If It Walks Like An Influence Operation...

by FRANK GAFFNEY

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/

September 18, 2015

Ahmed Mohamed, 14, right, and his father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, left, at a news conference at their home, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Irving, Texas. (AP Photo/Brandon Wade) (Brandon Wade)

The more we learn about the facts surrounding the events in Irving, Texas this week, the more it seems we’ve been bamboozled.

The now-universal rendering of the story is that a student named Ahmed Mohamed was wrongly removed from his school in handcuffs for innocently bringing in a homemade “clock.”

The purported injustice of this story – laced with the implication that it all happened because Ahmed is a Muslim – has made him an instant celebrity, winning fawning treatment from MIT to Stephen Colbert to the White House.

The facts, however, suggest this may have been a provocation. For starters, building and bringing to school what sure looked like a trigger for an improvised briefcase bomb would predictably raise an alarm.

It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger.  In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.

There is, moreover, now growing evidence that these creations were not even those of the geeky freshman. See Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock and Ourselves on Artvoice.com and Thomas Talbot’s YouTube video.

When Ahmed’s miniature briefcase “clock” did precipitate such concerns, he refused to answer questions from school personnel and police about “his intentions and why he had brought the device to school.” Presumably, they were particularly interested in knowing whether he had brought anything else to school – perhaps to include the other part of such a bomb: the explosive component.

Under the circumstances and in accordance with protocols adopted in Irving – and in school districts across America to protect students and faculty from the sorts of attacks that have resulted in mass murders in several instances, Ahmed was taken into custody. The photograph of him in handcuffs that has gone viral, however, was not taken as he was escorted from the high school. Rather, it was staged after his father insisted at the police station that the cuffs remain on so his sister could take the picture.

In very short order, the family was under management by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization established – ironically, in a federal prosecution conducted in nearby Richardson, Texas – to be a Muslim Brotherhood-associated fundraising and political warfare arm for the designated terrorist group, Hamas. Ahmed lawyered up and he and his family were no-shows for scheduled meetings with school officials and with the police chief and Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne.

In fact, at the very hour the latter meeting was supposed to occur, the Mohameds and their Islamic supremacist handlers were instead holding a press conference. In the course of the presser, the family made clear that their beef wasn’t with the Irving school district or the police. It was with the city’s political leadership, starting with Mayor Van Duyne.

That message has subsequently become a staple of the Islamists. For example, local news on September 18th featured a quote from one, Khalid Hamadeh of the Islamic Association of North Texas, decrying “political leaders espousing inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric and creating a climate of fear.”

Mayor Van Duyne has been a prime target of the Muslim grievance industry in Texas – a fixture of the Islamists’ large and aggressive operations in the state and elsewhere – ever since last spring when she opposed the establishment of an Islamic tribunal in her city. She did so out of a legitimate concern that such an entity would serve as its counterparts have elsewhere, notably in Britain – namely, as a vehicle for dispensing “justice” as defined, not by the laws of the land, but in accordance with the Islamic supremacist code called shariah.

Another data point: Attacks on Ms. Van Duyne in connection with the Ahmed Mohamed affair appear to have been pre-arranged and synchronized, rather than the sort of reaction that builds over time. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and those of the city government and school district, were suddenly and massively assaulted with vehement denunciations of the treatment of this student. Some were so vile, obscene and threatening that the Mayor has been compelled to accept police protection.

It is impossible to say for certain at this point whether the campaign to smear, silence and politically destroy Mayor Beth Van Duyne – a campaign pursued for months by the Islamists and greatly enabled by the Dallas Morning News and others – was actually a premeditated and skillfully executed provocation and influence operation. What is clear, however, is that in the aftermath of the predictable response to Ahmed’s actions, it has turned into an extraordinarily successful campaign of disinformation and political warfare against an American community and its courageous and honorable mayor, the Irving school district and local law enforcement.

Either way, this larger campaign must be recognized for what it certainly is, and repudiated, not applauded – not only by protective parents of school-age children, but by patriotic Americans across the country who are opposed to Islamic supremacism and the threat it poses to us all.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the President of the Center for Security Policy. He formerly acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in President Reagan’s administration.

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The real reason behind Benghazigate

Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?

By Frank J. Gaffney
The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com
October 29, 2012

President Obama’s once seemingly unstoppable march toward re-election hit what he might call “bumps in the road” in Benghazi, Libya, late on Sept. 11, 2012. It might be more accurate to describe the effect of the well-planned and -executed, military-style attack on a diplomatic facility there as the political equivalent of a devastating improvised explosive device on the myth of the unassailability of the Obama record as commander in chief.

Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.

The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.

One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.

Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.

What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.

Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”

We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”

It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.

What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”

In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.

Read more: GAFFNEY: The real reason behind Benghazigate - Washington Times http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/22/the-real-reason-behind-benghazigate/#ixzz2Ak572xAb 

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The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course

By Mark Tapson
http://frontpagemag.com/
May 4, 2012

Just in time for the President’s reelection campaign to pick up steam, the Obama administration last week declared an end to the War on Terror. A few drone strikes, and voilà – mission accomplished! Yet, in an awkward coincidence, in the same week as that announcement came the release of an online video course exposing the alarming degree to which we are losing the broader war against the enemy we officially refuse to identify.

Of course, it was never a war on “terror” anyway; as many have pointed out, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. We weren’t waging a War on Blitzkrieg in World War II. And terrorism was never the only threat posed by our Islamic enemy, which Obama limits to “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” In fact, our focus on violent jihad has left us vulnerable to the subversive Muslim Brotherhood’s more insidious “civilization jihad,” which continues apace.

Obama himself has been supportive of the Brotherhood’s rise to political power internationally and has opened the door for them at home. He has literally welcomed them into the White House (at least his predecessors made them work for such access by infiltrating), pretending that we are now partners in the political process instead of enemies. But while the Obama administration trumpets this and the waning influence of al Qaeda as the end of the ill-named War on Terror, Frank Gaffney declares that we are no closer to victory than we were on 9/11.

