Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 14

CAIR: Censor or Free-Speech Champion?

Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers.

A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor cannot completely refute is the roadmap to acquittal.

This, however, is not the lot of most defense lawyers. In the vast majority of cases, the client really is guilty, and the state really does have ironclad proof. So defense counsel becomes the charlatan for whom every trial day is a new day. On Monday, he tries a false-identification theory, suggesting that the defendant was not even at the scene of the crime. When that doesn’t fly, on Tuesday he runs with, “Well, maybe he was there, but he didn’t know the three guys he was with.” Once that blows up, Wednesday’s gambit is: “Well, sure, he knew them, but he didn’t know they were going to rob the bank.” By Thursday, it’s: “Well, maybe he said he’d help them, but one was a government informant, so he must have been entrapped.”

Our defense lawyer is put in this untenable position because his true objective is fundamentally different from his lofty pretense. He purports to be on a quest for justice, but the only thing he really cares about is getting the defendant off, by any means that might work. Thus, he tries all means he can think of, even if they are contradictory -- even if positing the first defense undermines the next, ultimately destroying his overall credibility as an advocate.

#ad#Although it does more than its share of litigating, the Council on American-Islamic Relations operates mainly in the court of public opinion. CAIR is the Muslim Brotherhood bullhorn created to cheerlead for sharia, for Hamas, and for sundry other jihadists -- all under the guise of “civil rights.” In unison with its “social justice” collaborators on the left, CAIR is most often found campaigning against “Islamophobia.” This is a term strategically created by the Brotherhood to slur as “defamation” or “incitement” (collectively, “hate speech”) any criticism of Islamic supremacism. That includes the ideology’s undeniable roots in Muslim scripture; its vow to destroy the West from within; and its promotion of terrorism against legitimate sovereign authority, spun as “resistance” against “occupation.”

It is farce. CAIR has no real interest in hate speech per se. Indeed, it has no real interest in civil rights -- no proponent of sharia could. Its sole actual imperative is Islamic supremacism: promoting any cause that increases Islamic influence and protesting any effort either to reduce Islamic influence or to subject Islamic-supremacist doctrine to scrutiny. Consequently, CAIR’s precious fretting over hate speech extends only so far as Islam is advanced or imperiled.

The same is true of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation -- the supranational caliphate in the making -- whose top goal at the moment is suppression of speech about Islam. Like its CAIR confederates, the OIC pretends to be a champion of universal “human rights.” Thus it feigns opposition to defamation or incitement against what it calls “religion.” But we know this is fraudulent -- or at least we would know if examination of Islamist ideology were not so adamantly discouraged. It is a plain, irrefutable fact that Islamic countries repress the practice of other religions. Indeed, the practice of religions other than Islam is illegal in Saudi Arabia, the OIC’s de facto leader. Patently, it is not “religion” that the OIC cares about; it is Islam. “Religion” is invoked as a smokescreen, enabling these Islamist activists to pose as guardians of civil rights rather than the vanguard of Islamic supremacism.

All of this is worth sorting out because, unexpectedly, we have a teachable moment. The state of California has adopted a resolution decreeing that “no public resources will be allowed to be used for any anti-Semitic or any intolerant agitation.”

#page#It is right up the Islamist alley -- or it would be if, as CAIR and the OIC maintain, their concern is hate speech against “religion.” Yet CAIR has come out against the resolution. As Robert Spencer notes, CAIR’s Golden State chapter has issued a statement pleading with the legislature to reconsider. The resolution, according to the Islamists, “stifles robust political debate on university campuses.” Yes, with a curb on Jew hatred at issue, the guys who want to put you in jail for noticing that violent jihadists accurately quote Muslim scripture are suddenly worried that the marketplace of ideas may be shuttered!

#ad#Islamic supremacists have to take this position. To be sure, it flies in the face of their long-running defamation scam. But the code is broken once we decipher that CAIR’s reverence is for sharia -- that these Islamists reject a universal, rather than a sharia-dictated, construction of civil rights. We then realize it makes perfect sense that Islamists would oppose critical examination of Islam but favor incitement against Jews. It makes perfect sense that, like our defense lawyer, CAIR is the scourge of “hate speech” one day and the avatar of free expression the next.

In a trial court, the defense lawyer’s dizzying assertion of contradictory positions never works, for two reasons. The first is that a jury is a captive audience: For as long as the trial lasts, other occupations are suspended and deciding the case is the jurors’ only job. They therefore pay close attention, and their common sense cannot but take account of the lawyerly legerdemain.

