Tag Archives: CAIR

Fact-Checking NPRs Agenda Journalism on Terrorism

Yesterday’s poorly reported National Public Radio Morning Edition story, "Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee," demands a fact-check critique. The NPR report alleged that the head of Ohio’s Muslim outreach program Omar al-Omari was wrongly terminated due to a law enforcement briefing on political Islam.  We needed to issue several corrections:

NPR Claim #1: "Federal officials familiar with the case say Omari was singled out because he distinguished between extremist Muslims and mainstream Muslims in his outreach and training programs."

Fact Check #1: Many of the materials Omari had written, including his Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture, and a brochure titled ‘Agents of Radicalization‘ were slanted towards a pro-radical Islamic view and support a revisionist history which blames America for many of the Middle East’s problems.  In the Guide, Omari defines jihad as:

Jihad doesn’t mean holy war, as many people are led to believe. It actually means a struggle to achieve excellence. It’s the struggle Muslims face in life which varies from the Greater Jihad where a person is obliged to struggle within him/herself to overcome evil and establish good, to the Lesser Jihad which is the struggle in daily life. As Muslims are obliged to maximize their potential in order to be the best citizens they can be, jihad is the vehicle that lifts them to the challenge.  The term holy war is a European concept that began with the Crusades and was extended to Islam by the West.

In an interview with The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Zuhdi Jasser, Muslim President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was highly critical of Omari’s publications:

Jasser describes the two publications as "full of factual inaccuracies" including the assertion that 66 percent of American Arabs are Muslim (close to three-fourths are Christian). Alomari also "misses the core problem: political Islam." Instead, he indulges in "bizarre revisionist history" which "seeks to portray Muslims as victims."

The United States is engaged in "a war of ideas" with radical Islam. Regarding jihadists, "you would hope that [Alomari] would say that these are corrupt thugs who have hijacked our faith," Jasser told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. But instead he "describes [terrorism] as a response to what the West has done."

The material Alomari’s agency is putting out is "classic Islamist propaganda" which suggests that "these thugs who kill people in restaurants and shopping malls will stop if we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict," Jasser said. "In fact, they’ll find another grievance in a year or two."

The brochure "Agents of Radicalization," was printed but then copies were destroyed because Omari had listed as "organizations we are working with" a list that included numerous unindicted co-conspirators from the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: "Some of the organizations we are working with," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA) Muslim American Society (MAS) Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) Muslim Student Association (MSA)." Many of these groups were listed as unindicted coconspirators in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, US vs Holy Land Foundation.

Omari’s brochure on radicalization was never distributed, according to a source within the Department:

Thousands of copies were printed up by the department (at taxpayer expense, of course). Some copies had been provided to some of our partner agencies. As boxes of these things were getting ready to be shipped out, our director was contacted by some counter-terrorism officials and told that the brochure was promoting groups that the FBI and other agencies were trying to distance themselves from (like CAIR).

According to a report by counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, Ten Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat,

"When [Omari] organized a forum on "interfaith dialogue" for the department in August 2009, the two lone Muslim representatives included a local imam, Hany Saqr, who was identified in the Holy Land Foundation trial as one of the top Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the nation; and CAIR-Ohio president Asma Mobin-Uddin."

NPR Claim #2: "Omari lost his job with the state of Ohio, though not because of claims that he had ties to terrorism…his employment application was incomplete. He hadn’t listed all of the schools where he had worked before taking the job with the state of Ohio."

Fact Check #2: Omari was fired not only for failing to list his prior employment at Columbus State Community College, "where he was fired after an improper consensual sexual affair with a student," according to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper but also for failing to disclose his prior work for the Jordanian Minister of Labor and for lying to investigators, also reported by FOX News and first published at the online investigative journalism website My Pet Jawa.

According to reports, Omari sued the female student who had reported his illicit activities as sexual harassment to higher-ups, claiming the woman had defamed him.  He lost.

Omari is now currently suing the state of Ohio for wrongful termination, as well as other alleged discriminations he suffered while working as the Multicultural Relations Officer for the Ohio Department of Public Safety.

NPR Claim #3: According to the NPR story on the mid-April 2010 training session, "Deputy Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Columbus Division of Police stated about Omari that "I knew him really well … And I thought he was a great professional, so that was part of the reason why I was so surprised when his picture popped up in the presentation."

Fact Check #3: Omari’s highly Islamist-influenced brochure (the one that had to be destroyed) and guide had been widely publicized after he testified to Congress on March 17 and was widely criticized – one month PRIOR to the mid-April law enforcement training session, where the trainers discussed the content of the Omari publications with the attendees.  The facts raised by the trainers about Omari’s publications were not in dispute when published in March or presented by trainers in April.  According to participants the trainers had been invited to brief by the Columbus Police Department, and far from being "suspended," the training continued through to the end of the planned session.  The entire course of instruction was completed.

This information was available to National Public Radio by simply googling Omari’s name, but NPR’s story was not an exercise in journalism.  They’re in the whitewashing business for Islamist supporters like Omari.

Congress, on the other hand, is in the spending reduction business these days.  Exactly one year after the public exposure of Omari began, on March 17, 2011, the House of Representatives voted to stop federal funding for National Public Radio.  The vote was 228 to 192.  Not even close.

Freeing Al Qaeda?

Just when you thought it was not possible for the Holder Justice Department to become any more hostile to the national and homeland security interests of the American people, along comes yet another travesty.  This one threatens both, as it apparently would involve turning loose in America a convicted terrorist known to be a top Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic) operative and al Qaeda financier: Abdurahman Alamoudi.

According to a short Associated Press report on July 8th:

Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to cut the 23-year prison term being served by an American Muslim activist who admitted participation in a Libyan plot to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Alamoudi – who famously declared his support for Hamas and Hezbollah at a rally in Lafayette Square in October 2000 and was recognized by the Justice Department as a Muslim Brother – has been incarcerated with other top terrorists in the Supermax facility in Colorado.  As an American citizen, he would presumably be allowed to stay in this country upon his release.

Alamoudi at Large

Can it be precluded that, once he is freed, Alamoudi would take up again with those he did so much to help sponsor, foster and run as one of the leading Muslim Brothers in the country?  Lest we forget, as a driving force behind many of the myriad MB front organizations in the United States, he previously was deeply involved with the fulfillment of the Ikhwan‘s mission here as described in its 1991 strategic plan.

That plan, which was found by the FBI in 2004 when they discovered the secret archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in Annandale, Virginia, is entitled An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. (It is reprinted in its entirety as Appendix 2 of Shariah: The Threat to America, ShariahtheThreat.com.)  According to this memorandum, the Brotherhood’s mission in America is "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within…by their [read, our] hands and the hands of the believers."

This objective is, of course, identical to that of al Qaeda, the other jihadist enterprise for whom Alamoudi previously worked.  Who knows, if freed, could he rejoin its ranks, too?

At the very least, one has to assume that Abdurahman Alamoudi would be able to reconnect with the Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military and prison systems whom the Clinton administration allowed him to recruit, train and credential.  As no evident effort has been made to relieve his hand-picked folks from their clerical responsibilities ministering to such exceedingly sensitive populations, putting Alamoudi back in business – or at least back in touch – with them could intensify the grave security threat they might pose even now.

Why Would Alamoudi be Freed?