Gaffney runs the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a nonprofit organization for national security research and policy advocacy founded in 1988. In 2010 Gaffney and CSP published Shariah: The Threat to America, a highly acclaimed report on the dangerous reality of political Islam. Now he and his team have rolled out a free, ten-part, online “video briefing” entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course,” designed to educate American citizens about “a threat most Americans are even unaware even exists within our country, let alone the peril it represents”:

The threat is the totalitarian, supremacist doctrine its adherents call shariah, and the organized, disciplined, and increasingly successful efforts such adherents – most especially the Muslim Brotherhood – to bring it here.

Gaffney describes the course as a “distillation of all we’ve learned” in the 24 years since the CSP’s inception. Narrated by the quietly intense Gaffney himself, the videos range from fifteen minutes to two hours in length (eight hours total), and define how and why our very civilization is in danger.

Part 1 lays the groundwork in “The Threat Doctrine of Shariah & the Muslim Brotherhood.” Part 2 elaborates on the Brotherhood’s plan to “eliminate Western civilization from within” in “The Brotherhood’s ‘Civilization Jihad’ in America.” In Part 3, the course takes a closer look at the Brotherhood’s penetration and manipulation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America – a development which will come as a shock to those who are concerned only about the complicity and naiveté of the left.

In Part 4, the course examines a case study in such infiltration, the story of a Brotherhood-linked conservative activist named Suhail Khan. Part 5 offers examples of the many ways in which Khan’s mentor, influential tax reform advocate Grover Norquist, and his team are actively promoting the Islamist agenda, and Part 6 scrutinizes how Norquist’s Islamist protégés are running for office as Republicans. In Part 7, Gaffney et al. examine how Norquist’s ongoing Islamist influence operation is advancing the agendas of the civilization jihadists.

In “Part 8: Team Obama & the Islamists,” the course looks at “Brotherhood-associated individuals who have been allowed access to – and, in some cases, given prominent positions in the Obama administration” – figures like the influential Daliah Mogahed. Then in “Part 9: Team Obama & the Islamist Agenda,” the course takes a hard look at Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” this country, in a “two-hour deep drill-down into the disastrous policies of the Obama White House, its State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and more.”

The course isn’t solely educational. It also seeks to empower American citizens “to take myriad steps to counter this civilization jihad.” It concludes with “Part 10: What’s to be Done?” in which Gaffney offers practical suggestions on “how to defeat the most serious and imminent of such dangers in our time”: the attempt to impose shariah through violence or stealth. Those suggestions include educating others, engaging the media and elected representatives, and developing a support network. Some of these steps can be undertaken as individuals, some through organized efforts, and others as a nation.
The website also provides Endnotes for documentation, and Resources which include links to books and films on the subject, like Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad and Islam: What the West Needs to Know. The Resources section contains links as well to organizations like CSP and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and to activist groups such as Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America and Stop the Islamization of Nations.

The site also lists 16 “Key Findings” about shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of which “there is an urgent need for rigorous congressional oversight and investigations aimed at exposing the extent of the civilization jihad – and the need for corrective action aimed at countering it.” A sampling of those findings:

2. Shariah is principally about power, not faith. Accordingly, acting to realize its political end of overthrowing the U.S. government is seditious and must be prosecuted, not treated as protected religious practice…

15. The conduct of seven key federal agencies suggests the considerable success of the Muslim Brotherhood in destroying us from within by our own hands – starting with the policies and directives emanating from the Oval Office…

A unique and monumental project by Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course” is both an essential guide to comprehending the depth and breadth of the threat posed to America by the Muslim Brotherhood, and a useful plan of action to counter that threat.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Yes, They Can ... Impose Sharia Law

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama became president-elect on the uplifting, if inexact, slogan, "Yes, we can."

This week, there is growing evidence that people who have in mind doing away with the presidency of the United States - and all other aspects of our secular, democratic and constitutional form of government - are similarly convinced of their inevitable success. Judging by the sheer audacity of their agenda, "Yes, they can" would appear an apt description of the prospects for the Saudis and other champions of the totalitarian program they call Shariah.

In the run-up to an emergency summit outgoing President Bush has called to address the now-global financial crisis, the oil-rich Islamists of the Persian Gulf led by Saudi Arabia have not only established that their petrodollars are indispensable to any solution. They also seem to have secured the Bush administration's acquiescence to the sinister strings attached to any bailout of the West in which they might participate.

Specifically, the Saudis and their friends want the United States to join those, particularly in Europe, who have accommodated themselves to Shariah. No, we are assured, they aren't taking about the brutal theo-political-legal code that features such barbaric practices as beheadings, floggings, stonings, amputations, female genital mutilation and mysogeny more generally.

All they want, those in the know insist, is for Washington to encourage Wall Street - more and more of which is owned by the U.S. government - to embrace Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). A Treasury Department seminar convened last week depicted SCF as nothing more than a kind of socially responsible investing vehicle that respects Muslim religious beliefs by eschewing interest-bearing transactions and those involving pork and "sin" stocks. So, what's the big deal? The Catholics, Methodists and Jews have their funds, why not the Muslims?

What makes the Shariah-Compliant Finance gambit both a big and troublesome "deal" is that, unlike these other religious traditions, Shariah's adherents are pursuing a global theocracy. They believe they must impose their agenda on everybody else, religious and secular alike, using violence if necessary. And SCF is explicitly described by leading practitioners as a complement to violent holy war: "financial jihad" and "jihad with money."

In other words, there is no such thing as free-standing Shariah-Compliant Finance. According to all of the recognized authorities and institutions of Islam, Shariah is a unified, indivisible program to which all faithful Muslims must adhere comprehensively.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Saudis & Co. are not simply seeking to insinuate Shariah-Compliant Finance into our capital markets. They are also advancing creation of a parallel Shariah-governed society through various other means.

One of these techniques will be in evidence when the Saudi monarch himself convenes a meeting in New York City in the hope of imposing Shariah blasphemy laws worldwide. In light of the stated, and seemingly benign, purpose of the so-called "Culture of Peace" event hosted by King Abdullah at the United Nations - namely, promoting interfaith understanding and tolerance, numerous world leaders, including President Bush, will be present. Never mind that Saudi Arabia is arguably the most intolerant nation on Earth, a fact even some in the Bush administration have acknowledged.

