Robert Spencer: What if the media had covered World War II the way it covers jihad? Jihad Watch via YouTube, March 9, 2017
Archive for the ‘Islamists in America’ category
New York Cedes Ground in the Fight Against Terrorism
March 7, 2017New York Cedes Ground in the Fight Against Terrorism, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Patrick Dunleavy, March 7, 2017
Capitulation in a time of conflict is demoralizing to the rank and file charged with protecting the community they serve. This appears to be the case in the latest legal go round between the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Muslim activist groups.
U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr, is about to accept an agreement that will hand over control of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division investigations to a civilian monitor appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. This is the same mayor who loudly cheered President Obama’s last-minute commutation of FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, who will be freed in May. De Blasio extolled the works of a man whose organization was responsible for more than 100 bombings, many in New York City, including one that killed four innocent people.
To understand the impact that this proposed settlement, between the NYPD, and the activist organization known as the Muslim Advocates will have on existing counter terrorism measures, we have to understand how vitally important is the issue of protecting cities against attacks by radical Islamist terrorists. The activist groups claim that the police department unfairly singled out Muslim communities in the greater New York/New Jersey area for investigation and surveillance. They also claim that gathering specific information about the neighborhoods amounted to unprecedented “profiling.” They point to a little known NYPD unit that collected the data and accuse it of spying.
Their argument belies the fact that collecting demographic statistics has been used for years by the U.S. Census Bureau to map out trends and changes in neighborhoods. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have used this practice for decades to investigate criminal organizations such as the Mafia, or Columbian drug cartels. The normal investigative process would include forensic examination of the communities most likely to be victimized by criminal organizations. The FBI did not set up surveillance in Chinatown when taking down the Cosa Nostra. They went to Little Italy.
Radical Islamist organizations have in the past infiltrated Muslim neighborhoods in the United States and exerted harmful influence on those communities.
For example, in 1990 a little known Islamic cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman came to live in the greater New York area. He visited mosques in Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City and elsewhere, and before long forced out any clergy who were not in line with his radical ideology.
In Brooklyn’s Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue, where Mustafa Shalabi served as a treasurer, an argument occurred over how the money should be spent. Shalabi was found murdered in his Coney Island apartment not long after that fight. Another of the mosque’s clerics, a Sudanese imam named Zakaria Gasmalla, was forced out and moved his entire family to the Buffalo area to escape the pressure from Abdel Rahman and his followers. The Blind Sheik and his followers continued to use Muslim communities to raise money for their plots, to hide weapons, and to build the truck bomb that was placed in the garage of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993. Six people died and more than 1,000 were injured in the resulting explosion.
The first soldiers in the jihad against America lived within the Muslim neighborhoods in the New York/New Jersey community.
In 2000, two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, settled into an apartment in a San Diego neighborhood near the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque. There Anwar al Awlaki, a young Islamic clergyman, welcomed them. Today we know the American-born Awlaki as one of al-Qaida’s most influential preachers and most effective radicalizers and recruiters.
Terrorists will seek out the neighborhoods where they feel most at home, a place where they can use the community to their advantage. Members of the Ribat mosque provided both transportation and language education skills to the two terrorists not knowing their true objective.
Minneapolis’ Cedar Riverside neighborhood has been dubbed “Little Mogadishu” because of it large Somali population. It is a community that has seen more than 50 of its members go overseas to join the Islamist terrorist organization Al Shabaab. Al Shabaab preyed on second generation immigrants who felt a disconnect between American society and their ancestral home. To stem the tide of continued recruitment by radical Islamist terrorists like Al Shabaab, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force successfully focused its investigation on the Muslim community in the greater Minneapolis area.
On the other hand, groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) seek to portray law enforcement as sinister characters sneaking through neighborhoods in trench coats looking to do harm to the community. One chapter urged community members to “Build a Wall of Resistance” and not cooperate with investigators in ongoing terrorist investigations. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Thankfully, many members of Minneapolis’ Somali community rejected this approach.
To blindly think that neighborhoods are somehow immune from the nefarious tactics used by either criminal or terrorist organization is to cede ground to those who would do us harm. Police departments exist to protect and serve communities and one of those tools most helpful is knowing the makeup of each neighborhood they patrol. Turning that responsibility over to a terrorist-friendly mayor will only handcuff police with the ambiguity of political correctness and lead to greater harm.
