Tag Archives: CAIR

Frank Gaffney & Zuhdi Jasser vs. CAIR spokeswoman on Fox Business

Frank Gaffney and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser join Eric Bolling on Fox Business News to discuss the Homeland Security hearings led by Rep. Peter King on the radicalization of the US Muslim community. Frank tangles with a representative from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial.  CAIR-Chicago Civil Rights Director Christina Abraham resorts to schoolyard tactics when confronted with the reality of CAIR’s origins and ideology.

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

New Study on Hate Crimes Debunks the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization

The Center for Security Policy today released a revised edition of their groundbreaking longitudinal study, Religious Bias Crimes 2000-2009: Muslim, Jewish and Christian Victims –  Debunking the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization, based on FBI statistics reported annually in the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The Center’s study contradicts the assertions that religious bias crimes against Muslims have increased, and that the alleged cause is widespread “Islamophobia” in America.  In fact, the study shows that religious bias crimes – also known as hate crimes – against Muslim Americans, measured by the categories of incidents, offenses or victims, have remained relatively low with a downward trend since 2001, and are significantly less than the numbers of bias crimes against Jewish victims.

The Center’s study also contradicts the assumption of increased hate crimes against Muslims which has been asserted by Senator Richard Durbin’s (D-IL) Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, and is the topic of hearings being held today.  Printed copies of the study were delivered to each member of the U.S. Senate early this morning.

According to the Center’s analysis, in 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).  Even in 2001 when religious bias crimes against Muslims increased briefly for a nine-week period, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses and victims remained approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals.

The study provides hard data that disproves the counterfactual statements made by a small number of highly vocal Muslim lobbying groups, many linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as leftwing activists.   Citing these false assumptions concerning America’s alleged “Islamophobia” and a supposed rising trend in hate crimes against Muslim Americans, these organizations  argued against holding the March 10, 2011 House Committee on Homeland Security hearings on Muslim American radicalization, and have argued for today’s hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution.  The study shows that these arguments against the March 10 hearings, and for today’s March 29 hearings, are not based on facts but rather on a political agenda.

Frank Gaffney, President of Center for Security Policy remarked: 

This report is important because it exposes a false belief perpetuated by a few vocal groups that religious bias crimes against Muslims are on the upswing.  The truth is quite the opposite.  These arguments, unsubstantiated by hard factual data, are corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to national security.

Note: This Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper is available as a PDF, or is reprinted below.

 

Religious Bias Crimes (2000-2009): Muslim, Christian & Jewish Victims – Debunking the Myth of a Growing Trend in Muslim Victimization

Clare M. Lopez, Roland Peer & Christine Brim

 

Introduction

Misperceptions about religious bias hate crimes in America are widespread.  This study is a longitudinal comparison of religious bias hate crimes, as reported by the FBI, from the pre-9/11 year of 2000 through 2009, the most recent year for which statistics were available.[1]  The assertion that religious bias hate crimes against one group in particular, Muslims in America, have proliferated in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has gained acceptance within media and government, thanks to a steady drumbeat of assertions to this effect from a small but vocal group of advocacy organizations.

Internationally, the most aggressive of these is the 57 member state Organization of the Islamic Conference, with its so-called "Islamophobia Observatory." In the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)[2] and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)[3] have taken the lead in issuing claims that discrimination and religious bias hate crimes against Muslims are increasing.[4]  These organizations have also asserted that "Islamophobia" and statements critical of Islam, Shariah law, or political Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood may be linked to the alleged rise in hate crimes.  Alternatively, counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson has suggested "In advancing the notion that government policy has resulted in an undeserved backlash against ordinary Muslims, CAIR seeks to muster opposition to the anti-terror laws it finds objectionable."[5]

To inform this public debate about religious bias hate crimes in America, the Center for Security Policy analyzed data from 2000 through 2009 for three FBI-identified victim groups: Jews, Muslims, and Christians (a combined statistic for the purposes of this whitepaper, combining separate FBI data for Catholics and Protestants). The source of all the religion bias crimes information cited in the following report is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[6] which collects crime statistics on an annual basis and presents them online. Appendices B-T at the end of this report present those official FBI statistics in tables and charts showing the comparative incidence of religious hate crimes for Christians, Jews, and Muslims from 2000-2009. 

The results may prove surprising to those who took CAIR or MPAC spokesmen at their word. For example, in 2009[7], in totals for a combined five categories of hate crime, from Simple Assault to Crimes Against Property, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). Nor is 2009 an anomalous year in terms of these numbers. Across the decade, from 2000 through 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes by religion outnumbered their Christian and Muslim counterparts, with the exception of a nine-week period following the 9/11 terrorist acts for two categories of bias crimes: simple and aggravated assaults statistics.[8]   From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).

The Center for Security Policy presents this study to inform the dialogue surrounding religious bias crimes in the U.S. and to provide a fact-based resource that analysts, researchers, and citizens can use for a reality check. 

Prior Research

Although a number of European academics and institutes (particularly the British[9]) have produced studies on the general topic of "Islamophobia" in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, few Americans have tackled "hate crimes" from the objective perspective of a neutral academic and empirical study based on the available FBI statistics. Two studies are representative, though unlike our study, neither is a longitudinal study encompassing a ten-year period.

Jeffrey Kaplan, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh authored a report entitled, "Islamophobia in America?: September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime."[10] Although this report does reference FBI hate crime statistics, it does so only for the period from 2000-2002, as Kaplan’s study focus is that period of time just after the September 11 attacks on the U.S. He concludes that "The intense phase of these attacks comprised approximately nine weeks, after which the number of hate crimes fell sharply" due, he writes, to national leadership from the U.S. president, decisive law enforcement intervention, grassroots outreach to Muslim communities across the country, and a "rapid dissolution of American moral certainty about the War on Terror."

In other research, Steven George Salaita produced a study for the New Centennial Review in the Fall of 2006 which set out to "summarize the evolution of the Arab image in American media since Ronald Stockton’s seminal 1994 analysis, with emphasis on the role of 9/11, and advance the usage of the term anti-Arab racism as a more accurate replacement for the traditional descriptors Orientalism and Islamophobia in relation to the negative portrayal of Arabs in the United States."[11] Unlike our study, the author approached the topic with a non-empirical framework.

Scholarly research in the area of hate crimes is increasingly a popular area for specialization, as witnessed by the Journal of Hate Studies, celebrating its 8th Volume in 2010.[12]  A useful short review of the field’s scope – though unfortunately not addressing a longitudinal analysis nor  the FBI data – can be found in Barbara Perry’s essay, "The more things change…post-9/11 trends in hate crime scholarship," a summary of the various disciplines’ research addressing the issue of hate.[13]

Methodology and Findings

The "Religious Bias Crimes in America" study is a longitudinal look at the instances of religious bias crimes, also known as hate crimes, against Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the United States from 2000 to 2009. The use of the term "Hate Crime" is defined by the FBI in its 1996 Training Guide for Hate Crime Data Collection[14] as well as in its Uniform Crime Reporting Program,[15] which find their authorization in the April 23, 1990 "Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990."[16] This legislation requires the U.S. Department of Justice to compile and publish an annual summary of data about crimes that "manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity."  This study focuses on those hate crimes that clearly demonstrate prejudice based on bias against Christians (Catholics and Protestants combined), Jews and Muslims, as identified by the FBI.  Three other categories of religious bias crime for which the FBI collects statistics, but which were not included in this study because they are less specific for purposes of comparison are: anti-other religion, anti-multi-religious group, and anti-atheism-agnosticism.

The Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines define a bias crime:

A criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin; also known as Hate Crime.

Definitions of the various offenses against person and property are also provided in the Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines.[17]

Three broad categories of religious hate crimes are included in this study: incidents, offenses, and victims. A single incident may include more than one offense (for example, intimidation and robbery). An offense may have more than one victim.  A victim may be the target of more than one offense.  Data categories for offenses and victims are sub-divided between crimes against persons, and crimes against property. Each of these sub-categories is further broken down by specific types of crimes.  For example, crimes against persons include 1) murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, 2) forcible rape, 3) simple assault, 4) aggravated assault, 5) intimidation (by far the largest crimes against persons category), and 6) other.   Crimes against property include 1) robbery, 2) burglary, 3) larceny/theft, 4) motor vehicle theft, 5) arson, 6) destruction/damage/vandalism (by far the largest crimes against property category), and 7) other.  A third category, crimes against society, (at the same hierarchical level as crimes against persons, and crimes against property) presented only insignificant numbers for all three religions in the study (19 victims for all three religious groups from all ten years combined – see Appendix C, Table 2).

While there has been a slight variation through the years, anti-Jewish hate crimes have hovered around 70% of total anti-religious hate crime, while anti-Muslim violence has accounted for around 10%, and anti-Christian hate crime has totaled slightly less than 10%. Jewish and Muslim populations in America, as noted previously, each are estimated at 6 million persons (with an alternate estimate by Pew for the Muslim population). There was an increase in anti-Muslim violence in 2001 (exceeding both Jewish and Christian rates for simple and aggravated assault), which decreased to the 10% range in 2002, where it has remained (a temporary smaller spike was seen in 2006 against both Jewish and Muslim victims).  Even in the anomalous year of 2001, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses, and number of victims were approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals (Muslim Incidents – 481, Victims – 546, Offenses – 554; Jewish Incidents – 1043, Victims – 1117, Offenses – 1196). That the terrorist attacks occurred relatively late in the year – in September of 2001 – suggests that the increase in anti-Muslim violence occurred over a period of a few weeks, or more specifically nine weeks as noted in Kaplan’s study. Looking at total numbers of victims over the 2000-2009 period, for every Muslim victim from 2000 to 2009, there have been over six (6.13) Jewish incidents of hate crimes.  As noted previously, in 2009 the ratio increased: for every Muslim victim, there were even more – over 8 – Jewish victims.

Most anti-religious hate crimes in the United States are not of a violent nature against persons. Aggregating anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish hate crimes against persons and property from 2000 to 2009[18], demonstrates that 64% of total hate crimes are crimes against property, and of these, 92% are cases of destruction/damage/vandalism, and the majority of the remaining 8% are burglary and larceny/theft. There have been 38 robbery offenses, or 0.3% of total hate crimes and of these, 23 were anti-Jewish. The rate of arson is very small, accounting for slightly more than 1% of total crimes against property.  

Of the remaining 36% of total cases that are crimes against persons, most (77%) are classified as intimidation. Virtually all of the other 23% are simple or aggravated assault. There were no rape cases and only one murder, of a Jewish victim. There was an increase in 2006 in anti-Muslim aggravated assault (24 offenses), compared to 22 anti-Jewish offenses, and in 2009 (11 vs. 9). There were no similar spikes in cases of simple assault, and in other years, anti-Jewish aggravated and simple assault cases are double that of anti-Muslim assault cases. While cases of anti-Jewish aggravated assault decreased between 2008 and 2009 from 25 to 9, anti-Jewish simple assault cases increased sharply from 58 to 82. When compared to the overall population of over 300 million people, anti-religious hate crimes are not highly prevalent in the United States for any religious group.  Bias-motivated crime is simply not that common for any religious group in the U.S.

Comparing the prevalence of anti-religious hate crimes by religion requires measuring the number of incidents against the overall population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the United States. Self-identified Christians accounted in 2008 for 76% of the adult American population[19], or 173,402,000 persons, significantly higher than for Muslims or Jews, and therefore the relative prevalence of anti-Christian crimes is by far the lowest of the three. Muslim groups in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with an interest in presenting the U.S. Muslim population as equivalent to the Jewish one, repeatedly have declared the number of Muslims in the U.S. to be about 6 million persons, ,[20]  Within the same range, Chicago Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, the 2010 Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Board of Trustees Chairman, has cited 2001 estimates of 5.8 million and 6.7 million Muslims in America.[21] On February 3, 2011, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly cited "the reality of 6 million Muslims."[22] A lower estimate was published by the Pew Research Center in January 2011, when it put the Muslim population of the U.S. at 2.6 million.[23] The 2010 US Census estimates the Jewish population in the United States to be 6.5 million, or 2.1% of the total population in 2009, and this includes those who self-define as Jewish either by religion, ethnicity, or culture. [24] This broad definition thus can be seen as defining an upper boundary for the U.S. Jewish population, given that the FBI hate crime statistics define Judaism as a religion.