The real reason attendance at the king's seance will be impressive, of course, has more to do with the hope that petro-largess will flow to those who ingratiate themselves to the House of Saud. Abdullah appears confidently to have signaled that, if the West plays ball on the "Culture of Peace" agenda, the Saudis and their fellow Islamists will be constructive at what might be called the subsequent "Culture of Money" meeting in Washington.

What will the answer be when the Islamists insist that free speech must not allow the slander, libel or defamation of Shariah, or other aspects of their faith? If the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council have already accommodated themselves to this demand, why should we object? So what if, by so doing, we would effectively thereby be precluded from talking about - or even understanding - the Islamist threat we face, to say nothing of eviscerating the First Amendment? As the Treasury Department can attest, we need the money.

Unfortunately, this is no time for us to be diminishing awareness throughout the Free World of the various, grave dangers we face from adherents to Shariah's seditious program. London's Sunday Telegraph reported last weekend that a classified British government assessment has concluded there are "some thousands of extremists in the U.K. committed to supporting Jihadi activities, either in the U.K. or abroad."

Such extremists are said to be engaged in attack planning in the United Kingdom "either under the direction of al Qaeda, or inspired by al Qaeda's ideology of global Jihad" (read, Shariah). They may inflict "mass casualties" and constitute a "severe" threat to the Government Security Zone (including the Houses of Parliament and key executive offices) in the heart of London.

At such a moment, a federal judge in Oregon has held the law criminalizing material support for terror is unconstitutionally "vague." Taken together with the other manifestations of our capitulation, is it any wonder the champions of Shariah are convinced that "yes, they can" have their way with us? Who will disabuse them of this terrifying notion? We can, but will President-elect Obama lead the way?

- Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

The Other Debate

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Thursday, October 09, 2008

Shortly before John McCain and Barack Obama, as the Car Guys would say, wasted a perfectly good hour-and-a-half of America’s time in a largely uninformative town hall meeting, a really interesting debate about the most important issue of our time took place near Baltimore. Sponsored by a local educational organization called The Harbor League, I had at last an opportunity to confront publicly and directly one of the most senior and controversial Muslim officials in the Bush Administration: the Assistant to the Secretary of Transportation for Policy, Suhail Khan.

Readers of these pages will recall my previous writings about Khan and his patron, conservative activist Grover Norquist (notably, here and here).

In these articles, I carefully documented Khan’s personal ties to Wahhabi mosques in California and a variety of organizations identified by the Department of Justice as Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and, in some cases, as un-indicted co-conspirators in a terrorism financing conspiracy. I also reported on the role Norquist has played before and during the George W. Bush administration in facilitating Islamist influence operations involving – at key points, with Suhail Khan’s help at the White House Office of Public Liaison – the likes of now-convicted terrorist-supporters like Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian. Khan serves on the board of the Islamic Free Market Institute, the organization Alamoudi helped Norquist establish a decade ago in his Americans for Tax Reform offices, apparently for the purpose of credentialing Islamists as conservatives, promoting their agenda in Washington and placing their friends in government jobs.

While Khan and Norquist have used various vehicles to denounce these treatments – notably, accusing me of racism and bigotry – they have yet to disprove any of my findings. Last night’s debate addressing the question of whether Islamic law (Shariah) is consistent with a “religion of peace” and the U.S. Constitution was an opportunity for Khan to do so. At the very least, it was a chance for Khan to allay concerns about the attitude of such a highly placed individual towards the Islamists’ stealthy efforts to advance the repressive theo-political-legal code they call Shariah and its stated objective of global Islamic rule under a theocratic leader.

Unfortunately, as the audio of the “Other Debate” shows, Suhail Khan chose to do neither. Instead, from his opening remarks to his impassioned conclusion, he extolled America, its people, its culture, even its national pastime. He inveighed against those “hate-mongers” and “racists” whom he accused of knowing nothing of and defaming Islam (Jihad Watch’s extraordinary director, Robert Spencer, came in for repeated defamation, as did my esteemed colleague, David Yerushalmi). Perhaps in deference to the moderator, Sinclair Broadcasting’s Mark Hyman, who enjoined us from ad hominem attacks, Khan expressed those aimed at me only through oblique references.

For my part, I used the occasion to frame the issue as clearly as I could. (A copy of my prepared remarks – which were pretty much deployed in their entirety, together with several Powerpoint slides can be found here [attached]. The problem, I observed, is Shariah, the theo-political-legal program born of the texts, traditions and practices of authoritative Islam. At its core, Shariah’s agenda is seditious since it is designed to destroy the constitutional government of the United States and replace it with Islamic rule.

This end-state will be achieved here as elsewhere through violent (or “hard”) jihad, if possible. Where that is not immediately practicable, the Muslim Brotherhood has established scores of organizations to promote what might be called “soft” or “stealth” jihad.

The objective, however, is absolutely the same: In the words of an internal planning document written in 1991, “[The Brotherhood’s] work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

I concluded with the following points:

Every U.S. government official swears a solemn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Those officials who are Muslim have a special responsibility to reject Shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood organizations stealthily trying to impose it on all of us.

To do otherwise is to fail to act in the face of seditious behavior – a felony offense under the U.S. code known as “misprision of treason.”

We need the help of all patriotic, law-abiding, tolerant Americans who are Muslims in fighting our mutual enemy: Shariah-adherent Islamists in this country and elsewhere. A key test of which camp they are in is whether they acknowledge the nature of authoritative Islam’s Shariah and the threat it represents to our country and Constitution, and work against – not with – the groups advancing this seditious agenda.

Suhail Khan reacted to this dose of salts in a manner reminiscent of Linda Blair’s character in “The Exorcist,” minus the vomit and physical gyrations. He vehemently insisted that my portrayal of Shariah – from its embrace of the law of “abrogation” (whereby the intolerant, violent passages of the Koran that come chronologically after the more moderate, earlier ones) to its absolutely delineated interpretations and the myriad obligations arising therefrom (including to engage in jihad) – was the stuff of a few extremists like Osama bin Laden and “wack-job web sites.”