So what possible justification could the Holder Justice Department have for releasing such an individual just nine years into a twenty-three year sentence?  The AP story notes that, "The documents explaining why prosecutors want to cut Alamoudi’s sentence are under seal, but such reductions are allowed only when a defendant provides substantial assistance to the government."

We can only speculate about what such "assistance" might be.  Could Alamoudi be telling the feds insights about his former paymaster, Qaddafi, that could be helpful in removing the latter from power?  As it is not entirely clear whether such an outcome is actually the goal of the United States, France or NATO in Libya at this point, it is hard to see that possible help as justification for running the serious risks associated with springing so dangerous an individual.

Perhaps, alternatively, Alamoudi might have spilled the beans about his friends in the Brotherhood’s vast North American infrastructure.  Did he provide further confirmation of the subversive role being played as part of what the Ikhwan calls its "civilization jihad" by, for example, organizations and members of: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Community Association (MCA), the Islamic Council of North America (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Fiqh Council?

Such insights seem unlikely to have been valued by the Obama administration, though, since it continues to have extensive dealings with such groups and individuals associated with them.  If anything, such ties with MB fronts and operatives will be intensifying, now that Team Obama has decided formally to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood’s mother ship in Egypt.

Unfortunately, given this trend – to say nothing of the mindlessness of the Holder Justice Department when it comes to matters of national security – a more probable explanation for its willingness to give Alamoudi a get-out-of-jail-free pass is that the Obama administration is anxious to remove an irritant in relations with its friends in the Muslim Brotherhood and to demonstrate that a new day is dawning in those ties.

Alamoudi’s GOP Influence Operation

As it happens, in the aftermath of the Alamoudi announcement, one of his most successful pre-incarceration influence operations bore fresh fruit.  In 1998, Alamoudi personally provided seed money to enable libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to establish the Islamic Free Market Institute (better known as the Islamic Institute or II).  The Institute served the purpose of credentialing Muslim Brotherhood operatives like Khalid Saffuri, Alamoudi’s longtime deputy at the American Muslim Council (AMC), who became II’s founding executive director – as "conservatives" and enabling them to infiltrate the George W. Bush 2000 campaign and administration.

After the incarceration of his sponsor on terrorism charges, Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has continued to promote Muslim Brotherhood personnel and agendas inside Republican circles.  For instance, just this week, at the July 13th meeting of his so-called "Center-Right Coalition" in Washington, Norquist staged a denunciation of legislation now being debated in state legislatures across the country: the American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation.

MB Priority: Stopping American Laws from Governing in American Courts

The Muslim Brotherhood is outraged that three states have already enacted one version or another of the ALAC bill designed to preclude foreign laws (including, but not limited to, shariah) from being used in that state’s courts if doing so would deny constitutional rights or otherwise conflict with state public policy.  It has been introduced in some twenty others states and, to date, has passed in one house or another of four of them.

Such successes have been achieved by Americans all over the country because there simply is no good argument for opposing this affirmation of our civil liberties for all Americans – including American Muslim women and children whose rights are frequently being impinged upon by the application of shariah.  (See ShariahinAmericanCourts.com, a study of twenty-seven cases in twenty-three states where shariah was allowed to trump American laws.)

Last Wednesday, Norquist arranged for three speakers – self-described Jews or Christians – to promote the Muslim Brotherhood line that free practice of religion, including that of non-Muslims, would be denied were ALAC to be adopted.  Nothing could be farther from the truth, as the legislation itself makes clear (See PublicPolicyAlliance.org).  But it is instructive that the GOP influence operation Alamoudi spawned continues to serve his intended purpose: dividing and suborning conservatives in the best tradition of the stealth jihad at which he and his Brothers have long excelled.

Perhaps another venue in which we can expect to see Abdurahman Alamoudi should the Obama administration actually get away with freeing this al Qaeda terrorist will be as a featured speaker at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting?

Caution: Storm Approaching

It was seven months ago that Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable peddler in Tunisia set himself and the Arab world on fire. The 26-year-old staged his suicidal protest on the steps of the local city hall after a municipal inspector took away his unlicensed vegetable cart thus denying him the ability to feed his family of eight. 

Most depictions of the Arab revolutions that followed his act have cast them as struggles for freedom and good government. These depictions miss the main cause of these political upheavals. No doubt millions of Arabs are upset about the freedom deficit in Arab lands. But the fact is that economics has played a decisive role in all of them. 

In Bouzizi’s case, his self-immolation was provoked by economic desperation. And if current trends continue, the revolutionary ferment we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, the political whirlwind will not be contained in the Middle East.

Most of the news coming out about Egypt today emanates from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. There the protesters continue to demand ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s head on a platter alongside the skulls of his sons, business associates, advisors and everyone else who prospered under his rule. While the supposedly liberal democratic protesters’ swift descent into bloodlust is no doubt worth noting, the main reason these protesters continue to gain so much international attention is because they are easy to find. A reporter looking for a story’s failsafe option is to mosey on over to the square and put a microphone into the crowd. 

But while easily accesible, the action at Tahrir Square is not Egypt’s most important story. The most important, strategically consequential story is that Egypt is rapidly going broke. By the end of the year, the military dictatorship will likely not only default on Egypt’s loans. Field Marshal Tantawi and his deputies will almost certainly be unable to feed the Egyptian people.

Some raw statistics are in order here.

Among Egypt’s population of 80 million, some 32 million are illiterate. They engage in subsistence farming that is too inefficient to support them. Egypt needs to import half of its food from abroad.

As David Goldman, (aka Spengler), reported in Asia Times Online, in May the International Monetary Fund warned of the impending economic collapse of non-oil exporting Arab countries saying that, "In the current baseline scenario the external financing needs of the region’s oil importers is projected to exceed $160 billion during 2011-13."

Goldman noted, "That’s almost three years’ worth of Egypt’s total annual imports as of 2010."

Since Mubarak was overthrown in February, Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have plummeted from $36bn to $25-28bn. Last month Tantawi rejected an IMF loan offer of $3bn. claiming he would not accept any conditions on the loans. Instead he accepted $4bn in loans from Saudi Arabia and another $2.34bn from the Gulf States. 

And still, Egypt’s foreign currency reserves are being washed away. As Goldman explained, the problem is capital flight. Due in no small part to the protesters in Tahrir Square calling for the arrest of all those who did business with the former regime, Egypt’s wealthy and foreign investors are taking their money out of the country.

At the Arab Banking Summit in Rome last month, Jordan’s Finance Minister Mohammed Abu Hammour warned, "There is capital flight and $500 million a week are leaving the Arab world." 

According to Goldman, "Although Hammour did not mention countries in his talk… most of the capital flight is coming from Egypt, and at an annual rate roughly equal to Egypt’s remaining reserves." 

What this means is that in a few short months, Egypt will be unable to pay for its imports. And consequently, it will be unable to feed its people. 

EGYPT IS far from alone. Take Syria. There too, capital is fleeing the country as the government rushes to quell the mass anti-regime protests.

 

Just as Egyptian and Tunisian protesters hoped that a new regime would bring them more freedom, so the mass protests sweeping Syria owe in part to politics. But like the situation in Egypt and Tunisia, Syria’s economic woes are dictating much of what is happening on the ground and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Last month Syrian President Bashar Assad gave a speech warning of "weakness or collapse of the Syrian economy." As a report last month by Reuters explained, the immediate impact of Assad’s speech was capital flight and the devaluation of the Syrian pound by eight percent.

