Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 15

Paul Ryan & 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?  

Obama Sweetens Pot for Taliban with Gitmo Prisoner Exchange Offer

The totally-bereft-of-any-Islamist-influence-whatsoever Obama administration certainly can do it all: Negotiating with terrorists (you invite more terrorism when you show the terrorists that it works), hostage exchanges with terrorists (you invite more hostage-taking when you show the hostage-takers that it works), even sweetening a pot you should never have entered in the first place (the terrorists become even more demanding once you show them you are desperate). Yes, the president has reportedly improved the offer he initially made in begging the Taliban terrorist organization to please, please come to the table to negotiate with the hapless Karzai regime.

Not to make any actual concessions, mind you. We're willing to spring these anti-American jihadists violent extremists from Gitmo if the Taliban will just come and chat. And now, since he's already playing this dangerously naive game anyway, Obama has apparently even offered to release the Gitmo gang before the terrorists release our POW if that's what it takes to entice the Taliban to talk to us Karzai. 

For his part, Karzai has taken time out from pardoning imprisoned rape victims who agree to marry their rapists to urge Taliban leader Mullah Omar to run for president of Afghanistan's "Islamic democracy." This makes sense. As I've previously pointed out, the Taliban could easily restore their repressive regime without having to change a comma of the Constitution that the totally-bereft-of-any-Islamist-influence-whatsoever Bush State Department wrote for Afghanistan. That Constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and installs sharia as fundamental law. Under it, besides imprisoning rape victims for engaging in extramarital sex, at least two men have already been subjected to capital trials for apostasy from Islam (they were quietly whisked out of the country before we could be further humiliated by the execution of death sentences). 

So we've kept our troops in Afghanistan for eleven years after routing al Qaeda -- eleven years of prohibitive rules of engagement that often prevented them from defending themselves, eleven years of being killed by the "friendly" forces they thought they were training -- so that at the end we could negotiate the return of the Taliban, the prevention of whose return was our main reason for staying eleven years? Just want to make sure I have that straight.

Maybe Dana Milbank Ought to Start Reading the Washington Post

As I noted earlier, Dana Milbank's Washington Post column today belittles Huma Abedin's job at the State Department, as if she were merely Secretary Clinton's lady's maid, just "helping the boss with suits and handbags and logistics." A friend alerts me, however, that Milbank's newspaper doesn't quite see it that way. As the Post reported last year in a flattering profile of Ms. Abedin, she is "one of the few Clintonites to remain an insider from the [Clinton] White House to the State Department." The Post added, "While her official title is deputy chief of staff, Abedin is personally close to Clinton, an ever-present assistant and gatekeeper. She oversees planning and scheduling and advises on politics and policy, especially the Middle East."

College Founded by Abedin's Mother Is in Saudi Arabia, Not Egypt

One other point on this. I wasn't going to respond to Dana Milbank's observations on my remark yesterday about Secretary of State Clinton's visit to the college founded by Huma Abedin's mother. But I did make an error about the location of the college, so I'll correct the error and use that opportunity to make another point.

Mr. Milbank asked me for an example of Ms. Abedin's influence. As I said when Senator McCain made this same frivolous point in his speech attacking the five House conservatives who've raised concerns about Muslim Brotherhood influence, Ms. Abedin is a top adviser to Secretary Clinton -- she gives her advice privately and, unless either of them tells us about it, we have no idea what matters she is weighing in on. (We do know what the general trajectory of State Department policy is, and last I checked, Ms. Abedin hasn't exactly resigned in protest.)

Yesterday, however, when pressed for an example by Milbank. I pointed to the fact that Secretary Clinton chose to visit Dar al-Hekma College. I regret to say that I misspoke about the college's location -- an error Milbank repeats in his column. I said it was in Egypt when, of course, it is in Saudi Arabia, where Dr. Saleha Abedin is based. I knew that, but I just blew it as we went back and forth.

Milbank somehow thinks he "crumbled" my case by pointing out that Bush State Department official Karen Hughes also visited Dar al-Hekma. It's like an "A-ha!" moment for him, in that I agreed Ms. Hughes had done "her share" of what he called "the Muslim Brotherhood's bidding." His point, if I can follow this, is that the Obama State Department is only doing what the Bush State Department did; its policies can be of no concern since the Bush administration could not possibly have been abetting the Brotherhood. But anyone who has followed what I've been arguing here and elsewhere for years knows that I was extremely critical of the Bush administration's outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. Contrary to Milbank's intimation, I was not making a partisan argument; I was making a national-security argument.