Oklahoma lawmaker gives questionnaire to Muslims, Hamas-linked CAIR enraged
March 5, 2017Oklahoma lawmaker gives questionnaire to Muslims, Hamas-linked CAIR enraged, Jihad Watch,
(Mr. Spencer seems to encourage CAIR, et al, to join the Muslim Reform Movement, which he generally disparages elsewhere as at best pointless. — DM)
If Soltani and Hamas-linked CAIR were operating in good faith, they would admit that the Qur’an sanctions wife-beating and that spousal abuse is not just rampant but taken for granted in many areas of the Islamic world, and would detail a genuine program for reform and a determination that women not be beaten. Instead, Soltani dismisses the questions as “Islamophobic” and claims victim status. This is typical, but it doesn’t make the questions go away. [Emphasis added.]
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Hamas-linked CAIR’s Adam Soltani asks: “The question that comes to mind is, does he do this to others? Does he ask question to his Christian constituents? His Jewish constituents? If the answer is no, that’s discrimination. There’s no other way to call it.”
All right. However, there have been 30,000 murderous jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11 carried out by Muslims who found impetus and justification for them in the Qur’an and Sunnah. Christians and Jews, meanwhile, are not committing acts of violence and pointing to their holy book to justify it and make recruits among peaceful Christians and Jews. Is John Bennett not allowed to notice that, and decry it?
Soltani also said: “Nobody should be vetted with stupid, Islamophobic, hateful, bigoted questions before they can meet with their representative.”
Well, in reality, if my representative asked me to fill out a questionnaire before he or she would meet with me, I would just fill it out. Soltani says that the questions are “stupid, Islamophobic, hateful, bigoted,” but he doesn’t explain why (and of course “journalist” Mary Ann Georgantopoulos of the establishment propaganda media organ BuzzFeed doesn’t ask him to). There is an important reason for this: Soltani knows full well that the Qur’an tells Muslim men to beat women from whom they fear disobedience (4:34), and that multiple hadiths record that Muhammad married a 6-year-old girl (Aisha) when he was 51 (or thereabouts), and that Bennett’s other questions also have a foundation in actual Islamic teaching and practice.
If Soltani and Hamas-linked CAIR were operating in good faith, they would admit that the Qur’an sanctions wife-beating and that spousal abuse is not just rampant but taken for granted in many areas of the Islamic world, and would detail a genuine program for reform and a determination that women not be beaten. Instead, Soltani dismisses the questions as “Islamophobic” and caims victim status. This is typical, but it doesn’t make the questions go away.
“This Lawmaker Asked Muslims If They Beat Their Wives Before He Would Allow A Meeting,” by Mary Ann Georgantopoulos, BuzzFeed News, March 3, 2017:
Muslims hoping to meet with a Oklahoma lawmaker during a special event had to first fill out a controversial questionnaire about Islam that included inquiries such as “Do you beat your wife?”
Oklahoma Rep. John Bennett asked his constituents taking part in the state’s third annual Muslim Day on Thursday — in which Muslims have the opportunity to interact with state legislators at the capitol — to fill out the questionnaire.
Adam Soltani, executive director of Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) Oklahoma, told BuzzFeed News that high school students from Tulsa’s Peace Academy visited Bennett’s office to either meet with him or schedule a meeting.
The students were met by a legislative assistant, Soltani said, who gave the students a questionnaire, telling them it must be filled out in writing.
The nine-part questionnaire includes questions such as, “The Koran, the sunna of Mohammed and Sharia Law of all schools says that the husband can beat his wife. Do you beat your wife?”
Another question is, “I have heard that, according to accepted Islamic sources, Mohammed, at age of 49, married a 6-year-old girl, and that he had sex with her when he was 52 and she was only 9 years old. Is that really true?”
“I was distraught when [the students] showed me the questionnaire,” Soltani told BuzzFeed News. “I wasn’t completely surprised by it because obviously we have been challenging Bennett’s hate rhetoric for many years.”…
Soltani said he does not know how many people got the questionnaire because more than 200 people attended Muslim Day at the Capitol, adding that all the other legislators were very supportive and welcoming.The questionnaire was written up by anti-Islam group ACT for America — the group’s logo and email address are on the sheet of paper.
“The question that comes to mind is, does he do this to others?” Soltani said. “Does he ask question [sic] to his Christian constituents? His Jewish constituents? If the answer is no, that’s discrimination. There’s no other way to call it.”