For the past decade, Assad has been trying to liberalize the Syrian economy. He enacted some free market reforms, opened a stock exchange and attempted to draw foreign investment to the country. While largely unsuccessful in alleviating Syria’s massive poverty, these reforms did enable the country a modest growth rate of around 2.5% per year. 

In response to the mass protests threatening his regime, Assad has effectively ended his experiment with the free market. He fired his government minister in charge of the economic reforms and put all the projects on hold. Instead, according to a report this week in Syria Today, the government has steeply increased public sector wages and offered 100,000 temporary workers full-time contracts. The Syrian government also announced a 25% cut in the price of diesel fuel at a cost for the government of $527 million per year. 

Boasting foreign currency reserves of $18bn, the Syrian regime announced it would be using these reserves to pay for the increased governmental outlays. But as Reuters reported, the government has been forced to spend $70-80 million a week to buck up the local currency. So between protecting the Syrian pound and paying for political loyalty, the Assad regime is quickly drying up Syria’s treasury. 

In the event the regime is overthrown, a successor regime will face the sure prospect of economic collapse much as the Egyptian regime does. And in the event that Assad remains in power, he will continue to reap the economic whirlwind of what he has sown in the form of political instability and violence.

What this means is that we can expect continued political turmoil in both countries as they are consumed by debt and tens of millions of people face the prospect of starvation. This political turmoil can be expected to give rise to dangerous if unknowable military developments.

POOR ARAB nations like Egypt and Syria are far from the only ones facing economic disaster. The $3bn loan the IMF offered Egypt may be among the last loans of that magnitude the IMF is able to offer because quite simply, European loaners are themselves staring into the economic abyss. 

Greece’s debt crisis is not a local problem. It now appears increasingly likely that the EU is going to have to accept Greece defaulting on at least part of its debt. And the ramifications of Greek default on the European and US banking systems are largely unknowable. This is the case because as Megan McArdle at The Atlantic wrote this week, the amount of Greek debt held by European and US banks is difficult to assess. 

Worse still, the banking crisis will only intensify in the wake of a Greek default. Debt pressure on Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal which are all also on the brink of defaulting on their debts will grow. Italy is Europe’s fourth largest economy. Its debt is about the size of Germany’s debt. If Italy goes into default, the implications for the European and US banking systems – and their economies generally — will be devastating.

The current debt-ceiling negotiations between US President Barack Obama and the Republican Congressional leadership have made it apparent that Obama is ideologically committed to increasing government spending and taxes in the face of a weak economy. If Obama is reelected next year, the dire implications of four more years of his economic policies for the US and global economies cannot be overstated. 

DUE TO the economic policies implemented by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu since his first tenure as prime minister in 1996, in the face of this economic disaster, Israel is likely to find itself in the unlikely position of standing along China and India as among the only stable, growing economies in the world. Israel’s banking sector is largely unexposed to European debt. Israel’s gross external debt is 44 percent of GDP. This compares well not only to European debt levels of well over 100 percent of GDP but to the US debt level which stands at 98 percent of GDP. 

Assuming the government does not bend to populist pressure and take economically hazardous steps like reducing the work week to four days, Israel’s economy is likely to remain one of the country’s most valuable strategic assets. Just as economic prosperity allowed Israel to absorb the cost of the Second Lebanon War with barely a hiccup, so Israel’s continued economic growth will play a key role in protecting it from the economically induced political upheavals likely to ensue throughout much of the Arab world and Europe. 

Aside from remaining economically responsible, as Israel approaches the coming storms it is important for it to act with utmost caution politically. It must adopt policies that provide it with the most maneuver room and the greatest deterrent force. 

First and foremost, this means that it is imperative that Israel not commit itself to any agreements with any Arab regime. In 1977 the Camp David Agreement with then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in which Israel surrendered the strategically invaluable Sinai for a peace treaty seemed like a reasonable gamble. In 2011, a similar agreement with Assad or with the Palestinian Authority, (whose budget is largely financed from international aid), would be the height of strategic insanity. 

Beyond that, with the rising double specter of Egyptian economic collapse and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, Israel must prepare for the prospect of war with Egypt. Recently it was reported that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has opted to spread over several years Israel’s military preparations for a return to hostilities with Egypt. Gantz’s decision reportedly owes to his desire to avoid provoking Egypt with a rapid expansion of the IDF’s order of battle. 

Gantz’s caution is understandable. But it is unacceptable. Given the escalating threats emanating from Egypt – not the least of which is the expanding security vacuum in the Sinai — Israel must prepare for war now.

So too, with the US’s weak economy, Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood friendly foreign policy, and Europe’s history of responding to economic hardship with xenophobia, Israel’s need to develop the means of militarily defending itself from a cascade of emerging threats becomes all the more apparent.

The economic storms may pass by Israel. But the political tempests they unleash will reach us. To emerge safely from what is coming, Israel needs to hunker down and prepare for the worst. 

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

Obama’s Legacy

For some time, the outlines of an Obama Doctrine have been apparent.  It can be summarized in nine damning words:  Embolden our enemies.  Undermine our friends.  Diminish our country.  These days, it is hard to avoid proof that these outcomes are not inadvertent, or attributable to sheer and sustained incompetence.  Rather, they are a product of deliberate decisions approved, we must assume, by the President himself.

Consider last week’s announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the United States was going to "engage" the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  At one fell swoop, Team Obama hit its doctrinal trifecta:

America arguably has no more mortal enemy than the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic). The MB’s own documents – including a number of those introduced into evidence by the Justice Department in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history, the Holy Land Foundation prosecution – make clear that this international Islamist organization seeks to impose its politico-military-legal doctrine of shariah on our country. 

One such document describes a "phased plan" that calls for the Ikhwan  assiduously and stealthily to pursue precisely this objective.  Ultimately, the plan calls for the use of violence to take over our government, clearing the way for the triumph of Islam worldwide and the reestablishment of a global ruler, the Caliph, who will govern in accordance with shariah.

Sounds crazy, right?  Or at least unachievable?  It does – at least until you realize that the message being sent by the Obama administration is that, despite such ambitions, we are prepared to legitimate and deal with the Muslim Brothers who are animated by them.

Well, perhaps you say, just because we are recognizing that the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to be a big player (read, the winner) in the elections currently scheduled for later this year in Egypt does not mean we are going to facilitate their aspirations in this country.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what it means.

By engaging the Ikhwan in its native land, the Obama administration is effectively eliminating any lingering impediment to the operations of its myriad front groups in this country.  Even before Secretary Clinton’s announcement, many of them have already been accorded unprecedented access to and influence in the U.S. government.  In fact, it stands to reason that one of the factors prompting Team Obama to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood is the success of such influence operations within the United States.

In addition to emboldening our enemies by reinforcing their conviction that we are in decline, the Obama administration’s MB initiative undermines our friends.  That is  most obviously the case with respect to Israel, a nation already reeling from the President’s serial, gratuitous acts of enmity towards the Jewish State.  Now, his embrace of the Ikhwan can only exacerbate the worsening strategic environment the Israelis have faced in the months since the United States pulled the plug on Mubarak.