In response to my repeated observation that the characterization of Shariah is not mine but that of all of the recognized authorities of Islam, Khan asserted again and again that it was not true. When pressed by a member of the audience to name a single Muslim scholar deemed authoritative by the institutions of his faith (like Al Azhar University in Cairo or the senior clerics of Saudi Arabia) who agreed with his view, he could only come up with three Americans who went to school in the Mideast and who have written as-yet unpublished books Khan claims will affirm his position. I noted that even if these books existed and actually did deviate from the traditions and tenets of Shariah, none of his authors had any standing as Islamic scholars. In any event, according to Shariah, there has been no opportunity for new interpretations of settled Islamic law for nearly 1200 years.

Speaking of the audience, the packed room included a couple of car-loads worth of staff and associates of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Several of them asked pointed questions taken straight out of the Islamist play-book: asserting a moral equivalence between the extremists of Islam and those of Christianity and Judaism; insisting that there was no problem with authoritative Shariah, only with a small number of terrorists who falsely claim religious grounds for their criminal conduct; and suggesting that if Jews and various Christian sects can have and observe their own laws, why can’t Muslims? The fervor with which these non-Muslim conservative activists parroted the Brotherhood line suggested that more than simple solidarity with their friend, Suhail Khan, is at work in Norquist’s Islamist influence operation.

I closed the program with an appeal to those present – and to the larger audience that may see the Other Debate if, as promised Al Jazeera plays it in its entirety: Do your homework. It is your civic duty to find out whether my characterization of Shariah, its inherently seditious nature and its utter incompatability with our Constitution and freedoms is correct. Or are Suhail Khan’s blithe assurances that Shariah is consistent with a “religion of peace” and no danger to America, nothing more than a program that Muslims can interpret however they wish, to be believed?
As one knowledgeable questioner pointed out, these are questions of fact. Even the most superficial examination of the texts, traditions and institutions of Shariah – helpfully and authoritatively translated into English by the Saudis – will establish that I am correct. And the fact that Suhail Khan says otherwise leaves only two possible explanations: Either he is woefully ignorant of the fundamentals of his own faith or he is willfully dissembling about them in the way Muslim Brotherhood operatives and their friends consistently do.

Whichever may be the case, Suhail Khan clearly is not a reliable source for insights into the central challenge of our time – a challenge that went completely unaddressed in the McCain-Obama debate last night, namely the danger of Shariah and the stealth jihad systematically seeking to insinuate it into our country and society. Khan’s performance in the evening’s Other Debate calls into the question not only his true purposes, but the judgment and wisdom of those who do rely upon him.

Frank Gaffney's Prepared Remarks for his debate with Suhail Khan (who is the Special Assistant for Policy to the Secretary of Transportation):

“Shariah is Anti-Constitutional and Seditious”

The Harbor League
Baltimore, Maryland
7 October 2008

I come to this debate with an expertise in national security matters rather than in the texts, traditions and practices of authoritative Islam. There is, however, a nexus between the two in the theo-political-legal program born of these texts, traditions and practices – a program that the recognized Islamic authorities call “Shariah.”

I am here to discuss Shariah’s profound implications for our national security and for the Constitution of the United States – which is, according to its Article VI, the “supreme law of the land.” [Slide 2]

Shariah 101

The roots of Shariah are to be found in the Koran which Muslims regard as the word of God – or Allah, although most of it is the product of scholars and caliphs who lived hundreds of years after Mohammed’s death. Of particular importance to this debate is the Koranic principle of “abrogation.”

According to the recognized Islamic authorities, Allah made plain in a verse of the Koran known as Sura 2:106 that earlier passages of his revelations to Mohammed would be replaced by “something better.”

Hence, the chronology of the verses of the Koran is all important. (Slide 4)Passages from the Meccan period, which tend to be peaceable and tolerant were followed by those of the Medinan period, which are in many cases neither.

Two examples are sufficient for the present purpose: what are generally accepted to be the last two Sura of the Koran – Sura 9 which deals with “jihad” and Sura 5 which addresses interfaith relations.

As the next two slides make clear, earlier passages that are often cited as evidence that Islam is a “religion of peace” and tolerant of other faiths, in particular those of “People of the Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians) have in both cases been abrogated in favor of what are believed to be divine directives to use violent means where necessary to assure the triumph of Islam over other faiths and the world. (Slides 5 and 6)

The Shariah Agenda

In fact, all four schools of Sunni Islam and the 1 or 2 schools of Shi’a Islam agree that:

• First, it is God’s will that Islam will rule the world.

• Second, jihad to achieve the global governance of a Caliph/Ayatollah pursuant to Shariah is the obligation of all Muslims.

• Third, those Muslims who don’t adhere to Shariah are apostates – a crime punishable by death.

• Where possible, jihad is to be pursued with terror-inducing violence. Where not, “soft” or “stealth” jihad is to be employed, backed by the threat of violence – if not its actual use elsewhere.

The Muslim Brotherhood

With a view to organizing a disciplined, international effort to wage stealth jihad until such time as violent means could be productively employed, Hassan al-Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.

According to an internal memorandum explaining the Brotherhood’s “strategic goal for the group in North America,” written by a top Brotherhood operative here in 1991:

[The Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Importantly, the memorandum goes on to identify virtually every one of the most prominent Muslim-American organizations as Muslim Brotherhood fronts. It enthuses: “Imagine if they all march to one plan!” In fact, many of these entities have also been identified by the Department of Justice as un-indicted co-conspirators in a terrorism financing conspiracy – the Holy Land Foundation’s fundraising operations on behalf of Hamas.

The Brotherhood’s Program

Focuses of the “soft” jihad being perpetrated by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups to advance this strategic goal in America include:

1) Dominating the Muslim population. The strategy is a classic totalitarian model: segregate the targeted group, promote a sense of its victimhood, radicalize its members and recruit them to action – in this case, jihad. It is being advanced systematically, if incrementally, in mosques, prisons, military, schools and campuses, unions, government and most recently, on what is left of Wall Street in the form of Shariah-Compliant Finance.

2) Intimidating opponents. This involves the imposition in this country of what amounts to Shariah’s law of submission, which prohibits any blasphemy, slander, libel against Islam. The injunction, of course, is applied only one-way; Shariah is virulently intolerant of all other religions. Techniques employed to suppress opposition to the imposition of Shariah – or even discussion of its insinuation into our society include: branding critics as “Islamophobes”; using litigation, legislation and other forms of lawfare to hector or silence them; threats of extradition to places where Shariah courts can impose ghastly penalties for “offending” Islam; ostracism; and, of course, threats of violence.

