Tag Archives: Barack Obama

A Disturbing Event: The American Conservative Union Embraces an Islamist

The conservative movement appears to be at a crossroads in its approach to the threat of Islamic supremacism—not only abroad but at home. Does the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood as the dominant force of the “Arab Spring” bode ill for America? Or is the Brotherhood merely another “political actor” as the Obama administration would have us believe? Is Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, a potential security risk worth investigating, as Representative Michele Bachmann and four conservative congressmen have suggested? Or is the mere raising of this question a witch-hunt, as Senator John McCain and Speaker John Boehner and numerous Democrats maintain?…

The full article can be read at frontpagemag.com.

Making the U.S. Military Submit to Shariah

Suddenly, a murderous threat has intensified in Afghanistan: American servicemen are being killed there at an accelerating rate by Afghans who ostensibly are their allies.

These attacks have been dubbed “green-on-blue” incidents, an antisceptic and deliberately inoffensive way of describing the treachery of Muslim natives (designated by the Islamic color green) against our folks (the blue forces).  So serious a threat are such murders “inside the wire” deemed to be that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Martin Dempsey, went to Afghanistan last week to assess what is being done to prevent them in the future.

That challenge is made considerably harder by the fact that President Obama’s strategy for extricating the United States from the war in Afghanistan is to have U.S. personnel train, advise and otherwise help Afghan army and police units assume responsibility for its conduct as we rapidly pull out.  Consequently, Afghans willing to take out Americans have plenty of opportunities to do so – and the latter are essentially unceasingly vulnerable to attack.

Unfortunately, an even bigger factor in our troops’ vulnerability to such violence is the refusal of their chain-of-command to recognize and understand, let alone effectively counter, the motivation behind it.  For example, the commander of U.S. and other foreign forces in Afghanistan, Marine General John Allen, attributed the recent uptick in green-on-blue attacks to irritability on the part of Afghan personnel performing missions at high operational tempos while sweltering in summer heat and hungry due to the Ramadan fast.  The appropriate response?  In an August 24th op.ed. in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-can-build-a-durable-peace-in-afghanistan/2012/08/24/f1b86312-ed73-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html), the general declared that, “The closer the relationship, the more secure, ultimately, our troops will be.”

Syndicated columnist Diana West has caustically observed (http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2217/Fire-General-Allen.aspx), “Like his brothers-in-brass, Allen is all about ideology – the Counter-Insurgency (COIN) ideology. This Leftist dogma transmuted to the battlefield is founded on the Big Lie of ‘universalism,’ which takes in the absurd but also liberty-threatening belief that all cultures, all religions, all civilizations have interchangeable values and aspirations. The theory is easily disproven, but it remains a commandment of postmodern gospel.”

Pursuant to the Team Obama-approved COIN doctrine, the posture our troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan must adopt is one of doing everything possible not to give offense to the Afghans.  In fact, last February, the military distributed to U.S. forces in theater a handy pocket guide entitled, “Inside the Wire Threats – Afghanistan Green on Blue.” It is all about establishing of a “bond of trust” between Afghan army and NATO personnel.

Interestingly, another document produced for the military’s use in May 2011 shows why, as a practical matter, that can’t happen. This unclassified “red team” analysis suggested that the problem is, as its title suggests, “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.”  It found, based on extensive interviews with U.S. and NATO troops, that practices inspired by, condoned or even mandatory under the brutally repressive Islamist doctrine of shariah – such as the “poor treatment and virtual slavery of women in Afghan society,” the practice of child abuse including the “raping and sodomizing of little boys” and the torture of dogs – contributed to a “cultural gap” that alienated U.S. and Western personnel from their trainees and other native counterparts.

As noted by shariah expert and blogger Andrew Bostom (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/army_report_buried_islamic_motivations_for_afghan_murders_of_us_troops.html), one of the recommendations (albeit, the fortieth out of fifty-eight) offered by the red team for addressing this underlying problem was, clearly at variance with the COIN party line:  “Better educate US soldiers in the central tenets of Islam as interpreted and practiced in Afghanistan. Ensure that this instruction is not a sanitized, politically correct training package, but rather includes an objective and comprehensive assessment of the totalitarian nature of the extreme theology practiced among Afghans.”

The Obama administration responded to this red team analysis and its findings by ordering it to be rewritten and by classifying it.  Then, the COIN-compatible pocket guide was promulgated, directing in the words of the inimitable Diana West (http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2218/Dying-over-the-Truth-Murder-Inside-the-Wire.aspx) that:

“1) U.S. troops are to walk on eggs and refrain from saying or doing anything that might set off their armed, ‘hair-trigger moderate’ Afghan counterparts: ‘Avoid public rebukes,’ troops are told. ‘Counsel in private jointly with [the Afghan army] chain of command’….

“2) Worse, U.S. troops are ordered to assume the age-old role of the dhimmis, those wretched, self-censoring non-Muslims repressed and stunted by Islamic law: ‘Respect Islam, Koran or a mosque; Afghan women, elders and children. Avoid arrogance; i.e., belief that ISAF culture is superior to Afghan culture.'”

Whatever we call such behavior – “politically correct,” “multicultural,” “diversity-minded” or simply “sensitive” – our enemies perceive it through the lens of their culture and, more importantly, the doctrine that governs it, namely shariah.  Specifically, they understand it for what it is: submission.  And, according to that doctrine, the appropriate response to an infidel enemy’s submission is more violence to make him, as the Quran puts it, “feel subdued.”

Accordingly, if we persist in this submissiveness, far from winning Afghan hearts and minds, we are likely to put not just our troops there at ever greater risk.  We will invite our foes to engage in more jihadist violence elsewhere, including here.

Israel faces the cynical world

This week a German doctor in Bavaria filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg.

Rabbi Goldberg’s “crime”? He performs ritual circumcisions on Jewish male infants in accordance with Jewish law.

The doctor’s complaint came shortly after a ruling by a court in Cologne outlawing the practice of male circumcision.

The Austrians and the Swiss also took the ruling to heart and have banned infant male circumcision in several hospitals in Switzerland as well as in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Denmark and Scandinavian governments are also considering limiting the practice of circumcision which has constituted one of the foundational rituals of Judaism for four thousand years.

Meanwhile, in Norway Dr. Anne Lindboe has come up with the perfect way out of the artificial crisis. Lindboe serves a Norway’s ombudsman for children’s rights. And she proposes that we Jews just change our religion to satisfy anti-Jewish sensitivities. She suggests we replace circumcision with “a symbolic, nonsurgical ritual.”

It’s worth mentioning that circumcision isn’t the only Jewish ritual these enlightened Europeans find objectionable. Sweden, Norway and Switzerland have already banned kosher slaughter.

Attacking circumcision isn’t just a European fetish. The urge to curb Jewish religious freedom has reached the US as well. Last year San Francisco’s Jewish Community Relations Council had to sue the city to strike a measure from last November’s ballot that would have banned circumcision if passed. The measure’s sponsor gathered the requisite 12,000 signatures to enter the proposition on the ballot. Circumcising males under the age of 18 would have been classified as a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Sponsors of the measure distributed anti-Semitic materials depicting rabbis performing circumcisions as villains.

The people involved in banning or attempting to ban circumcision are not on the political fringe of their societies. They are part of a leftist establishment. They are doctors and lawyers, judges and politicians. This doesn’t mean that all their fellow leftists are anti-Semites. But it does mean the political Left in the Western world feels comfortable keeping company with anti-Semites.

This state of affairs is even more striking in international affairs than in domestic politics. On the international level the Left’s readiness to rub elbows with anti-Semites has reached critical levels.

While the Europeans have long been happy to cater to the anti-Semitic whims of the Islamic world, the escalation of the West’s willingness to accept anti-Semitism as a governing axiom in international affairs is nowhere more apparent than in the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

And the American Left’s willingness – particularly the American Jewish Left’s willingness – to cover up the administration’s collusion with anti- Semitic regimes at Israel’s expense is higher today than ever before.