The Facts Contradict the Myths

These findings seem to contradict the popular perception that Muslims face more discrimination than Jews in the United States. For example, a Pew poll conducted in 2009 found that 58% of Americans believe there is "a lot of discrimination against" Muslims, opposed to 35% who thought the same for Jews. [25] FBI statistics do show a lower percentage of anti-Jewish hate crimes have identified offenders, which may contribute to the misperception that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States are not as prevalent as they really are.  Of total known offenders from the period of 2000 to 2009, 56% committed anti-Jewish hate crimes; the number rises to  67% when unknown offenders are included.

The process of local law enforcement data collection and categorization is inconsistent and both over-reporting and under-reporting may occur[26].   The goal of our analysis is to show the relative frequency of hate crimes, by religion and by type.

We have looked at primarily at some summary statistics for this report.  In addition, we include the tables here as appendices along with a selection of charts.  The spreadsheet data tables and charts are available for download in excel format at securefreedom.org.

Hate Crime Rhetoric

 Concerns about a backlash against Muslims in America arose in the aftermath of 9/11 and were given added impetus by books, studies, and other publications and statements by various organizations and Muslim leadership figures and groups. The November 2002 report by Human Rights Watch, "We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11"[27] is representative of the genre. Citing a "severe wave of backlash violence" involving "more than two thousand September 11-related backlash incidents" against Arabs and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, the report claims such people were targeted "solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."[28] Although the report goes on to claim that "comprehensive and reliable national statistics are not available," this study cites the readily-available official FBI statistics that indeed do show a spike from 28 to 481 total hate crimes against Muslims between the years 2000 and 2001; however, according to the FBI figures, even that high mark is exceeded by a factor of two for the typical annual total of hate crimes against Jews in America.[29]

The January 6, 2010 report, "Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim Americans," produced with funding from the Department of Justice, also cites an "increased anti-Muslim bias" in the years since the 9/11 attacks. This paper’s three authors, David Schanzer and Ebrahim Moosa of Duke University and Charles Kurzman from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assert that Muslim-Americans bear the brunt of government counterterrorism initiatives, some of which they consider discriminatory.[30]

Then there is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which styles itself an organization "that challenges stereotypes of Islam and Muslims" and a "Washington-based Islamic advocacy group" dedicated to challenging "anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide."[31] The CAIR website includes an extensive section on "Islamophobia,"[32] a term reportedly coined by the Muslim Brotherhood front group, the International Islamic Institute of Thought (IIIT),[33] in an effort to find a concept useful in beating back critics of Islamic law (shariah) and jihad.[34]

CAIR traces the phenomenon of "Islamophobia" to writing by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s that posited a coming "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. CAIR claims that "when 9/11 happened," those already prejudiced against Islam were influenced by "right wing outlets" and "pro-Israeli commentators such as Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson, Judith Miller, and Bernard Lewis" to amplify an atmosphere of "extreme prejudice, suspicion, and fear against Muslims."[35] Deftly sidestepping the historical record of decades of international terror attacks perpetrated by Muslim jihadis well before 9/11[36], in addition to centuries of shariah-inspired jihad that preceded the current one[37], CAIR’s Islamophobia page cites a number of surveys conducted in the years following 2001 that indicate Americans believe Islam encourages violence, does not teach respect for the beliefs of non-Muslims, or that mosques ought to be monitored by U.S. law enforcement officials. Americans’ entirely rational concerns about jihadist attacks and the encroachment of shariah on American society are then described not only as the font of "discrimination, exclusion, and violence" against Muslims (without citing any official statistics to substantiate the accusation), but the naturally-to-be-expected source of Muslims’ own "disillusionment, social disorder, and….irrational violence." [Emphasis added][38]   

Slander, Blasphemy, and Insult to Islam in Shariah

It is imperative that western societies like ours understand the serious implications within Islamic law for accusations of insult to Islam, Islamic doctrine, or Muslims. Under shariah, the offense of slander is defined very differently than in U.S. law. According to the ‘Umdat al-Salik (or Reliance of the Traveller), a book of Islamic law that carries the imprimatur of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the global seat of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, Slander "means to mention anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike…"[39]  Several pages later, a further explanation is provided: "A person should not speak of anything he notices about people besides that which benefits a Muslim to relate or prevents disobedience."[40] Under Islamic law, truth is no defense against an accusation of slander and the offense is held to be a Hudud crime, one deserving the harshest punishment.

Even more serious than Slander under Islamic law is the offense of Blasphemy. The Muslim authorities hold Blasphemy to be insulting or abusing that which is held sacred in Islam. This can include anything from cursing Allah or the prophet Muhammad to irreverent behavior towards Islamic religious beliefs or customs. Even expressing opinions about Islam considered at variance with normative beliefs can be construed as blasphemy under this extremely subjective definition. Not only Muslims traditionally have been held accountable under the Islamic blasphemy laws, but also non-Muslims, especially dhimmis (conquered, subjugated People of the Book, i.e., Christians and Jews). "Reviling Muslims" or "Harming the Friends of Allah Most High" are considered serious sins, termed "Enormities".[41]  Such offenses are described in Islamic law as those that entail either a threat of punishment in the hereafter, a prescribed Hadd punishment, or being accursed by Allah or the prophet Muhammad.[42]

Islamic laws on Blasphemy and Slander should not be considered outmoded or an irrelevant remnant of the 7th century: they remain very much in effect in modern times, as the following excerpt from the authoritative Malaysian scholar Mohammad Hashim Kamali’s 1997 essay, "Freedom of Expression in Islam", makes clear:

"However, a general observation which should be made here is that in matters which pertain to the dogma of Islam, or those which are regulated by the direct authority of the Qur’an or Sunnah, criticism, either from Muslims or non-Muslims, will not be entertained, as personal or public opinion does not command authority in such matters. Islam is basically a religion of authority, and the values of good and evil, or rights and duties are not determined by reference to public opinion, or popular vote…" [Emphasis added][43]

It might be added that Dr. Kamali, who was a Professor of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence at the International Islamic University Malaysia and also Dean of the International Institute of Islamic Thought & Civilization (ISTAC) from 1985 – 2007, and is currently Chairman and CEO of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, Malaysia, is considered not only a leading international academic authority on Islam, but a "moderate Muslim."  He was on the advisory group for Imam Feisal Rauf’s "Shariah Index Project" and is a listed expert at the purportedly moderate organization World Organization for Resource Development and Education (WORDE).[44]

The deadly intent of the shariah laws on Blasphemy and Slander repeatedly has been demonstrated in recent times: among examples which could be cited are the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and Anwar al-Awlaki’s 2010 fatwa against the Washington state journalist Molly Norris (who was forced into permanent hiding for jesting online about an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day"). The consequences, therefore, of being accused by a Muslim of offending Islamic beliefs, customs, or laws should not be underestimated. The developing concept of "Islamophobia" obviously is heading in this direction.

Here is a final example. Given the centrality of this doctrine to Islam, the 21 February 2011 demand by CAIR for Fox News program host and former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, to apologize for "inaccurate and offensive" comments about Islam and to meet with Muslim leaders to discuss growing Islamophobia in American society"[45]  needs to be taken very seriously. CAIR’s leadership knows exactly what such an accusation implies under Islamic law; it is to be hoped that the Governor does, too.

There is one more aspect of the Islamic laws on Slander that needs to be mentioned in this regard. Our jihadi enemy does not want the non-Muslim infidel world (and especially our national security leadership) to understand the true character and intentions of those shariah adherents who are dedicated to "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within."[46] Specifically, the enemy reserves the right to employ taqiyya (deceit and dissimulation) as well as the Islamic laws on obligatory lying[47] to keep such information from those whose knowledge of it could lead to effective defensive measures against shariah. Attempted enforcement of this legally sanctioned code of silence about the genuine nature and objectives of the jihadist enemy is one of the key usages of the Slander and Blasphemy laws in the west.[48]  

"Islamophobia" and Defensive Jihad

To carry through the Islamic legal principles inherent in the Slander and Blasphemy laws to their logical end point, it is useful to refer to classical as well as modern pronouncements on the elements that Muslim scholars hold necessary to justify and declare defensive jihad. For, in fact, this justification is where accusations of "Islamophobia", religious "hate crimes," and insult to Islam plausibly lead.  In fact, in numerous cases, hate crime violence or intimidating threats of violence against persons and property in response to perceived "blasphemy" has been a response in the last decade in Muslim-majority countries, and also in Canada, Europe, and the U.S.  The examples in Muslim-majority countries are too numerous to list, but a sample of U.S. cases include the jihad threats against Molly Norris, creator of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day", the South Park cartoon producers, and publications that republished the Danish "Muhammed Cartoons."

Classical scholars of Islam, such as Al-Shaybani (8th-9th century disciple of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence and a jurist in his own right) and Ibn Rushd (12th century legal scholar known as Averroes in the West) have written extensively and assertively on the obligatory nature of offensive jihad according to shariah, simply for the purpose of establishing Islam in the world.[49] It was understood both explicitly and implicitly that defensive jihad was obligatory as well. Among the Qur’anic verses commonly cited as justification is the following:

"Fight them until there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s entirely."  —  (Q 8:39)

Turning to the modern Islamic scholars, Louay Safi is a Muslim author and scholar who has served at the top ranks of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the U.S. He formerly was the Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)’s Leadership Development Center, Executive Director and Director of Research for the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), editor of the Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) (1999-2003). ISNA, IIIT, and the AMSS all appear on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own list of "our organizations and the organizations of our friends."[50] Safi currently serves as Common Word Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. His credentials, in other words, would seem impeccable to speak to Islamic rulings on defensive warfare.

The slim 2001 paperback book, "Peace and the Limits of War," was authored by Safi and published by the IIIT in response to the post-9/11 surge in public awareness of Islam and jihad. While Safi attempts to distance himself from the classical Islamic scholars on the topic of mandatory offensive jihad, he has no such compunctions when it comes to "War in defense of Muslim individuals and property." He writes:

"When wrong is inflicted on a Muslim individual by a member, or members, of another political community….the Islamic state is obligated to make sure the individual, or his family, is compensated for his suffering, and that his rights are upheld…it suffices to say that the Islamic state should ensure that justice has been done to the wronged Muslim, even if that take a declaration of war…"[51]

Perceptions about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims matter, especially when considered in the context of Islamic law (shariah), which criminalizes insults to Islam as "slander" or even "blasphemy."[52] A false belief, perpetuated by a few vocal groups, that deliberate religious bias crimes against Muslims are increasing regardless of the lack of support by hard factual data, is corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to First Amendment free speech rights and national security. Efforts at the international level, especially by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)[53], to define any questioning of Islamic doctrine as "hate speech" leading to "hate crimes", such as  "Islamophobia" and as a "human rights violation" by way of official resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), directly create the premise for criminalization of free speech. Further, although non-binding at this time, such UNHRC resolutions conceivably could legitimize an eventual casus belli, by which an appropriate fatwa could declare justification for violent defensive jihad by the forces of Islam.  As recently as March 7 2011, James Zogby of the Arab American Institute, formerly with the Democratic National Committee, wrote of critics of the Shariah law and Islamic terrorism in America, that:

 If these ‘professional bigots" have provided the grist, the mill itself was run by the vast network of rightwing talk radio and TV shows and websites and prominent preachers, who have combined to amplify the anti-Muslim message nationwide. Their efforts have done real damage. They have tormented descent [sic] public servants, created protests that have shuttered legitimate institutions, fomented hate crimes and produced fear in the Muslim community.[54]

Conclusions

This data presented in this study demonstrate that common perceptions about the incidence of "hate crimes" in America that are directed at individuals or groups on the grounds of religious identification often mistakenly ascribe the majority of such offenses to anti-Muslim sentiment. To the contrary, the 2000-2009 FBI crime statistics data used in this study indicate that the majority of U.S. "hate crimes" in fact are perpetrated against Jews. The spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes following 9-11 did not last longer than nine weeks according to prior research.  The most important conclusion may be that total religious bias crimes are few in a country of over 300 million persons.  In fact, the U.S. is a model as a tolerant country, with a significantly low (and in some cases falling) number of hate crimes, in which most Muslim Americans are fully integrated and accepted, as well as economically and socially successful, fellow citizens.