Second, even if the jurors’ attention wanders or they have memory lapses about the testimony, the trial has a record: The stenographer transcribes all of the testimony. An able prosecutor can thus easily show that while he has presented a straightforward case, the defense has responded with inconsistent bunkum.

Alas, Islamists romp in the court of public opinion. It is not a trial court, and there is no captive audience to judge its goings-on. People are busy living their lives. CAIR is obviously fraudulent, but who has time to notice? Or, better to say, the public cannot be expected to notice unless we have a responsible stenographer to make an honest record and a good-faith prosecutor to highlight the contradictions.

Today, in those roles, we have a left-leaning media that colludes in CAIR’s “civil rights” pretensions, and a pusillanimous political class that coddles Islamists while scalding their detractors. That’s how the charlatans win.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

I, I, Yay, Yay . . .

If someone had said the main speech would be an out-of-place exercise in autobiography and self-adulation that couldn't have had more I's in it if every other word had been Mississippi, you'd have figured we must be talking about the other guys' convention, right?

Was the GOP's goal to add self-absorption to Big Government, the Arab Spring, and suppression of conservatives on the list of things they can do just as well as Democrats? If so, they're off to a flying start. 

Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood

I’m a big fan of the 1 percent. No, not the dastardly 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street myth; I’m partial, instead, to the 1 percent of Congress that takes seriously the threat of Islamic-supremacist influence operations against our government.

The people have 435 representatives serving in the House and another hundred in the Senate. Of these 535, a total of 288 are Republicans -- 241 and 47 in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. Of these, only five House conservatives -- five -- have had the fortitude to raise concerns about the Islamist connections of government officials entrusted with positions enabling them to shape U.S. policy.

Think about that. Republicans purport to be the national-security party. For decades this claim was well founded, starting with Ronald Reagan’s clarity in seeing the Soviets as enemies to be defeated, not accommodated. President Reagan’s plan for the Cold War was, “We win, they lose,” and he pulled it off because he was not under any illusions about who “they” were.

But something happened to the GOP in the Bush years. For all the welcome understanding that Bill Clinton was wrong -- that the jihad could not be indicted into submission -- the Bush administration never learned a fundamental truth that Reagan knew only too well: You cannot defeat your enemies unless you understand them, and you cannot even begin to understand them if you are too craven to name them.

#ad#As they gather in Tampa for their quadrennial showcase, Republicans, but for the 1 percent, remain timorous on the subject of America’s enemies. Oh, they’ll tell you that we must confront “terrorism” and crack down on the “terrorists.” But that’s not much different from claiming to be against “burglary” and “burglars.” Terrorism is a vicious crime, but it becomes a national-security threat only when it is an instrument of an ideology that aims to destroy our country. What made the terrorist organizations armed and trained by the Soviets in the Sixties and Seventies a threat was the Soviets, not the terrorism.

America’s enemies are Islamic supremacists: Muslims adherent to a totalitarian interpretation of Islam who, like Soviet Communists, seek to impose their ideology throughout the world, very much including the United States. Terrorism is an offensive strategy they use, but it is only one arrow in the quiver. Its chief utility, moreover, is not that it will coerce surrender on its own; it is the atmosphere of intimidation it creates. That dramatically increases the effectiveness of the enemy’s several other offensive strategies -- legal demands for concessions, media campaigns, infiltration of society’s major institutions, and influence operations against government.

The most disheartening thing about the modern Republican party’s dereliction -- about its accommodation and empowerment of our enemies under the delusional guise of “Muslim outreach” -- is that it flies in the face of the Bush Justice Department’s signal counterterrorism achievement.

That was the 2007–08 Holy Land Foundation case. For once, political correctness and the fear of being smeared as “Islamophobic” were shelved. In the course of convicting several Hamas operatives, prosecutors proved that the Muslim Brotherhood is engaged in a far-flung enterprise aimed, in the Brothers’ own words, at “eliminating and destroying” our way of life “from within” by means of “sabotage.” The Bush Justice Department not only showed that what the Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad” (or “civilization jihad”) is real; Justice shed light on the ideology that fuels this enterprise, and expressly identified many of the global Brotherhood’s accomplices.

Alas, this achievement is one today’s Republicans prefer to ignore. The party of Ronald Reagan would have worn it like a badge of honor. Today’s GOP would rather engage our enemies and call them our friends -- not understand them, call them what they are, and defeat them. Today’s Beltway Republicans save their wrath for the occasional conservative -- the messengers who embarrass them by illustrating how small the big time has made them.