A clear-cut example of both the Obama administration’s willingness to adhere to anti- Semitic policies of anti-Semitic governments and the Left’s willingness to defend this bigoted behavior is the Obama administration’s decision not to invite Israel to participate in its new Global Counterterrorism Forum.

The GCTF was founded with the stated aim of fostering international cooperation in fighting terrorism. But for the Obama administration, it was more important to make Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, who supports the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups, feel comfortable, than it was to invite Israel to participate.

Not only did the US exclude Israel, at the GCTF’s meeting last month in Spain, Maria Otero, the State Department’s under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, seemed to embrace the Muslim world’s obscene claim that Israelis are not victims of terrorism because terrorism against Israel isn’t terrorism.

In her speech, titled “Victims of Terrorism,” Otero spoke of terror victims in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, India and the US. But she made no mention of Israeli terror victims.

Rather than criticize the administration for its decision to appease bigots at the expense of their victim, American Jewish leftists have defended the administration. Writing in The Atlantic, Zvika Kreiger, senior vice president of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, wrote that allowing the Jewish state entry to the GCTF parley would have “undermined the whole endeavor.”

Kreiger sympathetically quoted a State Department official who explained that actually, by ostracizing Israel the administration was helping Israel.

The source “reasoned the progress made by the organization would ultimately better serve Israel’s interests (not to mention those of the United States) than would the symbolic benefits of including it in a group that likely wouldn’t accomplish anything. [Moreover]… once the organization was up and running, and its agenda was established, they could find ways to include Israel that would not be disruptive.”

So despite the fact that Israel is a major target of terrorism, and despite the fact that many of the states the US invited to its forum condone terrorism against Israel and support terrorist groups that murder Israeli Jews, Israel is better off being excluded, because the anti-Jewish governments invited by the Obama administration will somehow totally change their perspective on anti-Jewish terrorism as long as they don’t have to suffer the irritation of sitting in the same room as real-live representatives of the Jewish state.

THE CYNICISM of the State Department official’s statement to Kreiger is only outpaced by Kreiger’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that cynicism.

Kreiger’s behavior makes sense. If he acknowledges the bigoted nature of the Obama administration’s policies he will have to stop defending them.

To a degree, Kreiger’s willingness to defend and justify the Obama administration’s anti-Israel behavior parallels the behavior of Israelis who argue against Israel unilaterally striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to delay the Iranian regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Since 2003, when Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the world community, Iran’s leaders have succeeded in convincing world leaders that Israel is No. 1 on their target list. And so, the international debate about what a nuclear-armed Iran will mean for the world has always followed the Iranians’ lead and centered on the dangers it would pose to Israel.

Israel’s leaders from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon down to the last governmental spokesman have maintained that Iran’s nuclear program threatens the entire Free World. Sharon – like his leftist disciples today – claimed that given the threat Iran’s nuclear program constitutes for global security, Israel has no reason to lead the global fight to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Indeed, Israeli leadership of the campaign against Iran’s nuclear program would cause some countries to do nothing because they hate Israel even more than they fear Iran.

Like his followers today, Sharon insisted that the US, as the leader of the Free World, is responsible for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And they are right. Iran’s nuclear program does threaten global security and Iran’s nuclear program does threaten the US specifically. Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei just ordered his troops to carry out terror attacks against the US in retaliation for US moves to overthrow Iran’s Syrian puppet Bashar Assad. Iran was the principle sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and remains the principle supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It’s not that Israel’s leaders belittle the threat Iran’s nuclear weapons program constitutes for Israel. Across the spectrum on the Iran debate in Israel – from former Mossad director Meir Dagan and President Shimon Peres on the Left to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the Right – everyone agrees that in light of the Iranian regime’s religious fanaticism and its millenarian belief that Armageddon will hearken the coming of the Shi’ite messiah, Iran cannot be trusted not to use nuclear weapons against Israel.

Everyone admits that given Iran’s open sponsorship of terrorism, it is a certainty that terror groups would use the Iranian nuclear umbrella to massively expand their terrorist war against Israel.

Just as Dagan, Peres and their associates share Netanyahu’s assessment of the threat Iran’s nuclear program poses for Israel, Netanyahu agrees with their assessment that Israel’s options for contending militarily with Iran’s nuclear program are limited and imperfect. No one argues that Israel has a magic bullet to destroy Iran’s nuclear project.

Netanyahu and Barak have repeatedly warned that Israel has no perfect strike option. They have also warned that a response from Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon to an Israeli strike will likely be harsh and deadly. All they say is that it is better than the alternative of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The doves agree with Netanyahu that a limited Israeli strike is better than the alternative of a nuclear-armed Iran. They differ with Netanyahu on only one issue: their assessment of the US’s willingness to use military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Voicing the doves’ assessment of the Obama administration and Europe, this week former commander of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Aharon Zeevi Farkash told NBC news, “I think Western leaders realize a nuclear Iran is the No. 1 challenge facing the world.”

Unfortunately, Farkash is wrong. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, made this point earlier this week in an interview from Afghanistan. There Dempsey said frankly, “Israel sees the Iranian threat more seriously than the US sees it, because a nuclear Iran poses a threat to Israel’s very existence.”

In other words, Dempsey told us that Iran’s cynical packaging of its nuclear program as an anti-Israel initiative has worked. The Americans – and the Europeans – believe that Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s problem to deal with. The Israelis are right that as the leader of the Free World it is the US’s responsibility to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But as Dempsey’s statement shows, the US is not interested in fulfilling its responsibility.

Like the Europeans, the Americans will only act when Iran forces them to do so. And that means they will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing the bomb. They will only move when Tehran has already crossed Israel off the top of its target list.

Israeli opponents of an Israeli strike against Iran don’t want to believe that Americans are capable of such cynicism. They would like to believe that the only government capable of behaving cynically is their own. They want to believe that the US – with its vastly superior military capabilities to destroy Iran’s nuclear program – will do the right thing and not leave it to Israel – with its limited means – to take care of the problem for a cynical world.

But just as Kreiger’s defense of the Obama administration’s courtship of anti-Semites at Israel’s expense crosses the line separating naivete from willful, bigotry-enabling blindness, so Peres, Dagan and their colleagues cross the line. And it is not mere bigotry they are enabling.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Who ‘Lost’ Egypt?

In 1949, the Communist takeover of China rattled the US foreign policy establishment to its core. China’s fall to Communism was correctly perceived as a massive strategic defeat for the US. The triumphant Mao Zedong placed China firmly in the Soviet camp and implemented foreign policies antithetical to US interests.

For the American foreign policy establishment, China’s fall forced a reconsideration of basic axioms of US foreign policy. Until China went Red, the view resonant among foreign policy specialists was that it was possible for the US to peacefully coexist and even be strategic allies with Communists.

With Mao’s embrace of Stalin this position was discredited. The US’s subsequent recognition that it was impossible for America to reach an accommodation with Communists served as the intellectual architecture of many of the strategies the US adopted for fighting the Cold War in the years that followed.

Today the main aspect of America’s response to China’s Communist revolution that is remembered is the vindictive political hunt for scapegoats. Foreign Service officers and journalists who had advised the US government to support Mao and the Communists against Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists were attacked as traitors.

But while the “Red Scare” is what is most remembered about that period, the most significant consequence of the rise of Communist China was the impact it had on the US’s understanding of the nature of Communist forces. Even Theodore White, perhaps the most prominent journalist who championed Mao and the Communists, later acknowledged that he had been duped by their propaganda machine into believing that Mao and his comrades were interested in an alliance with the US.

As Joyce Hoffmann exposed in her book Theodore White and Journalism as Illusion, White acknowledged that his wartime report from Mao’s headquarters in Yenan praising the Communists as willing allies of the US who sought friendship, “not as a beggar seeks charity, but seeks aid in furthering a joint cause,” was completely false.

As he wrote, the report was “winged with hope and passion that were entirely unreal.”