The persistence, scope, and sophistication of the campaign to portray Muslims in America inaccurately, as making up the majority of "hate crime" victims, points to an organized effort whose potential implications derive from Islamic law (shariah). Insult towards Islam, Islamic doctrine, and individual Muslims, especially by non-Muslim infidels, can carry serious penalties under Shariah law. Further, because the "crimes" of insult, slander, and blasphemy are so subjectively defined in shariah, the doorway is wide open for those with an agenda of victimology to lay a foundation that not inconceivably could lead ultimately to a declaration of "defensive jihad" against persons, property or the broader community.   "Homegrown" jihadist terrorism can find its motivation as part of the radicalization process in this heightened, and counter-factual, sense of victimization that justifies organized or "lone wolf" acts of jihad that are rationalized as defensive. 

 

 

Charts & Data

Charts and data for this Occasional Paper are available in the PDF, or as Microsoft Excel files below:

[1] Center for Security Policy staff and interns contributed to the data entry, analysis, and verification.

[2] The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an Islamic advocacy group and America’s largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization. CAIR was included on the Department of Justice’s published list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding case of 2007-2008. Its Internet home page may be found at http://www.cair.com/Home.aspx . See CAIR’s reports on bias from 2007 (http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/2007-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf)
 and 2008 (http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/civilrights2008.pdf ). 

[3] The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) calls itself a "Public service agency working for the civil rights of American Muslims". According to the counterterrorism think tank The Investigative Project, "MPAC’s public advocacy often involves defending accused terror financiers and opposing law enforcement efforts to root out terrorists and their enablers.  In nearly every case, MPAC has responded to investigations by the FBI and the U.S. Treasury Department with complaints that authorities have not proven their allegations, and variations on the constant themes that enforcement actions unfairly single out Muslim groups and ‘bear strong signs of politicization.’  At the same time, MPAC has been equally diligent in defending individual terrorists uncovered by federal investigations." http://www.investigativeproject.org/profile/181,accessed February 28, 2011.

[4] "Behind CAIR’s Hate Crimes Report," Daniel Skinner, The Weekly Standard, may 6, 2004, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/054aycfi.asp; "CAIR’s Hate Crime Nonsense," Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, May 18, 2005, http://www.danielpipes.org/2627/cairs-hate-crimes-nonsense; "Fudging the Numbers on Hate Crimes," Mike Pesca, NPR, may 23, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662915; all accessed February 28, 2011.

[5] "CAIR Pushes Phony Charges of Anti-Muslim Hysteria, Hate Crimes," Investigative Project, April 4, 2008.  http://www.steveemerson.com/2008/04/cair-pushes-phony-charges-of accessed February 28, 2011.

[6] The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its annual Crime in the United States reports are described online at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

[7] 2009 is the most recent year for which full data are available. See the FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2009 at http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/victims.html, accessed 12 February 2011.

[8]  Simple Assaults by Victim by Religion for 2001 (Muslim 66, Jewish 45, Christian 3); Aggravated Assaults by Victim by Religion for 2001 (Muslim 27, Jewish 13, Christian 1)

[9] Neil Chakraborti, editor, Hate Crime: Concepts, policy, future directions, Willan Publishing, 2010.

[10] Kaplan, Jeffrey, "Islamophobia in America?: September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime," Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Accessed 20 February 2011 at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a737727150

[11] Salaita, Steven George, "Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride," CR: The New Centennial Review, Michigan State University Press, Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2006, pp. 245-266. Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/new_centennial_review/v006/6.2salaita.html  

[12] Journal of Hate Studies, Volume 8 (No. 1), 2010, http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/issue/archive accessed February 28, 2011.  The Journal’s authors defend a wide spectrum of beliefs, ranging from a positive review for the anti-jihad movie "Obsession" (Vol 5, #1) to numerous articles from a more conventional perspedctive.

[13]Perry, Hate Crime: Concepts, Policy, Future Directions, p. 17

[14] Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/trainguidedc99.pdf

[15] The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its annual Crime in the United States reports are described online at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr 

[16] 28 U.S.C. § 534. See Appendix C for the full text of this legislation.

[17] Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines, p. 24, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/hcguidelinesdc99.pdf accessed February 28, 2011.

[18] This does not include the negligible number (19) of "crimes against society) from 2000-2009 for all three religious groups.

[19] "Self-described Religious Identification of Adult Population: 1990 – 2008," U.S. Census, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0075.pdf, accessed February 28, 2011.

[20] Ihsan Bagby, Ph.D., Paul M. Perl, Ph.D., Bryan T. Froehle, Ph.D., The Mosque in America: A National Portrait, Council on American Islamic Relations, April 26, 2001, p.6: "Estimates of a total Muslim population of 6-7 million in America seem reasonable…"

[21] Abdul Malik Mujahid, "Muslims In America: Profile 2001," Soundvision, http://www.soundvision.com/info/yearinreview/2001/profile.asp , accessed February 28, 2011.

[22] "Background Information on Radicalization Hearings," Muslim Public Affairs Council, February 3, 2011.  http://www.mpac.org/programs/government-relations/background-information-on-radicalization-hearings.php# accessed February 28, 2011.

[23] The Future of the Global Muslim Population, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Jan. 27, 2011. http://pewforum.org/The-Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx. Accessed 7 March 2011 at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth.

[24] Table 77, Christian Church Adherents, 2000, and Jewish Population, 2009 – States. 2010 US Census. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0077.pdf.

[25] Muslims Widely Seen as Facing Discrimination. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Sept. 9, 2009. http://pewforum.org/Muslim/Muslims-Widely-Seen-As-Facing-Discrimination.aspx.

[26] "FBI Report Notes Rise in Hate Crimes," Deborah Tedford, NPR, November 23, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120715771 , accessed February 28, 2011.

[27] Available in PDF format and accessed 21 February 2011 at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2002/11/14/we-are-not-enemy

[28] "We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11," Human Rights Watch, NOVEMBER 2002 VOL. 14, NO. 6 (G) (p. 4). 

[29] See Appendix D, "Hate Crime Trends: 2000-2007"

[30] Schanzer, David, Charles Kurzman, and Ebrahim Moosa, "Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans," January 6, 2010. Accessed online 21 February 2011 at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/229868.pdf

[31] The official CAIR website is at http://www.cair.com/Home.aspx. CAIR’s foundational organization, The International Association for Palestine, was included on a list of organizations called "our organizations and the organizations of our friends" in a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document called "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America."

[32] "Islamophobia," http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx accessed February 28 2011.

[33] The website of the Herndon, Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is at  http://www.iiit.org/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx  The IIIT, like CAIR, is on the Muslim Brotherhood list of its friends and organizations of friends; also like CAIR, the IIIT was included in a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007-2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[34] Muhammad, Abdur-Rahman, "Whether or not Ground Zero mosque is built, U.S. Muslims have access to the American dream," The New York Daily News as cited by The Investigative Project on Terrorism, September 5, 2010. Accessed online 21 February 2010 at http://www.investigativeproject.org/2164/whether-or-not-ground-zero-mosque-is-built-us. Muhammad is a former member of the IIIT, whose by-line states that he "now works to combat Islamic extremism in the American Muslim community."

[35] CAIR "Islamophobia" page; accessed 21 February 2011 at http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx

[36] "List of Islamic Terror Attacks Against America Before 9/11," http://factreal.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/list-of-islamic-attacks-against-america/ , accessed February 28, 2011.

[37] Andrew Bostom and Ibn Warraq, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, Prometheus Books, 2008.

[38] "Islamophobia," http://www.cair.com/Issues/Islamophobia/Islamophobia.aspx

[39] ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. Section r2.0: Slander (p. 730).

[40] Ibid, Section r3.0 (p. 741).

[41] Ibid, Section p50.0 (Hurting or Reviling Muslims) and p51.0 (Harming the Friends of Allah Most High) (pp. 686-688.

[42] Ibid, The Author’s Introduction, Section p0.0 (pp. 651-2).

[43] Kamali, Mohammad Hashim, "Freedom of Expression in Islam," Islamic Text Society, 1997. From chapter IX. Freedom of Religion (Al-Hurriyyah al-Diniyyah). Accessed online 22 February 2011 at www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/…/freedom/kamali_freedom.doc      

[44] "Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Biographical Highlights," http://worde.org/specialists/ProfessorMohammadHashimKamali.php accessed February 28, 2011.

[45] "Dissemblers At Council On American Islamic Relations – CAIR – Whip Up The Discredited Bogeyman Of Islamophobia," PipelineNews.org, February 21, 2011. Accessed 22 February 2011 at http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=cair2212011102.htm

[46] "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," a 5/22/91 Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in the 2007-2008 U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[47] ‘Umdat al-Salik, Section r8.0, Lying (beginning on p. 744).

[48] "Shariah: The Threat to America," Center for Security Policy, October 2010 (pp. 103-106).

[49] See "The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar" by Majid Khadduri and Ibn Rushd’s magnum opus, "Bidayat al-Mudtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid" for their authoritative treatments of jihad.

[50] "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," 1991. ISNA also appeared on the U.S. Department of Justice list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007-2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

[51] Safi, Louay M, "Peace and the Limits of War." International Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon, VA.

[52] See "Slander (Ghiba)" in Section r2.0 of the ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (pg. 730). For a thorough discussion of Slander and Blasphemy in Islamic law, see also the Center for Security Policy study, "Shariah: The Threat to America," September 22, 2010. Available online at http://www.amazon.com/Shariah-America-Exercise-Competitive-Analysis/dp/098229476X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297556949&sr=1-1

[53] Organization of the Islamic Conference: http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html

[54] "Islamophobia can create radicalization," James Zogby, March 7, 2011, The Nation, http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Opinions/Columns/07-Mar-2011/Islamophobia-can-create-radicalisation/1  accessed March 8, 2011.

How to make Egypt safe for democracy

Hosni Mubarak’s resignation as president of Egypt, after thirty years of authoritarian rule, is a major seismic event in the unstable Middle East. Although not as shattering as the 1981 assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, Mubarak’s departure may actually pose more of a challenge to Egypt’s long-ruling military than either Sadat’s murder or the natural death of Gamal Nasser, the first officer in the modern military line after the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk.  The "regime" thereafter was the military itself; while Mubarak was obviously its apex in recent years, the military establishment as a whole governed, not just one man.  

When Nasser and Sadat died, the collective military leadership knew its next step: have another military leader succeed his fallen predecessor.  That outcome seems very unlikely today, although not impossible.  In the short term, the military’s highest body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, is in charge, having dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution, pending parliamentary and presidential elections to be scheduled. Whether there is a larger, longer-term political role for Egypt’s military (as in Pakistan and Turkey) remains to be seen.

Commentators and historians will debate what actually sparked the demonstrations that brought Mubarak down, but for now the most likely explanation is that they were essentially spontaneous, initiated by the demonstrations in Tunisia against the despised Ben Ali government, fuelled by social networks like Twitter and Facebook and more broadly through the internet and email.  As in many Third World countries, youth unemployment, especially among those with "university" educations, was widespread; opportunities seemed limited; and 6,000 years of bureaucratic government weighed heavily on the people.  