#page#Did you know, for example, that when the Republican establishment had its hissy fit over the inconvenient 1 percent -- when John McCain and John Boehner led the shrieking over their five conservative colleagues’ purported scaremongering over Islamist influence-peddling -- the fact that this influence-peddling effort exists had just been proved in court?

As Patrick Poole, one of few to cover the case, has observed, it is the biggest spy scandal you’ve never heard about. Right around the time McCain and Boehner were dressing down the 1 percent last month, Ghulam Nabi Fai was finally heading off to prison. He had pled guilty last December to acting as a secret foreign agent against our government.

In sum, Fai was paid millions of dollars over two decades by the Pakistani intelligence service to push its agenda through a D.C.-based front, the Kashmiri American Council. You haven’t heard much about it because it is a Muslim Brotherhood operation through and through, one that demonstrates exactly what the 1 percent is warning about.

#ad#Fai grew up in Kashmir, the disputed territory Islamists have sought to wrest from India, often by terrorism, for over half a century. His story would be typical of Muslim Brotherhood operatives if we actually spoke about Muslim Brotherhood operatives. He became a member of Jama’at-e-Islami, which maintains close relations with the Brotherhood and is, for Pakistanis, what the Brotherhood is for Arabs -- the vanguard of global Islamic supremacism.

The force that globalizes this movement is Saudi money and commitment. During one of the many Indian crackdowns on Kashmiri Islamists, Fai did exactly what Muslim Brothers in Egypt frequently did during regime crackdowns: He fled to Saudi Arabia. While studying at one of the kingdom’s Wahhabist universities, he made himself useful to a highly influential imam who incited Kashmiri jihadists. Impressed by Fai’s devotion to the cause, the Saudi government agreed to pay for his education in the United States.

The Saudis steered Fai to Temple University, where Islamists had a beachhead. Fai studied under a Palestinian sharia specialist, Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, who led the Saudi-funded “Islamization of knowledge” program. Ismail would later join Muslim Brotherhood operatives to found the International Institute of Islamic Thought — a think tank dedicated to the “Islamization of knowledge” project, and one that worked so closely with Sami al-Arian, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad emir, that its leadership was listed among the unindicted co-conspirators cited by the Bush Justice Department at al-Arian’s terrorism trial.

At Temple, Fai became the president of the Muslim Students Association -- the national organization. Established in the early sixties, the MSA is the original foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. It now has hundreds of chapters grooming Islamists across the United States and Canada. Patrick Poole has recounted the numerous MSA leaders who have graduated to violent jihadism. They include -- and this is just to name a few of many -- Wael Jalaidan, a founder of al-Qaeda; Abdurahman Alamoudi, a leading financier of al-Qaeda who was eventually convicted in a murder plot; and Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda leader who counseled the 9/11 hijackers and, before finally being killed in Yemen last year, was implicated in sundry jihadist plots, including the Fort Hood massacre and the attempt to bomb a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Like Fai, both Alamoudi and Awlaki were once admired in Washington as model moderates thanks to the magic of “Muslim outreach.” (So was al-Arian.)

From the MSA, Fai seamlessly moved on to the “shura council” (i.e., the advisory board) of the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA evolved out of the MSA and the two organizations consider themselves as one. ISNA has become the largest and, perhaps, the most influential Brotherhood affiliate in the United States -- see its president, Mohamed Magid, pictured here with State Department official Huma Abedin at the Iftar (end-of-Ramadan) dinner hosted by President Obama just a few weeks ago.

#page#Fai joined ISNA in the late Eighties. That is when the Brotherhood formed Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization whose funding during and after the Intifada was the Brotherhood’s top American priority. It was to route money to the jihad against Israel that the Brotherhood established the Holy Land Foundation -- the subject of the Bush Justice Department’s aforementioned terrorism prosecution. Ostensibly a charity, HLF was housed in the headquarters ISNA shared with another Brotherhood entity, the North American Islamic Trust. NAIT was formed with Saudi funding to buy up real estate throughout the U.S. for the construction of mosques and Islamic community centers -- which Brotherhood ideology considers the “axis” of Islamic supremacism in each city and town. In the HLF plot, bank accounts controlled by ISNA and NAIT were used to funnel funds to Palestinian jihadists.

This Saudi and Brotherhood pedigree made Fai an ideal recruit for the Pakistani intelligence service -- creators of the Taliban and longtime supporters of al-Qaeda. He was thus tabbed in the late Eighties to begin conducting influence operations against the United States. His front organization, the Kashmiri American Council, was incorporated in 1990 by Fai, along with the wife of Sayyid Syeed, ISNA’s longtime secretary-general and currently its director of (what else?) “interfaith outreach.” The venture, which opened with an office just a few blocks from the White House, got a boost from a $20,000 start-up loan from NAIT.

