to the challenge of understanding and engaging with Islam’s doctrines.  This deflection has a purely emotional function, as it serves to reduce cognitive dissonance: by diverting attention away from stress-inducing information about Islam, it helps relieve a person of the responsibility to make a moral judgement about Islam which has challenging and perhaps frightening implications.

Sometimes blame-shifting means searching around for a surrogate cause.  This was the coping mechanism played out after the Fort Hood Massacre, when Major Nidal Hasan, acting in accordance with jihad principles he had so clearly expounded in a medical seminar attacked and killed 13 fellow soldiers. After the event, President Obama pleaded with Americans not to ‘jump to conclusions’ saying, “we cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”  Newsweek’s Evan Thomas opined ‘he’s probably just a nut case.’

Sometimes blame shifting can involve constructing elaborate alternative narratives.  An example is the claim that the Palestinian conflict is the underlying cause of global jihad terrorism. Hence Malcolm Fraser’s claim that the West’s support for Israel perpetuates a breeding ground for terrorism:

“… the West’s one-sided policies relating to Israel and Palestine … is an abscess which breeds terrorists and will do so until there is a viable two-state solution.

This view can be understood as an elaborate coping mechanism for managing the cognitive dissonance caused by the problem of Islamic violence, a phenomenon which however predates the formation of the modern state of Israel by 1400 years.

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President Bush’s public statement after the 9/11 atrocity that “Islam is Peace” (implying that the attackers were not genuine Muslims and were not motivated by Islam) is another example.

Suppression of cognitive dissonance is not merely an individual experience.  It can be an epidemic, a mass psychosis, as coping mechanisms are replicated across newspapers, board rooms, government policies, talkback radio shows, family gathering and internet forums.  For example, the rising hatred being directed against Israel across Europe is a societal response to manage the cognitive dissonance — and fear — caused by the rise of supremacist Islam.

When the Obama administration banned the use of the expressions ‘jihad’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ in discussions of terrorist threats by its  security officials, this was an institutional form of deligitimizing and veiling the well-attested religious motivations of terrorists.  This illustrates how a cognitive coping mechanism can be played out at the highest levels of government, even through deliberate policy decisions, and filter down to change the thought patterns of society.

When newspapers and police forces repeatedly suppress Islamic motivations of crimes (see here and here) — whether in Egypt or in the West – this is a manifestation of a coping mechanism which has become a cultural trait.

Denial can be comforting.  It spares one the trauma and hard work of engaging with realities which do not fit with cherished and deeply held personal beliefs, and few things are more personal than one’s beliefs about religion.  But will it deliver peace and harmony?

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The problem is that the relativist and universalist belief systems are not reasonable.  They are not credible.  Not being truth-based, and relying on prejudice, they demand intense, constant and costly management of cognitive dissonance.  Truth is the first casualty of these coping strategies, which result in bad policy, and poor strategies which only serve to empower and cover for enemies of freedom and truth.

Shameful, painful examples abound.  Consider Major Nidal Hassan, the jihadi-for-a-day, who continues to draw an army salary while the Pentagon persists in mis-classifying his killing spree, performed while shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar’, as ‘workplace violence’.  One consequence is that his wounded victims have not been granted benefits normally available to those injured in combat, such as Purple Heart retirement and preferential medical support.

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The War on Terror is Over: Now What?

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images (67)by Clare M. Lopez:

“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” — President Barack Obama , National Defense University, 23 May 23, 2013

Just a few days before the Memorial Day holiday weekend in May 2013, the President of the United States declared unilateral surrender in what used to be called the Global War on Terror [GWOT] – that is, the war to defend the U.S. and the free world against the forces of Islamic jihad and Islamic Shariah Law. No, he did not actually wave a white flag from the podium, but he may as well have done: in calling for an end to the “Authorization to Use Military Force” (AUMF); declaring al-Qa’eda “on the road to defeat” (again—or maybe it is ‘still’), and expressing reservations about “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing,” Barack Obama made it clear that he hasn’t the stomach for this fight. It is not that the war is actually over, of course, but rather that, as Andrew McCarthy put it, “he wants it to be over.”