But the critical political motivator was almost certainly opposition to Mubarak’s long-feared effort to have his son Gamal succeed him in yet another well-rigged Egyptian election.  The elder Mubarak, 82 and ailing, was not likely to run again, but the idea of pharaonic succession was more than most Egyptians could tolerate.  Significantly, opposition included Egypt’s armed forces: Gamal had never been part of the military, unlike his father, a former commander of the Air Force. Combined with obviously fixed parliamentary elections last November, Mubarak the Second was simply unacceptable.

The spontaneity of the street turmoil was confirmed by the absence of leaders, either from among the demonstrators, or from Egyptian intellectuals, existing opposition political figures, or media moths like Mohammed el-Baradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who rushed back to Egypt from Vienna to speak English to the Western press and unsuccessfully claim leadership of the rising tide of protest.

Although far from certain, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (the "Ikhwan") probably did not instigate the demonstrations, and may well have been caught off guard like so many others.  But the Brotherhood, although legally banned in Egypt for decades and living in a shadow world politically, was nonetheless a major factor in what happened next. It remains well-organised, tightly disciplined, and clear in its Islamicist agenda.  On the first Friday after the demonstrations began, the Ikhwan’s mullahs used the Friday prayers to call its followers into the streets, substantially increasing both the size of the demonstrations and their intensity.  

The Brotherhood had already been active in the scheduled September presidential elections, moving close to a formal endorsement of el-Baradei’s candidacy, a seemingly odd coalition between a collection of medieval, theocratic radicals and, in effect, a European social democrat. Nonetheless, the alliance served both parties, giving the Ikhwan entrée to the Western media and a role in opposition to Mubarak.  Even before the demonstrations began, el-Baradei had announced support for the Hamas autocracy in the Gaza Strip and for ending all sanctions against Hamas:  "Open the borders, end the blockade!" he told Der Spiegel last July. Since Hamas is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Brotherhood, this was a critical point. Ending Egypt’s blockade of its border with Gaza (the little-known and sporadically effective counterpart to Israel’s blockade) would allow free transit between Gaza and Egypt, thereby facilitating the transfer of operatives, weapons and finance from Hamas’s major backer: Iran.

As the days passed in Egypt, the Obama Administration went through a public agony of confused, contradictory, and inconsistent responses.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened the public torrent of words by observing that Mubarak’s government was stable, and Vice-President Biden chimed in that it was not a dictatorship.  Within days, however, President Obama himself was telling Mubarak privately and publicly that the "transition" to democracy had to begin "now", enabling his press avatars to leak furiously that Mubarak must resign immediately. Within less than a week, the White House endorsed Mubarak remaining in office until the end of his term in September, a line replaced just days later by renewed insistence on Mubarak’s immediate departure from office.

This foolish, endless public commentary was an all-too transparent effort to stay on top of the news cycle, and to portray the US President as directing events rather than merely responding to them. As a consequence, Obama’s credibility was undercut everywhere.  By trying to please everyone, he ended up pleasing no one. The truly important communications, entirely off the media’s radar, were between the Pentagon and Egypt’s military, urging restraint while also trying to understand the shifting dynamics on Egypt’s streets and behind closed doors, where the key political negotiations were taking place. Unfortunately, Obama’s public twisting and turnings have obscured the important, beneficial impact of these invisible lines of communication between Washington and Cairo. 

The issue now, of course, is what happens next. The West can justifiably be optimistic about the legitimate aspirations for freedom and true democracy many demonstrators in Egypt and elsewhere expressed. Tunisia, for example, now seems the most likely candidate to make a successful transition from authoritarian rule to truly representative government. But a pragmatic assessment of the situation in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East nonetheless underlines the daunting obstacles in the way of that transformation. Moreover, critical US national security interests, such as the stability of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, Egypt’s 35-year strategic alignment with America following Sadat’s pivot away from the Soviet Union, and the fate of the Arabian Peninsula’s oil-and gas-producing regimes, justifiably weigh in the balance for Washington’s decision-makers, and the West as a whole.

Many others also have strategic interests at risk. Suddenly, one of the foundations of Israel’s security, the Camp David Accords, is potentially imperiled. Pro-Western Arab governments, particularly monarchies from Morocco to the Gulf, see their stability endangered. They watched in dismay the way in which Obama treated Mubarak, loyalty to unappealing allies in trouble not having been a strong suit in Washington for many years. If the White House threw Mubarak "under the bus", they wondered, what would be their fate if they faced internal turmoil? And concern whether loyalty was a principle that counted in Washington was not confined to the Middle East, but extended globally.

Conceptually, of course America supports democracy for all people; how could we do otherwise? But in international politics, as in life, key moral principles and deeply held philosophical values can conflict. Statesmen necessarily face deeply unappealing choices which academics and commentators in their suburban literary redoubts are spared. Sad to say, it is comforting but utterly unrealistic to believe that pursuing one value to the effective exclusion of the others will nonetheless result in all being reconciled satisfactorily.

Advocating democracy and actually building it are two radically different things. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which first brought her to the attention of prospective presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, deftly skewered Jimmy Carter’s handling of two earlier regime crises, which may have uneasy parallels with what is transpiring in Egypt. Kirkpatrick’s characteristic honesty made famous the argument that pro-Western authoritarian governments had at least the potential for a gradual transformation to democracy, something no repressive communist government had ever done. But Kirkpatrick’s thesis was more profound than simply a Cold War polemic; she explained eloquently why proclaiming support for democratic ideals in no way guaranteed implementing them successfully. Her case studies were the Shah’s government in Iran and the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, replaced, respectively by ayatollahs in Tehran and Sandinistas in Managua. We thus moved from two authoritarian, pro-US regimes to two even more authoritarian, anti-US regimes, partially thanks to Carter’s bungling.  The lesson was plain.

Kirkpatrick quoted approvingly from John Stuart Mill’s magisterial essay, "Considerations on Representative Government", in which Mill described three preconditions for such governments to succeed: "One, that the people should be willing to receive it; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them." Americans have their own version of this insight, a perhaps apocryphal tale occurring in Philadelphia after the secret, closed-session drafting of the Constitution in 1787. As the story goes, a woman approached Ben Franklin on the street and said, "Well, Doctor, what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?"  To which Franklin reportedly replied, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."

Today’s world is filled with failed efforts at democratisation. Russia has passed from totalitarianism, into democracy, and now seems to be passing right out again, regressing to authoritarianism or worse, although seemingly not of the communist variety. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution has been hijacked by Hizbollah, the Shi’ite terrorist group armed and financed by Iran. And in Gaza, Hamas, albeit Sunni, is similarly armed and financed by Iran. In short, the forms and processes of democracy can produce substantively decidedly illiberal results, as Mussolini’s Fascisti and Hitler’s Brown Shirts should have amply warned us in the last century.

Moreover, beyond the issue of Egypt’s future government, broader US national security interests have legitimate – and enormous – claims. Americans may admire Woodrow Wilson’s aspirations to make the world safe for democracy, but they actually follow Theodore Roosevelt’s devastating response: "First and foremost, we are to make the world safe for ourselves." Attention to US strategic interests is not evidence of indifference to democracy, but a recognition that America’s democracy itself requires its leaders to do what nation states exist to do, and as its Constitution specifically admonishes, to "provide for the common defence".

Ironically, once Egyptian demonstrators verged on toppling Mubarak, the Obama Administration suddenly found virtue in demonstrations in Iran, with ringing statements by Vice-President Biden and others. By contrast, after Iran’s fraudulent 2009 presidential election, the White House had been silent or even supportive of Ahmadinejad’s election "victory", so desperate was it to engage Tehran in negotiations over its nuclear weapons program. Obama’s sustained unwillingness to acknowledge, let alone endorse, the protesters in Iran against their totalitarian, theocratic military rulers provoked enormous criticism, which obviously stung the hyper-media-conscious White House. But while being rhetorically ahead of the media spin cycle is a mark of success at the Obama White House, as in so many other cases, rhetoric is all there is.  Mistaking rhetoric for action is the Obama Administration’s hallmark.

So, today’s pressing question for Egypt is what steps the new military rulers should take. First, there should not be a rush to elections. It was a fatal mistake for Palestinians when the Bush Administration, reading supposedly irrefutable polls that Hamas could not win, scheduled elections in 2006 that allowed Hamas to do just that. Democracy is a culture, a way of life, as Mill and Kirkpatrick recognised, not simply the counting of votes. Any realistic assessment of Egypt’s "opposition" shows it to be weak, disorganised, and indifferently led. Moving to early elections, as the Muslim Brotherhood wants, will not bring the Age of Aquarius, but only benefit those factions with existing political infrastructures, which is a formula for domination by the Brotherhood. Far better to proceed when the true democrats are ready, which may not be soon enough for some, but which is unambiguously the more pro-democratic course. 

Second, participation in the elections, whenever scheduled, should be limited to real political parties. From Mussolini to Putin, from Hamas to Hezbollah, terrorists, totalitarians and their ilk masquerading as political parties do not really believe in representative government. Banning such faux-democrats from participating in the legitimate political process until they become true political parties is entirely legitimate, and may well be critical to avert disaster.  America did so for decades by outlawing the Communist Party, as post-World War II Germany did with the National Socialists. Thus, for President Obama to say, as he did, that the transition "must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table" is not only naive, but fundamentally dangerous.  

In order to join legitimate political parties in contesting elections, we asked in Lebanon and in Palestinian elections that terrorists had to renounce violence (and mean it), give up their weapons, and abjure the prospect of resorting to force if they didn’t like the outcome. Sadly, we did not insist on these standards, and the results in Lebanon and Gaza prove our mistake. We should not repeat these errors, although Obama seems well on the way to doing so.

Third, the West should provide material assistance to those truly committed to a free and open society. In days of yore, the United States supplied extensive clandestine assistance to prevent communist takeovers in post-World War II elections in France, Italy and elsewhere. Undoubtedly, the Obama Administration is too fastidious for such Cold War-style behaviour, but perhaps overt, democratic institution-building assistance is not too much to ask. Advocates of doing nothing will argue that Western assistance, overt or covert, will "taint" the real democrats, and should therefore be avoided. Of course, there are always excuses for doing nothing. At a minimum, we should let Egyptians themselves decide whether they will be "tainted" with outside assistance; if they can live with the taint, so should we.

Fourth, Egypt’s military must restore and extend stability, setting an example throughout the Middle East, thereby allowing whatever progress toward a truly democratic culture to emerge. Egypt’s military will require political space in the months ahead. The Pentagon’s continuing close relationship with Egypt’s military should give us confidence that the right message about civilian control over the military is getting through.  One of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ first announcements was that it would honour Egypt’s international obligations, presumably including Camp David. This is important and reassuring internationally, but hardly dispositive of what future governments will do.  

The 1990s were filled with visions of a "new Middle East" that would transform the "cold peace" Israel had achieved with Egypt and Jordan into broader economic and security ties, and that would extend to other Arab countries too. That vision was stillborn, but there is little doubt that we are now going to see a new Middle East whether we like it or not, and whether or not it will be better than what it replaces. Alea iacta est – "the die has been cast" – and it may be long years before it comes to rest.

 

Lara Logan and the media rules

Among the least analyzed aspects of the Egyptian revolution has been the significance of the widespread violence against the foreign media covering the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

The Western media have been unanimous in their sympathetic coverage of the demonstrators in Egypt. Why would the demonstrators want to brutalize them? And why have Western media outlets been so reticent in discussing the significance of their own reporters’ brutalization at the hands of the Egyptian demonstrators?