For example, Israel has been seriously buffeted by actions taken to date by an Egyptian military clearly under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.  These include steps taken to: restore relations with Hamas and Iran; broker the Palestinians’ so-called "unity government; open the Raffa crossing into Gaza; afford a hero’s welcome in Tahrir Square to one of the world’s most virulent Islamist ideologues, Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi; and threaten to dispense with the peace treaty with Israel.

If both the Egyptian military and the Brotherhood conclude – as they reasonably could be expected to do – that there will be no costs associated with going beyond the unfriendly initiatives Cairo has already adopted, it is predictable that still worse behavior with respect to our interests and allies will be forthcoming.  That conclusion will probably not be lost on one other important audience: whatever secular democrats there actually are in Egypt, who must be watching with horror the dissipation of any hope for support in keeping their country from becoming the next shariah-adherent Islamist stronghold.

It is hard to characterize all this as other than a further diminishing of America as a beacon of liberty and reliable friend to those who cherish freedom, or aspire to obtain it.  If we are unable to counter even those who are explicitly hostile to our survival as a nation, we encourage the perception that this country is reduced to appeasing its enemies and selling out our friends. We will have many more of the former and far fewer of the latter.

A further impetus to the perception of a diminished America may come this week after Atlantis performs the planned final flight of a U.S. space shuttle. President Obama declined to keep the shuttles going, canceled the planned replacement platform for manned space flight and thereby condemned this country for the foreseeable future to reliance on Russian and perhaps, in due course, Chinese rockets to deliver our astronauts to the space station.

Lest we forget, this momentous dismantling of America’s place as the world’s preeminent space power fits the Obama Doctrine in one other way:  It was just a year ago that the then-newly appointed NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, recounted how President Obama had apprized him of his priority mission: "Perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering."

Kind of hard to miss the pattern here. 

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

 

Determined disinterest in our own destruction

During the Cold War, America faced an implacable enemy, driven by a supremacist ideology that called for, among other things, the use of an array of covert front groups, stealthy techniques and subversive activities to achieve our destruction.  For many years, our effort to defeat Soviet Communism featured a concerted counter-intelligence (CI) effort aimed at ferreting out and defeating such sedition.

Unfortunately, America now faces once again an implacable enemy, driven by a supremacist ideology that calls for, among other things, the use of an array of covert front groups, stealthy techniques and subversive activities to achieve our destruction.  In the place of the Soviet Union and the influence operations run by its intelligence service, the KGB, and the Communist International (Comintern), we confront the Islamic doctrine known as shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood, which serves as the principal engine for extending its reach.

It seems, however, that we have no counter-intelligence effort comparable to that of the Cold War or remotely commensurate with today’s threat.  Indeed, based on the evidence of successful penetration and influence operations being run by the Muslim Brotherhood these days, one would be tempted to conclude that counter-intelligence has effectively ceased to be part of our toolkit in keeping America safe and free.

Consider just a few of many worrying examples:

When President Obama engaged in his latest "outreach to the Muslim world" at the State Department last month, seated in the front row next to the Secretary of State was Imam Mohammed Magid.  Magid happens to be the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization in the country, the Islamic Society of North America.  As with the White House’s insistence that MB representatives be included in the audience during the President’s Cairo 2009 address, the message could not be any clearer:  Far from perceiving the Brotherhood as what it is – an organization determined to destroy the United States and the rest of the Free World – Team Obama sees them as reliable partners.

That message was being reinforced at this writing when, on Monday, senior U.S. government officials sat down with an assortment of Muslim Brotherhood operatives and groups under the auspices of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.  Bin Talal – a major benefactor of Brotherhood causes and enabler of its own and similar Islamist influence operations – endowed his center at Georgetown University with a gift of $20 million.  The investment is paying handsome dividends as it affords the MB a vehicle for using "interfaith dialogue" as a means of legitimating and promoting its personnel and agendas.

In 2009, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) – an organization counter-terror expert Patrick Poole describes as the "political lobbying arm of the U.S. Brotherhood" – boasted that it was "consulted" by Los Angeles Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa about his choice of police chief.  Such political stroke may have something to do with the MB threat being downplayed by LAPD’s current Deputy Chief Michael Downey, who testified last week before Rep. Pete King’s House Homeland Security Committee about Islamist "radicalization" in the U.S. prison system.

Besides the cyber-sexploits of Rep. Anthony Weiner, the most astonishing revelation to come out of his public meltdown was the fact that his wife, Huma Abedin, a member of a prominent Muslim Brotherhood family in Egypt, happens to be Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff.  (For more on the Abedins, see Arnold Ahlert’s damning report.)  Secretary Clinton told an Egyptian audience last Tuesday that the job held by the Saudi-reared Ms. Abedin’s job was an "important and sensitive position."

Meanwhile, part of the job of performing background checks for U.S. security clearances has been contracted out to companies incentivized to help clean up a serious backlog.  According to employees, they are given quotas of cases to process with one company requiring as many as twenty per day.  Does anyone seriously believe that this is a formula for properly vetting personnel?

Meanwhile, there is an issue requiring serious vetting whose problems date back to the bad old Cold War days.  The United States Senate is poised to confirm as the next Secretary of Defense a man who, back during Angleton’s days, would have been considered a security threat.

Thanks to intrepid reporting by Cliff Kincaid and Trevor Loudon, we now know that during his days as a California Congressman, Leon Panetta, had close personal ties to Communist agents and spies.  At no point has he disavowed such relationships or expressed remorse for any help he may have provided them.  Neither has any senator indicated concern about the problematic judgment or security risks that might be associated with such a Pentagon chief.

The question occurs:  Can we possibly hope to survive our time’s ideologically-driven subversion – let alone prevail over it – if we systematically disregard the threat its adherents pose here at home?  We need to reconstitute the sort of serious counter-intelligence capability and practice that we have employed to greateffect in the past.  Continuing to do otherwise is to invite, if not assure, our destruction.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

A do or die moment

Every day, major stories come out of the Middle East. And behind each of these stories are major developments that deserve of our attention and, more often than not, our intense concern. Just this week, major stories have come out of Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen and Pakistan that are all deeply disconcerting.

In Syria, dictator Bashar Assad’s violent repression of the popular revolt against his tyrannical, minority regime has exposed the Syrian leader as a vicious murderer. While there is some room for hope that the Syrian people may successfully overthrow him, given the US’s refusal to provide any tangible assistance to the regime opponents, it is hard to see how such a happy future could come about.

For his part, Assad is the beneficiary of a steady stream of support from the Iranian regime. The mullahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will ensure that he never runs out of bullets to kill his people.

As to the Palestinian Authority, this week’s Fatah-Hamas coalition negotiations in Cairo revealed the depth and breadth of Hamas’s control over the unity government now being formed. Despite massive American pressure, Hamas successfully vetoed Fatah’s bid to retain Salam Fayyad as prime minister in the unity government.

Moreover, in the face of significant international pressure, Hamas maintains its refusal to accept the so-called Quartet conditions of recognizing Israel, ending terrorism and agreeing to respect all previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.

Given Hamas’s maintenance of its annihilationist goals toward Israel and Fatah’s inability to convince Hamas to accept its minimal demands, it is obvious that Hamas is the stronger force in the Palestinian unity government. It is also clear that this government will not under any circumstances agree to make peace with Israel.