Soltani said there shouldn’t be somebody working for the state of Oklahoma who doesn’t represent all citizens.
“Nobody should be vetted with stupid, Islamophobic, hateful, bigoted questions before they can meet with their representative,” Soltani said in a video posted to Facebook Thursday.
The Islamic Society of North America’s Destructive Agenda
March 2, 2017The Islamic Society of North America’s Destructive Agenda, Front Page Magazine, John Perazzo, March 2, 2017
Below is the fourth installment in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. Click the following for the previous profiles on the Souther Poverty Law Center, Students for Justice in Palestine and the New Black Panther Party.
The truly incredible fact that ISNA’s president occupied a seat on Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security speaks volumes of the utter contempt in which Obama holds the United States and Israel alike.
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A number of major Democrats have cultivated highly significant ties to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). For example: Congressman Keith Ellison (Minnesota), who narrowly lost in his bid to become DNC chairman a few days ago, has spoken at ISNA’s massive national conferences on a number of occasions. Congressman Andre Carson (Indiana) has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from ISNA-affiliated donors, as have Keith Ellison, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. And ISNA president Mohamed Magid was a key figure in Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, where he was authorized to train and advise personnel affiliated with the FBI and other federal agencies.
Yet most Americans are entirely unaware of just how subversive and anti-American the Islamic Society of North America is.
ISNA was established in July 1981 by U.S-based members of the Muslim Brotherhood who also had been leaders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Muslim Brothers would dominate ISNA’s leadership throughout the Society’s early years, when it was highly dependent upon Saudi funding. ISNA’s founding mission was “to advance the cause of Islam and serve Muslims in North America so as to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” Today ISNA is the largest Muslim organization on the continent. Its annual conferences routinely draw 30,000 to 40,000 attendees.
When ISNA was incorporated on July 14, 1981, its headquarters were located at the same address as those of the MSA. Eventually, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF)—the U.S.-based financing wing of Hamas—would share the address as well.
One of ISNA’s key founders in 1981 was Sami Al-Arian, who subsequently became the North American leader of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was indicted by the Justice Department in 2003, was held under house arrest for several years, and finally was deported in 2015.
Another ISNA co-founder was Muzammil Siddiqi, who went on to serve two terms (1997-2001) as ISNA president and continues to sit on the organization’s governing board. Siddiqi has praised Islamic suicide bombers as “those who die on the part of justice” and consequently reside “with the Lord” in a place of “the highest honor.” Moreover, he has defined jihad as “the path” and “the way [for Muslims] to receive the honor.”
Yet another prominent founding member of ISNA was Mahboob Khan, who in 1983 helped establish the California-based Muslim Community Association, which at least twice hosted and raised money for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would later go on to become al Qaeda‘s second-in-command.
In November 1987, ISNA established its own Political Awareness Committee headed by Abdurahman Alamoudi, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who in 2004 would be convicted on terrorism-related charges and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Declassified FBI memos indicate that ISNA was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front as early as 1987, and a 1988 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood document bluntly identified ISNA as part of the “apparatus of the Brotherhood.” Further, ISNA was explicitly named in a May 1991 memorandum as an ally that shared the Brotherhood’s goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation by means of a “grand Jihad.”
ISNA leadership rejects all practices and social mores that fail to comport with the Wahhabist vision of Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. For instance, Muzzamil Siddiqi calls homosexuality “a moral disorder,” “a moral disease,” “a sin,” and a “corruption” that merits the death penalty.
ISNA plays a major role in providing Wahhabi theological indoctrination materials to a large percentage of the mosques in North America. As such, it is able to influence the nature of the sermons given in those mosques, the selection of reading materials that are available in mosque libraries and bookstores, and the policies governing the exclusion of dissenters from any given congregation. Kaukab Siddique, a Lincoln University professor who has called for the destruction of Israel, avers that “ISNA controls most mosques in America and thus also controls who will speak at every Friday prayer, and which literature will be distributed there.”
ISNA’s central tenet is Jew hatred. On May 24, 1998, ISNA was one of 11 organizations that sponsored a Brooklyn College event where the Egyptian cleric Wagdy Ghoniem spoke about the “infidelity,” “stealth,” and “deceit” of the Jews, and referred to Jews as “descendants of the apes.” Three years later, when the U.S. government designated the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) as a terrorist organization, ISNA, which had raised money for the group, complained that HLF was being unfairly “targeted” by “pro-Israel organizations and individuals.” In December 2003, U.S. Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus of the Senate Committee on Finance listed ISNA as one of 25 American Muslim organizations that “finance terrorism and perpetuate violence.”