To date the most egregious attack on a foreign journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square took place last Friday, when CBS’s senior foreign correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten by a mob of Egyptian men. Her own network, CBS, took several days to even report the story, and when it did, it left out important information. The fact that Logan was brutalized for 20 to 30 minutes and that her attackers screamed out "Jew, Jew, Jew" as they ravaged her was absent from the CBS report and from most other follow-on reports in the US media.

The media’s treatment of Logan’s victimization specifically and its treatment of the widescale mob violence against foreign reporters in Cairo generally tells us a great deal about the nature of today’s media discourse.

But before we consider the significance of the coverage, a word must be said about Logan and her colleagues in Tahrir Square. For some time, the common wisdom about journalists has been that they are cowards. Multiple instances of journalistic malpractice led many to conclude that reporters are prisoners of their fears.

For instance, recall the story of the Palestinian lynching of IDF reservists Vadim Nozhitz and Yosef Avrahami at the Palestinian Authority police station in Ramallah on October 1, 2000.

There were dozens of reporters on the scene that day as the Palestinian police-led mob murdered and dismembered Nozhitz and Avrahami.

But only one camera crew – from Italy’s privately owned Mediaset television network – risked life and limb to film the event.

After Mediaset’s footage was published, Ricardo Cristiani, a reporter for RAI television, Mediaset’s state-owned competitor, published an apology in the PA’s official trumpet Al-Hayat al-Jadida.

Among other things, Cristiani wrote, "We [RAI] emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect… the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work."

Cristiani’s behavior, like that of his colleagues who failed to film the lynching, led many to believe that the international media are nothing but a bunch of cowards.

Then there was then-CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s remarkable op-ed in The New York Times in April 2003. In that article, Jordan informed the public that for more than a decade, CNN had systematically covered up the brutality and criminality of Saddam Hussein’s regime. CNN hid the information from the public because it thought it was more important to maintain access to senior Iraqi officials – who fed the network a diet of lies – than to lose that access by reporting the truth.

These stories and many like them are what caused many to believe that that journalists are cowards. But the behavior of the international media in Tahrir Square proves that reporters are by and large brave. Logan and her colleagues willingly went to Tahrir Square to cover the demonstrations in spite of the dangers.

While the reporters on the scene in Cairo serve as a rebuke to the notion of journalistic cowardice, the international media’s tepid and superficial coverage of their brutalization at the hands of the demonstrators shares important features with the negligence of CNN in Iraq and the reporters in Ramallah.

TO BEGIN to understand those common components, it is worth considering another story about sexual misconduct that hit the presses in the US around the time the story about Logan’s victimization was first reported.

This week, a group of female US soldiers filed a class action lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld. The plaintiffs allege that both men and the US defense establishment are responsible for the sexual assaults they suffered during their military service. They claim that the men who abused them were a product of US military culture.

The US media has provided blanket coverage of the story, which effectively places the entire US military on trial for rape.

What is interesting about the lawsuit story is that it highlights the alleged perpetrator. Coverage of the lawsuit has been heavy on details about the alleged misogyny of US military culture.

In stark contrast, coverage of Logan’s sexual assault makes almost no mention of the perpetrators. Certainly the issue of Egypt’s societal misogyny has been ignored.

What makes the distinction between coverage of the two stores so remarkable is that there is there is no comparison between the alleged anti-female bias in the US military and the actual misogyny of Egyptian society.

According to a 1999 report from the World Health Organization, 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have undergone the barbaric practice of genital mutilation. A 2005 report by the Cairo-based Association for Legal Rights of Women submitted to the UN explained that Egyptian women are constitutionally deprived of their basic rights, including their rights to control their bodies and property. Males who murder their female relatives are often unpunished. When they are tried and convicted for premeditated murder, their sentences average from two to four years in prison.

So far the only culprit the US media have managed to find for the sexual assault perpetrated against Lara Logan by a mob of Egyptian men has been a radical leftist reporter named Nir Rosen.

On Tuesday, Rosen wrote defamatory attacks against Logan on his Twitter account. He mocked her suffering and bemoaned the fame the attack would win her.

Rosen’s statements on Twitter set off a feeding frenzy of reporters and commentators who raced to condemn him. New York University’s Center for Law and Security, where Rosen served as a fellow, hastened to demand his resignation.

The onslaught against Rosen for his anti-Logan statements is extremely revealing about the nature of the international media. Rosen’s writings reveal him as an anti-Semite and an anti- American. Rosen has written prolifically about his hope to see Israel destroyed. His war reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq unfailingly takes the side of America’s enemies. He was an embedded reporter with the Taliban and is an outspoken champion of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban.

Rosen’s hateful politics have brought him book contracts, prestigious fellowships, interviews on influential television shows and even a request to give testimony before the US Senate. His work has been published in elite magazines and newspapers.

No one batted a lash when he called for Israel to be destroyed or supported the Taliban – whose treatment of women and girls is among the most brutal in history. But for attacking Logan, he was excommunicated from polite society.

In the hopes of rehabilitating himself, Rosen gave a groveling interview to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night in which he called himself "a jerk."

But it is too late. He broke the rules.

THE STORY of the media at Tahrir Square exposes those rules for all to see. The bravery of the journalists on the scene, the media’s determination to ignore Islamic misogyny, and their expulsion of Rosen from polite society all tell us that what drives the international media is not a quest for truth. It is a quest to advance the ideology of identity politics.

Identity politics revolve around the narrative of victimization. For adherents to identity politics, the victim is not a person, but a member of a privileged victim group. That is, the status of victimhood is not determined by facts, but by membership in an identity group. Stories about victims are not dictated by facts. Victim stories are tailored to fit the victim. Facts, values and individual responsibility are all irrelevant.

In light of this, a person’s membership in specific victim groups is far more important than his behavior. And there is a clear pecking order of victimhood in identity politics.

Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.

After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals.

Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering.

In cases when victim groups are attacked by victim groups – for instance when Iraqis were attacked by Saddam, or Palestinians are attacked by the PA, the media tend to ignore the story.

When members of Western victim groups are attacked by Third World victims, the story can be reported, but with as little mention of the identity of the victim-perpetrators as possible. So it was with coverage of Logan and the rest of the foreign reporters assaulted in Egypt. They were attacked by invisible attackers with no identities, no barbaric values, no moral responsibility, and no criminal culpability. CBS went so far as to blur the faces of the men who surrounded Logan in the moments before she was attacked.

When we understand the rules of reportage as dictated by adherents to identity politics, we understand why Rosen was excommunicated when he mocked Logan and not when he called for Israel’s destruction, condemned the commemoration of the September 11 attacks, or sided with the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents killing Americans. In those cases, he followed the rules – preferring the cause of "victims" over the lives of "perpetrators."

But when he mocked Logan, he crossed the line. He treated Logan as a perpetrator because he thought of her as an insufficiently anti-American reporter. He didn’t realize that when she was brutalized, she had slid into the victim category.

Identity politics are nothing more than socially acceptable bigotry. Those who practice them are racist bigots who have replaced liberal values that hold everyone to the same moral and criminal standards with illiberal values that judge people’s morality and criminality by the identity group with which they are most readily associated.

When we understand identity politics, we understand how it is that the wholesale assaults against foreign journalists have received so little analysis. Lara Logan and the other hundred reporters attacked in Tahrir Square are real victims, not because of who they are, but because of what happened to them. The Egyptians who attacked them are real criminals, not because of who they are, but because of what they did.

But until reporters are willing to admit this – that is, until they dump their ideological attachment to identity politics in favor of the truth – news consumers worldwide will continue to receive news reports that obfuscate more than they tell us about the world we live in.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The legacy of a teetering peace

One of the first casualties of the Egyptian revolution may very well be Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. The Egyptian public’s overwhelming animus towards Jews renders it politically impossible for any Egyptian leader to come out in support of the treaty.

Over the weekend, the junta now ruling Egypt refused to explicitly commit themselves to maintaining the treaty. Instead, under intense American pressure they sufficed with stating that they would maintain all of Egypt’s international obligations.

According to news reports, the generals themselves are split in their positions on Israel. One group supports maintaining the treaty. The other supports its abrogation.

Ayman Nour, the head of the oppositionist Ghad Party and the man heralded as the liberal democratic alternative to Mubarak by Washington neo-conservatives has called for the peace treaty to be abrogated. In an interview with an Egyptian radio station he said, "The Camp David Accords are finished. Egypt has to at least conduct negotiations over conditions of the agreement."

For its part, the Muslim Brotherhood has been outspoken in its call to end the treaty since it was signed 32 years ago.

Whatever ends up happening, it is clear that Israel is entering a new era in its relations with Egypt. And before we can begin contending with its challenges, we must first consider the legacy of the peace treaty that then prime minister Menachem Begin signed with then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on March 26, 1979.

What was the nature of Israel’s agreement with Egypt? What was its impact on Israel’s strategic vision? What were the strategic assumptions that formed the basis of its component parts? How did all of these issues impact Israel’s perception of the long-term prospects for its relations with Egypt?

WHEN BEGIN and Sadat signed the peace treaty, their act was the culmination of 15 months of negotiations catalyzed by Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and his speech before the Knesset on November 20, 1977.

Sadat’s visit to Israel’s capital was an extraordinary gesture. Here was the man who just four years earlier had waged an unprovoked, brutal war of aggression against Israel that placed the country in mortal danger and killed some 2,600 of its finest sons.

Here was the leader of the country that had fought five unprovoked wars of aggression against Israel in 29 years.

And yet suddenly, here was this man, Israel’s greatest foe, standing before the Knesset and declaring that he was not seeking a ceasefire, but peace.

As he put it, "I have not come to you to seek a partial peace, namely to terminate the state of belligerency at this stage…I have come to you so that together we might build a durable peace based on justice, to avoid the shedding of one single drop of blood from an Arab or an Israeli."

The effect of Sadat’s visit on the Israeli psyche generally and on Begin’s mindset in particular was profound. A new book of the two leaders’ correspondence, Peace in the Making: The Menachem Begin-Anwar Sadat Personal Correspondence edited by Harry Hurwitz and Yisrael Medad of the Begin Heritage Center presents readers with a portrait of the Israeli leader enthralled with the belief that he and Sadat were embarking their nations on the road to a peaceful future.

But it was not to be. Whether Sadat was purposely deceptive or whether he was simply blocked from implementing his vision of peace by an assassin’s bullet in 1981is unclear. True, he committed Egypt committed to peace. The peace treaty contains an entire annex devoted to specific commitments to cultivate every sort of cultural, social and economic tie imaginable. But both Sadat and his successor Mubarak breached every one of them.
 
As the intervening 32 years since the treaty was signed have shown, in essence, the deal was nothing more than a ceasefire. Israel surrendered the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and in exchange, Egypt has not staged a military attack against Israel from its territory.

The peace treaty’s critics maintain that the price Israel paid was too high and so the treaty was unjustified. They also argue that Israel set a horrible precedent for future negotiations with its neighbors by ceding the entire Sinai in exchange for the treaty. Moreover, they note that Palestinian autonomy agreement in the treaty was a terrible deal. And it set the framework for the disastrous Oslo peace process with the PLO 15 years later.
 
For their part, supporters of the treaty claim that the precedent it set was terrific for Israel. The treaty cites the borders of the Palestine Mandate as Israel’s legal borders. And since the Mandate envisioned a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River, at a minimum the peace treaty sets a precedent for a future annexation of the west bank of the Jordan.

Whatever their relative merits may be, in the end, both sides of the argument are largely irrelevant. Precedents don’t matter in politics. Interests, not precedents determine how states and non-state actors operate. As for whether or not the deal was justified given the exorbitant price, it is unclear what choice Begin had.

In 1977 Jimmy Carter was the president of the United States. And Carter was the most hostile president Israel had faced. His negative attitude towards Israel made it all but impossible for Begin to walk away from the table. When Carter’s antagonism is coupled with Sadat’s romantic pledges of everlasting peace and brotherhood, it is easy to understand why Begin agreed to overpay for a ceasefire.