AND YET, in the face of these realities, US President Barack Obama is intensifying his pressure on Israel to agree to the now-powerless Fatah’s preconditions for negotiating. Indeed, he has adopted Fatah’s preconditions as his own.

Obama is demanding that Israel agree to surrender its right to defensible borders by insisting that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accept the pre-1967 boundaries – that is the 1949 armistice lines – as the starting point for future negotiations. Since Obama surely recognizes that a Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority will not accept Israeli control over anything from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, he knows that he is requiring that Israel surrender its right to defensible borders before it even begins negotiating.

It is not surprising that the unity talks that crowned Hamas the king of Palestinian politics have taken place in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite the rosy, post-Mubarak scenarios put forward during the revolution in January by American liberal and neo-conservative intellectuals, post- Mubarak Egypt is shaping up to be a dangerous, frightening place.

With the supposedly liberal Wafd Party merging with the Muslim Brotherhood this week, the Brotherhood took a significant step toward consolidating its rise to political leadership of the country in the elections scheduled for September.

The ruling military junta’s decision to arrest Israeli-American Ilan Grapel on trumped-up espionage charges last week is just one more signal that post-Mubarak Egypt is turning its back on Egypt’s peace with Israel.

And as The Washington Times reported last week, the US has been reduced to begging the Egyptian military authorities to re-arrest a number of top jihadist terrorists freed from Egyptian prisons in the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Yet, not only have the terrorists not been re-jailed, some of them have formed new political parties and are slated to run in September’s elections. Clearly, the US is also being betrayed by the new regime.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controls the next Egyptian government, Egypt will join Lebanon and Turkey as the newest member of the growing club of nations ruled by Islamic radicals. This week, Lebanon’s Hezbollah-appointed Prime Minister Najib Mikati finally formed his Hezbollah- controlled government.

Hezbollah has now officially swallowed Lebanon. The regional and indeed global repercussions of the development are simply mind-boggling.

Then there is Turkey. This week, the Turks went to the polls and re-elected Prime Minister Recip Erdogan and his radical Islamic AKP party to lead the country for a third term. In his victory speech, Erdogan signaled his Islamist and neoimperialist ambitions by stating that former Ottoman empire-controlled cities from Sarajevo to Jerusalem, from Damascus to Beirut to Ramallah should all be cheering his victory. Turkish intellectuals like Sinan Ulgen, who heads the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, are arguing for a more independent Turkish role within NATO.

Both nuclear-armed Pakistan and Yemen are quickly approaching the day when they will be led by al Qaida or its affiliates. The forced departure of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh two weeks ago after he was wounded in an attack on the Presidential Palace was seen as a major victory for al Qaida. Al Qaida forces continue to attack government installations in Aden and other cities throughout the country.

As for Pakistan, the US’s assassination of Osama bin Laden last month exposed the dirty secret of Pakistani military collaboration with al Qaida for all to see. This week’s arrest of five Pakistanis accused of acting as informants to the US in its bid to locate the al Qaida chief is further proof – if any was needed – that the $21 billion in military and economic assistance the US has showered on Pakistan since 2002 has bought it precious little in the way of strategic support or partnership from Islamabad. Recent reports indicate increased concern that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal may eventually fall under the control of al Qaida sympathizers.

AMAZINGLY, WHILE all of these developments are alarming, and while all of them have justifiably dominated much of the coverage of the Middle East in recent weeks and months, the fact is that all of them pale in comparison to what is happening in Iran. And this story is receiving only scant and generally superficial attention from the international media and the major governments of the Western world.

Monday, The Wall Street Journal editorialists summarized the major developments on this front. First, last week the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency released previously classified sections of its latest report on Iran. The report says that in the last six months, Tehran enriched 970 kilos of uranium to reactor-grade levels, bringing its publicly known stockpile of low enriched uranium to 4,105 kilos.

Iran also has enriched 56.7 kilos of uranium to the 20% level, from which it is a relatively simple matter to increase enrichment levels to the 90% needed to make a nuclear bomb.

Iran has also installed upgraded centrifuges in its until recently secret enrichment facility at Qom.

Rand Corporation scholar Gregory S. Jones wrote this month that Iran has reached nuclear breakout capacity. In his words, "Iran can now produce a weapons’s worth (20 kilograms) of HEU [weapons-grade uranium] any time it wishes. With Iran’s current number of operating centrifuges, the batch recycling process would take about two months."

Apparently owing to their certainty that Iran is an unstoppable nuclear power, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took their guard down in a recent issue of their in-house journal. The magazine published an article describing the day after Iran performs a nuclear test.

And the beat goes on. Yesterday, Iran successfully launched a second spy satellite into space.

The launch indicates that Iran is acquiring greater prowess in developing intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities. Such capabilities along with Iran’s nuclear program and global ambitions constitute a clear and present danger to Europe and the US.

Iran’s steady progress toward a nuclear arsenal was made all the more frightening in the face of the recent comments by retired Mossad director Meir Dagan. In a shocking breach of protocol and in apparent violation of the law, the man who until a few months ago stood at the helm of Israel’s efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions attempted to take Israel’s military option for striking Iran’s nuclear installations off the table. In press interviews, Dagan stated that it would be disastrous for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear installations.

Dagan failed to note that it would be far more disastrous to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

At this point, it is inarguable that the policy of sanctioning Iran favored by the US and Europe has failed to dampen Iran’s commitment to developing nuclear weapons. It has also failed to significantly slow Iran’s progress towards the atom bomb. Obviously, the only possible way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons at this late hour is to attack its nuclear installations.

For years, Israel’s governments have taken a back seat to Washington on Iran. From Ariel Sharon to Ehud Olmert to Netanyahu, since Iran’s nuclear program was first revealed in 2003, Israel has allowed itself to believe that the US could be trusted to take the greatest threat to Israel’s survival off the table.

The belief that the US would lead a military strike against Iran was always based more on blind faith than fact. When, in 2003, George W.

Bush decided to work through the UN Security Council on the issue. despite Russia’s open assistance to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and China’s growing addiction to Iranian natural gas, it was already apparent that the US was not serious about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And when, in late 2007, the US’s National Intelligence Assessment published the demonstrably false claim that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it became clear to anyone willing to see that the US had decided not to take any significant action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This dire state of affairs was reinforced with the inauguration of Obama as US president in 2009.

Obama’s sole policy for dealing with the nuclear weapons-seeking and openly genocidal Iranian regime is appeasement. And Obama doesn’t seek to appease the mullahs in order to convince them to end their nuclear program.

For Obama, appeasement is an end in and of itself. This is why – even after Iran has spurned all his offers of appeasement and has been caught red-handed repeatedly aiding Iraqi and Afghan forces killing US servicemen, and despite Iran’s swift progress toward a nuclear arsenal – Obama refuses to even state openly that he would use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

What this means is that – as was the case in May 1967, when the combined Arab armies gathered with the express purpose of wiping the Jewish state off the map – today again, Israel is alone at its hour of greatest peril. All of the lesser threats now gathering from Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey will become insurmountable if Iran becomes a nuclear power.