#ad#In the 20 years that followed, Fai received approximately $4 million in funding from Pakistani intelligence. He used it to buy access -- scores of meetings with top federal officials, a ballyhooed annual conference on Capitol Hill, and international credibility as a prominent Muslim who had Washington’s ear. The lion’s share of his political contributions were targeted at Republicans, particularly Representative Dan Burton, the chief congressional supporter of Fai’s Kashmiri American Council, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Fai, however, opportunistically courted members of both parties, and the executive branch as well as Congress. In fact, when President Obama was elected, Pakistani intelligence directed Fai to build relationships in the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon. Nor did they leave it at government officials; Fai was instructed to court specific members of the media and particular Washington think tanks.

Fai had a partner in the scheme: an American named Zaheer Ahmad, who lived in Pakistan and orchestrated the scheme by which Pakistani funds were transferred to Fai. Ahmad, mysteriously, is no longer among the living. Turns out that in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks, he and a Pakistani nuclear scientist had a meeting with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawhiri about getting mass-destruction weapons for al-Qaeda. That meeting was reported by the Hindustan Times in fall 2011, and two days later Ahmad was found dead in Pakistan -- of a cerebral hemorrhage, they say.

It was in 2011 that the FBI concluded it had plenty of evidence to justify arresting Fai. For years he had illegally failed to reveal his status as a Pakistani agent, and he had lied about it in FBI interviews, another felony. But in moving on Fai, the Bureau was stalled by the State Department and the CIA. As Poole suggests, this may be explained by a desire not to exacerbate the growing tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan after American special forces raided bin Laden’s Pakistani compound and killed the al-Qaeda leader that spring. That may also explain why Fai got a sweetheart plea deal -- requiring only a two-year prison term -- despite the fact that the FBI told the court Fai had refused to cooperate regarding “his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Pakistani terrorist groups.”

Here’s the most alarming thing -- the thing about our enemy being an enemy: Even after Fai pled guilty and was sentenced, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure continued to support him ardently. As Poole reports, fundraising dinners in his honor were held by ISNA, the Muslim American Society (which is the Brotherhood’s quasi-official presence in the United States), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR -- which originated out of the Brotherhood’s now-defunct Islamic Association for Palestine and serves as an Islamist public-relations and lawfare arm). Mind you, Fai’s guilt is not in doubt; he pled guilty and agreed to a 26-page statement of facts detailing his operations against our country. Yet the Brothers stand by their man.

When the five House Republicans rose up to call for scrutiny of enemy efforts to influence our government, they were not speaking hypothetically. The effort is very real. And the enemy is now so brazen, so confident about the inroads it has made, that it publicly closes ranks around its operatives even after their treachery has been laid bare.

Republicans have had ample opportunity to stand with their intrepid 1 percent. Most of them are in hiding, though. The few who’ve spoken up have, like their Democratic counterparts, calculated that it’s more expedient to stand with the Muslim Brotherhood’s network than with those trying to expose the Muslim Brotherhood’s network.

Twenty-eight years ago this week, the Reagan Republicans gathered in Dallas for their convention, rightly anticipating a landslide electoral victory. They understood the enemy and they had no reluctance about calling it exactly what it was. But that was then.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

'Abortion Extremist'? That's Harsh, Rich. I'd Call Him an 'Infanticide Moderate.'

Actually, Rich is quite right about Obama's abortion extremism. I wrote about his pro-infanticide stance in the run-up to the ’08 election, here. No one in the media seemed, or seems, to care. Maybe if he'd explained that he was trying to protect "legitimate killings" . . .

'The Egyptian Kansas' -- Hateful Islamophobia at the New York Times

My column this weekend is about the unravelling situation in the Muslim Brotherhood's new Egypt, where another Islamist general got a big promotion this week in that multi-billion-dollar American-funded military that we were told was going to stop Egypt from going the way of the Muslim Brotherhood. I was stunned reading the report, though, to find that the New York Times seems to have been mugged by reality. From the column:

The Times report is very enlightening. As NR readers know, I’ve been arguing for the better part of a decade that the Islamic democracy project is a fool’s errand because Islamist ideology, far from being an outlier, is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East. I even wrote a book, The Grand Jihad, that both explains Islamic supremacism and illustrates that this ideology’s chief proponent — the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by deep Saudi pockets — rightly perceives itself as the avant-garde of a dynamic mass movement. Other than a few appearances on the bestseller list, which I’m sure must have pained the Gray Lady, the book was studiously ignored by the Times. Elsewhere, it was pooh-poohed as Islamophobic tripe. Imagine my surprise, then, to find that my theory, virtually overnight, has gone from an object of ridicule to a truth so undeniable it warrants judicial notice.