WHILE BEGIN’S behavior during the negotiations is relatively easy to understand, Israel’s behavior since the peace with Egypt was signed is less comprehensible, and certainly less forgivable. Since Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1981, it has been the state’s consistent policy to ignore Egypt’s bad faith. This 30-year refusal of Israel’s leadership to contend with the true nature of the deal Israel achieved with Egypt has had a debilitating impact both on Israel’s internal strategic discourse as well as on its international behavior.

As the US-backed demonstrators in Tahrir Square gained steam, and the prospect that Mubarak’s regime would indeed be overthrown became increasingly likely, IDF sources began noting that the IDF and the Mossad will need to build intelligence gathering capabilities towards Egypt after 30 years of neglect. These statements make clear the debilitating impact of Israel’s self-induced strategic blindness to our neighbor in the south.

Under the ceasefire, with Israeli approval and encouragement, Egypt has built a modern, US-trained and armed military. And for 30 years, that military has been training to fight Israel.

On the other side, Israel stopped training in desert warfare and stopped gathering intelligence on the Egyptian military. As far as IDF commanders and successive defense ministers have been concerned, there was no reason to prepare for war or care about Egypt’s preparations for war because we were at peace.

On the international stage, our leadership’s refusal to acknowledge that Egypt had not abandoned its belligerent attitude against Israel was translated into an abject refusal to admit or deal with the fact that Egypt leads the international political war against Israel. Rather than fight back when Egyptian diplomats at the UN instigate anti-Israel resolution after anti-Israel resolution, Israeli diplomats have pretended that there is no reason for concern.

The same is the case regarding Egyptian anti-Semitism. Before the peace treaty, the Foreign Ministry prepared regular reports on anti-Semitism in the Egyptian media and school system. These reports were distributed at embassies and consulates throughout the world. After the treaty was signed, the reports were filed away and never spoken of.

In his speeches Sadat repeatedly claimed that he was channeling the hopes and beliefs of the entire Egyptian people. But the fact is that Sadat was a military dictator.

Israel failed to consider the implications of signing a deal with a military dictator on the prospects for the deal’s longevity. In an interview with Der Spiegel last week the Muslim Brotherhood’s puppet Mohammed ElBaradei explained those implications. As ElBaradei put it, Israel has "a peace treaty with Mubarak, but not one with the Egyptian people."

THE ADVANTAGE of having a good relationship with a dictator is that he can deliver quickly. The disadvantage is that once he is gone no one is bound by his decisions because he doesn’t represent anyone.

There are other problems with making deals with dictators. Due to the repressive nature of authoritarian regimes, they have no mechanisms in place for peaceful changes. And yet change in dictatorships, like change everywhere else, is an historic inevitability. In the absence of a mechanism for peaceful change, as a general rule, change in authoritarian regimes is revolutionary rather than evolutionary. The revolution in Cairo is the clearest example of this.

Another problem with the deal that Israel made with Sadat the dictator is demonstrated by the current unrest in the Sinai. In 1977 Egypt’s was the strongest regime in the region. So when Israel thought about the threat emanating from Egypt, it thought about the Egyptian army barreling toward Beersheba. That is why the Egyptian military was barred from operating in the Sinai.

The last thing on Israel’s mind in 1978 was the Bedouin tribes in the Sinai. Back then Sinai’s Bedouin were pro-Israel and bitterly disappointed when Israel withdrew. But a lot has changed since then.

Over the past 20 years or so, the power of Egypt’s central authority in its hinterlands has weakened. The strength of the Bedouin has grown. And over the past decade or so, the Bedouin of Sinai, like the Bedouin from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Israel have become aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and its al Qaida and Hamas spinoffs.

The Bedouin attacks on Egyptian police and border guard installations in al Arish and Suez over the past three weeks are an indication that the fear of a strong state, which was so central to Israel’s thinking in during the peace process with Egypt, is no longer Israel’s most urgent concern. Transnational jihadists in the Sinai are much more immediately threatening than the Egyptian military is. But the peace treaty – signed with a military dictator — provides neither Israel nor Egypt with tools to deal with this threat.

AS ISRAEL moves into the uncharted territory of managing its relations with the post-Mubarak Egypt, it is imperative that our leaders understand the lessons of the past.

Fantasies are no match for reality. Aggression must be fought, not wished away. And the world is a dynamic place. Today’s solutions will likely be irrelevant tomorrow as new challenges eclipse the current ones. Our strategies must be rational, flexible and sober-minded if we are to chart a forward course rather than be thrown asunder by the coming storm.

And we must never put all our eggs in anyone’s basket.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

David Horowitz Confronts the Muslim Brotherhood at CPAC

Editor’s note: Below is David Horowitz’s speech at CPAC 2011:

The Transcript:

Our country finds itself at a troubling crossroads. We confront challenges from forces that are opposed to its very existence as the nation our founders created. These forces are secular and religious and are poised to attack the foundations of our nation both at home and abroad. In facing them conservatives have a special responsibility as a patriotic vanguard dedicated to the principles that have made America what it is, and who are willing to confront the enemies that seek to destroy her.

At home the adversary calls itself a progressive movement but its goal is to transform America into a socialist state, which would mean the destruction of our liberties. For as the founders warned, there is an ineluctable conflict between liberty and equality. You cannot make men equal without taking away their freedom. The founders devised a Constitution designed to thwart what they called “wicked schemes” to take wealth from one segment of the population  and distribute it to another.

Our political parties are now divided between those on the left who want to use the state to redistribute wealth and those on the right who want to protect individual liberty, between those who want to expand government and those who want to limit it.

Here is my advice. You cannot defeat the forces who want to expand government merely by arguing that government is wasteful and inefficient and that the private sector accomplishes tasks better. We have already enlisted those who understand the benefits of the private sector. The only argument that will persuade others is the argument that government is destructive and hurts the people it is intended to serve.

I will give you one example. One of the largest government programs that virtually everyone supports is public education. But public education administered by government is destroying the lives of millions of poor and mainly black and Hispanic children every year. Half the children in our urban public schools drop out before they graduate and half of those who do graduate are functionally illiterate. Stop the government from destroying the lives of millions of poor black and Hispanic children by giving full tuition education vouchers to every child. Take government out of the school business. Vouchers are the civil rights movement of the 21st Century. That is an argument that can persuade the unpersuaded.

We are also faced both at home and abroad with an existential enemy in political Islam. Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means insofar as possible, and by terror where necessary, and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam, and it is growing force within the Islamic world itself.

In Egypt, 85% of the population is on record approving of the death penalty for apostates who leave Islam. The same people also believe that the death penalty for defectors from the faith is a form of democracy and religious freedom. There is nothing new in this apparent contradiction. Communist totalitarians also worked through the electoral process wherever possible and through violence when necessary. They called the police states and gulags they created “people’s democracies.” The Soviet Constitution was described by its creators and by the progressive movements that defended it as “the most democratic in the world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of political Islam and has spawned 12 terrorist armies including al-Qaeda and Hamas is a political force in Egypt that is also willing to participate in elections and in the civil institutions of society. The Holy Land Foundation, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest Islamic charity in America until it was raided by the FBI and put on trial in Texas for funding Hamas. One of the documents seized in a concealed basement at the Foundation headquarters and put into evidence by the FBI was the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America. The stated goal of this plan was to “destroy the American civilization.”

The plan called for building a secret leadership in America and for the creation of a series of Brotherhood front groups that would appear to be participants in America’s democracy until the time came when and where force would be necessary to accomplish the Brotherhood’s goals.

When I read the document, it reminded me of the Communists in America who were on trial for conspiring to overthrow the government, which they surely were, but who described themselves as Jeffersonian democrats. I knew several of them personally, including one who went underground to prosecute the violent revolution. Thanks to the imprudent tolerance of our courts, their convictions were all overturned.

The front groups that the Muslim Brotherhood set up were identified in the captured document. Among them were the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The latter was set up to be a so-called civil rights organization whose purpose was to use the American Constitution to advance the Brotherhood’s aims. The Communist Party had several similar fronts, including the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born as well.

The late Mahboob Khan was an American Muslim, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association. He was also instrumental in creating the Islamic Society of North America. Mahboob Khan’s widow today sits on the board of one of the regional organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood front CAIR.

Mahboob Khan also founded three mosques in California, which preach the totalitarian doctrines of the Brotherhood. In 1993 Mahboob Khan and one of his mosques hosted the “Blind Sheik” Abdul Rahman just two months before the Sheik’s terrorist group blew up the World  Trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than a thousand. In 1995 Mahboob Khan and his mosque in Santa Clara, California hosted and held a fund-raiser for Ayaman al-Zawahiri, a member of the Brotherhood and the number two man in al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been wildly successful in its plan to become part of America’s civil culture and to infiltrate the institutions of America’s civil government, including the White House and both political parties, and the conservative movement as well. Suhail Khan is the proud son of Mahboob Khan and his protégé, as he is also the protégé of the convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.

Sponsored by his longtime patron Grover Norquist, who has been a pillar of the conservative movement, Suhail Khan was given a White House appointment in the Bush Administration and facilitated Alamoudi’s access to the president. Suhail then became an Undersecretary of Transportation where he received a top security clearance. With Grover’s support Suhail has also been made a board member of the American Conservative Union and was the moderator of a panel on Religious Liberty yesterday at this event.

Suhail Khan used his offices in the Bush White House with Grover’s connivance to carry water for the terrorist Sami al-Arian in an attempt to ban the use of secret evidence in terrorist trials – a proposal that thanks to Grover’s immense political influence was actually endorsed by President Bush and was only thwarted by the 9/11 terror attacks.

Over the last ten years the influence of the Brotherhood has spread throughout our government. There is nothing new in this sad reality. In 1938 Whittaker Chambers attempted to warn President Roosevelt that one of his White House advisers, Alger Hiss, was a Soviet agent. When Roosevelt was given Chambers’ information, he laughed and disregarded it. Alger Hiss remained as the president’s adviser until the House Un-American Activities Committee flushed him out.

In the midst of the current crisis in Egypt, our biggest ally in the Middle East, both Secretary of State Clinton and the present director of national intelligence have given the Muslim Brotherhood an imprimatur as a peaceful, moderate and democratic organization. FBI directors appear at the annual dinners of CAIR, and the president has appointed members of the Islamic Society of North America to top positions in the Department of Homeland Security.

Frank Gaffney has been the courageous bringer of the bad news about Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the board of the American Conservative Union. Many good conservatives on the board have refused to believe the evidence of Suhail Khan’s Brotherhood allegiances and agendas. They are of the opinion that Suhail’s public appearances with Alamoudi and the Muslim Brotherhood fronts took place a decade ago, and that he doesn’t promote violent agendas. I understand this. My parents were Communists in the heyday of Stalin. The Party’s slogan was not “Bring on the dictatorship of the Proletariat” or “Revolution Now.” But that is what they believed. The slogan of the Communist Party was “Peace, Jobs and Democracy.”

As for the question of whether Suhail Khan believes now what he openly said then, my answer is this. When an honest person has been a member of a destructive movement and leaves it, he will feel compelled to repudiate it publicly and to warn others of the dangers it poses. This is a sure test of whether someone has left the Muslim Brotherhood or not.

I urge conservatives to school themselves in the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and the networks it has spawned. And to be vigilant against its spread into the ranks of the conservative movement and the government of the country they love.

Editor’s Update: See David’s rebuttal to Suhail Khan’s response here.

Why We Should Fear the Moslem Brother

As we follow the unfolding story in Egypt, we are torn between hope and fear — hope that democracy will gain a toehold and fear that the fundamentalist Moslem Brothers could take control of Egypt.  Perhaps you have heard the Moslem Brothers are the oldest and largest radical Islamic group, the grandfather of Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda.