In liberal societies like ours, this campaign generally exploits civil liberties and human rights and the institutions designed to safeguard them. In this, the Shariah adherents pursuing soft jihad often secure valuable assistance from what the Soviets used to call “useful idiots” – those who are, for whatever reason, alienated from their own nations and disposed to help Islamists who they see as kindred spirits in their alienation. Such help takes the form of assistance with lawsuits and legislation aimed at countering law enforcement, intelligence, interrogation of detainees, etc. It also can be found on campuses, in textbooks and the public square where leftists (among them homosexuals, feminists and Jews) help legitimate a program that will, if fully instituted here, be unpleasant for them, to say the least.

3) Creating parallel societies. The object of the preceding activities is to establish, initially, a separate society for Muslims within that of their host nations in which non-Muslims are the majority. This is accomplished by insinuating preferential arrangements for Muslims – religious accommodations, their own legal code and courts (i.e., Shariah), territorial “no-go” zones and assorted political benefits. Initially, these seem modest and unthreatening. Separate rules governing dress codes, accommodations in public spaces for the practice of a single religion, latitude to deny service or handling of certain products in deference to religious sensibilities, organized labor contracts that substitute of Muslim holy days for Labor Day, etc.

Inevitably, however, these concessions result in pressure from Shariah-adherent Muslims to extend such beachheads ever further. Inevitably, over time if not in relatively short order, a parallel society is in place that is utterly at odds with the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution, its precepts, freedoms and institutions.

The Bottom Line

Taken together, these Shariah-ordained initiatives represent a mortal threat to the security and constitutional government of the United States. The good news is that not all Muslims adhere to Shariah, particularly here in the United States.

The bad news is that those who do include all of the recognized authorities of Islam, they speak for the faith, control its institutions and have enormous resources and infrastructure – including inside the United States (both MB and Wahhabi).

By contrast, those who don’t adhere to Shariah – both here and abroad – are generally without resources, disorganized and often extremely isolated. Worse yet, they are considered apostates by the authorities and millions of their co-religionists – a powerful disincentive to adopting visible public profiles opposing Shariah.

As a result, we confront an unprecedented threat: a Fifth Column inside this country and in other Western societies advancing by stealth, as well as by terror (or the threat of it), a seditious program aimed at destroying the United States and bringing about its people’s submission to Islamic rule under Shariah.

With Us or Against Us?

Every US government official swears a solemn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Those officials who are Muslim have a special responsibility to reject Shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood organizations stealthily trying to impose it on all of us.

To do otherwise is to fail to act in the face of seditious behavior – a felony offense under the U.S. code known as misprision of treason.

We need the help of all patriotic, law-abiding, tolerant Americans who are Muslims in fighting our mutual enemy: Shariah-adherent Islamists in this country and elsewhere.

A key test of which camp they are in is whether they acknowledge the nature of authoritative Islam’s Shariah and the threat it represents to our country and Constitution, and work against – not with – the groups advancing this seditious agenda.

- Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

The Democrats' 'Soft' Jihadist

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, August 26, 2008

On Sunday, Democratic delegates convening in Denver were prayed over by representatives of various faiths. One stood out: Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America. With this choice, Barak Obama's campaign has committed a strategic error of the first order.

After all, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) has been identified by the Department of Justice not only as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood - a global Islamist movement with the stated mission in America of "destroying Western civilization from within." Worse yet, it has also been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the United States' largest alleged terrorism financing conspiracy.


Ingid Mattson speaking at the 2007 World Economic Forum

Like other Brotherhood operations, ISNA's purpose is to promote what might be called "soft jihad" - the task of steadily insinuating the brutally repressive and subversive program the Islamists call Shariah through da'wa, proselytizing and social networking.

The more one learns about Dr. Mattson and her organization, the more questions will be raised about Barak Obama's judgment and that of his party in affording them a prominent role in the 2008 Democratic convention. For example:

Ingrid Mattson is director of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut . Her program is used to credential Muslim chaplains for U.S. prisons and our military. (The armed forces require its chaplain candidates to take 72 credit hours from Dr. Mattson's program.) This credentialing was previously performed by organizations founded by Abdurahman Alamoudi, once among the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives in America. Today, Alamoudi is serving a 23-year prison sentence for his involvement in terrorism-related crimes.

A course taught by Mattson at the Hartford Seminary entitled "The Koran and Its Place in Muslim Life and Society" featured readings from texts by two of the Islamofascist ideology's most revered figures: Syed Abul A'la Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. She has publicly credited the former with producing "probably the best work of [Koranic commentary] in English." As Robert Spencer has observed in his invaluable Jihad Watch blog, Maududi succinctly described the Islamists' Shariah agenda as follows:

"Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam regardless of the country or the nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and program, regardless of which nation assumes the role of the standard bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State....Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single State or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution."

As to Qutb, an amicus brief filed last week by the Center for Security Policy before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals noted that his "writings expand on [Maududi's] theme of Jihad against wayward Muslim regimes and the infidel West and the establishment of a hegemonic Shariah-based political order. His work has been credited as a central doctrinal source for al Qaeda's doctrine of Jihad, as well." According to the brief prepared for the Center by two of the West's foremost scholars of Shariah, attorneys David Yerushalmi and Stephen Coughlin (resident expert on the subject for the Joint Chiefs of Staff until he was purged by an ISNA admirer in the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England), "Da'wa is used to prepare the battle space for violent Jihad."

Unbeknownst to most Americans, such Da'wa is being systematically advanced through the Islamists' take-over of the vast majority of U.S. mosques, Islamic centers and madrassas (Muslim parochial schools). This onslaught is being accomplished as Saudi money flows through another Muslim Brotherhood front spun off by ISNA, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which acquires the mortgages of existing religious facilities or creates new ones. Along with titles to these properties comes Saudi Wahhabi influence in the form of virulently Shariah-adherent clerics, textbooks and other materials. In her capacity as president of ISNA, Mattson also is an ex officio member of NAIT's board.