As was the case in May 1967, Israel has arrived at a do-or-die moment. And we should all pray for the strength and courage of our leaders, our soldiers and our nation at this time.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The real Egyptian revolution

The coverage of recent events in Egypt is further proof that Western elites cannot see the forest for the trees. Over the past week, leading newspapers have devoted relatively in-depth coverage to the Egyptian military authorities’ repressive actions in subduing protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, particularly during their large protest last Friday.

That is, they have provided in-depth coverage of one spent force repressing another spent force. Neither the military nor the protesters are calling the shots anymore in Egypt, if they ever were. That is the job of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The proximate cause of last Friday’s mass demonstration was what the so-called Twitter and Facebook revolutionaries consider the military’s slowness to respond to their demand for ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s head on a platter. The military responded by announcing that Mubarak and his sons will go on trial for capital crimes on August 3.

Beyond bloodlust, the supposedly liberal young sweethearts of the Western media are demanding a cancellation of the results of the referendum held in March on the sequencing of elections and constitutional reform. Voting in that referendum was widely assessed as the freest vote in Egyptian history. Seventy-seven percent of the public voted to hold parliamentary and presidential elections in September and to appoint members of a constitutional assembly from among the elected members of the next parliament to prepare Egypt’s new constitution.

The protesters rightly assert that the early elections will pave the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Egypt, since the Brotherhood is the only well-organized political force in Egypt. But then, the liberals said they wanted popular rule.

The Facebook protesters demanded Mubarak’s immediate removal from power in January. They would not negotiate Mubarak’s offer to use the remainder of his final term to shepherd Egypt towards a quasi-democratic process that might have prevented the Brotherhood from taking over.

In their fantasy world – which they inhabit with Western intellectuals – the fates of nations are determined by the number of "likes" on your facebook page. And so, when they had the power to avert the democratic Islamist takeover of their country in January, they squandered it.

Now, when it is too late, they are trying to win through rioting what they failed to win at the ballot box, thus discrediting their protestations of liberal values.

Their new idea was spelled out last week at an EU-sponsored conference in Cairo. According to the Egyptian media, they hope to convince the military they protest against to stack the deck for the constitutional assembly in a way that prevents the Brotherhood from controlling the proceedings. As Hishan el-Bastawisy, a former appellate judge and presidential hopeful explained, "What we can push for now is that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has to put some guarantees of choosing the constituent assembly in the sense that it does not reflect the parliamentary majority."

So much for Egypt’s liberal democrats.

AS FOR the military, its actions to date make clear that its commanders do not see themselves as guardians of secular rule in Egypt. Instead, they see themselves as engines for a transition from Mubarak’s authoritarian secularism to the Brotherhood’s populist Islamism.

Since forcing Mubarak to resign, the military junta has embraced Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. They engineered the Palestinian unity government which will pave the way for Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative and presidential elections scheduled for the fall.

Then there is Sinai. Since the revolution, the military has allowed Sinai to become a major base not only for Hamas but for the global jihad. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned on Monday, Egyptian authorities are not asserting their sovereignty in Sinai and jihadists from Hamas, al-Qaida and other groups are inundating the peninsula.

Last week’s move to open Egypt’s border with Gaza at the Rafah passage is further proof that the military has made its peace with the Islamic takeover of Egypt. While the likes of The New York Times make light of the significance of the move by pointing to the restrictions that Egypt has placed on Palestinian travel, the fact is that the Egyptians just accepted Hamas’s sovereignty over an international border.

Many in the West argue that given Egypt’s increasingly dire economic situation, there is no way the military will turn its back on the US and Europe. By all accounts, Egypt is facing economic collapse. By summer’s end it will be unable to feed its population due to grain shortages. By November, its foreign reserves will have dried up.

But rather than do everything they can to convince foreign investors and governments that Egypt’s market is safe, the military junta is taking steps that destroy the credibility of the Egyptian market. To please both the Mubarak-obsessed protesters at Tahrir Square and the Muslim Brotherhood, the military refuses to reinstate natural gas shipments to Israel.

Not only is Egypt denying itself hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues by cutting off gas shipments to Israel, (and Jordan, Syria and Lebanon). It is destroying its reputation as a credible place to do business. And according to the New York Times, it is also making it impossible for the Obama administration to help the Egyptian economy. The Times’ reported this week that the US tied President Barack Obama’s pledge of $1 billion in debt forgiveness and $1b. in loan guarantees to the Egyptian authorities asserting sovereignty in northern Sinai. Presumably this means they must renew gas shipments to Israel and fight terror.

The fact that the military would rather facilitate Egypt’s economic collapse than take the unpopular step of renewing gas shipments to Israel ought to end any thought that economic interests trump political sentiments. This situation will only get worse when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt in September.

AND MAKE no mistake. They intend to take over. As they did in the lead up to March’s constitutional referendum, the Brotherhood is using its mosques as campaign offices. The message is clear: If you are a good Muslim you will vote for the Muslim Brotherhood.

When Mubarak was overthrown in January, the Brotherhood announced it would only contest 30% of the parliamentary seats. Last month the percentage rose to 50. In all likelihood, in September the Brotherhood will contest and win the majority of the seats in the Egyptian parliament.

When Mubarak was overthrown, the Brotherhood announced it would not run a candidate for president. And when Brotherhood Shura governing council member and Physicians Union leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh announced last month that he is running for president, the Brotherhood quickly denied that he is the movement’s candidate. But there is no reason to believe them.

According to a report Thursday in Egypt’s Al- Masry al-Youm’s English edition, the Brotherhood is playing to win. They are invoking the strategies of the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, for establishing an Islamic state. His strategy had three stages: indoctrination, empowerment and implementation. Al-Masry al-Youm cites Khairat al- Shater, the Brotherhood’s "organizational architect," as having recently asserted that the Brotherhood is currently in the second stage and moving steadily towards the third stage.

Now that we understand that they are about to implement their goal of Islamic statehood, we need to ask what it means for Egypt and the region.

On Sunday, Brotherhood Chairman Mohammed Badie gave an interview to Egyptian television that was posted on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English website iquwanweb.com. Badie’s statements indicated that the Brotherhood will end any thought of democracy in Egypt by taking control over the media. Badie said that the Brotherhood is about to launch a public news channel, "with commitment to the ethics of the society and the rules of the Islamic faith."

He also demanded that state radio and television begin broadcasting recordings of Banna’s speeches and sermons. Finally, he complained about the anti-Brotherhood hostility of most private media organs in Egypt.

As for Israel, Badie was asked how a Brotherhood- led Egypt would react if Israel takes military action against Hamas. His response was honest enough. As he put it, "The situation will change in such a case, and the Egyptian people will have their voice heard. Any government in power will have to respect the choice of the people, whatever that is, like in any democracy."

In other words, the peace between Israel and Egypt will die of populist causes.

SO FAR, Israel’s responses to these strategically disastrous developments have been muted and insufficient. On Wednesday, the Defense Ministry announced that Israel is speeding up construction of the border fence between Egypt and Israel. The 210-km.-long fence is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012.

While this is an important move given Gaza’s effective fusion into Sinai with the border opening, it does not address the looming threat from Egypt itself. It does not address the fact that with Mubarak’s ouster, a previously all-but unthinkable outbreak of hostilities with Egypt has now become eminently thinkable.