During its 2006 national convention, guest speaker Kamran Memon rationalized al Qaeda’s terrorist activities as understandable reactions to provocative American policies overseas: “Some Muslims in the Muslim world decided that they were just not going to take it anymore. They were angry at our ongoing support from their enemies, so they began to attack American targets to pressure our government to change its foreign policy.”
At ISNA’s convention a year later in Illinois, Parvez Ahmed of the Council on American-Islamic Relations defended the jihadist activities and agendas of Hamas and Hezbollah as “legitimate.” And at ISNA’s 2008 convention, a guest speaker lauded the “amazing work” that Hamas was doing to promote education and health care in the West Bank.
Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, assesses ISNA as follows: “ISNA … officials refuse to condemn both [Hamas and Hezbollah], will not label either as terrorist organizations, but instead refer to Hamas favorably as the ‘democratically-elected Palestinian government.’ ISNA studiously ignores the Hamas Charter—a virulently anti-Semitic tract which states that ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it’—and the fact that violent jihad is a core principal of Hamas and Hezbollah.”
The truly incredible fact that ISNA’s president occupied a seat on Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security speaks volumes of the utter contempt in which Obama holds the United States and Israel alike.
Muslim Brotherhood: We’re Spending $5 Million on PR in U.S.
February 28, 2017Muslim Brotherhood: We’re Spending $5 Million on PR in U.S., Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, February 28, 2017
Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups in the U.S. include the Council of American Islamic Relations. Shown here are CAIR’s Founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad (R) and National Communications Director and Spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper (L). Awad was present at the 1993 secret meeting of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI. Participants of the meeting discussed how to support Hamas and, in the words of U.S. District Court Judge Solis “goals, strategies and American perceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood.”(Photo: © Reuters)
The allotment of money for this campaign is an indirect acknowledgement by the Brotherhood that it exists in the U.S., and its activity in the country is important enough to fight for. The claim that the Brotherhood has an American wing will earn you a branding as a bigoted “Islamophobe,” but it isn’t so controversial in the Arab press (even though the Brotherhood insinuates the same thing there).
Foreign influence operations are at the top of the news right now in the U.S., but they center about Russia. Why is it acceptable to say that Russia would try to influence our policy, but it is bigoted to suggest that the Brotherhood—the largest Islamist movement in the world—would do the same?
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A senior Muslim Brotherhood official in Sudan told an Arab newspaper* that the group’s international leadership has launched a major PR campaign to influence the U.S. media and members of Congress to oppose the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The Brotherhood official predicted that the group would not be designated by the Trump Administration and that the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act introduced into Congress would fail.
He claimed that his organization had made contact with governmental officials and members of Congress and convinced them that the Brotherhood is opposed to terrorism, even though the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing—Hamas—is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department.
The author of the article reports that, according to sources within the Brotherhood, the group has spent $5 million on the PR campaign, with contracts being signed last month. The effort to influence American media included having articles and essays published to argue against designation of the Brotherhood.
Indeed, a slew of articles defending the Brotherhood were published as it was reported that the Trump Administration was planning to designate the Brotherhood. Most of these argue that the Brotherhood is opposed to terrorism and violence. As I wrote in December 2014, this notion is patently false.
The Brotherhood also thanked the leaders of Turkey and Qatar for defending the organization. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist group.
The Egyptian government warned that the Brotherhood has a lobby in the U.S. disguised as civil society organizations. An Egyptian government website cited a study done by a think-tank in Cairo that concluded that the Brotherhood is trying to influence U.S. policy using affiliates in America that “aim to spread the Muslim Brotherhood’s extremist ideologies in the U.S.,” in the words of the website.
A senior UAE official likewise said that the Brotherhood’s American lobby was responsible for political blowback over his country’s previous designation of the Brotherhood and two of its U.S.-based entities, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS).
The allotment of money for this campaign is an indirect acknowledgement by the Brotherhood that it exists in the U.S., and its activity in the country is important enough to fight for. The claim that the Brotherhood has an American wing will earn you a branding as a bigoted “Islamophobe,” but it isn’t so controversial in the Arab press (even though the Brotherhood insinuates the same thing there).