Now, the Times tells us:

Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, said American policy makers would be naïve to think that the positions held by Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood — including criticisms of the United States and strong support for the Palestinians — represented fringe thinking.

On those issues, “the Brotherhood is the Egyptian Kansas,” said Professor Shehata. Their positions on foreign policy “reflect rather than oppose what the Egyptian center is thinking,” he said.

Well, I’ll be darned . . .

Egypt’s Military and the Arab Spring

Earlier this week, I wrote about Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. He is a Muslim Brotherhood adherent who rose to the rank of general in Egypt’s military -- the armed forces he has just been tapped to command by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood eminence who was elected president of Egypt a few weeks back. My column was prompted by the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Sissi’s appointment, which strained to put a positive spin on an unfolding catastrophe.

The Journal has been “all in” on the “Arab Spring” fairy tale from the get-go, joining the bipartisan Beltway chorus in presenting the rise of Islamist totalitarianism as a spontaneous eruption of freedom fervor. Even so, it was jarring to find the paper burying General Sissi’s Brotherhood sympathies at the bottom of a lengthy profile. The thud came only after paragraph upon sunny paragraph of conceit that Sissi’s decades of exposure to American military counterparts and his high standing in the eyes of Obama-administration officials boded well for future Amercan-Egyptian relations and Israeli security.

The mainstream media, it seems, have their template: We’ve spent 30 years and about $45 billion cultivating the Egyptian military, so rest assured it is not going to stand by and let Egypt fall under the yoke of Islamist rule. Pretty soon, though, they’ll have to fire up Story Line B: Islamist rule is actually quite moderate and perfectly compatible with democracy#...# On Friday, the New York Times reported on yet another key Islamist military appointment in the Brotherhood’s new Egypt: General Sedky Sobhi, who was just named army chief of staff.  

#ad#Sobhi, it turns out, is author of an academic paper that sharply rebukes American foreign policy as both insufficiently deferential to sharia (Islamic law) and too one-sided in favor of Israel. He’s on record calling for “the permanent withdrawal of United States military forces from the Middle East and the Gulf.”

Feel better now?

To its credit, the Times does not repeat the Journal’s sleight of hand. Rather than being obscured, General Sobhi’s sympathies are, for the most part, fronted. We quickly learn that he has forcefully argued against our military presence in the region, claiming that the U.S. has itself to blame for being (as the Times phrases it) “mir[ed]#...#in an unwinnable global war with Islamist militants.”

Still, while one can guess why the general feels this way, the Times is elliptical about his Islamist convictions and rationalizations until we come to the end of the story. Only then do we hear of Sobhi’s complaint about (as the Times puts it) U.S. “hostility toward the role of Islamic law” (if only!) and his objection to the American characterization of al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants as “irrational terrorist organizations” (Sobhi’s words).

Sobhi was no doubt correct about the latter charge, though not for the reason he offers. The general posited the vapid (albeit commonly voiced) Islamist talking point that America created global terrorism by adopting policies that inevitably resulted in “popular grievances,” which al-Qaeda and other militants “tapped into.”

Obviously, there has to be a reason U.S. national-security policies gave rise to “popular grievances” in the Muslim Middle East -- that’s the elephant in the parlor that no one cares to notice. The pursuit of American interests and promotion of American principles are unpopular because they collide with classical sharia doctrine. Yes, as the general says, the jihadists are rational actors, not wanton killers -- they are acting on the commands of a coherent doctrine. But that doctrine is also ardently anti-Western. Any policy we would adopt to further our ends is bound to be unpopular in an environment where the presence of a Western army is deemed to trigger a duty to expel that army by violent jihad. Any policy we would adopt to shore up Israel’s security is bound to be unpopular in an environment where the Jewish state’s destruction is unapologetically proclaimed to be an Islamic duty.

#page#Withal, the Times report is very enlightening. As NR readers know, I’ve been arguing for the better part of a decade that the Islamic democracy project is a fool’s errand because Islamist ideology, far from being an outlier, is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East. I even wrote a book, The Grand Jihad, that both explains Islamic supremacism and illustrates that this ideology’s chief proponent -- the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by deep Saudi pockets -- rightly perceives itself as the avant-garde of a dynamic mass movement. Other than a few appearances on the bestseller list, which I’m sure must have pained the Gray Lady, the book was studiously ignored by the Times. Elsewhere, it was pooh-poohed as Islamophobic tripe. Imagine my surprise, then, to find that my theory, virtually overnight, has gone from an object of ridicule to a truth so undeniable it warrants judicial notice.