What you haven’t been told is this: the Moslem Brothers were a small, unpopular group of anti-modern fanatics unable to attract members, until they were adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich beginning in the 1930s.  Under the tutelage of the Third Reich, the Brothers started the modern jihadi movement, complete with a genocidal program against Jews.  In the words of Matthias Kuntzel, "[t]he significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas."

What is equally ominous for Jews and Israel is that despite Mubarak’s pragmatic coexistence with Israel for the last thirty years, every Egyptian leader from Nasser through Sadat to Mubarak has enshrined Nazi Jew-hatred in mainstream Egyptian culture out of both conviction and political calculation.  Nasser, trained by Nazis as a youth, spread the genocidal conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, making it a bestseller throughout the Arab world.  On the Ramadan following 9/11, Mubarak presided over a thirty-week-long TV series dramatizing Elders and its genocidal message.  

It is impossible to assess the danger posed by a takeover of Egypt today by the Moslem Brothers without knowing that Nazism launched the Brothers and is still at their core.  This response to modernity and to Jews was not predetermined by Egyptian history or culture.  It was Germany under Hitler that changed the course of history for Egypt and the Middle East.

How do we know all this?  We know it because the Third Reich was a meticulous keeper of records.  We have the memos, the planning documents, the budgets, even photos and films of the Reich’s spectacularly successful campaign, implemented by the Moslem Brothers, to turn the Middle East into a hotbed of virulent Jew-hatred.  We have the minutes, the photo, and the memo of understanding, when Hitler and the head of the Moslem Brothers in Palestine, the Mufti of Jerusalem, shook hands on a plan for a Final Solution in the Middle East.

We have the records of this meeting, in which Hitler and the head of the Moslem Brothers in Palestine shook hands on a Final Solution for the Middle East — years before the creation of Israel.

The Moslem Brothers helped Hitler succeed in genocide by slamming shut the door to safety in Palestine.  This was a key part of the success of the Final Solution.  The anti-Jewish riots in Palestine that led the British to cave to Arab pressure and shut off Jewish escape are well-known — how many of us know they were funded by Hitler?  Winston Churchill protested the closing of Palestine to the Jews in the House of Commons, arguing against the appeasement of Nazi-funded Arab violence:

So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. … We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.

Who knows how many Jews would have escaped Hitler if the Jewish National Home in Palestine had remained open to them?

We do know that without the work of Hitler’s allies, the Moslem Brothers, many signs indicate that Israel would have been a welcome neighbor in the Middle East, but this path was closed off by Moslem Brotherhood terrorism.  This is not "ancient history."  According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat (born Mohammed Al-Husseini, in Cairo) adopted the name Yasser to honor the Moslem Brothers’ terror chief, who threw moderate Palestinians into pits of scorpions and snakes, eliminated the entire Nashashibi family of Jerusalem because they welcomed Jews into Palestine, and drove forty thousand Arabs into exile.  The corpses of their victims would be left in the street for days, shoes stuck in their mouths, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating a Jewish homeland.  Arafat as a member of the Moslem Brothers was directly trained by Nazi officers who were invited to Egypt after the fall of Hitler in Europe.

Like the pro-democracy demonstrators out in the streets of Cairo this week, immediately after World War I, Egypt was filled with hope for developing a modern, tolerant society.  The Egyptian revolution of 1919 united the country’s Moslems, Christians, and Jews around the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood."  The constitution of 1923 was completely secular, establishing a constitutional monarchy.  It took Western democracy as a model and worked for the equal status of women.  Jews were an accepted part of public life.  There were Jewish members of parliament.  The Zionist movement was accepted with "considerable sympathy," because the government’s priority was to maintain good relations between the three most important religious groups — Moslems, Jews, and Coptic Christians.  Today, the Jews are gone, and the Copts are viciously persecuted.  But in 1919, there was even an Egyptian section of the International Zionist Organization.  Its founder, Leon Castro, a Jew, was also the spokesman of the largest Egyptian political party, the Wafd, related to the largest opposition party taking part in this week’s demonstrations.

When, in March 1928, the charismatic preacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, it was a flop.  It promoted world domination by Islam and the restoration of the Caliphate, focusing on a complete subjugation of women.  In its first decade, the Moslem Brothers attracted only eight hundred members.

Then Hitler ascended to power.  A branch of the Nazi party was set up in Cairo.  The Egyptian government was told that if it did not begin to persecute their Jews, Germany would boycott Egyptian cotton.  When the government caved and began a press campaign and discriminatory measures against Jews, it was rewarded by Germany’s becoming the second largest importer of Egyptian goods.  The Egyptian public was impressed by the propaganda about Germany’s economic progress and impressive Nazi mass marches.  The pro-fascist Young Egypt movement was founded in 1933.  Abdel Nasser, later Egypt’s most famous leader, remained loyal to Nazi ideology for the rest of his career.  During the war there was a popular street song in the Middle East: "Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth."

In the 1930s, the Third Reich poured men, money, weapons, and propaganda training into the Moslem Brotherhood.  It was the Reich that taught the fundamentalists to focus their anger on the Jews instead of on women.  By war’s end, thanks entirely to Hitler’s tutelage and direct support, the brotherhood had swelled to a million members, and Jew-hatred had become central to mainstream Arab culture.  Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini listened daily to the Nazi propaganda broadcast from Berlin by Moslem Brother Haj Amin al-Husseini.  So did every Arab with a radio, throughout the war, as it was the most popular programming in the Middle East.  Thanks to Hitler, the Moslem Brothers enshrined anti-Semitism as the main organizing force of Middle East politics for the next eighty years.

Egyptian society has lived in Hitler’s world of hate ever since.  According to leading expert on the Third Reich’s fusion with Islamism in Egypt Matthias Kunztel:

On this point (Jews), the entire Egyptian society has been Islamized.  In Egypt the ostracism and demonization of Jews is not a matter of debate, but a basic assumption of everyday discourse.  As if the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty had never been signed, Israel and Israelis are today totally boycotted … be it lawyers, journalists, doctors or artists…all Egyptian universities, sports associations, theatres and orchestras. … If there is one theme in contemporary Egypt which unites Islamists, Liberals, Nasserites and Marxists, it is the collective fantasy of the common enemy in the shape of Israel and the Jews, which almost always correlates with the wish to destroy Israel.

In launching the Moslem Brothers’ modern jihadi movement, Hitler did far more than enshrine anti-Semitism in the Middle East.  As if some kind of divine punishment, the creation of jihadism also sabotaged the move towards modernity and representative government, ruining hopes for freedom and prosperity for the Arab people.  The Brothers were the excuse for Mubarak’s thirty years of emergency rule.  The Brothers were central to both the PLO and Hamas, killing all hope for peaceful coexistence and prosperity for the Palestinian people.  They had an early role in founding the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq, turning those countries over to kleptocratic tyrants.  Moslem Brothers taught Osama bin Laden, and their philosophy is considered the foundational doctrine of al-Qaeda.

Will history repeat itself?  Or will the Egyptian people take back their country, throw off Hitler’s long shadow, and begin again on the hopeful path to democracy and a decent life that they began at the beginning of the modern era?

 
This article was originally posted at The American Thinker.

Who tossed Egypt (to the wolves)?

Dick Morris has observed that President Obama’s tenure will be darkly remembered by our countrymen for his having "lost" Egypt.  Since the effect of the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak collapsing imminently and its replacement by one dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood will likely be a terrible regional war, it would be bad enough if the Obama administration were simply culpable of the sort of malign neglect that contributed in the past to the toppling of other friends of the United States.

Unfortunately, the question to be pursued – presumably by the new Republican House of Representatives – is not "Who lost Egypt?" but rather "Who tossed Egypt?" as in, to the wolves.

To be sure, Wikileaks has recently published classified diplomatic cables from Embassy Cairo that exhibit the standard clientitis (a pathology common in State Department circles, in which Foreign Service types strive to protect bilateral relations by doing what the host government wants).  For example, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized today:

"The Egyptians quickly responded [to President Obama’s explicit rejection of George W. Bush’s "Freedom Agenda"] by telling the new Administration to drop the Bush emphasis on political reform. ‘Wherever [Mr. Mubarak] has seen these U.S. efforts, he can point to the chaos and loss of stability that ensued,’ reported current U.S. ambassador to Cairo Margaret Scobey in a 2009 [message to Foggy Bottom]."

Still, it appears that the Obama Administration has been "reaching out" for some time to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt among other places, including here in the United States.  Most obviously, as Sean Hannity noted on his program with me and Egyptian expatriate author and former Muslim Nonie Darwish last night, President Obama insisted that Muslim Brotherhood representatives be included in the audience for his speech in Cairo in June 2009.

 

 

In September 2009, the Obama administration co-sponsored with Egypt a deeply problematic resolution in the deeply problematic UN Human Rights Council.  While it is technically true that the Mubarak regime was the lead sponsor, the real impetus behind this bid to have United Nations members take steps to sanction expression that offends Islam were actually fronting for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).  The OIC is a multinational Islamist entity whose views and policies closely correlate to the MB’s shariah-promoting agenda.  (For more on the menace posed by OIC, see Shariah: The Threat to America).

Aaron Klein points out that:

This past weekend, the London Telegraph reported the U.S. embassy in Cairo in 2008 helped a young dissident attend a U.S.-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.  The Telegraph would not identify the dissident, but said he was involved in helping to stir the current protests.  The report claimed the dissident told the U.S. embassy in Cairo that an alliance of opposition groups had a plan to topple Mubarak’s government.

Klein added that, “The disclosures, contained in U.S. diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police.”

In the days since the “street” started erupting in Egypt, moreover, Team Obama has been ever more explicitly cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood.  For example, the President, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs have, in turn: pressed Mubarak publicly not to use violence against the demonstrators; then called on him to negotiate with them; then insisted that he  make an orderly transition to democracy; then announced that “important non-secular actors” should be included in that successor government; and then, after the dictator announced he would not run for reelection, told him to leave office now.

And now we learn from Egyptian government sources, that Obama emissary and former U.S. ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner has met face-to-face in Embassy Cairo with Issam El-Erian, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.  What was said by the two has yet to be disclosed.  But the message could not be more transparent:  The Muslim Brotherhood is now deemed by Washington to be a legitimate interlocutor and welcome to exercise power in Cairo.

Based on this trajectory, it is predictable that, within days – if not hours, America will be formally endorsing a new MB-dominated government.  This will be an unmitigated disaster, not just for our ally, Israel, but for U.S. security interests in the region and beyond.

At a minimum, how will the United States be able to oppose the Ikhwan’s ascendancy in other states throughout the so-called “Muslim world”?  And what are we going to do about the immense amounts of advanced military hardware successive administrations have foolishly sold or given to the governments we are now complicit in toppling, weapons that will almost surely be used against us?

Before this impending debacle eventuates, Congress should immediately launch investigations to determine exactly what President Obama and his subordinates have done to toss Egypt to the Islamist wolves – and what may yet be done to limit the damage done to our credibility as an ally and to our security interests.

Clueless in Washington

The Egyptian multitudes on the streets of Cairo are a stunning sight. With their banners calling for freedom and an end to the reign of President Hosni Mubarak the story these images tell is a simple one as old as time.

On the one hand we have the young, dispossessed and weak protesters. And on the other we have the old, corrupt and tyrannical Mubarak. Hans Christian Andersen taught us who to support when we were wee tots.

But does his wisdom apply in this case? 

Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak’s predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.

The blue ribbon panel’s recommendations were applauded by its members’ many friends across the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard‘s editor William Kristol praised the panel on Sunday and wrote, "It’s time for the US government to take an active role… to bring about a South Korea/Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt, from an American-supported dictatorship to an American-supported and popularly legitimate liberal democracy."

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak’s regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe. 