Foreign influence operations are at the top of the news right now in the U.S., but they center about Russia. Why is it acceptable to say that Russia would try to influence our policy, but it is bigoted to suggest that the Brotherhood—the largest Islamist movement in the world—would do the same?
*This article was first noticed by Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It was then reviewed by Clarion Project’s Arabic translator.
Claire Lopez FULL SPEECH- CPAC 2017
February 27, 2017Claire Lopez FULL SPEECH- CPAC 2017, Right Side Broadcasting via YouTube, February 23, 2017
In posting the above video, The Gates of Vienna stated,
Clare M. Lopez is a strategic policy and intelligence expert who focuses on national defense, Islam, Iran, and counterterrorism issues. She is a former career operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.
Ms. Lopez spoke at a CPAC event on Thursday. Below is a video of the brief talk she gave about stealth Islamization and sharia in North America:
Anti-Trump Women’s Movement Teams Up With Islamist Terrorist
February 27, 2017Anti-Trump Women’s Movement Teams Up With Islamist Terrorist, Clarion Project, February 27, 2017
Rasmea Odeh speaking at the International Working Women’s Day 2016 (Photo: Video screenshot)
The liberal left has teamed up with extremist and violent Islamists in its next salvo against newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, a follow-up event to the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, will be staged.
One of the co-authors of the “militant” manifesto behind the nationwide event is convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Yousef Odeh.
Odeh was convicted in Israel in 1970 for being involved in two fatal bombings. Odeh spent 10 years in jail before she was released in a prisoner exchange in 1980.
She moved to the U.S. by omitting her terror conviction on her immigration papers and served as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and later as an ObamaCare navigator. In 2014, she was convicted in the U.S. for concealing her past and thus illegally obtaining U.S. citizenship.
After claiming she forgot about her conviction and imprisonment in Israel due to post traumatic stress disorder, she was awarded a new trial which is currently pending.
The women’s event manifesto, printed as an open letter in The Guardian, calls for “striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses.
All women are requested to wear red in solidarity for a day of “anti-capitalist feminism.”
Odeh’s co-authors include Angela Davis, a self-professed communist professor (now retired), who was a supporter of the original Black Panthers and a 1960s radical icon. Davis was prosecuted and acquitted in 1972 for an armed takeover of a California courtroom that resulted in the murder of a judge.
The January 21 Women’s March on Washington was organized by Islamist apologist and activist Linda Sarsour, a supporter of shariah law.
“Shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics,” tweeted Sarsour.
As for women with whom she does not agree, Sarsour tweeted, “Brigitte Gabriel=Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s asking 4 an a$$ whippin’. I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.”
New DNC Chair Perez Engaged Islamists, Ignored Reformers
February 27, 2017New DNC Chair Perez Engaged Islamists, Ignored Reformers, Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, February 27, 2017
Tom Perez (Photo: Justice Department)
Tom Perez has defeated Rep. Keith Ellison in the race to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but don’t rest easy: Perez also has a concerning record and chose Ellison as his deputy chairman.
When he was the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, he included Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and their allies in discussions about counter-terrorism training and investigations and laws punishing alleged “hate speech” against the religion of Islam. Muslim and non-Muslim critics of such Islamist groups were not a part of Perez’ outreach on these issues.
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor responsible for locking up the “Blind Sheikh” behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, rightly pointed out at the time that the result of excluding the Islamist groups’ rivals is that officials like Perez “are making these Islamist groups into the representatives of Muslims in the United States.”
In 2012, Perez wouldn’t answer what should have been a very easy question posed by Rep. Trent Frank (R-AZ) while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution :
“Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?”
His answer was a series of stammers and assertions that it was hard to answer. (See shocking video below:)
Then, as Secretary of Labor, Perez continued to give groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a platform while excluding the other side. In May 2015, CAIR-Florida Communications Director Wilfredo Amr Ruiz was invited to take part in a roundtable with Perez about immigration and wage issues.
Keep in mind, Perez invited a group that FBI policy officially prohibits from being involved in outreach programs.
Counter-terrorism investigator Joe Kaufman has followed Ruiz and CAIR’s Florida branch closely, documenting their radicalism and links to other Islamist extremist entities here and here.
Ruiz appeared on Newsmax TV with me in March 2016 where he made the ridiculous statement that there have been no terrorist networks in America since 2001. You can watch the segment here. He subsequently told Newsmax he would not appear on the show with me ever again.