Insofar as the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly seeks and is working for the destruction of our government and Western civilization more generally, it is engaged in a criminal conspiracy that constitutes treasonous sedition. That reality has two critical implications:

First, the Brotherhood must be formally designated a terrorist organization, putting an end to the reckless notion - promoted by, among others, the U.S. State Department - that practitioners of soft jihad are less dangerous and an effective antidote to co-religionists who are prepared to use violence immediately, rather than later on.

Second, under 18 US Code 2382: " Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to [appropriate officials] is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both."

Senator Obama, his party, Bush administration officials and, for that matter, ordinary citizens of the United States are obliged to take steps to counteract seditious Muslim Brotherhood activities in our midst. To do otherwise is not just suicidal. It is a crime.

- Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

Israel's Staticide

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addresses his ministers in Jerusalem on May 25. A US millionaire testifying in a corruption probe that could end Olmert's career said he gave him envelopes stuffed with cash to fund his political ambitions and perhaps his taste for high living.
(AFP/Pool/File/David Silverman)

There is a Greek tragedy unfolding today in the Middle East. In response to past mistakes and as a result of hubristic political calculation, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is setting in motion forces that promise to lead inexorably to grief for his nation. The result could be staticide, the destruction of the Jewish State, with incalculably serious repercussions for the Free World in general and the United States in particular.

In the pursuit of peace with its neighbors, Israel has made one strategic concession after another. In 1979, it surrendered the Sinai to Egypt when Anwar Sadat promised peace and then was murdered for doing so. In 1993, Israel adopted the Oslo accords, legitimating one of its most virulent enemies, the PLO terrorist chief Yasser Arafat, and setting the stage for Palestinian control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Eight years ago this month, Israel unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon, creating a vacuum promptly filled by Iran’s proxy army there, Hezbollah. Then, in 2005, Israel forcibly removed its citizens living in Gaza and turned the Strip over – temporarily – to Arafat’s right-hand man and successor, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Space constraints will not permit a full rendering of the costs associated with these serial mistakes. The “peace” with Egypt proved to be a very cold one. In Sadat’s stead, the government of Hosni Mubarak has promoted virulent hatred for Israel among its people and assiduously armed for renewed conflict with the Jewish State. It has also used the Sinai to funnel ever-longer-range missiles and other advanced weapons from Iran to the Gaza Strip – now under the control of another Palestinian terrorist faction, Hamas.

The latter and its friends, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, are now using Gaza as a safe-haven for planning and executing terrorism against Israel. It is a safe bet that Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is being targeted from there, as well.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has not just taken over South Lebanon – its dominance of which was greatly strengthened when Olmert’s government proved incapable of decisively defeating the forces of this so-called “Army of God” in 2006. In recent days, Hezbollah launched attacks in Beirut that effectively produced a coup d’etat. The hopes for a democratic Lebanon, free of Syrian and Iranian interference, have given way to a dark future for the Lebanese people and their neighbors in Israel, alike.

Tragically, despite this sorry record of retreat followed by intensified danger, Ehud Olmert is making further and even more strategic territorial and political concessions to Israel’s enemies. By so doing, the Israeli prime minister evidently hopes to stave off accountability for these past mistakes. He also appears to be calculating that “peace-making” will spare him prosecution on myriad corruption charges.

Unfortunately, there is now no basis for depicting such a policy as one in which Israel trades “land for peace.” Today, Israel is giving up land for war.

In the illusion that that there is any appreciable difference between Fatah and Hamas, Olmert’s government is trying to turn over nearly all the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem to Abbas and his faction’s Palestinian police force. A similar illusion is causing the United States to give Fatah’s troops training, intelligence collection equipment and arms. The latter have already used their American-supplied know-how and weapons to kill Israelis.

Olmert is also allowing the Egyptians to broker a cease-fire with Hamas. The result is predictable: Hamas will be legitimated, effectively ending international efforts to relegate it to pariah status and probably producing a unity government whereby the two Palestinian factions join forces once again. The stage will then be set for the ultimate defeat of Fatah by Hamas in the West Bank as well, putting all of Israel within range of its weapons.

These tragic steps are now being compounded by one further, potentially staticidal act: Olmert has just launched negotiations to surrender all of the Golan Heights to Syria.

This concession would place Syrian – and quite possibly Iranian – forces on high ground which, in Israeli hands, has kept the peace for 35 years. If once again at the disposal of Israel’s enemies, these heights will put northern Israel at risk of, at best, harassing fire and, at worst, a new invasion in force.

Moreover, as my esteemed colleague, Caroline Glick, observed in her Jerusalem Post column last week, if Israel can no longer use the Golan to threaten Syria, Damascus and Tehran may feel free to redouble their subversion in Iraq. Iran may even conclude the Golan can allow it to checkmate any lingering Israeli willingness to interfere with the mullahs’ pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Importantly, the Israeli people finally seem to have had enough of false peace processes. Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Israelis oppose their country’s surrender of the Golan; a majority believe it is motivated by Olmert’s efforts to stave off prosecution. Even the Bush Administration is said to be unhappy about his Golan initiative.

This weekend, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – universally known as “the Israel lobby” – holds its annual Policy Conference in Washington. The organization exists to support the Israeli government. At this juncture, however, attendees have an opportunity and an obligation to object to that government’s increasingly reckless, and predictably tragic, conduct. After all, friends don’t let friends commit staticide.


Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: To give America freedom

The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com
May 20, 2008

What do the following recent events have in common? The president of the United States has prostrated himself for the second time in five months before the king of Saudi Arabia, pleading for more oil. Despite George Bush's inducements — an array of advanced, offensive arms; the promise of nuclear technology with which the Saudis can expect (like the North Koreans, Iranians, Pakistanis, etc.) to acquire the ultimate weapons; and U.S. help securing Saudi Arabia's borders (something the president has declined to do at home) — the American plea was spurned. The contempt felt by the House of Saud was captured in its oil minister's quip, "If you want more oil, buy it."

• The Senate rejected, by a vote of 56-42, an initiative offered by Republicans that called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska and some offshore waters now closed to exploration and exploitation of their substantial oil reserves.