What he had been shown in Yenan, Hoffmann quotes White as having written, was “the showcase of democratic art pieces they (the Communists) staged for us American correspondents [and] was literally, only showcase stuff.”

Contrast the US’s acceptance of failure in China in 1949, and its willingness to learn the lessons of its loss of China, with the US’s denial of its failure and loss of Egypt today.

On Sunday, new President Mohamed Morsy completed Egypt’s transformation into an Islamist state. In the space of one week, Morsy sacked the commanders of the Egyptian military and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists, and fired all the editors of the state-owned media and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists.

He also implemented a policy of intimidation, censorship and closure of independently owned media organizations that dare to publish criticism of him.

Morsy revoked the military’s constitutional role in setting the foreign and military policies of Egypt. But he maintained the junta’s court-backed decision to disband the parliament. In so doing, Morsy gave himself full control over the writing of Egypt’s new constitution.

As former ambassador to Egypt Zvi Mazel wrote Tuesday in The Jerusalem Post, Morsy’s moves mean that he “now holds dictatorial powers surpassing by far those of erstwhile president Hosni Mubarak.”

In other words, Morsy’s actions have transformed Egypt from a military dictatorship into an Islamist dictatorship.

The impact on Egypt’s foreign policy of Morsy’s seizure of power is already becoming clear. On Monday, Al-Masri al-Youm quoted Mohamed Gadallah, Morsy’s legal adviser, saying that Morsy is considering revising the peace accord with Israel. Gadallah explained that Morsy intends to “ensure Egypt’s full sovereignty and control over every inch of Sinai.”

In other words, Morsy intends to remilitarize Sinai and so render the Egyptian military a clear and present threat to Israel’s security. Indeed, according to Haaretz, Egypt has already breached the peace accord and deployed forces and heavy weaponry to Sinai without Israeli permission.

The rapidity of Morsy’s moves has surprised most observers. But more surprising than his moves is the US response to his moves.

For instance, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, one administration official dismissed the significance of Morsy’s purge of the military brass, saying, “What I think this is, frankly, is Morsy looking for a generational change in military leadership.”

The Journal reported that Egypt’s new defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sissi, is known as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer. But the Obama administration quickly dismissed the reports as mere rumors with no significance. Sissi, administration sources told the Journal, ate dinner with US President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan during Brennan’s visit to Cairo last October. Aside from that, they say, people are always claiming that Morsy’s appointments have ties to Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood.

A slightly less rose-colored assessment came from Steven Cook in Foreign Affairs. According to Cook, at worst, Morsy’s move was probably nothing more than a present-day reenactment of Gamal Abel Nasser’s decision to move Egypt away from the West and into the Soviet camp in 1954.

Most likely, Cook argued, Morsy was simply doing what Sadat did when in 1971 he fired other generals with whom he had been forced to share power when he first succeeded Nasser in 1969.

Certainly the Nasser and Sadat analogies are pertinent. But while properly citing them, Cook failed to explain what those analogies tell us about the significance of Morsy’s actions. He drew the dots but failed to see the shape they make.

Morsy’s Islamism, like Mao’s Communism, is inherently hostile to the US and its allies and interests in the Middle East. Consequently, Morsy’s strategic repositioning of Egypt as an Islamist country means that Egypt – which has served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world for 30 years – is setting aside its alliance with the US and looking toward reassuming the role of regional bully.

Egypt is on the fast track to reinstating its war against Israel and threatening international shipping in the Suez Canal. And as an Islamist state, Egypt will certainly seek to export its Islamic revolution to other countries. No doubt fear of this prospect is what prompted Saudi Arabia to begin showering Egypt with billions of dollars in aid.

It should be recalled that the Saudis so feared the rise of a Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt that in February 2011, when US President Barack Obama was publicly ordering then-president Hosni Mubarak to abdicate power immediately, Saudi leaders were beseeching him to defy Obama. They promised Mubarak unlimited financial support for Egypt if he agreed to cling to power.

The US’s astounding sanguinity in the face of Morsy’s completion of the Islamization of Egypt is an illustration of everything that is wrong and dangerous about US Middle East policy today.

Take US policy toward Syria.

Syria is in possession of one of the largest arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in the world. The barbarism with which the regime is murdering its opponents is a daily reminder – indeed a flashing neon warning sign – that Syria’s nonconventional arsenal constitutes a clear and present danger to international security. And yet, the Obama administration insists on viewing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s murderous behavior as if it were a garden variety human rights crisis.

During her visit with Turkey’s Islamist Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last Saturday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t even mention the issue of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons. Instead she continued to back Turkey’s sponsorship of the Islamist-dominated opposition and said that the US would be working with Turkey to put together new ways to help the Islamist opposition overthrow Assad’s regime.

Among other things, she did not rule out the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria.

The party most likely to be harmed from such a move would be Israel, which would lose its ability to bomb Syrian weapons of mass destruction sites from the air.

Then of course, there is Iran and its openly genocidal nuclear weapons program. This weekThe New York Times reported a new twist in the Obama administration’s strategy for managing this threat. It is trying to convince the Persian Gulf states to accept advanced missile defense systems from the US.

This new policy makes clear that the Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Its actions on the ground are aimed instead at accomplishing two goals: convincing Iran’s Arab neighbors to accept Iran as a nuclear power and preventing Israel from acting militarily to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The missile shields are aspects of a policy of containment, not prevention. And the US’s attempts to sabotage Israel’s ability to strike Iran’s nuclear sites through leaks, political pressure and efforts to weaken the Netanyahu government make clear that as far as the US is concerned, Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not the problem.

The prospect of Israel preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the problem.

Several American commentators argue that the Obama administration’s policies are the rational consequence of the divergence of US and Israeli assessments of the threats posed by regional developments. For instance, writing in the Tablet online magazine this week, Lee Smith argued that the US does not view the developments in Egypt, Iran and Syria as threatening US interests. From Washington’s perspective, the prospect of an Israeli strike on Iran is more threatening than a nuclear-armed Iran, because an Israeli strike would immediately destabilize the region.

The problem with this assessment is that it is nonsense. It is true that Israel is first on Iran’s target list, and that Egypt is placing Israel, not the US in its crosshairs. So, too, Syria and its rogue allies will use their chemical weapons against Israel first.

But that doesn’t mean the US will be safe. The likely beneficiaries of Syrian chemical weapons – Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations – have attacked the US in the past. Iran has a history of attacking US shipping without a nuclear umbrella. Surely it would be more aggressive in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz after defying Washington in illegally developing a nuclear arsenal. The US is far more vulnerable to interruptions in the shipping lanes in the Suez Canal than Israel is.

The reason Israel and the US are allies is that Israel is the US’s first line of defense in the region.

If regional events weren’t moving so quickly, the question of who lost Egypt would probably have had its moment in the spotlight in Washington.

But as is clear from the US’s denial of the significance of Morsy’s rapid completion of Egypt’s Islamic transformation; its blindness to the dangers of Syrian chemical and biological weapons; and its complacency toward Iran’s nuclear weapons program, by the time the US foreign policy establishment realizes it lost Egypt, the question it will be asking is not who lost Egypt. It will be asking who lost the Middle East.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Biggest DC Spy Scandal You Haven’t Heard About

Two years ago, the executive director of the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), Ghulam Nabi Fai, was riding high in Washington, D.C. circles. In March 2010, he hosted a pricey fundraiser in his own home for Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and co-chairman of the Congressional Pakistan Caucus.

In 2004, Fai testified before Burton’s subcommittee. Internal KAC documents show that in just 2007 alone, he had 33 meetings with members of Congress, congressional staff, the Bush administration’s National Security Council, and the State Department. He led congressional delegations to the disputed Kashmir region, and over the years nearly three dozen different members of Congress of both parties attended or spoke at Fai’s annual Kashmir Peace Conference held on Capitol Hill. KAC’s events were even broadcast live on C-SPAN.