Understanding this, Israeli officials and commentators have been nearly unanimous in their negative responses to what is happening in Egypt. The IDF, the national security council, all intelligence agencies and the government as well as the media have all agreed that Israel’s entire regional approach will have to change dramatically in the event that Egypt’s regime is overthrown.

None of the scenarios under discussion are positive.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior – as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics – is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets? 

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo? 

Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world’s only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can’t see their way past them.

The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush’s democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.

Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush’s push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.

The problem is that while Bush’s diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.

Bush was right that tyranny breeds radicalism and instability and is therefore dangerous for the US.

But his belief that free elections would solve the problem of Arab radicalism and instability was completely wrong. At base, Bush’s belief was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal.

When, due to US pressure, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to vote in open and free elections in 2006, they voted for Hamas and its totalitarian agenda. When due to US pressure, the Egyptians were given limited freedom to choose their legislators in 2005, where they could they elected the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood to lead them.

The failure of his elections policy convinced Bush to end his support for elections in his last two years in office.

Frustratingly, Bush’s push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites – anti-colonialism – Bush’s leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.

It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration’s foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.

As Obama put it at the time, "It’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections."

And it is this anti-colonialist paradigm that has guided Obama’s courtship of the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian regimes and his unwillingness to lift a hand to help the March 14 movement in Lebanon.

MOREOVER, SINCE the paradigm claims that the non-Western world’s grievances towards the West are legitimate, Obama’s Middle East policy is based on the view that the best way to impact the Arab world is by joining its campaign against Israel. This was the central theme of Obama’s speech before an audience dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members in Cairo in June 2009.

Like the pro-democracy paradigm, the anti-colonialist paradigm is narcissistic. Whereas Western democracy champions believe that all people are born with the same Western liberal democratic values, post-colonialists believe that non-Westerners are nothing more than victims of the West. They are not responsible for any of their own pathologies because they are not actors. Only Westerners (and Israelis) are actors. Non-Westerners are objects. And like all objects, they cannot be held responsible for anything they do because they are wholly controlled by forces beyond their control.

Anti-colonialists by definition must always support the most anti-Western forces as "authentic." In light of Mubarak’s 30-year alliance with the US, it makes sense that Obama’s instincts would place the US president on the side of the protesters.

SO THERE we have it. The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.

Add to that Obama’s electoral concern about looking like he is on the right side of justice and we have a US policy that is wholly antithetical to US interests.

This presents a daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge for the US’s remaining authoritarian Arab allies. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until now restive publics have been fearful of opposing their leaders because the US supports them. Now that the US is abandoning its most important ally and siding with its worst enemies, the Hashemites and the Sauds don’t look so powerful to their Arab streets. The same can be said for the Kuwaiti leadership and the pro-American political forces in Iraq.

As for Israel, America’s behavior towards Egypt should put to rest the notion that Israel can make further territorial sacrifices in places like the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley in exchange for US security guarantees. US behavior today – and the across-the-board nature of American rejection of Mubarak – is as clear a sign as one can find that US guarantees are not credible.

As Prof. Barry Rubin wrote this week, "There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt but the Obama administration may be adopting something close to the worst option."

Unfortunately, given the cluelessness of the US foreign policy debate, this situation is only likely to grow worse.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

Exposing the puppet masters

Israel is today in the throes of a powerful backlash against the Knesset’s decision last week to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the foreign funding of Israeli NGOs that engage in political warfare against the state. 

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni claimed on Tuesday that the commission shows that "Israel today is deteriorating and abusing the very values for which we want to fight. The way that Israel is presented by the belligerent, violent government is hindering Israel’s ability to defend itself." 

As head of the opposition, over the past two months Livni has angrily opposed every initiative supported by the government as loudly as she can, regardless of its merits. So it isn’t surprising that she would condemn the commission. More jarring are the statements by Likud ministers condemning the Knesset move. 

It has been known for years that European governments finance Israeli anti-Israel pressure groups. The exact amount of funding has never been determined. No one can tell the public whether or not these groups could survive without foreign funding. The Israeli public deserves to know just how Israeli these groups are and what foreign governments require them to do in exchange for receiving funding.

Some estimates place foreign funding for Israeli NGOs at NIS500 million per year. Some estimates have claimed that foreign donations make up the majority of many of the radical leftist groups’ budgets. 

Take Ir Amim for instance. Ir Amim is a group dedicated to undermining Israeli sovereignty in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. Last year NGO Monitor reported that Ir Amim receives 67 percent of its budget directly from European governments. 

What does this mean about the nature of this group? Can it be reasonably called an Israeli organization? 

It is hard to understand why exposing this information to the public would be a cause of consternation and worry for the likes of Likud ministers Dan Meridor, Bennie Begin, Michael Eitan and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin who have been outspoken in criticizing the formation of the Knesset panel of inquiry. 

More likely than not, what really bothered these gentlemen from Likud was that these groups are not simply being called out for the European funding they receive. They are being accused of receiving money from Arabs and assisting terror groups. 

In remarks in support of the probe proposed by his Yisrael Beitenu party, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did not simply accuse the likes of Ir Amim, B’Tselem, Adalah, New Profile, Breaking the Silence, the Public Committee Against Torture, Human Rights Watch, Ittijah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, Moked: Center for the Defense of  the Individual, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights in Israel of being on Europe’s payroll. 

He said that these groups, "help terrorists, and their main aim is to weaken the IDF and its ability to protect the citizens of the State of Israel."

The notion that Israeli NGOs may have ties to terrorists is without a doubt political dynamite. And people get frightened by dynamite. But a new report indicates that Lieberman’s accusations are an accurate depiction of reality. 

THIS WEEK Im Tirtzu, the Zionist student movement released a report that makes a convincing case that foreign Arabs are funding Israeli Jewish and Arab NGOs with the aim of criminalizing Israel and influencing Israel’s political discourse in a way that constrains Israel’s ability to defend itself.

Im Tirtzu’s report is titled, "Support by Arab foundations and states for organizations working against the policies of the State of Israel and the IDF." It focuses on two Palestinian organizations headquartered in Ramallah: The Welfare Association, and the NGO Development Center. 

The Welfare Association was established in 1983 for the purpose of building a sustainable Palestinian society. It operates in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, Gaza, throughout Israel and in Lebanon. It receives money from the EU and the World Bank and separate European governments. It also receives money from Arab governments and Arab governmental funds from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and OPEC. Of its 2004 budget of nearly $30 million, more than half came from Arab sources. 

As the Im Tirtzu report notes, one of those contributors is particularly notable. In 2004, the Welfare Association received $796,606 from the Islamic Development Bank – al Aksa Fund – Saudi Arabia. Im Tirtzu attests that the IDB has continued to fund the Welfare Association since then as well. 

According to the IDB’s own documents, cited by the Im Tirtzu report, in October 2000 at an Arab League summit in Cairo, Arab leaders decided to establish the IDB’s al Aksa Fund and the Al-Quds Intifada Fund "to assert comprehensive Arab support for the Palestinian people in the face of continuous Israeli aggression." Together the two funds received $1 billion to distribute. 

According to a report by the American Center for Democracy cited by Im Tirtzu, "In 2001 alone, the IDB transferred $538 million raised publicly by Saudi and Gulf Royal telethons to support the Palestinian intifada and families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IDB has also channeled UN funds to Hamas, as documented by bank records discovered in the West Bank and Gaza."

In 2001 the Saudi Ain A-Yaqeen newspaper reported that that year the IDB transferred $2,378,072 to the families of Palestinian "martyrs," and prisoners. 

Among the many groups it funds, the Welfare Association supports Israeli Arab NGOs. These include Adalah, Balanda, Ahali, Ittijah, Mada al Carmel, and the Galilee Society. The Welfare Association also gives direct support to Israeli Arab municipal governments including Nazareth’s municipal government and Kfar Kanna’s local council. Its efforts are aimed at breaking the cultural and civic ties between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews. Among other things, it sponsored a campaign to block Israeli Arabs from volunteering in national service. It also buys properties for Arabs throughout the country. 

The Im Tirtzu report shows that in 2006 the Welfare Association was instrumental in forming the NGO Development Center in Ramallah. Five out of 13 members of the NDC’s board of directors are also on the Welfare Association’s Board of Directors. The Welfare Association also donates money to the NDC.

The NDC acts as yet another clearinghouse for donor money to Palestinian and Israeli NGOs. Aside from the money it receives from the Welfare Association, most of its annual budget of $19 million comes from European governments. 

According to the NDC’s website, to receive funds from the NDC, groups must agree to "monitor, document, and report on violations by the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian human rights, as well as undertake campaigning and advocacy activities to address these violations and raise awareness about them."

Between July 2008 and December 2009, the NDC allocated $1.89 million to the following Israeli NGOs: B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, the Public Committee Against Torture, Moked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Bimkom, the Public Committee Against Housing Demolitions, Moussawa, Breaking the Silence, Gisha, Yesh Din, and Workers’ Hotline. 

The largest beneficiaries were B’Tselem, which was allocated $450,000 and received $405,000 by the end of the reporting period, and Moked which received $500,000. 

While it is true that most of NDC’s funds are donated by European countries, it is also true that it is a Palestinian organization. And as it funding requirements make clear, in order to receive money from the NDC, groups need to actively participate in political warfare against Israel. 

Given Im Tirtzu’s limited resources, it is more than likely that its findings are merely the tip of the iceberg. And yet, even with its limited scope, the report makes a convincing case that hostile Arab governments and bodies linked with terror finance are indirectly funding Israeli Arab groups. 

It also makes a convincing case that the NDC is a Palestinian organization founded and largely controlled by another Palestinian organization, the Welfare Association, which is funded by hostile Arab governments and foundations with ties to terror funders. And in turn, the NDC is financing Israeli Jewish and Arab organizations that have agreed to conduct political warfare against Israel and the IDF.

THE PROPOSED inquiry has not only raised the hackles of Israeli politicians. It has provoked the ire of European politicians as well. During his visit here this week, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store threw diplomatic niceties to the seven winds. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, he condemned Lieberman for sponsoring the inquiry into foreign funding of Israeli NGOs hissing, "I think it is a worrying sign," about the state of Israeli democracy.

Norway is a key funder of some of the most radical Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. It is also increasingly a major fount of anti-Semitic blood libels. Store himself endorsed one such blood libel when he wrote a blurb on the back cover of a book about Operation Cast Lead written by two radical physicians named Eric Fosse and Mads Glibert. 

The two men spent the mini-war at Shifa Hospital in Gaza which Hamas used as its command center. There they broadcast Hamas propaganda back to Norway. Then they returned home and wrote a book in which they claimed that the IDF entered Gaza with the express goal of murdering women and children. 

And Store endorsed their book. 

It is possible that Store’s hostile response is just the kneejerk reaction of an anti-Semite. Or it could be that he doesn’t want his Norwegian voters and the people of Europe as a whole to know about the anti-Israel political war their governments are waging with their taxes. Either way, his statements are simply more reason for the Knesset to move ahead with the probe.

Then there are the NGOs themselves. Their responses to the probe of their finances have been marked by total hysteria. They have attacked the commission’s supporters as McCarthyites and fascists. If nothing else, the Im Tirtzu report makes clear that they have good reason to not want the public to know where their money is coming from. 

One of Lieberman’s most incendiary claims against the radical groups the Knesset inquiry will investigate was, "We’re talking about organizations whose entire goal is to deter Israeli security forces and the IDF. It is clear that these groups are not interested in human rights. These groups disseminate lies. They demonize and incite against the State of Israel and against IDF soldiers. Never have any of these organizations ever said that Israel was right. Of course we are talking about groups that assist terror, and that is all, that their goal is to weaken the IDF."

Against the backdrop of the Im Tirtzu report’s finding, Lieberman’s allegations seem more or less spot on. At a minimum, backed by the new data, it is obvious that the public needs to have a full picture of who and what stand behind these self-proclaimed human rights groups.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.