Putting aside Dr. Saleha Abedin's other Brotherhood ties (which I've described at length), the "Establishers" of Dar al-Hekma College included Yasin Qadi, a specially designated global terrorist because of his support for al-Qaeda. (It also included two other reputed Saudi funders of Osama bin Laden, but whether they supported him after he founded al-Qaeda -- as opposed to before, when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan -- is the subject of some dispute.) Given the college's Brotherhood and terrorism ties, I think it was shameful for Karen Hughes to appear there as a representative of the U.S. government -- just as it was shameful for her to appear at the 2005 convention of the Islamic Society of North America at a time when the Justice Department was citing ISNA as an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing case. Even assuming Ms. Hughes was not adequately briefed beforehand, someone at the State Department must have known about the Justice Department's overwhelming evidence of ISNA's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and facilitation of money transfers to Palestinian terrorists. And as Steve Emerson pointed out in congressional testimony, during Ms. Hughes's watch, the State Department funded Islamists. 

I really don't see how conceding, as we often must concede, that Obama's "Islamic outreach" just picks up from where Bush's "Islamic outreach" left off -- and goes way beyond -- means my argument against Islamic outreach has "crumbled."

My Speech on the Muslim Brotherhood and 'Guilt By Association'

I gave a speech yesterday morning at the National Press Club on the Muslim Brotherhood and why we need to worry about our government's growing coziness with it.  I spoke for almost an hour and then there was an extensive Q&A. C-SPAN covered it, and you can watch here. (The text of my speech is here.)

Dana Milbank, the leftist columnist of the Washington Post, covered the event -- though you can judge for yourself whether his account of it in the paper today accurately reflects what I actually said. It would take too long, and is not worth the time, to react all of Mr. Milbank's meanderings. I do want to address two contentions he makes, however:

1. Ms. Abedin is an inconsequential official being subjected to "guilt by association."

I guess we've come a long way since John McCain first claimed that the concerns about Huma Abedin's ties to Islamists were "unspecified and unsubstantiated." Those concerns have now been so overwhelmingly proved that apologists have to change tacks. So now the argument is, "Well, all right, there are many connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, but Ms. Abedin is a victim of 'guilt by association.’” Mr. Milbank tries to make that fly today. 

Remember, we are not talking about an indictment here. When people are being evaluated for their suitability for appointment to high public office and access to national-security information, the whole process is about associations -- that's why, for example, the form all candidates for security clearances have to fill out exactingly probes a person's background, relations and associations. I don't expect Milbank to agree with me on this point -- although he certainly seemed to think background and associations were pretty significant when Sam Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court). Still, given that I specifically addressed the charge in the speech, he might at least have given readers my take on the "guilt by association" canard:

The five members [of the House of Representatives who have asked for five executive branch inspectors-general to investigate Muslim Brotherhood influence at their agencies] have not made accusations of criminal wrongdoing. The critics who say they are relying on “guilt by association” are absurdly mixing apples and oranges.

Our bedrock principle against “guilt by association” has to do with criminal prosecutions -- we won’t tolerate someone’s being convicted of a crime and having his freedom taken away just because of who his friends are, or what his associates have done. But “guilt by association” has nothing to do with fitness for high public office. High public office is a privilege, not a right. Access to classified information is a privilege, not a right. You need not have done anything wrong to be deemed unfit for these privileges.

It is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests of the United States. It is about whether the American people can have confidence that you are likely to act in the public interest rather than out of bias, favor, or intimidation. It is about whether there’s a reasonable chance you could be compromised -- not whether you have been compromised.

In making his guilt-by-association claim, Milbank mentions that he questioned me yesterday (you can see it on the C-SPAN video), but he fails to note that I did not accept two premises that he asserts as if they were fact rather than his (implausible) opinion. The first is that Ms. Abedin is a person of no substance as far as the State Department is concerned -- he describes her as Secretary Clinton's "personal aide" whose job is "helping her boss with suits and handbags and logistics." That's a pretty demeaning suggestion. Ms. Abedin is actually the deputy chief of staff to the U.S. secretary of state; she is a top adviser . . . and not just on handbags.