One thing that bought Fai so much access was that Fai and the KAC board of directors generously spread campaign contributions all over Capitol Hill to members of both political parties. However, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the bulk of contributions by Fai, KAC’s board, and Fai’s associates went to Burton and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

That all changed on July 19, 2011, when Fai was arrested by the FBI not far from his Fairfax, Virginia home, where he had held the fundraiser for Burton sixteen months earlier. And just last month, a year after his arrest, Fai reported to federal prison.

According to an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Sarah Webb Linden that was the basis for the criminal complaint, an extensive investigation into Fai’s activities showed that all of Fai’s efforts over the past 20 years had been illegally financed and directed by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.

The FBI affidavit stated that Fai was in constant contact with his Pakistani ISI handlers: since June 2008, Fai and his handlers exchanged more than 4,000 messages.

The FBI also found that Fai and KAC had received more than $4 million from the ISI since KAC’s founding in 1990 through the use of U.S.-based Pakistani-American straw donors who would donate to KAC and receive tax deductions, and then be reimbursed in Pakistan by the ISI. This was arranged through Fai’s conspirator Fazeer Ahmad, a U.S. citizen who lived in Pakistan and was charged along with Fai in the case.

These straw-donor transactions concealed that KAC was not an independent public relations effort by U.S. citizens to advocate on behalf of the Kashmiri people, but rather an influence operation run by the intelligence agency of a hostile foreign power, one intended to influence members of Congress to shape U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan’s favor. The stated targets for much of KAC’s operations were the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

KAC’s activities didn’t have to be illegal. All Fai had to do was register his organization with the attorney general under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Doing so would have exposed the Pakistani ISI’s role in the operation, however, and would have closed most doors in Washington, D.C., to Fai and KAC.

The FBI gave Fai sufficient opportunity to come clean about his operation and its ties to Pakistani intelligence. In March 2007, the FBI interviewed Fai, who claimed he had never met anyone affiliated with the government of Pakistan.

In March 2010, the Justice Department sent Fai a letter stating that press reports in India had identified him as an agent of Pakistan, and that if true, he was required to file as a foreign agent with the attorney general’s office under FARA. In an email reply, Fai stated that KAC “has never engaged in activities on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or any other foreign entity.”

What undoubtedly prompted that Justice Department letter was a meeting that Fai had with two of his Pakistani ISI handlers in Geneva just days before. In that March 2010 strategy meeting, according to notes of the meeting obtained by U.S. Customs officials when Fai reentered the U.S., Fai briefed his handlers on KAC’s 2010 goals and the targets of his efforts. Most notably: “E.B. [Executive Branch], State, DoD, WH [White House]; Media, Think tank; Congress; U.N.”

According to the FBI, the two ISI handlers Fai met with in that March 2010 Geneva strategy meeting were Sohail Mahmood and Major General Mumtaz Ahmad Bajwa, the then-head of the ISI’s Security Directorate, which oversees operations of several Kashmiri terrorist groups.

Bajwa had also attended Fai’s Tenth International Kashmir Peace Conference on Capitol Hill in July 2009. Also at the event was Fai’s then-ISI handler, Lt. Col. Touqeer Mehmood Butt, whose visa application noted his employer as “Pakistani Ministry of Defence, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Islamabad, Pakistan.” Among the speakers at that conference were Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA), Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), and the ubiquitous Rep. Dan Burton, as seen in the video below:

The event was even covered by the Hindi-language section of Voice of America:

The day after the 2009 KAC conference ended, Bajwa and Butt met with Fai in KAC’s Washington, D.C. office and had a conversation that was wiretapped by the FBI.

According to Agent Linden’s affidavit, the wiretap transcript shows that Fai gave his Pakistani ISI handlers a review of his efforts (p. 24):

His comments included the history of the establishment of KAC; KAC’s primary lobbying targets within the U.S. (to wit, White House, State Department, Pentagon, Congress, and the United Nations); KAC’s prior encounters with U.S. and Pakistani politicians; and Fai’s relationship with the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.

Agent Linden’s affidavit (p. 20) also notes a plan of action submitted by Fai to his handlers in December 2008 for the incoming Obama administration in 2009, outlining his strategy:

[S]ecure Congressional support to encourage the Executive Branch to support self determination in Kashmire, build new alliances in the State Department, the National Security Council, the Congress, and the Pentagon, and to expand KAC’s media efforts.

Fai’s budget for KAC for 2009 was $738,000, which included $100,000 intended for campaign contributions for members of Congress. After his ISI handlers balked, Fai reduced his budget to $638,000, most of which would be passed from the ISI to KAC through the U.S.-based straw donors.

The proposed activities for KAC in 2010 approved by the Pakistani ISI listed 61 events that Fai had planned for the year, including 10 briefings/events for members of Congress and their staff. In 2011, Fai was ordered by his handler to cultivate relationships with eleven identified members of the media and six intellectuals from D.C. think-tanks.

Under normal circumstances, you might think it would be front-page news that Pakistani intelligence had successfully penetrated the inner recesses of Capitol Hill and the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations; Pakistani intelligence had conducted a 20-year influence operation; and Pakistani intelligence made campaign contributions primarily to Republican members of Congress (including Burton — one of the most vocal critics of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. You would expect the establishment media to subject the issue to investigation rivaling the Jack Abramoff scandal during the Bush administration.

You would be wrong.

While Fai’s arrest was noted by many press outlets and a smattering of articles appeared in the subsequent days, within a week the story virtually vanished from the establishment media.

The New York Times reported on Fai’s arrest, and the following day published an article announcing denials by Burton and his congressional colleagues that they had any knowledge of Fai’s ties to Pakistani intelligence. The last mention in the newspaper of the matter was less than a week later, when they reported that the FBI had attempted to arrest Fai several times, only to be stymied by the State Department and the CIA, who wanted to avoid heightening tensions with Pakistan. And except for a two-sentence mention on the New York Times India blog, the matter then disappeared from their pages entirely.

The Fai arrest got the same treatment from the Washington Post, which ran two stories and a short blog post in the days following Fai’s arrest, and later made short mention of his guilty plea. The paper has published nothing since.

The only full-scale treatment of the Fai matter and his influence on Capitol Hill was an October 2011 investigative piece by ProPublica researchers published by The Atlantic that outlined Fai’s background and lobbying efforts, as well as the extensive evidence compiled by the FBI in the case.

One might have at least expected a flurry of reporting when Fai pled guilty and was later sentenced to two years in prison, Alas, no. Nor was there any discussion of the 26-page Statement of Facts signed by Fai where he admitted in detail to his crimes outlined in FBI Agent Linden’s July 2011 affidavit.

The ambivalence about one of the biggest foreign intelligence influence operations on Capitol Hill in our lifetimes extended to Capitol Hill itself. No handwringing, no committee hearings or investigations, no press conferences by members of Congress explaining exactly how they had been duped for 20 years.

The Hill also made short work of the Fai affair, merely noting his arrest, guilty plea, and sentencing. No in-depth reporting, no stonewalling by congressional spokesmen, and certainly no chasing down members of Congress in the halls asking for comment.

About the only response from Congress was a two-paragraph press release from Rep. Burton’s office claiming he knew nothing, and promising to turn over the amount received by Fai to the Boy Scouts. In a brief interview with Rep. Joe Pitts by Lancaster (PA) Online, Pitts said in response to Fai’s arrest: “It never appeared to me that Dr. Fai was a lobbyist for Pakistan.” With respect to Fai’s attempt to influence him, “it didn’t work”.

In recent months I’ve conducted briefings for congressional staff and members of Congress on the Fai matter, and without exception have been met with blank faces and surprised stares.

So was the 20-year illegal lobbying effort by Ghulam Nabi Fai on behalf of Pakistan’s intelligence service really much ado about nothing? Was Rep. Pitts right that Pakistan’s influence operation on Capitol Hill “didn’t work”?

Or might there be something larger at work? Could it be that there’s more to the story of Ghulam Nabi Fai and the Kashmiri American Council than what you read in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Hill?

The story of Pakistan’s two-decade influence operation in the heart of Congress, the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon is the biggest Capitol Hill spy scandal you’ve never heard about.