• In addition, that chamber's appropriations committee refused by a similar party-line vote to lift its moratorium on oil-shale production in Colorado. It seems that, if we want more oil, we will have to buy it at ever increasing prices from the Saudis and others even more unfriendly to this country's national security and economic interests — like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Russia's Vladimir Putin, perhaps even Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• One thing the Senate and House did agree upon, by overwhelmingly bipartisan majorities, was suspending purchases of oil to fill the remaining 3 percent of the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. This action will have negligible (if any) impact on energy prices. But it will ensure that less oil will be available to us than would otherwise have been the case in the event, for example, the next terrorist attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure succeeds where others have failed and seriously disrupts world supplies.

• Then there is the newly formed coalition, ostensibly spearheaded by the Grocery Manufacturers' Association, that has launched a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort aimed at discouraging development of one alternative to oil: domestically produced or imported ethanol. Wrongly asserting that producing this transportation fuel from corn is largely responsible for rising food prices and the attendant global shortages, this instant grass-roots (read, "astroturf") coalition appears to want America to remain essentially dependent on oil. Wonder where the money for this campaign is coming from?

Answer: These actions — given soaring energy prices and the attendant hemorrhage of U.S. petrodollars to, among others, people who wish us ill — represent the sort of behavior in which only a nation utterly unserious about energy security could indulge.

In truth, no matter what we do, we will need oil for the foreseeable future. As a result, we should do our utmost to find and exploit it in places either under our control (for example, near where the Cubans and Chinese are getting it off the coast of Florida) or at least friendly to us (notably, Canada, Mexico and Brazil).

It is equally axiomatic that, no matter what we do, we almost certainly will have less oil than we need, certainly at prices we can afford. The question is: Are we going to do something to meet the shortfall? Or are we simply going to allow the economy and security of the United States to bleed out at the hands of the Saudi-led OPEC cartel?

The Set America Free Coalition — an initiative launched several years ago by unlikely array of national security-, environmental- and energy-minded people and organizations from across the political spectrum — is advancing practical, near-term alternatives to that unappetizing and unacceptable prospect.

At the moment, the Coalition is mounting its own campaign aimed at achieving in the immediate future, a simple yet far-reaching goal: Ensuring each of the 17 million new cars added to America's highways each year is capable of being powered by ethanol (from whatever source), methanol (ditto) or gasoline (or some combination thereof).

There are already some 6 million of these Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) on our roads today. Most of these are American-made (name another technology in which Detroit has a competitive advantage?) It costs less than $100 per car to equip new cars with this feature.

Ask yourself, and your elected representatives and would-be presidents: As each of these cars will last, on average, roughly 17 years, do we want any more of them built the old way — namely able to use only gasoline. Can we responsibly continue for another generation to lock our transportation sector (the principal, and most profligate, consumer of imported oil) into dependence on oil substantially imported from unfriendly places?

Robert Zubrin — a leader of the Set America Free Coalition and author of the terrific new book, "Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil" — notes that, at today's oil prices, we are allowing the Saudis and their friends to impose the equivalent of a 40 percent income tax of about $3,300 on every man woman and child in this country. We cannot afford to allow such lunacy to continue.

Sooner or later, Congress will adopt an Open Fuel Standard requiring every new car sold in America to be an FFV. The effect will be, in short order, to create an immense and highly competitive market for alternative, "Freedom Fuels" that we can make here or buy from friends. That will, in turn, will set America free by beginning to end its cars' present addiction to oil. Why wait any longer?

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times and a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: The New Dhimmi Times

http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Stephanie Sinclair for The New York Times

The High Court in Cairo. In Egypt, courts must act in accordance with the basic tenets of Islamic jurisprudence.

Totalitarians have an uncanny appreciation for the subversive effect of foreign propagandists. The Nazis had Lord Haw-Haw, Imperial Japan its Tokyo Rose, the Soviets the World Council of Churches (among many others) and the North Vietnamese Jane Fonda. Now, our time’s totalitarian ideologues – the Islamofascists – have the New York Times.

This may not seem to be exactly a news flash. After all, the Times has been rendering invaluable service to the enemy’s information operations and military campaigns for years. To cite but a few examples: In December 2005, the paper disclosed a highly classified program for monitoring suspected terrorists’ communications on this war’s global battlefield. In June 2006, it revealed another enormously sensitive surveillance effort concerning movement of funds around the world. And practically every day, what passes for its news pages and editorials run down the Nation’s leadership, military and progress in defeating our foes.

The New York Times marked a deplorable new milestone this weekend, however – a true nadir in collaborating with the enemy in the War of Ideas. Its Sunday magazine featured an article by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman entitled “Why Shariah? Millions of Muslims think Shariah means the rule of law. Could they be right?” According to the Times’ Mr. Feldman, the answer is a resounding “Yes.”

The disinforming character of this essay is evident to the trained eye from the opening paragraph. Feldman depicts sympathetically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who “gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture” recently in London. Dr. Williams we are told offered “the tentative suggestion…that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.” Then, it seems through no fault of his own, “all hell broke loose” on the poor, thoughtful clergyman.

Actually, what the head of the Church of England declared on the BBC was that it was “unavoidable” that Shariah law – a theo-political-legal code that the Islamofascists seek to impose on Muslims and non-Muslims alike in all of its barbaric, intolerant, totalitarian and misogynistic glory – will be observed in the United Kingdom. The man now derided as “the Grand Mufti of Canterbury” was exhibiting the classic symptoms of an unbeliever who chooses to submit to the rule of Islam, rather than accept the other choice under Shariah, namely being put to death. The former is known as a dhimmi.

In an article that can only be described charitably as selective in its rendering of the facts, Feldman paints a portrait of Shariah that would earn admiration from the inventor of the Big Lie, Adolf Hitler. In fact, the text could have been written by the Muslim Brotherhood – an Islamofascist movement that is, by its own documents, charged with “destroying [the United States] from within” and “by its own hands.” Actually, it is no exaggeration to say that the Times’ Magazine has provided a six-page advertisement for the Brotherhood, effectively portraying it as a force for democracy and the rule of law that would make Thomas Jefferson swoon.

The Harvard professor, who helped write the new Iraqi constitution with its requirement that all laws must conform to Shariah, seems open to the Islamofascists’ determination to have the same apply elsewhere. He concludes with this rhapsody: “…With all its risks and dangers, the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law while coming to terms with contemporary circumstances is bold and noble – and may represent a path to just and legitimate government in much of the Muslim world.”