Facing the prospect of a Muslim Brotherhoodruled Egypt in September, Israel’s government must begin preparing both diplomatically and militarily for a new confrontation with Egypt.

The West’s intoxication with the myth of the Arab Spring means that currently, the political winds are siding with Egypt. If Egypt were to start a war with Israel, or simply support Hamas in a war against Israel, at a minimum, Cairo would enjoy the same treatment from Europe and the US that the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government and army enjoyed in 2006. To block this possibility, the government must begin educating opinion shapers and political leaders in the West about the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood It must also call for a cut-off of US military aid to Egypt.

Militarily, the government must increase the size of the IDF’s Southern Command. The Egyptian armed forces have more than a million men under arms. Egypt’s arsenal includes everything from F-16s to Abrams tanks to first-class naval ships to ballistic missiles to sophisticated pontoon bridges for crossing the Suez Canal.

The IDF must expand its draft rolls and increase its force size by at least one division. It must also begin training in desert warfare and develop and purchase appropriate conventional platforms.

With the Iranians now apparently moving from developing nuclear capabilities to developing nuclear warheads, and with the Palestinians escalating their political war and planning their next terror war against Israel, it stands to reason that no one in the government or the IDF wants to consider the strategic implications of Egypt’s reversion from peace partner to enemy.

But Israel doesn’t get to decide what our neighbors do. We can only take the necessary steps to minimize their ability to harm us.

It’s time to get cracking.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama’s next war

Barack Obama’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief has not exactly been characterized by success.  What comes next, however, may make his record to date look like the good old days.

To be sure, on his watch, an extraordinary intelligence-special forces team liquidated Osama bin Laden and drones have dispatched a number of other "high value targets" in what the President calls our "war on al Qaeda."  These are morale-boosting tactical achievements, but in the great scheme of things are more like whack-a-mole than strategic victories.  Much more important is the fact that Mr. Obama is in the process of losing the two wars he inherited, and making a hash-up of the one he initiated in Libya.

Worse, Mr. Obama is actively encouraging trends that threaten to unleash the next, horrific regional war in the Mideast -a war that may well embroil nations far beyond, including ours.

The President’s mishandling of the present conflicts has set the stage for such dangers:

Mr. Obama’s earlier insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq and his abiding determination to pull out virtually all others by year’s end has, as a practical matter, made it impossible for the government in Baghdad to ask us to stay on.  Even if the Iranian puppet, Muqtada al-Sadr, were not threatening if Americans are invited to stay to relaunch his Madi army’s sectarian warfare and bring down the coalition government (in which his party is a prominent part), the Iraqis can hardly be more in favor of maintaining an American presence than we are.

The predictable result in Iraq next year (if not before) will be a vacuum of power that Iran will surely fill.  State Department and other Americans left behind, in the hope that the immense investment we have made in lives and treasure in Iraq’s democratic and pro-Western future will not be squandered, stand to become endangered species.  The ironic symbol of our defeat may be the takeover in due course of the immense new U.S. embassy in Baghdad by Iranians – this time by invited diplomats, not the hostage-taking "students" of 1979.

Afghanistan – now no longer George Bush’s war, but Barack Obama’s – is, if anything, in even worse shape.  There, despite the valor of our troops and others trying to build a 21st Century nation out of a backwards 6th Century tribal/Islamist entity, we are in the process of negotiating the Afghans’ surrender to the Taliban.  Again, the President’s insistence that U.S. forces will begin coming out of theater this summer signals to friends and foes alike that we will not stay the course.  The only question now is:  How ignominious will be our defeat at the hands of those we routed after 9/11, and their Pakistani, Chinese, Iranian and Russian friends?

Then, there is Mr. Obama’s first "elective war":  His ill-considered, incoherent, congressionally unauthorized and, to date at least, unsuccessful campaign in Libya.  Mr. Obama has tried to limit the costs and offload responsibility for this fiasco onto the French, British and other NATO allies.  Once again U.S. forces have performed their missions impressively – but, to what end?  We are now aligned with, defending and increasingly supporting "rebels" who, if anything, are likely to be more dangerous enemies of the United States than Muammar Gaddafi.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama’s next war.  In his speech last week to what he calls "the Muslim world," the President made it U.S. policy to support whoever manages to get elected in the various nations of North Africa and the Middle East currently undergoing political upheavals. As a practical matter, that will mean legitimating, working with and underwriting the Muslim Brotherhood, since they are far and away the most organized, disciplined and ruthless of the contenders for power in country after country.  History tells us that such people – from Hitler in Weimar Germany to Hamas in the Gaza Strip – win even "free and fair" elections, which then amount to one-man, one-vote, one-time. (For more on the deadly nature and agenda of the MB or Ikhwan, see last week’s column in this space.)

President Obama’s openness (to put it mildly) to bringing the Brotherhood to power was manifested not only by his pledge to forgive $1 billion in Egyptian debt and to provide it another billion in additional foreign aid.  Just as he did in his last much-ballyhooed "outreach" to Muslims in Cairo two years ago, Team Obama had one of the top Muslim Brothers – Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Ikhwan‘s largest front group in this country, the Islamic Society of North America – prominently seated in the audience at the State Department.

Beyond his embrace of the ascendant Muslim Brotherhood, Barack Obama has helped catalyze the next Mideast war by declaring that Israel must return to the 1967 borders, whose indefensibility induced the Arab nations to precipitate the Six-Day War of that year.  However much the President may deny it, and point to others as supporting a "two-state solution" based on such borders, the Jewish State cannot survive without the high ground, strategic depth and aquifers of the Golan Heights and West Bank.  Period.

It is in America’s vital interests to deter more wars in the Mideast, not invite them.  If President Obama persists in the latter, his already checkered record as Commander-in-Chief may be best remembered as the man who elected to precipitate World War III.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Muslim Outreach 2.0

On Thursday, President Obama will "reach out" yet again to what he insists on calling "the Muslim world."  Think of it as the 2.0 version of his much-ballyhooed, but seriously deficient, 2009 speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

His message this time, we are told, will be that the death of Osama bin Laden and the outpouring of support for democratic change across the Middle East and North Africa opens a new dawn for Muslims – and even greater opportunities for expanded relations with the United States than he promised two years ago.  But will they?

The answer would appear to depend on who actually benefits most from these developments.  As things stand now, the answer seems likely to be the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or, in Arabic, Ikwan).  If the Brotherhood does indeed come to power in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, "Palestine" (through its local franchise, Hamas) and/or others of the roughly 13 countries in North Africa and the Middle East currently in play, there is no chance that U.S. interests will be served – no matter how much Mr. Obama tries to reach out to Muslims in those regions.

That reality is rooted in the jihadist nature of the Ikhwan and its goals.  While some have claimed the organization is non-violent and, in the words of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, even "largely secular" – the most cursory examination of the Muslim Brotherhood’s own words makes clear that such assertions are unfounded, and dangerously so.

Consider the MB’s creed: "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 hope."  Not much non-violent or secular about that.

Then, there is a pregnant quote from a 1991 document entitled the Ikhwan‘s "Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goals of the Group."  The memo was found in a concealed archive in Annandale, Virginia in 2004.  It was introduced into evidence in the successful 2008 prosecution of the first group of defendants in the Holy Land Foundation conspiracy, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in the nation’s history. 