In Part Two, I’ll tell you the reason why.

 

In Part One, I explored the court documents in the case of Ghulam Nabi Fai, the executive director of the Kashmiri American Center (KAC) who admitted in a 26-page Statement of Facts at the time of his plea deal last December that he was an influence agent working for the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. He penetrated the halls of Congress and successive administrations over a 20-year period to help shape U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan’s favor.

As noted in the affidavit by FBI Special Agent Sarah Webb Linden that was the basis for the criminal charges filed in federal court against Fai, he was in constant communication with his ISI handlers, exchanging more than 4,000 emails between June 2008 and his arrest in July 2011. According to the FBI, the ISI spent more than $4 million funding Fai’s operation, funneling money to straw donors in the Pakistani-American community. The operation was coordinated by Zaheer Ahmad, a U.S. citizen living in Pakistan who was charged along with Fai in the case.

As I noted in Part One, while the establishment media reported on Fai’s arrest, the story virtually disappeared from all of the leading news outlets. But while the U.S. media was ignoring the scandal entirely, the matter was the subject of considerable media scrutiny in Indian and Pakistani media.

One curious episode that received no attention from the U.S. media was the strange death of Fai’s conspirator, Zaheer Ahmad.

Several months after Fai’s arrest, an extensive investigative piece (the only one ever published on the topic) by ProPublica noted Ahmad’s ties to Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. Mahmood had met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri prior to 9/11, wanting to help al-Qaeda obtain nuclear weapons. Ahmad told the ProPublica researchers:

In a phone conversation, Ahmad said he was free and working at Shifa. “Until this case is finished, I can’t discuss this,” Ahmad told a ProPublica reporter. “And it could be dangerous for you, too.”

Two days after the ProPublica exposé appeared, a bombshell report from the Hindustan Times placed Ahmad (Fai’s conspirator) at the meeting with Mahmood, Bin Laden, and Zawahiri just weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Two days after that Hindustan Times article appeared tying him to the meeting with al-Qaeda leaders, Ahmad, who was living in Pakistan, dropped dead from a “cerebral hemorrhage”.

So within one week the following happened: ProPublica published an exposé examining Fai’s efforts on Capitol Hill on behalf of Pakistani intelligence; another report tied Fai’s charged conspirator in the case with meeting with Osama bin Laden just weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks; and the conspirator dropped dead.

Yet that was not sufficient to stoke the curiosity of the American media.

Why did this story get buried?

The official response to that question will be that Fai’s arrest was part of the diplomatic game between the U.S., India, and Pakistan, which is entirely true. In fact, as the New York Times reported, the FBI’s efforts to arrest Fai in 2011 were repeatedly opposed by the State Department and the CIA.

And considering the tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan after the raid that killed bin Laden in May 2011 and the subsequent closing of U.S. supply routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, that certainly explains the reason why the U.S. government was so willing to cut a plea deal with Fai (which it did).

But it doesn’t explain the hands-off policy of the story by the U.S. media.

One possible reason: Fai’s operation had seen considerable success under the Clinton and Bush administrations, and documents obtained by the FBI in the raid of KAC showed that Fai anticipated his efforts would flourish in the new Obama administration. Was the media merely protecting Obama?

According to the FBI, a “plan of action” for 2009 submitted to his ISI handlers showed Fai’s plan to expand his operations by building new alliances with the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon under the incoming Obama administration. In 2010, his list of proposed activities included 61 key events planned for the year, including 10 briefings for members of Congress and their staff. In 2011, Fai was directed by the Pakistan Embassy in D.C. to expand his outreach even further by contacting and building relationships with 11 members of the media and six think-tank personnel.

It’s doubtful anyone in the establishment media was eager to investigate whom at the State Department, White House/National Security Council, and the Pentagon Fai had been meeting with.

Another possible reason for the media’s lack of attention to the Fai scandal can be seen in Fai’s own biography:

His articles appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Plain Dealer, Baltimore Sun, and many other foreign policy journals in the United States and around the world.

Not only did he have the political establishment fooled for 20 years, he had the media establishment snookered as well.

However, while the diplomatic sensitivities of the Fai case, the protection of the Obama administration, and self-interest were all possible contributing factors to the media’s sitting on the biggest spy scandal on Capitol Hill in recent memory, there is a more evident motive as to why the media took a pass.

Ghulam Nabi Fai was not only active in leadership roles in many of the largest Islamic groups in the U.S. — particularly those leading the U.S. government’s Islamic “outreach” efforts. These groups also actively aided in his operations.

The ProPublica exposé noted some of these ties:

The late Ismail Raji al-Faruqi was a professor specializing in Islam at Temple and would soon help found the International Institute of Islamic Thought. (The institute later came under investigation in a federal probe into terrorism funding, although no charges were filed.) Another professor, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a respected Islamic scholar, was trying to “Islamicize” the social sciences, Fai said.

At Temple, Fai became president of the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. & Canada, an organization started in part by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had spread from Egypt through the Middle East. Some branches of the Brotherhood were hardline; others, more moderate.

Fai also started working for the ISI in about 1985 while at Temple, according to correspondence cited by the FBI, although the affidavit does not make clear what he was doing.

After earning his doctorate in 1988, Fai joined the advisory council for the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella group started by the Muslim Students Association that also received Saudi funding. [PP – as federal prosecutors noted, Fai falsely claimed to have received his doctorate and presented himself as “Doctor”, but in fact he never obtained the degree.]

But that’s not all:

Incorporation documents filed in Maryland in April 1990 show Fai was one of three people who established the Kashmir center. A second founder was Rafia Syeed, the wife of Sayyid Syeed, one of the organizers of ISNA. The third founder’s father, who retired from the Pakistani military, also held a key post in a charity run by Fai’s alleged accomplice, Zaheer Ahmad. The Syeeds did not reply to requests for comment. The third founder, Mohammad Bilal Yousaf, denied knowing Fai. “I have never heard of Dr. Fai before, only what’s been reported in the media,” he said.

IRS filings show the group got startup funds from two board members and a $20,000 loan from the North American Islamic Trust, an ISNA-linked group that holds titles to about 300 U.S. mosques, Islamic centers and schools.

To summarize what we know of Ghulam Nabi Fai:

  • He came to the U.S. to study under one of the top Muslim Brotherhood leaders, Ismail Faruqi, who founded the International Institute for Islamic Thought, which was identified by U.S. Customs as the hub of terrorism financing in the U.S.
  • Fai later served as national president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), during which time, according to an email cited in the FBI affidavit, he began serving on behalf of his Pakistani ISI masters.
  • He then served on the Shura Council for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
  • The wife of ISNA’s longtime Secretary General and present Director of Interfaith Outreach Sayyid Syeed was one of the original incorporators of KAC. Syeed had preceded Fai as national president of the MSA.
  • According to IRS filings, KAC’s Pakistani intelligence influence operation was launched with a $20,000 loan from the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which owns the property to hundreds of mosques around the country.

No doubt these organizations would say that their associations with Fai are ancient history and that they had no knowledge that Fai was operating on behalf of Pakistani intelligence.

But Fai’s involvement with these organizations continues to this day.

In fact, just two weeks before his arrest, Fai was speaking at ISNA’s annual conference, as seen in this video:

After his arrest, many of these Islamic groups — again, which are closely tied to the U.S. government — issued a statement in support of Fai under the rubric of the “American Muslim Taskforce” (AMT). This is how the AMT describes itself:

AMT is an umbrella organization that includes American Muslim Alliance (AMA), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), Muslim American Society-Freedom (MAS-F), Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), National Association of Imams (NAIF) and United Muslims of America (UMA).

After that August 2, 2011 AMT press release, media mentions of Fai’s case, save for his plea deal and sentencing, virtually disappear.

Even after Fai entered into a plea deal and signed a 26-page Statement of Facts admitting his work on Capitol Hill on behalf of Pakistani intelligence, these same Islamic groups continue to support Fai.