Let’s call this what it is: a paean to dhimmitude. The people who are actually going to have to “come to terms with contemporary circumstances” are not the Islamists. They are hewing to the immutable traditions of Shariah going back to the 9th century, as interpreted by the consensus of the faith’s “authorities,” the only figures allowed to speak for Islam.

It is the cruelest of delusions to contend that such Shariah law will produce “just and legitimate governments” anywhere. Feldman struggles to explain why it isn’t so in two of the four places ruled by Shariah today – Iran and Saudi Arabia; he doesn’t even try to do so with respect to Sudan or Gaza, let alone the nightmare that formerly was Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Sunday’s New York Times article could be chalked up to another travesty by a paper that has long since lost its way, but for one fact: It comes at a moment when the Islamofascists are poised to make a potentially decisive breakthrough. Unless action is taken swiftly, they will achieve a strategic penetration of Wall Street in the form of “Shariah-Compliant Finance” (SCF). Confusion, let alone deliberate disinformation, about the true nature of Shariah, constitutes an invitation to disaster.

After all, the calamitous credit crisis is vaporizing such pillars of American capitalism as Bear Sterns. Other investment houses and commercial banks are desperate for cash. Islamist Sovereign Wealth Funds (more accurately described as Dictators Slush Funds) and other champions of SCF are offering to recycle trillions of dollars here – if only Wall Street will allow Muslim Brothers and other Islamofascists to call the shots, dictating who gets capital and credit on the basis of Shariah adherence. Archbishop Williams judged Shariah law unavoidable in Britain in part because the UK has already embraced Shariah-Compliant Finance.

If we fall for this deadly Trojan horse and the seditious Shariah agenda that animates it, the New Dhimmi Times and Professor Feldman will deserve no small portion of the blame.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Shariah-t.html?ref=magazine


Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: Front-gate

Washington Times
January 22, 2008

It is now well-established in Washington that any scandal, no matter how seemingly innocuous, soon is given the suffix "-gate," establishing a lineal connection to the mother of all scandals, Watergate.

Well, let me be the first to suggest that a recent scandal in the Pentagon be known hereafter as "Front-gate" in recognition of the central role played in the drama by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization designated by the Justice Department as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). With the House and Senate both back in business this week, Front-gate should be subjected to close congressional scrutiny since it may involve the most strategically ominous case of official misconduct since the Clinton administration's China-gate.

The Front-gate saga began with the firing last month of Stephen Coughlin, a major in the Army Reserves working as a civilian contractor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he ran afoul of one Hashem Islam, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England's point-man on Muslim community outreach.

Hashem Islam is also evidently an admirer of ISNA. He arranged for Mr. England to address one of the group's meetings last year — a huge help to an organization reeling from its designation by the Bush Justice Department not only as a Brotherhood front but as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism-financing conspiracy.

According to reporting by The Washington Times' national security correspondent, Bill Gertz, the sacking of Maj. Coughlin was precipitated by a sharp disagreement with Mr. Islam over ISNA. The former had made a serious study of this and other Islamist organizations as part of a 333-page thesis titled "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad," prepared for and recently accepted by the National Defense Intelligence College.

Based on his analysis of the Islamofascist roots and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, Stephen Coughlin was given to warning his military audiences that it was no "moderate" organization. For example, he notes that one of the Ikhwan's most prominent leaders, Sheik Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, has declared: "The abduction and killing of Americans in Iraq is an obligation so as to cause them to leave Iraq immediately."

Maj. Coughlin has also studied the evidence submitted by the government in the Holy Land Foundation trial, including this chilling passage from a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum about its mission: "The Ikwan['s]... work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

Mr. Islam reportedly told the Joint Staff's Maj. Coughlin to soften his criticism of the Brotherhood's ISNA and, when the latter refused, defamed him as "a Christian zealot with a pen." Some accounts add that it was a "poison" pen. Since Maj. Coughlin is not giving his side of the story to the press, it may require a congressional subpoena to get it properly told.

What is known, however, is that shortly after this exchange, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not renew Maj. Coughlin's contract, which will expire at the end of March. Mr. Gertz reports the Chiefs deemed it "too hot" to retain the services of a man widely believed to be the military's most knowledgeable expert on the Islamist ideology of our enemies.

Unfortunately, the sacking of Stephen Coughlin is not only a scandal in its own right. It is a window into a variety of actions that cry out for congressional investigations. These include:

• The true nature, agenda and sources of funding of Muslim Brotherhood front organizations like the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sen. Jon Kyl convened a most informative Judiciary Committee hearing on the latter several years ago; it is time for an updated and more comprehensive review of the subject.

• The judgment, if not the loyalties, of those in government who promote such organizations — especially those officials who insist that Brotherhood fronts be the "go-to" groups for Muslim outreach, to the exclusion of anti-Islamist Muslims.

• The extent of Islamist penetration of the U.S. government. Such an evaluation should examine, among other things: Muslim military chaplains recruited and credentialed by Abdurahman Alamoudi, a convicted felon now serving 23 years in federal prison for terrorism-associated crimes; Saudi-sponsored travel and indoctrination of armed forces personnel; any Islamist ties to mosques on military bases like the Marine Corps' Quantico facility; and "sensitivity" training for FBI agents by CAIR.

• The larger, seditious political-religious-legal agenda the Islamists call Shariah and its newest, alarming manifestation: "Shariah Finance" (also doing business around the world as "Islamic banking," "ethical finance" or "structured finance"). To his credit, a freshman Rep. Paul Broun, Georgia Republican, last week convened the first Capitol Hill briefing for House members and staff concerning this deeply worrisome Trojan horse in Western capital markets, drawing on research developed by and for the Center for Security Policy.

The needed congressional investigations into Front-gate and related matters should result not only in a full airing of the Coughlin-Islam affair. They should ensure that the military is not denied in time of war the services of so able a student of our enemy, its motivations and doctrine as Maj. Coughlin.

If anything, as part of a comprehensive effort to counter the influence operations and penetration activities of Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, patriots like Steve Coughlin should be entrusted with even greater responsibilities — by Congress, if not the executive branch.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.