#ad#Now, the Times tells us:

Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, said American policy makers would be naïve to think that the positions held by Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood — including criticisms of the United States and strong support for the Palestinians — represented fringe thinking.

On those issues, “the Brotherhood is the Egyptian Kansas,” said Professor Shehata. Their positions on foreign policy “reflect rather than oppose what the Egyptian center is thinking,” he said.

Well, I’ll be darned. I thought it was hysterical “Islamophobia” to believe that such thinking represented “the Egyptian Kansas.”

Also remarkable is the paper’s matter-of-fact mention of the source of General Sobhi’s anti-American broadside. Turns out he wrote it seven years ago, when he was a student at the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania.

Think about that. As we’ve illustrated here time and time again, it is delusional to assume the Egyptian military is pro-American and thus a reliable bulwark against the advance of Islamic supremacism. Cairo’s armed forces reflect the broader society, whose able-bodied men are required to serve -- and, as even the Times now concedes, the Egyptian mainstream is Islamist. Plus, the Egyptian army has always had Islamists (including violent jihadists) in its ranks. Its historical tendency, moreover, has not been to lead; it has been to follow the shifting political programs of whatever dictator happened to be running the show.

Nonetheless, you’ve spent nearly two years being told not to worry: Bet the farm on these generals we’ve been training and funding. Yet, now we see that our government is not only well aware of the Egyptian army’s Islamist streak (or shall we say swath?); Egyptian officers, who often study in the U.S., actually submit sharia-driven “get out of Dar al-Islam” term papers to their American military professors. And I’m betting he got an “A.”

Finally, the military promotions are not occurring in a vacuum. Things are going very badly in Egypt, and the reporting ought not be so vested in a rose-tinted narrative that it evades this unhappy bottom line. Contemporaneous with ousting the pro-American Mubarak remnants, President Morsi assumed dictatorial powers. He indicated that he would unilaterally oversee the drafting of a new constitution. There is not much mystery about what it will say: During the campaign, he vowed that Egyptian law would be “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally, the sharia.”

Meanwhile, dissenters and journalists are already being imprisoned and beaten -- if not worse. (There are unconfirmed reports that crucifixion is making a comeback.) Terrorist leaders have been sprung from the prisons. The Sinai has become a jihadist haven. Women are attacked in the street if they fail to don the veil. A fatwa that prohibited eating during Ramadan was issued. Christians are fleeing in droves, their churches torched behind them. And the emirs of Hamas are warmly received as brotherly dignitaries.

No amount of whistling can obscure the graveyard. Things are bad, and they are going to get worse.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Senate Republicans Push for Internet Sales Taxes

Yup . . . FreedomWorks has the details, including Senator Jim DeMint's stalwart opposition.

General el-Sissi’s Ties

The neoconservative Wall Street Journal’s monotonously Islamophilic celebration of the “Arab Spring” has become as comically predictable as the open-borders enthusiasm that colors its coverage of illegal immigration. A fine example is the paper’s profile of the general chosen by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, to lead the armed forces.

The Journal is still stuck on the democracy-project dogma that free elections herald the birth of liberty, even as the Brotherhood tightens the noose in a nation whose population, by lopsided margins, keeps approving Muslim Brotherhood initiatives, electing Islamic supremacists, and telling pollsters that it would like to see Islam’s repressive sharia law strictly enforced. Thus, Journal’s story about General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi runs under a headline assuring readers that Morsi has picked a defense minister with longstanding “U.S. Ties.”

The profile elaborates that Sissi has been working with the American military for three decades and even took a basic training course at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1981. He is, we are further told, well known to, and liked by, senior Obama-administration officials. The implication is clear: Sure, there are now some Islamists running the government, but don’t be concerned, because the Egyptian armed forces are still really in charge and they remain staunchly pro-American. As the report states, “U.S. officials expressed confidence that Gen. Sissi will maintain close ties with the U.S., which provides Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid, and uphold Egypt’s peace deal with Israel.”