In fact, after Fai’s sentencing and before he reported to federal prison, many of these U.S. Islamic groups hosted fundraising dinners across the country in support of Fai and his legal expenses, hailing him as a hero.

One of these events was held in Newark, California, on June 21, and was promoted by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and co-sponsored by such prominent groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and ISNA.

Here’s a flyer for the event:

The audio of the event speakers in support of Fai can be found here.

ICNA president Zahid Bukhari sent a letter in support of Fai to the federal judge, urging a lenient sentence:

Dr. Fai was himself a victim of the Indian Government’s inhumane polices in the occupied Kashmir. He was not able to visit his parents and family living in Kashmir since his departure from that part of world several decades ago. In America, he became the globally recognized face of the plight of Kashmiri people.

He presented the Kashmiri case in 17 sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva from 2006 until June 2011. He participated in all summits of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) since 1991, and met with over 50 Heads of State over the last 20 years. He addressed the preliminary session at the Centennial Conference of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago in August 1993. Dr. Fai also organized ten International Kashmir Peace Conferences at the Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.

Federal prosecutors told the court in a sentencing memo that Fai’s cooperation with the FBI was lacking following his plea deal, particularly noting his lack of cooperation regarding “his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Pakistani terrorist groups.” (p. 9, fn. 3)

The story of the Pakistani ISI’s 20-year penetration into the heart of Congress, the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon should have been big news, especially since the U.S. government has identified the ISI as a terrorist organization in military tribunal documents.

But it wasn’t.

The media savaged Rep. Michele Bachmann and her congressional colleagues for daring to request an investigation into organizations that the U.S. government has gone into federal court and identified as front groups for the international Muslim Brotherhood yet somehow still considers helpful outreach partners. The story of how these same Islamic groups and leaders rushed to the support of Ghulam Nabi Fai and hailed Pakistan intelligence’s influence man on Capitol Hill as a hero even after admitting his crimes should be equally major news.

But it’s even worse than that. Fai was not only supported by these Islamic organizations, he served in senior leadership of these very organizations, which the U.S. government continues to consult with to help shape our domestic and foreign policy. These very same organizations are welcomed into the halls of Congress, the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon to this day.

That’s the reason I believe the story of Ghulam Nabi Fai, the Kashmiri American Council, and the Pakistani ISI is the biggest D.C. spy scandal you’ve never heard about.

The staggering implications of what federal prosecutors presented in court about this matter under any other circumstances would have shaken Washington, D.C., to its core. Instead, the political and media establishment closes their eyes in self-imposed blindness.

And in the end, it will be the American people who reap the consequences.

 

SPECIAL OPS: Stop Obama from politically capitalizing on US national security secrets

“STOP the politicians, President Obama and others, from politically capitalizing on US national security operations and secrets!

EDUCATE the public on the importance and necessity of Operational Security in today’s environment.

To Do Nothing is not an option as that allows the special operations and intelligence capabilities to be degraded…”

The video can be seen at opsecteam.org 

The Grand Deflection

A magician typically succeeds when the attention of the audience is diverted from his main activity onto some distraction.  President Obama has raised this sort of deflection into a political art form.

Take, for example, the matter of revelations by five Members of Congress and the Center for Security Policy that there appear to be a number individuals working for or with the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.   The possibility that their influence may be helping to shape U.S. policy in ways that increasingly align it with the demands, ambitions and goals of the Brotherhood and other Islamists is a national security problem of the first order.  That is especially true at a moment when Muslim Brothers are consolidating their hold on power in Egypt with the cashiering of two top generals at the hands of the Brotherhood’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Yet, Team Obama and its allies in the elite media have aggressively worked to deflect the focus away from these realities.  At first, they did so by viciously attacking Congresswoman Michele Bachmann – even though she was just one of five legislators who asked for investigations into these seeming influence operations by inspectors general of five federal agencies.

Then, they sought to portray as a victim of racism and bigotry just one of those about whom the Members of Congress raised legitimate questions: Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Journalists like CNN’s Anderson Cooper repeated uncritically – and unprofessionally –  assurances that there was no factual basis for linking Ms. Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Where compelled to acknowledge that members of her family do have ties to Brotherhood-connected organizations, the administration and its allies denounced such concerns as “guilt by association” and “McCarthyism.”

Then, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, former Muslim Brother Walid Shoebat and other researchers established a direct tie between Huma Abedin and a Muslim Brotherhood front, the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA).  IMMA was established essentially as an Abedin family business by Abdullah Omar Naseef, an officially designated al Qaeda financier.

Shortly after IMMA was founded under his chairmanship, Naseef became the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL) which Mr. McCarthy described in an August 8thspeech in Washington sponsored by the Center for Security Policy as: “the Saudi-financed global propagation enterprise by which the Muslim Brotherhood’s virulently anti-Western brand of Islamist ideology is seeded throughout the world, very much including in the United States.”

It happens that Huma Abedin was listed for twelve years on the masthead of the IMMA’s journal as an associate editor.  For at least seven of those years, Omar Naseef was also listed as a member of the editorial advisory board.

In his remarks last week, former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney McCarthy directly spoke to charges that Huma Abedin was being unfairly challenged by virtue of these various ties to the Muslim Brotherhood: “‘Guilt by association’ has nothing to do with fitness for high public office. High public office is a privilege, not a right. Access to classified information is a privilege, not a right. You need not have done anything wrong to be deemed unfit for these privileges.”

Andrew McCarthy added pointedly:  “It is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests of the United States.”

Nonetheless, two days later, the Deflector-in-Chief used the occasion of remarks at his fourth annual White House Iftar dinner – a ceremony marking the breaking of the Ramadan fast – to provide a shout-out to one of his guests, Huma Abedin.  Mr. Obama pronounced: “Huma is an American patriot, and an example of what we need in this country – more public servants with her sense of decency, her grace and her generosity of spirit. So, on behalf of all Americans, we thank you so much.”  Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Not only does Ms. Abedin’s relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood and involvement in policies favorable to its interests warrant close official scrutiny. There are at least six other individuals with Brotherhood ties whose involvement in Obama administration “Muslim outreach” and/or related policy-making also deserve investigation by the IGs and the Congress:

  • Rashad Hussain, Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation;
  • Dalia Mogahed, an advisor to President Obama;
  • Mohamed Elibiary, a member of Homeland Security Department’s Advisory Council;
  • Mohamed Magid, a member of the Homeland Security Department’s Countering-Violent Extremism Working Group;
  • Louay Safi, until recently the credentialing authority for Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military and now a leader of the Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council; and
  • Kifah Mustapha, a Hamas-fundraiser and graduate of the FBI’s ‘Citizens Academy’

The American people are entitled to know who is shaping the policies that are increasingly empowering, enriching and emboldening the Muslim Brotherhood – an organization sworn to our destruction.  Under no circumstances should legitimate and well-grounded congressional requests for formal investigations be deflected, let alone suppressed.

And the results of those investigations must be available to inform the critical choice American voters have to make this November.  It just might make all the difference in the outcome – which is presumably why the grand deflection is being pursued with such determination.

Forcing our all-volunteer force to fail

Concerns raised by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and four of her colleagues on the proper vetting of Huma Abedin, the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, provoke larger questions about Muslim Brotherhood penetration and influence in our government agencies, particularly the Department of Defense (DOD). Recently, we witnessedPentagon Islamic adviser Louay Safi’s reappearance as the political head of the Syrian National Council, a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated group. Among his many other activities, he is also the director of leadership development for the Islamic Society of North America(ISNA), which is the largest Muslim Brotherhood group in the United States.

The president of ISNA, Imam Mohamed Magid serves as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. He is a close adviser to the National Security Council as well as to President Obama. He continues to have access to not only the State and Treasury departments but has been used frequently by DOD to formulate responses to incidents that Islamists consider offensive. How comforting. Let’s not forget that the ISNA is an unindicated co-conspirator in theHoly Land Foundation trial in 2008 for providing funding to the terrorist group Hamas.