In an odd sort of way, though, Obama’s abandonment of the field of battle to the enemy clears away a good deal of the “clutter” that has attended the so-called GWOT over the last dozen years since the 9/11 attacks. Obama even used language that may help the average American and those observers who see things rather differently from him to begin formulating a new, coherent, and comprehensive kind of national security strategy geared actually to defeating an Islamic supremacist adversary.

The president rightly noted that “[w]e need all elements of national power to win a battle of wills, a battle of ideas.” He even went so far as to reference Islamic “extremists,” and acknowledged that there remains a “pull towards extremism.” Of course, after once again accurately mentioning that a “common ideology” fuels the terrorism we face, he shied quickly away from explaining just what that “common ideology” might be and instead launched into a shopping list of surrender terms that he is betting will somehow sap the fighting spirit of Islamic jihad, perhaps, one assumes, by the sheer force of their reasonableness. Among these are the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and fewer boots on the ground everywhere (they are claimed to be “self-defeating“); suspension of the “Authorization to Use of Military Force;” partnerships with jihadist state powers, such as Pakistan; addressing “underlying grievances,” such as poverty and sectarian hatred (no details on how to get Sunnis and Shi’as to start liking each other, though); more foreign aid (perhaps to some of the oil rich jihad nurseries such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia?); greater respect for state sovereignty (Libya, Syria and Israel presumably excepted); and, of course, closing Guantanamo Bay [GITMO]. The one that’s sure to grab jihadi attention immediately, though, is the president’s determination to “be humbler.” Unfortunately for the president’s strategy, the ideology of this particularly savage enemy tends to treat “humility” as groveling — and as an invitation to double down on aggression.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

#StandDown – Obama Surrenders the War on Terror

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president-obama-at-the-national-defense-university-in-washington-dc-446x350

By :

“Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” President Reagan counseled in his farewell address. We would do well to heed his advice as President Obama attempts to lead America backwards, to September 10. Make no mistake: That was the not-so-subtle message he sent last week during his speech at the National Defense University—a speech that was so full of inaccuracies that one is left to conclude the president is either living in an alternate universe or willfully disregarding the facts. Just consider some of the statements he made.

1. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.”

In fact, Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others during his shooting rampage at Ft. Hood in November 2009—an attack authorized by al Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen (AQAP). Since the U.S. Army—no doubt following orders far up the chain of command—refuses to classify the Ft. Hood shooting as a terrorist attack, the survivors’ injuries and acts of bravery cannot be categorized as “combat related.”

In addition, the Boston Marathon bombing was a large-scale attack carried out by individuals who were radicalized to jihad and trained by jihadist elements in Russia.

Moreover, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, inspired and trained by AQAP, almost took down a passenger plane in December 2009; and Faisal Shahzad, trained by jihadists in Pakistan, deployed an IED in Times Square in 2010. Just as catching a thief in the act doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed a crime, the fact that these attacks failed does not mean they were not attacks.

2. “The core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat…They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.”

Like a five-year-old, the president seems to believe that if he says something often enough and loud enough, it will become true. In fact, al Qaeda affiliates did carry out the attacks on Benghazi. No matter what the final draft of those infamous talking points said, several of the attackers were al Qaeda operatives.

3. “Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.”

In fact, American acquiescence and aloofness have allowed extremists to gain a foothold in these places.

Read more at Front Page

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General Jack Keane refutes Obama’s counterterrorism policy

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General Keane speaks the truth!

 

Flashback

Flashback

 

See also:

Obama’s Head-in-the-Sand Speech About Terrorism

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images (58)By Barry Rubin:

President Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, “The Future of Our Fight against Terrorism” is a remarkable exercise in wishful thinking and denial. Here is basically what he says: the only strategic threat to the United States is posed by terrorists carrying out terrorist attacks.
In the 6400 words used by Obama, Islam only constitutes three of them and most interestingly in all three the word is used to deny that the United States is at war with Islam. In fact, that is what President George Bush said precisely almost a dozen years ago, after September 11. Yet why have not hundreds of such denials had the least bit of effect on the course of that war?
In fact, to prove that the United States is not at war with Islam, the Obama Administration has sided with political Islam throughout the Middle East, to the extent that some Muslims think Obama is doing damage to Islam, their kind of non-revolutionary Islam.
And how has the fight against al-Qaida resulted in a policy that has, however inadvertently, armed al-Qaida, as in Libya and Syria?
Once again, I will try to explain the essence of Obama strategy, a simple point that many people seem unable to grasp:
Obama views al-Qaida as a threat because it wants to attack America directly with terrorism. But all other Islamist groups are not a threat. In fact, they can be used to stop al-Qaida.
 