#ad#Happy ending, right? Depends on whether you keep reading. It is not until 15 paragraphs down, by which point most readers have already moved on, that we get to the most significant part of the report, which deals with the “ties” that actually matter -- not to the U.S. military but to the Muslim Brotherhood:

Mr. Sissi’s appointment may also represent an ideal compromise between the secular-minded military old guard and Mr. Morsi’s Brotherhood. People with knowledge of the Egyptian military said Gen. Sissi has a broad reputation within military circles as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, a rare trait in a military culture inured against Islamism. “Sissi is known inside the military for being a Muslim Brother in the closet,” said Zeinab Abul Magd, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an expert on Egypt’s military.

So to summarize, in the course of ousting the pro-American, pro–Camp David military junta that was running Egypt until last week, the leader of the anti-Western, anti-Israeli Muslim Brotherhood, who is moving quickly to take over the country, managed to install as chief of the military -- Egypt’s most important institution -- a Brotherhood operative. That’s the story. But that’s not the way “Islamic democracy” devotees would have you see it.

In reality, everything about the Journal’s report is misleading. Egypt’s military culture is not “inured against Islamism.” Its top tier of Mubarak loyalists may have been, at least as long as that perennial $1.3 billion in U.S. largesse kept coming. But as a whole -- as an institution -- Egypt’s army has always been rife with Islamists. That is because Egyptian society is decidedly pro-Islamist. The military, in which almost all men serve for one to three years, is a reflection of Egyptian society. That is why Egyptians so revere their armed forces. Obviously, Sissi’s rapid rise through the ranks despite being known as a Brotherhood guy is testament to the fact that being an Islamist is no obstacle to advancement in the army.

Furthermore, the Journal confuses exposure to the American military with being pro-American. For over 30 years, ever since the Camp David peace accord, our Defense Department has taken a leading role in arming and training the Egyptian armed forces. As a result, thousands of Egyptian military personnel have been through training by our commanders, including training at U.S. bases. Necessarily, this has entailed the training of some of Egypt’s most rabid Islamists. They are delighted to have this exposure because it is the world’s best instruction in military strategy and tactics. It makes these Islamists more proficient warriors, but it does not alter their ideology.

#page#Indeed, Ali Mohamed -- a high-ranking aide to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri who was an officer in the Egyptian military and later drew up the plans al-Qaeda used to bomb the American embassy in Kenya -- was not only trained in the U.S. as an Egyptian soldier. He actually served in our armed forces for three years after emigrating to the United States. In the course of doing so, he stole sensitive military training documents from Fort Bragg and brought them to the New York area, where he used them to instruct anti-American jihadists (some of whom went on to bomb the World Trade Center) in combat strategy and tactics. The Islamists saw the American training as useful to the spread of their Islamic supremacist ideology; it did not modify or moderate their ideology. (I recounted the hair-raising life of Ali Mohamed in Willful Blindness.)

#ad#Finally, the Journal’s suggestion that Americans can take comfort in Sissi’s elevation because he is familiar to senior Obama officials would be laughable if the matter were not so serious. President Obama has been so transparently pro-Brotherhood that Egyptian secularists have openly groused that the administration has undermined any potential for genuine democratic reform.

Secretary of State Clinton pressured the junta to surrender power to the Brotherhood notwithstanding the Brotherhood’s notorious hostility to the United States. Obama upped the ante by issuing a formal invitation to Morsi to visit the White House in September -- notwithstanding the recent, unabashed calls by the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi, for jihad against the United States and Israel. Sissi’s biggest American booster, moreover, appears to be John Brennan, Obama’s hapless counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is on the record portraying Hezbollah (long a formally designated terrorist organization under U.S. law) as a “moderate” political movement and referring to Jerusalem as “al-Quds” -- the name preferred by Islamists who seek to eradicate the Jewish state, incorporating it into an Arabian caliphate with al-Quds as its capital. Brennan’s other claim to fame is the whitewashing of jihad -- a scripturally based, strictly Islamic concept of conquest by violent or non-violent means. Brennan conveys jihad as if it were a universal, non-sectarian, non-threatening summons to better humanity (rather than to fortify the ummah).

The Muslim Brotherhood is irrevocably committed to “conquering” the West, to quote the Brothers’ favorite sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. The Brothers’ ascendancy in the Middle East is a disaster for us. Yet their accession to power is purportedly being achieved by “democracy” -- i.e., by U.S.-supported elections and sharia-based constitution writing. Thus, the bipartisan Beltway consensus, voiced by Obama officials and Republican establishment organs, is to pretend that the disaster is actually a boon for America.