Milbank also claims I conceded Ms. Abedin is not a policymaker. You can see for yourself what I actually said. My concession was that the person ultimately responsible for Obama-administration policy is President Obama, and that the person who shapes and executes the president's policy at the State Department is Secretary Clinton. Neither of them, I acknowledged, needed Huma Abedin to make them sympathetic to Islamists -- they are their own people and have extensive records. Nevertheless, I also argued that second- and third-tier officials and advisers like Ms. Abedin "have very influential positions . . . because they have a lot to say about how policy gets shaped and executed." That seems pretty elementary. Does Milbank really think that, say, Rahm Emanuel had an inconsequential position in the White House because he was just a top staffer and it's the president who made all the policy -- was Emanuel just advising Obama on handbags? 

2. The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood's agenda.

Milbank also belittles Ms. Abedin's connection to Abdullah Omar Naseef, a major Muslim Brotherhood figure and a financier of al-Qaeda, by claiming that the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which Naseef founded and which Ms. Abedin worked at for twelve years, was an inconsequential sideshow that focused on such issues as "The North African Heritage of the Hui Chinese" and "Muslim Mudehar Women in Thirteenth Century Spain." This is a frivolous contention.

To begin with, let's say a Bush administration official had had a longstanding business relationship with an al-Qaeda facilitator -- and we won't even get into whether the business relationship occurred in the context of longstanding, intimate relations between the the facilitator and the Bush official's family. Is there any way that Dana Milbank would be saying, "Hey, wait a minute, let's not make an issue of that. After all, the business relationship seems to have nothing to do with the Islamist agenda."

More significantly, Naseef's journal, of which Ms. Abedin was an assistant (and of which one or the other of her parents has been chief editor since its inception in the late Seventies), actually has a great deal to do with the Islamist agenda. As I said in yesterday's speech, the journal promotes the fundamentalist version of sharia championed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Naseef, and Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood's chief sharia jurist.

Now, does it publish essays like the two Milbank alludes to? Sure. When I was investigating the Blind Sheikh, I learned that sometimes he was interpreting sharia to exhort terrorism and other times he was explaining sharia's instruction on matters like diet and hygiene -- the latter did not diminish the former.

On this score, after poring over many editions, Andrew Bostom has just written a rumination on the journal's worldview. It is lengthy, but I'd recommend all of it. Suffice it to say that, if we looked only at the last issue (April/May 2012) of the journal, it features two essays that champion what Bostom accurately describes as (a) "the global hegemonic aspirations of major 20th-century Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, such as the eminent Muslim Brotherhood theoretician, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), and Abul Hasan Nadwi"; and (b) "the more expansive application of Sharia within Muslim minority communities residing in the West, with the goal of replacing these non-Muslim governing systems as advocated by contemporary Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, [Sheikh] Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Tahir Jabir al-Alwani." (I've written at NRO about Alwani, here.)  

Both these essays are lavishly praised by Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, who is the journal's editor and Ms. Abedin's mother. As Bostom demonstrates, they are representative of the journal's historic output and consistent with Dr. Abedin's oft-stated views. 

The History of MPAC

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda operatives slaughtered nearly 3,000 Americans in an operation that marked the second major attack by violent jihadists against the World Trade Center. There wasn’t much mystery about who had carried out these atrocities -- unless you were Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Marayati warned Americans not to conclude that the suicide hijacking attacks were the work of Muslim terrorists. “If we are going to look at suspects,” he told a Los Angeles radio station, “we should look at groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.”

Having just returned from the beleaguered State of Israel, Mitt Romney, one hopes, will move Marayati’s reckless slander to the front of his mind. MPAC is attempting to inject itself into the controversy over calls by Representative Michele Bachmann and four other House conservatives for an examination of Islamist influence on our government. As the indispensable Patrick Poole reports, Monday’s scheduled MPAC demonstration was a bust: The group tried to agitate outside the Republican National Committee in Washington, in order to pressure Governor Romney, the putative GOP standard-bearer, to condemn Bachmann and her colleagues. But the “rally” fizzled because of lack of interest. Still, MPAC is sure to keep pushing.

Established in 1988 by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and admirers of Hezbollah, MPAC styles itself a “moderate, inclusive and forward-thinking organization with a history of fostering a strong Muslim American identity, and combating terrorism and extremism.” In reality, MPAC is yet another Islamist wolf in the “social justice” clothing of the hard Left. Its founders include Hassan Hathout, the former MPAC president who has described himself as “a close disciple” of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Hathout’s brother Maher, a senior MPAC adviser, is lavish in his praise of both Hezbollah’s “freedom fighting” and the social-justice pioneering of Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front -- the genocidal junta that gave safe haven to al-Qaeda in the early 1990s while imposing sharia on that war-torn east African nation.