An open question is what role Imam Magid played in influencing DHS to cancel a conference on homegrown radical extremism at CIA headquarters in August 2011. We know that the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR) demanded that the training conference featuring a presentation by Stephen Coughlin, among others, be canceled. It should be recalled that CAIR is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.CAIR was also successful in getting West Point’s chaplain to cancel a prayer breakfast in early February by Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, a West Point graduate and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, because of his views on Islam. So much for the First Amendment.

Based on his position at the ISNA, Mr. Safi has been designated as only one of two “ecclesiastical agents” to act as unpaid consultants to DOD for selecting Muslim chaplains. It should be remembered that Abdurahman Alamoudi, as a result of his close connections to the Clinton White House, had the lead role in establishing the Muslim chaplain programs. He not only nominated but approved which Muslims could serve as chaplains in the U.S. military. For the record, Mr. Alamoudi currently is serving a 23-year sentence in federal prison for his conviction on terrorism-related charges and was proved to be a senior al Qaeda financier as well as a strong supporter of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

Mr. Safi has cast a wide net in DOD. He was also responsible for teaching Islam to U.S. Army military personnel at various bases, including Fort Hood, so that they would be more sensitive to Islamic customs and traditions. This sensitivity training is all done under the guise of our counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy to win the hearts and minds of Muslims first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan. Actually, what’s important in the Middle East is “street respect.” Once it is established, hearts and minds will follow.

As part of his credentials, Mr. Safi was also named “unindicated co-conspirator No. 4” in the trial of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Sami Al-Arian. Nonetheless, he continues to have access to both DOD and the FBI.

On Oct. 19, 2011, a letter signed by an array of Muslim groups, including CAIR and ISNA, both Muslim Brotherhood organizations, was sent to Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan complaining about the government’s use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam. Much of the material utilized by U.S. trainers that the groups complained about was extracted from the Koran and Shariah law.

They demanded that all training material be purged of “biased materials.” Furthermore, they demanded that personnel reviews be conducted on all trainers and government employees who promoted biased training and materials and that they be “properly disciplined.” Their audacity has no limits.

Yes, our trainers are biased. They took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. This is their bias, one that every American should be proud to support. Instead of vetting our trainers and training materials used for countering violent extremism, the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations that signed the Oct. 19 letter as well as a Wired magazine article used as a primary reference to justify the complaints, should be vetted and their agenda exposed. Their objectives are clear: To silence those Americans who understand the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its strategy to impose Shariah in place of our Constitution using our “own miserable hands.”

Another important question: How much influence have these Muslim outreach advisers had in the development of the restricted rules of engagement under which our military is required to fight? In Afghanistan, they must observe rules of engagement that betray their intentions to the locals and then are restricted on use of their weapons, putting their lives in jeopardy.

Our troops are well aware that many Afghan army units, trained with our tax dollars, are negotiating unofficial truces with the Taliban. Complicating this unacceptable situation is the endemic corruption throughout the country.

Our military knows that Afghanistan, with a 90 percent illiteracy rate, will always be a failed state. After 10 years, we should recognize that our COIN strategy has not worked. A few more construction projects and Afghan army units will not turn the tide. We should stop sacrificing American military lives and money, particularly with the draconian budget cuts being forced on our military. If we are to keep faith with our all-volunteer force, a change in direction must be taken now.

Retired Adm. James A. Lyons was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and seniorU.S. military representative to the United Nations.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Times:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/8/forcing-our-all-volunteer-force-to-fail/.

The G.O.P.’s One-Legged Stool?

Ronald Reagan forged a winning electoral majority on the stable foundation of what he described as a three-legged stool: fiscal discipline, traditional values and peace through strength.  He understood it to be an appealing platform to the American people writ large, including of course economic, social and national security conservatives and the rest of his Republican Party.

Unfortunately, it seems increasingly, that today’s Republicans want to bet that they can regain the White House by cutting off two legs from that stool – disregarding, if not dismissing outright conservative social issues and national security themes.

A case in point came last week as the G.O.P.’s 2012 presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney, declared that his campaign was “not going to talk about” the Left’s attempt to punish the owners of Chick-fil-A for their stand on gay marriage.  Neither would it be talking about the request made by Rep. Michele Bachmann and four of her colleagues for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood influence operations that appear with increasing success to be targeting the Obama administration.

Whatever one thinks about marriage between people of the same sex, surely a man running as a business-friendly candidate would say whether he favors boycotts of privately owned businesses on the basis of the beliefs of their shareholders?

Similarly, the Republican standard-bearer could surely observe that there are statutes and administrative guidelines designed to protect individuals and the government from the possibility that foreign associates may seek to exercise influence on family members, friends, colleagues or their federal agencies that employ them.  He could make clear that he supports the rights of members of the House of Representatives to inquire whether there have been breaches of those rules.  He can say that he’s reserving judgment on their concerns until we learn the results of the requested Inspector General inquiries.

Instead, Gov. Romney is signaling an indifference to these topics – and, in the process, sending a message that can only alienate those for whom such issues are not just important but determinative of their votes.

In past elections since the Reagan era, Republican establishment candidates and their strategists have taken the support of conservatives of all stripes for granted, sometimes contemptuously declaring “they have nowhere else to go.”  Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush (during his reelection race) and John McCain are testament to the failure to appreciate that, while conservatives may not vote for their opponent, they do have somewhere to be on election day:  They can stay home

Mitt Romney is not exactly enjoying a surfeit of enthusiasm for his candidacy as it is.  Failing to address matters of concern to the various parts of the Republican base – and to the future of our nation – is a formula for his defeat, no matter how compelling his position may be on economic and fiscal matters, the one leg of the stool on which his campaign currently rests.

It happens that there is another powerful reason for addressing in particular the national security portfolio and the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood.  The next Commander-in-Chief will inherit a world substantially remade by the Obama Doctrine: “emboldening our enemies, undermining our friends and diminishing our country.”

Arguably, nowhere is that more true than in the parts of the globe where the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are ascendant.  That rise – and all that it portends for our one reliable ally, Israel, and what remains of our “friends” in the Mideast, South Asia, North and sub-Saharan Africa – will present grave challenges to our security and other interests.

We need to know how the man who would replace President Obama will contend with such a threat.  To do so, we at least need to understand whether he regards it as such.  And, if so, whether he is going to allow some of the factors that appear to have contributed to it – namely, the access the Obama administration has afforded to its councils to individuals with documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood – to operate in his campaign and White House.

It is gratifying that Mitt Romney did not join some other Republicans in denouncing Representatives Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Trent Franks, Lynn Westmoreland and Tom Rooney for seeking answers to these sorts of questions as they relate to the present administration.  Still, if he wants to become the leader of the Free World in the next one, Gov. Romney is going to have to address the mortal threat to it posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its civilization jihad – a stealthy, insidious form of subversion that will, unless checked, remove all three legs of the Reagan “stool” and the constitutional republic it has helped build and preserve.

Israel — Obama’s wedge issue

Less than 100 days before the US presidential elections, the Obama administration is openly denying Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Can this be a vote-getter?

Last week, the Emergency Committee for Israel released an ad titled, "O, Jerusalem." The commercial showed administration officials squirming when asked to name the capital of Israel, and highlighted the recent refusals of White House and State Department spokespeople to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city. The underlying message of the ad was that the administration’s policy is out of step with the views of the majority of Americans.

Barack Obama’s position is certainly a political outlier. The 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed nearly unanimously by both houses of Congress, explicitly stated that it is the policy of the United States that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel. The law granted the president a right to postpone the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on national security grounds. But the law’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was unconditional.

During his visit to Israel earlier this week, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney highlighted the fact that he holds the consensus view of the American public on Jerusalem.

In his speech in Jerusalem on Sunday afternoon, Romney said simply, "It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel."

The Palestinians were predictably enraged.

Also predictably, the Palestinians chastised Romney for another statement he made that was equally rooted in America’s bipartisan consensus.