The good news is that enough Democrats took Ellison’s record seriously to stop him from becoming the DNC chairman, to the point that prominent Democrat Alan Dershowitz said he’d leave the party if Ellison won. However, Ellison is still the deputy chairman and Perez’s record leaves much to be desired.
As deputy chairman, Ellison is still positioned to make the DNC adopt the talking points of Islamist groups like CAIR.
Gorka & Jasser: We Are Fighting ‘Not a War with Islam, but a War Inside Islam’
February 24, 2017Gorka & Jasser: We Are Fighting ‘Not a War with Islam, but a War Inside Islam’, Breitbart, John Hayward, February 24, 2017
Flickr/AFP
Broadcasting live from CPAC 2017, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow spoke with Dr. Sebastian Gorka and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser about national security, Islamist terrorism, and their panel discussion, “When Did World War III Begin?”
(Audio at the link. — DM)
Marlow began by asking his guests what they expected from the national security segment of President Donald Trump’s scheduled address to the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“Exactly what we’ve heard before,” Gorka replied. “If you really want to understand the direction of the White House and how much everything changed at 12:01 on January the 20th, you look at two things: you look at a speech that really wasn’t carefully addressed or really paid enough attention to, that’s the Youngstown campaign speech, which was about the threat of jihad in general and what we’re going to do about ISIS.”
“Specifically, it really bears repeating, the inauguration, the address that the president gave at the inauguration, was explicit,” he continued. “Number one, we are going to eradicate the Islamic State – not degrade, not manage, not ameliorate – eradicate. And secondly, words have meaning. When he says our enemy is ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ that is a 180 degree change from the last eight years, when we weren’t allowed to even say who the enemy was.”
“Zuhdi knows it better than anybody because he understands that this isn’t about poverty or lack of education. It’s about people who are fighting for the soul of Islam – not a war with Islam, but a war inside Islam; as King Abdullah, as General Sisi has said, for which version is going to win,” Gorka said.
Marlow asked Dr. Jasser about the topic of language control Gorka touched upon and the previous administration’s reluctance to use explicit language like “radical Islamic jihad” to describe the enemy.
“We got to this point because we had an administration who was being whispered to by Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, by apologists, by governments that might be our allies against al-Qaeda and ISIS, but they love a whack-a-mole program. They don’t want to treat the disease, which is not ‘violent extremism’ but violent Islamism,” Jasser charged.
“We have to start focusing on our own values,” he urged. “There’s nothing more American than fighting theocracy, and yet the Left for the last eight years has invoked blasphemy laws in America by telling us we can’t criticize Islamist political movements.”
Jasser predicted the new administration would succeed in destroying ISIS but warned that “it will come back in another form – two, three, four years later – unless we engage Muslim reformists, like our Muslim reform movement, to treat the underlying theocracy.”
Marlow complained that the mainstream media swiftly denounce candid talk about the problem of radical Islam as “hate speech” even when confined to straightforward reporting without editorial opinion, making it difficult to have a constructive discussion about the problem.
“I think this is exactly what the Saudi regime, the Iranian Khomeinists, the Brotherhood want, is they want to dominate what Islam means,” Jasser said. “And yes, it’s not my Islam, but we have to thread that needle. Because if you don’t call it political Islam or Islamism as the threat, you’re not going to be able to figure out who to engage. We want to engage anti-Caliphate, anti-violent jihad Muslims who are pro-freedom, pro-equality of men and women, who share our values. If we don’t do that discernment in our verbiage, we’re going to miss it and actually end up helping our enemies and end up actually not only being the firefighters, but the arsonists. We have to stop that cycle.”
“Let’s just take it one level deeper. It’s not just empowering our enemies, which would be bad enough,” Gorka added. “If you don’t talk truthfully about who the enemy is, how are you going to win? What we saw in the last eight years is a policy that actually weakened our most important allies.”
“So when you’ve got the president of the most populous Arab nation in the world say this is a war for the heart of Islam, General Sisi, when you’ve got King Abdullah with his Amman statement saying, ‘Look, we have to stop the jihadis hijacking the religion’ – we have a president here who stands up and says, ‘No, no, no, these are not the droids you’re looking for, the religion has nothing to do with this,’” he elaborated, referring to the Obama administration’s insistence on framing the war as a struggle against generic violent extremism.