This is an abandonment of a strategic perspective. The word Islamism or political Islam or any other version of that word do not appear even once. Yet this is the foremost revolutionary movement of this era, the main threat in the world to U.S. interests and even to Western civilization.

If one wanted to come up with a slogan for the Obama Administration it would be that to win the war on terrorism one must lose the war on revolutionary Islamism because only by showing that America is the Islamists’ friend will it take away the incentive to join up with al-Qaida and attack the United States.

Please take the two sections in bold above very seriously if you want to understand U.S. Middle East policy.

According to Obama:
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt that is not a strategic threat but a positive advantage because it is the best organization able to curb al-Qaida. And that policy proves that the United States is not at war with Islam.

 Read more at Rubin’s blog

 

Obamastan

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obamastanBy Melanie Phillips:

Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.

The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies — and covering up its egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while instead blaming America for its own victimisation.

What is coming out in the Benghazi hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in 2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some — but not to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).

But the administration has form on this — serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as an act of ‘workplace violence’.

Read more at Melanie’s Blog

Defense in the Age of Jihad

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jihad_9By Cliff May:

Defense policies are not created in a vacuum. They are designed to meet threats. Over time, threats change in ways that are difficult to predict. In the past, America’s enemies generally wore uniforms and confronted American soldiers on a foreign field of battle. Today, America’s enemies may wear backwards-facing baseball caps and attack marathon runners along with the men, women, and children cheering for them on a sunny April afternoon in New England.

What happened in Boston last week was terrible and terrifying — precisely the outcome terrorists seek to achieve. But it could have been worse. It was worse on September 11, 2001, and it will be worse again if we let down our guard, if we stop taking the fight to those sworn to destroy us, and if we refuse to understand who they are, what they believe, and what they want.

They have told us — over and over — that they are waging what they call a jihad. The policy of the current administration, and to a great extent the previous administration as well, has been to avoid such terminology. One notable exception: Just before she stepped down as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton spoke with rare candor. “We now face a spreading jihadist threat,” she said, adding, “we have to recognize this is a global movement.”

Yet so many people — in government, the media, academia — refuse to believe this, or at least refuse to acknowledge it. I was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this week debatingHina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. She declared, “There is no global war. . . . There is no global jihadist movement.”

About the massacre in Boston there is much we still do not know. But the evidence available so far can only lead to the conclusion that two young men from Chechnya committed an act of terrorism on American soil in support of what they believe is a global jihad.

How do we know the bombs were not a protest — a secular one, with no Islamist roots — against Russia’s occupation of Chechnya and in favor of Chechen independence? Because then the target would have been Moscow, not Boston.

Read more at Town Hall

 

What Went Wrong With American Policy?

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The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves, and the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves about terrorism. The number one lie is that there no – is no Arab-Islamic terror. Lie number two is that Arab-Islamic terror has been defeated. And the third lie: Even though Arab-Islamic terror has been defeated, there was no way to foresee it because it never existed and it never posed a threat. Yes, I know it is not logical to hold all these three lies in your mind at the same time, but that is what has happened - Michael Widlanski

 

The Endowment For Middle East Truth

Sept. 10, 2012, 11 Years After 9/11:  What Went Wrong With American Policy?

Transcripts pdf

 

Sarah Stern, Founder and President, of EMET

 

Frank Gaffney, President & CEO, Center for Security Policy; former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy

 

Michael Widlanski, Author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat, Former Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Public Security

 

Patrick Poole, National Security and Terrorism Correspondent for PJMedia

 

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Tx)

 

Sebastian Gorka, Miilitary Affairs Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies & Council for Emerging National Security Affairs

 

 

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

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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.