Romney noted that other things being equal, cultures that uphold and protect political and economic freedoms are more prosperous than cultures that don’t.

In a breakfast meeting with American supporters in Jerusalem on Monday, Romney noted that Israel’s per capita income is significantly higher than the per capital income of Palestinians in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority, just as per capita income in the US is higher than per capita income in Mexico, and per capita income in Chile is higher than per capita income in Ecuador.

It is hard to think of a milder criticism of Palestinian society than Romney’s comparison of the Palestinian economy to the economies of Mexico and Ecuador. Romney could easily have gone much further without ever leaving the confines of received wisdom. For instance, he could have mentioned – as Obama did in his speech in Cairo in June 2009 – that Muslim societies under-invest in education relative to non-Muslim societies.

Or he could have highlighted – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton often did during her tenure in the US Senate – that official Palestinian institutions indoctrinate Palestinian children in a culture of death, teach them to hate Jews and aspire to become suicide bombers in a jihad aimed at Israel’s physical eradication.

It was predictable that the Palestinians would condemn Romney for his run of the mill support for Israel and his milquetoast criticism of the Palestinians, because they reject every criticism of their behavior and take umbrage at every step anyone takes that suggests acceptance of the Jewish state or recognition of Jewish history.

This behavior is common to all groups in Palestinian society, from Hamas to Fatah to the so-called liberal reformers. In line with this, while Hamas condemned visits to Auschwitz as helping "Israel to spread the lie of the Holocaust… and garner international sympathy… at the expense of the Palestinians," the supposedly moderate, liberal Palestinian for Dignity organization condemned the EU for upgrading its trade ties with Israel.

The EU is the largest financial backer of the PA. Its policies towards Israel are in complete alignment with what the purportedly moderate Palestinians claim they want in a peace deal with Israel, including the partition of Jerusalem, and the expulsion of 600,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria and the neighborhoods built outside of the 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem. And yet, as Shoshana Bryen from the Jewish Policy Center reported, for simply upgrading EU trade ties with Israel, Palestinian for Dignity announced its members "will organize to protest the latest manifestation of EU complicity and to challenge its presence and operations in Palestine."

Given the routine nature of Palestinian hysteria at Romney, and the bipartisan consensus upon which Romney’s remarks were based, there was no reason either his remarks or the Palestinians’ response to his remarks would spark any controversy in the US. Indeed, given the fact that both US law and the majority of Americans respect Israel’s determination that Jerusalem is its capital city, it could have been taken for granted that Obama would keep his head down and hope to avoid further discussion of the issue.

Certainly, given that he had made statements similar to – indeed stronger than – Romney’s statements about cultural causes for economic prosperity, it could have been assumed that Obama and his surrogates would have disregarded PA spokesman Saeb Erekat’s ridiculous characterization of Romney’s statement as "racist."

Given that it is election season, and then-candidate Obama’s stated support for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2008, the Obama administration could reasonably have made its own endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city.

But amazingly, the Obama administration has taken the opposite tack. Obama and his media surrogates seized on the Palestinians’ criticism of Romney as proof that by embracing the American consensus on Israel, Romney had committed an unforgivable diplomatic faux pas.

First there was the White House’s statement Monday on Jerusalem. Rather than keeping quiet, Obama doubled down. In a press briefing, White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest not only refused to acknowledge that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. He drew attention to the difference between Romney’s position and the administration’s and denied that Israel has a capital.

In Earnest’s words, "Our view is that [Romney’s position that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital] is a different position than this administration holds. It’s the view of this administration that the capital should be determined in final-status negotiations between parties."

At the same time, Obama’s media surrogates have focused their wrath on Romney’s statement about the cultural sources of economic prosperity.

Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf condemned Romney’s statement as racist.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman accused Romney of "not knowing what he was talking about."

Both Rothkopf and Friedman – and a chorus of their colleagues on the even more hysterical Left – laced their broadsides against Romney with frontal assaults against top Republican donor Sheldon Adelson and other Jewish American supporters of Romney. These denunciations were – at a minimum – infused with anti-Semitic innuendo.

Rothkopf wrote that in embracing Israel, "at a fund-raiser to pander to big donors – including Sheldon Adelson," Romney displayed "a willingness to sacrifice US interests in exchange for political cash."

Friedman’s entire column was a screed against pro-Israel American Jews who contribute to the campaigns of candidates that support Israel. He argued that in pursuit of these American Jewish dollars, Republican politicians have abandoned America’s national interest. In other words, Friedman alleged that American Jewish money is causing Republicans to betray their country.

Friedman wrote, "the main Israel lobby, AIPAC, has made itself the feared arbiter of which lawmakers are ‘pro’ and which are ‘anti-Israel,’ and therefore who should get donations and who should not."

On their face, Obama’s repeated assaults on Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, and his surrogates’ attacks on pro-Israel politicians, make no sense. For the past two years, Democratic leaders have insisted that support for Israel is bipartisan.

Last year, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz demanded that her Republican colleagues avoid making Israel a "wedge issue," that would distinguish Democrats from Republicans.

But again, Romney’s statements in Jerusalem did nothing of the sort. They were the embodiment of the bipartisan consensus. It is Obama who is distinguishing between the parties’ positions on Israel.

Obama is making his hostility to Israel a wedge issue.

As Republicans repeat traditional positions, the Democrats are rendering conventional statements of amity with the Jewish state controversial. It is the Obama White House and its surrogates who are attacking those who recognize Israel’s capital as diplomatic flamethrowers. It is the Democrats who are demonizing American supporters of Israel as disloyal.

Obama’s assault on Romney is an extension and amplification of his Jewish proxy J Street’s campaign against Congressmen Allen West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois. Last month, J Street released ads attacking West and Walsh for being even more pro-Israel than most of their pro-Israel congressional colleagues. After Romney returned from Israel, J Street released a new ad attacking Romney for being nearly as pro-Israel as West and Walsh.

What has changed? Why are Obama and his surrogates now highlighting Obama’s hostility? Why are they making opposition to Israel a partisan issue and attacking Republicans for being pro-Israel?

Much of the answer was provided by by J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami last week. In an interview with The New York Times, Ben-Ami explained, "Every single number indicates that there is simply no such thing as a Jewish problem for the president. The people who only vote on Israel didn’t vote for Obama last time and know who they are voting for already."

In other words, Obama has given up on the pro- Israel vote. He’s going for the anti-Israel vote and the indifferent-to-Israel vote. True, Obama outrageously markets his anti-Israel platform as pro- Israel. For instance, J Street attack ads on pro-Israel Congressmen West and Walsh present them preposterously as "anti-Israel."

So, too, Friedman and Rothkopf write that by supporting Israel, Romney is harming Israel, because it is Israel’s vital interest to be diplomatically coerced into surrendering to its Palestinian enemies.

Although this seems merely ridiculous, it is actually insidious. These arguments are implicit messages to three groups. For out-and-out anti-Semites, they reinforce the paranoid belief that Jews and Israel are so powerful that even the president is afraid to openly say what he thinks about us.

For socially conscious Israel-haters, the messaging enables them to continue bashing Israel without fear that they will be accused of being anti-Semites.

And for American Jews who are indifferent to Israel, the messages give them cover to vote for Obama without having to admit that they couldn’t care less about Israel.

Obama’s reelection campaign strategy has mystified many observers. Why, they wonder, is he playing to his base instead of moving to the Center? Like his attacks on free enterprise and Catholics, his attacks on Israel seem to indicate that he doesn’t care about getting reelected.

But this is not the case. Evidently, Obama’s campaign strategy is to conduct multiple micro-campaigns rather than one national campaign. Apparently his data indicate that he will win or lose the election depending on how a few key districts in swing states vote. Based on these data, his campaign strategists have plainly concluded that some of these decisive districts are populated by anti- Semites, Israel-haters and indifferent Jews for whom his absurdly marketed anti-Israel positions resonate.

Aside from that, these positions clearly resonate with him. Consequently, they will certainly form the basis for his policy towards Israel if he wins a second term in office.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.