“Do you know who we hurt the most? Those Muslims who are on the front lines with the jihadis, who understand this isn’t about poverty or lack of education; it’s about an ideology. So we’ve actually hurt the people who are on the front line the most. We’re not prepared to do that anymore. This administration’s going to help the Jordanians, help the Egyptians, help them fight this war,” Gorka vowed.
“I think we have to own what it means to be diverse,” Jasser suggested. “What is ‘diversity’ in the Muslim community? It’s not ethnic diversity. Being Muslim is not an identity movement of a monolithic homogenous group. It is a diverse ideological movement that has fundamentalist, orthodox, liberal, secularists that are all in this Muslim diverse group. So if the Left actually believes in diversity different from what Pelosi whispered into Andre Carson’s ear – ‘Tell them you’re Muslim’ – Islam is not a race. They’re racializing the faith. That’s the biggest obstacle.”
“I think the other thing I hope to see is not only us being against jihadists, but what are we for,” he added. “I think that will be the difference between some of the dictators in the Middle East, that yes, some of them have been on our side against jihad, the militants, but we are the adults in the world, in being for liberty and freedom. I hope that will be part of a Trump Doctrine.”
Gorka agreed, saluting Jasser as “the point man here in America for sense, for common sense in this battle.”
“The saddest part is there are people like him in the Middle East. There are people every day risking their lives on their blog sites, in North Africa, in the Middle East pushing back on this, saying, ‘I’m a Muslim, but I don’t think an infidel needs to be killed.’ That means he’s put the crosshairs on his chest,” Gorka noted. “In some parts of the Muslim world, that’s an instant death sentence.”
“That’s why the four million Muslims in America need to step up and act because we can do things here that you just can’t do in the Middle East,” Jasser said. “They end up in prison. They end up slaughtered, tortured.”
Marlow proposed that “the stifling of speech in the Muslim world is really what has allowed a lot of the jihadist movements to flourish.”
“Why do you think they use the term ‘Islamophobia’ instead of talking about, yes, there might be some bigotry against Muslims in the West?” Jasser asked. “They use the term Islamophobia because they want to anthropomorphize Islam so that you don’t criticize it, and they suppress free speech. That’s how they invoke blasphemy laws in the West.”
“You’re absolutely right. The freedom of speech issue is huge in the Middle East because it’s a life and death issue in many cases,” Gorka said. “But here, it’s almost as important. It’s not life and death, but it is closing down the discussion.”
“You look at what’s happened in the last four weeks with this administration,” he said. “There’s a phrase in soccer: you play the man on the ball. We’re not going to talk about policies; we’re going to attack individuals, whether it’s Kellyanne, the president, myself, Steve Bannon. They do that how? ‘We don’t want to talk about the threat to America. You’re a racist. You’re an Islamophobe. You’re a xenophobe. Oh, well, in that case, we can’t talk to you.’ That’s as dangerous as just the constant ad hominem attacks because then there is no discussion.”
Jasser said his message to CPAC was that “there is hope” for a lasting victory in the long war against Islamist extremism.
“The first step is to defeat the militants, which this president will finally do,” he said. “The second step is to go back to our American roots and defeat theocracy, work with Muslims and our Muslim reform movement. We have a two-page declaration that can be used, I hope, not only to vet refugees, to figure out which groups are with us and against us. I hope we start doing security clearances through those who share our values.”
“There are so many that are – not in this administration, but that are in the government from the previous administration – that I think are Islamists, that might not be violent extremists, but we need to shift the axis of the lens of Homeland Security, foreign policy, to countering violent Islamism. There’s nothing this group here and the country can do to better empower reform-minded Muslims that share our values than to shift from this blasé CVE to CVI,” Jasser said, lampooning the Obama administration’s acronym for “Countering Violent Extremism.”
Gorka referred to CVE as “garbage from the last eight years that obfuscated the threat.”
He said the most important step taken by the new administration was President Trump’s executive order to temporarily limit immigration from the most unsecure Middle Eastern nations.
“Whatever the final version of the reform measures are, the fact is, when an Iraqi collars me in the halls of Congress and says, ‘My friends back home in Iraq applaud this measure because they know how many bad guys are in Iraq that want to come over here, so do it. Thank you,’” Gorka said.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is deputy assistant to President Trump and was formerly national security editor for Breitbart News. He is the author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.
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