#ad#Their Islamist sympathies aside, Marayati & Co. are Democratic-party activists and programmatic leftists, championing Obamacare, condemning post-9/11 national-security measures, and demagoguing conservatives. Daniel Pipes has recounted that Marayati was a member of the Executive Committee of the California Democratic party and served as a Clinton delegate at the 1996 Democratic Convention. As I outlined in The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, such cross-pollination between Islamists and leftists is commonplace. The anti-Islamist activist M. Zuhdi Jasser, a staunchly pro-American Muslim, aptly describes American Islamist organizations like MPAC as “collectivist groups.” They fall in line with the Muslim Brotherhood’s leftist orientation, seeking to “increase the power of government through entitlement programs, increased taxation, and restricting free markets whenever and wherever possible.”

Marayati first came to public attention in the late Nineties, when the Democrats’ then-leader in the House, Richard Gephardt, nominated him to serve on the National Commission on Terrorism -- a nomination that Gephardt later withdrew when it emerged that Marayati had spoken sympathetically of violent jihad. In 1993, for example, Marayati had proclaimed, “When Patrick Henry said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ that statement epitomized jihad.” Equally absurdly, he later analogized Islamic terrorists to “American freedom fighters hundreds of years ago [who] were also regarded as terrorists by the British.” Obviously, as Pipes observed, Marayati’s intent was “to render jihad and terrorism acceptable to Americans.”

While Democrats had hoped to raise Marayati’s profile, the exposition of his track record raised too many questions about his judgment. That problem intensified as the record became better known. In 1996, for instance, a Palestinian terrorist named Muhammad Hamida plowed his car into a crowded Jerusalem bus stop, killing one Israeli and injuring 23 others as he screamed “Allahu Akbar!” He was shot on the scene, before he could do any more harm. Immediately afterwards, while mum on the jihadist’s atrocity, Marayati demanded that the shooters of the jihadist be extradited to the United States to face trial on “terrorism charges” for this “provocative act.”

#page#Meanwhile, in a 1999 PBS interview, Marayati portrayed Hezbollah attacks as “legitimate resistance” -- a position that dovetailed perfectly with the sentiments of MPAC’s founders. In fact, in a position paper published around the same time, MPAC minimized Hezbollah’s murder of 241 U.S. military personnel in the 1983 terrorist suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon: “This attack, for all the pain it caused, was not in a strict sense a terrorist operation. It was a military operation, producing no civilian casualties -- exactly the kind of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against Washington’s enemies.”

Nevertheless, Marayati and his wife, Laila al-Marayati (founder of the “Muslim Women’s League”), remained Clinton favorites. Mrs. Marayati served on the Clinton State Department’s advisory committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, was appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and was tapped by Hillary Clinton to join the then–first lady’s delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women. The Marayatis, moreover, helped Mrs. Clinton organize the original White House Iftaar dinner in 1996. The event, marking the end of Ramadan, has since become an annual gala to which invitations are coveted by bipartisan Beltway luminaries. In 2009, at the first Iftaar dinner held by the Obama White House, which is more unabashedly Leftist than its Clintonian predecessor, Salam al-Marayati was called on to close the program. “Ramadan,” he told the revelers, “is a time of preparation to work for social justice.”

#ad#Yup.

Marayati, of course, showed no hesitation in accusing Israel of complicity in 9/11, the worst war crime ever committed on American soil, despite the absence of a shred of evidence. Yet MPAC is reliably found screaming “McCarthyism,” in harmony with the radical Left, over our government’s counterterrorism measures. It has been this one-trick pony's script for a quarter-century.

Typical is former MPAC “political director” Mahdi Bray’s speech at the leftist ANSWER Coalition’s “Pro-Palestinian Rally” in 2002: “They are using the guise of terrorism as a front to extort money from our coffers, to increase the military buildup#...#and they’re going around and they’re actually pimping the tragedy of 9/11.” It should come as no surprise, then, that MPAC now allies with the likes of Congressman Keith Ellison, a hard-left ideologue popular among Islamic supremacists, in pooh-poohing well-documented concerns about Islamist influence on government officials -- concerns raised at a time when the Obama administration is palpably tying U.S. policy to the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda, notwithstanding the Brotherhood’s unabashed hostility to America and the West.