This strategic plan describes the MB’s mission in America as "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, sabotaging its miserable house with their [i.e., Americans’] hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions."  Secular?  Non-violent?

The federal government also has made public another, undated Brotherhood document called, "Phases of the World Underground Movement Plan."  It describes precisely how the MB’s mission statement is being operationalized within the United States, and provides a progress report (in italics).  Highlights of its key passages make for chilling reading given the prospect of an even-more-aggressive Obama outreach campaign to Muslims, one that would inevitably entail parlaying with the Ikhwan:

Phase One:  Discreet and secret establishment of leadership.

Phase Two:  Phase of gradual appearance on the public scene and exercising and utilizing various public activities. [The Brotherhood has] greatly succeeded in implementing this stage. It also succeeded in achieving a great deal of its important goals, such as infiltrating various sectors of the Government.    

Phase Three:  Escalation phase, prior to conflict and confrontation with the rulers, through utilizing mass media. Currently in progress.

Phase Four:  Open public confrontation with the Government through exercising the political pressure approach. It is aggressively implementing the above-mentioned approach.  Training on the use of weapons domestically and overseas in anticipation of zero-hour. It has noticeable activities in this regard.

Phase Five: Seizing power to establish their Islamic Nation under which all parties and Islamic groups are united.

President Obama can try to promote the illusion that the Muslim Brotherhood does not really intend to act on these ambitions.  But the rest of us cannot safely ignore what those ambitions are, or the abundant evidence that the Ikhwan is, indeed, intent on realizing them – and disciplined, organized and ruthless enough to try to achieve them.

Finally, there is the strategic alignment of jihadist forces that led up and assuredly contributed to the so-called "Arab Spring."  Two co-authors of the Center for Security Policy’s new book, Shariah: The Threat to America (at Shariahthethreat.com), former Joint Chiefs of Staff advisor Stephen Coughlin and former FBI special agent John Guandolo, have been warning for months about the following developments:

In July 2010, al Qaeda used its new, English-language Inspire magazine to  challenge the Muslim Brotherhood to move from the "Meccan phase" (i.e., stealthy forms of jihad) to the "Medinan phase" (i.e., violent jihad).  In October 2010, the MB’s recently elected Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, issued what amounted to a declaration of war against Israel, the United States and the West.  And in January 2011, Al-Azhar University issued a fatwah affirming that offensive operations are a legitimate part of "defensive jihad."

Team Obama missed these ominous developments.  In all likelihood its Outreach 1.0 and other missteps actually encouraged them, even before the President called for the immediate removal of one of America’s relatively reliable Arab allies, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Now, Mr. Obama seems intent on compounding his earlier errors by further embracing Muslim Brotherhood operatives overseas and front organizations here at home.  Redoubling such efforts now will only serve to embolden our foes, undermine our friends and endanger our country.  Enough already.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

 

Something rotten in Denmark (and here)

Surprisingly, on net, last week was not a good one for the Free World.  Despite the signal accomplishment of liquidating Osama bin Laden, Western civilization suffered serious reverses on several fronts.

What these reverses all have in common is a deference to the doctrine our enemies’ call "shariah," in a manner they perceive to be acts of "submission." Such behavior is exceedingly dangerous, as it invites our foes to redouble their efforts to make us, in the words of the Koran, "feel subdued."

For instance, consider the aftermath of SEAL Team 6’s extraordinary take-down of bin Laden.  What ensued was nothing less than a debacle as President Obama’s political appointees kept changing their accounts of what had happened.  As one wag put it, "Osama bin Laden died and we got 72 versions." 

The subtext was of an administration effort desperately trying not to give offense to our adversaries.  Yet, they and our friends could only have felt reaffirmed in their already dim view of what passes for American leadership under Mr. Obama.

Then, there was the unctuous effort to dispose of bin Laden’s body in strict "conformance to Islamic practice."  The fastidious cleansing and wrapping of the body, the 40-minute ceremony and the burial at sea conjure up images of an America treating one of its most psychopathic enemies as a legitimate, even revered figure. Islam scholar Andrew Bostom raises the question whether such rites actually included shariah-conforming denunciations of Christians and Jews?  Either way, this exercise was a pathetic act of appeasement.

Next, the President announced that he had decided not to release the dead jihadist’s photo.  As with the handling of bin Laden’s burial, the justification given was concern that the picture’s dissemination would only inspire more violence against us and our forces overseas.  The truth of the matter is that the more we signal our fear of the violence of shariah-adherent Muslims, the more certain it is to be visited upon us.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday an appeals court in Denmark convicted one of Western civilization’s most courageous defenders – Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society.  His crime?  He gave offense to Muslims.  Yes, that’s right, a Danish judicial panel effectively enforced shariah blasphemy law.  In the process, the court violated one of the most cardinal pillars of freedom: the right to free speech. 

If allowed to stand, the ruling in the Hedegaard case will be used to abridge fundamental civil rights throughout Europe, and possibly far beyond. Yet, there has been remarkably little outcry about the defendant’s plight – most especially from journalists who have as much to lose as anybody. 

In this instance, as in the foregoing ones, the West is acting out of fear, lest our conduct become grounds for fresh violence.  This is an enduring legacy of, among other things, the manufactured outrage and mayhem over the Danish cartoons a few years back.  It gives ominous new meaning to the expression "Something is rotten in Denmark."

Unfortunately, our own judicial processes seem increasingly susceptible to Islamist intimidation, as well.  Recently, counter-terrorism expert Patrick Poole published at Pajamas Media excerpts from an interview with an anonymous source high in the Obama Justice Department.  These included an allegation that political appointees in that department had "quashed" a request by prosecutors to pursue individuals and organizations listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the nation’s largest terrorism financing trial: United States v. the Holy Land Foundation.

According to Poole’s insider, the problem was that the administration stood to be embarrassed if this prosecution went forward.  After all, the defendants associated with Muslim Brotherhood fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) would assuredly have tried to use their close ties with government officials and agencies to avoid the convictions and punishments meted out to the first five Holy Land conspirators. 

The plot thickened last week.  Shortly before Attorney General Eric Holder was scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill, the prosecutor in the Holy Land case, U.S. Attorney Jim Jacks, told the Dallas Morning News that there was no political interference from "the Attorney General or the White House" leading to a decision not to prosecute CAIR.  This directly contradicts not only Patrick Poole’s source but also House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY), who insisted that both prosecutors and FBI agents involved in the case had told him they had "vehement objections" to the "declination to prosecute" memo that came out of Washington.

Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX), himself a former judge and chief justice in the Texas court system, pointedly challenged the Attorney General during the latter’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.  Rep. Gohmert noted that it is a matter of record that Mr. Jacks had filed compelling briefs at both the federal district and appellate levels – and was upheld by both courts – in his position that there were sufficient grounds to treat CAIR and others as co-conspirators with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.  The AG claimed unconvincingly to be unfamiliar with the particulars.

We need to stand up against shariah, not submit to it – at home or abroad.  We must demonstrate that we are, to use bin Laden’s term, the "stronger horse," by touting our victories and power, and not convey the opposite impression by obscuring or apologizing for them.  And we must see the paperwork that precipitated the declination to prosecute CAIR and its Muslim Brotherhood friends – and then get on with putting them out of business.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.