Don’t buy it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Springtime for Journalism in Cairo

The main thrust of my soon-to-be-published book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, is that the "Arab Spring" is not about democracy but Islamization, and that we already know how "spring" will end in the Middle East because it has already happened in Turkey -- it's just that things will deteriorate much faster in places like Egypt. In the Middle East, there has never been a wholesale effort to repress fundamentalist Islam, much less anything like the Kemalists' 80-year secularization project.

To roll back Ataturk's Westernization of Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood-allied regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan needed to defang the armed forces. The army was, by law, the guardian of the secular order, and as it retreated an increasingly powerful and autocratic Islamist government has crushed dissent by, among other things, prosecuting journalists. The process has taken several years.

In Egypt, it has been just a few weeks. The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi has already managed to outmaneuver the Egyptian army -- which, as I warned here a year-and-a-half ago, was not to be trusted to keep Egypt in the pro-American camp -- and he has made a grab for dictatorial powers. As night follows day, the crushing of dissent has begun. Sky News reports that two Egyptian journalists, harsh critics of Morsi and the Brotherhood, have been arrested and will stand trial for "incitement" and publishing information considered "insulting" to the new president. More important than this predictably tyrannical use of police powers by the state is the social climate it creates. The population, teeming with Islamic supremacists, realizes it is safe to take matters into its own hands. The mob is now attacking non-Islamist journalists just like it riots against Coptic Christians.

Egypt will go quickly. This is not a "democratic" transformation; the dictator has been replaced by the totalitarians. 

Paul Ryan and the Muslim Brotherhood -- My Week Comes Full Circle!

I'm glad Mitt picked Paul Ryan. Of the finalists who've been floated in the last few weeks, he is the best choice. I like him, although as I've said before, he's not quite the Captain Courageous some on our side portray him to be. But he is more serious about dealing with our financial catastrophe than most of the Beltway GOP. As Mark's never-to-be-missed weekend column illustrates today, that's not exactly not a high bar, but hey, that's the hand we're dealt. Bottom line: I feel better about Romney because he made this choice, and I imagine most other conservatives will, too.

The pick also made me chuckle a bit because of the week I've had speechifying over the Muslim Brotherhood's influence on our government. A little over a year ago, I wrote a column about President Obama's speechifying. In particular, I was contrasting the difference between the way he treated the guests he famously took pains to invite to two of his speeches: Paul Ryan and the Muslim Brotherhood. It started out something like this:

There is always great intrigue in Barack Obama’s speeches. Not much heft, mind you, but substance is not the point. In this Chicago-style presidency, what is said is often less telling than who is invited to hear what is said. That’s where you find out who is in and who is out.

Count Rep. Paul Ryan among the outs. The GOP budget guru got a coveted invitation to hear the president outline his new vision for escaping the economic catastrophe wrought by his current vision. The speech was much anticipated, because it was Ryan’s own ambitious plan to slash trillions in spending that roused Obama from his customary crouch in the tall grass.

Ryan was reeled in by the suggestion that the invitation was an olive branch, a White House concession that he had grappled responsibly with a monstrous problem and that a gracious, cooperative presidential response was in order. But it was a setup. The Chicago mob strategically seated Ryan a few paces from the lectern, whence the don went Al Capone on him. The congressman was made into a prop, Exhibit A in a presidential tirade that mocked his plan and his party as scourges of the elderly, the destitute, and the chronically ill.

It wasn’t that way in Cairo in June 2009. That was when al-Azhar University — the font of Sunni theology and training ground for the virulently anti-American clerics who green-light jihadist terror — sponsored Obama's eagerly awaited oration on U.S. relations with the Muslim world. As usual, the speech was specious: a whitewash of the legacy of Islamic savagery, the expurgation of violent injunctions from Islamic scripture, historical ignorance of the Jewish claim to Israel, and even the adoption of “resistance” as the euphemism for Palestinian terrorism — a touch that must have brought a smile to the faces of Hamas and the president’s pal Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO mouthpiece turned Columbia professor.

More interesting than the speech, though, was the guest list. The Obama administration made a point of inviting prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood. And they didn’t get the Paul Ryan treatment. This really was an olive branch, more like the Corleones having the Tartaglias over for a sit-down. The ramifications rumbled through both Egypt and the United States.

A lot of things have changed in the 14 months that have followed. But one thing hasn't: the difference in Obama's tone when he growls over the GOP and swoons over the Brothers. Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood luminary just elected Egypt's new president, has been honored with an invitation to visit Washington in September. Obviously, Representative Ryan will also be a pretty hot conversation topic around that time. Anyone want to bet me on which one the Obama White House will laud as America's friend, and which one it will rebuke as an existential threat?