MPAC manages the dual roles of “leading Islamist” and “government’s favorite Muslims” because it has mastered the Brotherhood’s Janus face: It condemns “terrorism” before non-Muslim audiences, but neglects to explain that it does not consider “resistance” against those who “persecute Muslims” to be “terrorism.” It also works feverishly to defend actual terrorists and their financiers, ensuring that discerning Islamists know exactly where MPAC stands.

For example, while Marayati was out defending Hezbollah and pointing the accusatory 9/11 finger at Israel, MPAC hired Edina Lekovic to be its “communications director.” For years, Ms. Lekovic had been affiliated with al-Talib (“the Student”), a Muslim Students Association newspaper at UCLA. As I’ve noted before, the Muslim Students Association is the first building block in Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. During Lekovic’s affiliation, al-Talib published, to take just one example, a “Spirit of the Jihad” issue in July 1999 -- less than a year after al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In it, al-Talib exhorted Muslims to “defend our brother” Osama bin Laden, who was praised as a “great Mujahid” and “a freedom fighter who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah’s cause and speak out against oppressors.”

#page#In characteristic MPAC style, when called by terrorism researcher Steven Emerson on her work for al-Talib, Ms. Lekovic first totally denied having any association with the publication and accused Emerson of mudslinging. Soon, though, she grudgingly conceded that she might have “briefly worked” at al-Talib, but insisted that Emerson had distorted her views and associated her with “sentiments that I in no way support, and that are antithetical to the work I do day in and day out in the service of my community and my country.”

So Emerson’s organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, undertook to scrutinize her claims. IPT found that Lekovic’s “brief” affiliation with al-Talib had actually spanned nearly five years, from late 1997 through mid-2002. In fact, during much of that time, she had been al-Talib’s managing editor -- a position she proudly listed in her bio in late 2001 for the program distributed at an MPAC conference, “The Rising Voice of Moderate Muslims.” The IPT’s examination further showed that she had been listed as an editor in al-Talib editions that featured articles suggesting that the horror of the Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) had been tortured in federal prison, where he was serving a life sentence because, according to al-Talib, he had been “falsely accused” of involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

#ad#In October 2000, MPAC hosted a rally in Washington’s Lafayette Park at which Abdurahman Alamoudi -- then regarded in Washington as another “moderate” Muslim leader -- was featured as a speaker. To often raucous applause, Alamoudi asserted, “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody supports Hamas here? [Crowd cheers responsively]#...#Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are ALL supporters of Hamas. Allahu Akhbar! I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah!”

A few weeks later, MPAC co-sponsored another anti-Israel rally, organized by its then–political director, Mahdi Bray. As detailed in an IPT profile of MPAC, the rally’s master of ceremonies led protesters in an Arabic chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad saya’ud!” -- meaning, “Oh Jews, remember Khaybar; the army of Mohammed is returning!” Especially popular with Hamas supporters, this chant alludes to a seventh-century massacre and expulsion by Muslims of a Jewish tribe in Khaybar, a town in what today is Saudi Arabia.

As the rally proceeded, Bray played the tambourine as one of the speakers sang with the crowd, “al-Aqsa [mosque, in Jerusalem] is calling us, ‘Let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones in the face of the Jews!’” A prominent Hamas operative, Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar, took the podium to argue that Muslims had “exclusive rights over Jersualem” that were “not subject to negotiation.” Ashqar was later sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment for obstructing a grand-jury investigation of Hamas. Mohammed al-Asi, an open Hezbollah supporter who also spoke at the rally, urged that speakers “should be concentrating on militarizing the Muslim public.#...#Rhetoric is not going to liberate al-Quds [Jerusalem] and al-Aqsa [mosque]. Only carrying arms will do this task!” Posters calling for “Death to Israel” and equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika were openly displayed at the rally, and the crowd burned the Israeli flag while marching from the White House to the State Department.

#page#Besides campaigning for the government to de-list Hezbollah and Hamas from the list of formally designated terrorist organizations, MPAC regularly gets its pom-poms out for individual terrorists. That is, while winking about how much it abhors “terrorism,” MPAC tirelessly insists that the government’s efforts to prevent and punish terrorism are a scam -- camouflage for a neo-McCarthyite, “Islamophobic” persecution of Muslims.

For example, in 2002, when Bray was MPAC’s national director, he appeared on a panel with Sami al-Arian, who was then under investigation for his labors on behalf of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “Don’t fall for it, brothers and sisters,” Bray cautioned. “You have to realize this whole thing about terrorism is a paper tiger. It’s just an excuse. They’ve used it before. Before terrorism it was Communism. They’ve used it before. So don’t fall for the ‘terrorism.’” In 2003, al-Arian was arrested on terrorism charges. MPAC aggressively defended him throughout, portraying his prosecution as a bigoted smear of Muslims. But al-Arian eventually pled guilty to a terrorism conspiracy charge. In imposing the maximum sentence, a federal judge described him as a “master manipulator” who had been proved “a leader of the PIJ,” and who, contrary to his pretensions, did not defend Palestinian widows and orphans but created them by supporting suicide terrorism.

#ad#MPAC’s energetic support of al-Arian is typical. As the IPT profile demonstrates, it has consistently lambasted investigations of individuals and organizations involved in violent jihad and terrorist financing. It publicly sympathized, for example, with (a) Alamoudi, who was eventually convicted for his complicity in a Libyan plot to murder a Saudi royal (after which it emerged that he was a major fundraiser not only for the Hamas terrorist organization but for al-Qaeda); (b) the Holy Land Foundation, five of whose officers were later convicted in the Justice Department’s most significant terrorism-financing prosecution ever for transferring millions of dollars to Hamas; (c) Infocom and members of the Elashi family, who were eventually convicted for trading with enemy nations and, in the case of the Elashis, for supporting Hamas; (d) the Benevolence International Foundation, which was designated as a terrorism financier by the Treasury Department (its leader, Enaam Arnaout, ultimately pled guilty to racketeering charges, conceding that BIF had diverted charitable contributions to violent jihad); and (e) Rafil Dhafir, whose prosecution Marayati called a “sham,” but who was later convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison for transferring funds to Iraq. On it goes.

So now MPAC is leading its longtime confederates among the Obama Left as they browbeat Romney. They are, of course, emboldened by the GOP establishment, whose loudest voices -- rather than rallying behind conservative critics of Obama’s dalliance with the Muslim Brotherhood -- have slammed Bachmann & Co. Yes, how dare they suggest that there might be a problem with giving important policy positions at the State Department and elsewhere to people with extensive Islamist ties?

By the way, did I mention that the Obama State Department uses Salam al-Marayati as an emissary? Yeah, in 2010, Secretary of State Clinton’s minions invited him to lecture diplomats in Paris and Geneva on religious liberty, free speech, and “Islamophobia.” The Bush State Department, too -- they invited Marayati to Foggy Bottom in 2002, where he championed Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Tunisia’s Muslim Brotherhood party. What lunatics these House conservatives are to intimate that we might have the wrong people shaping government policy.

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

Talking Muslim Brotherhood In and Out of the U.S.

Hi folks ... back from pretty much no R and R -- but book is done, more details soon. Meanwhile, I'll be appearing on Steve Malzberg's spreecast this morning at 10:00 to talk about the State Department's Arab Spring, etc. Details here.

Talking Muslim Brotherhood In & Out of U.S.

Hi folks ... back from pretty much no R&R -- but book is done, more details soon. Meanwhile, I'll be appearing on Steve Malzberg's spreecast this morning at 10 to talk about the State Department's Arab Spring, etc. Details here.

Allahu Bachbar!

My column this morning asks whether Speaker Boehner might pause his jihad against Representative Michele Bachmann for a minute or two and give just a teensy bit of attention to the State Department's curious affection for Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties

Despite mounting evidence of close ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Clinton’s close aide, Republican congressional leaders -- particularly Senator John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner -- continue to target their ire not at the State Department but at Representative Michele Bachmann.

Representative Bachmann is one of five House conservatives who have raised concerns about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of our government. Glenn Beck reported Tuesday that GOP leadership is trying to extort an apology out of Bachmann by threatening to boot her from the House Intelligence Committee if she fails to submit.

That got me to wondering: Any chance Speaker Boehner might take just a couple of minutes out of his busy jihad against Bachmann to focus on how the State Department -- during Ms. Abedin’s tenure -- has cozied up to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist?

#ad#Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing -- by both men and women -- against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.

That’s rather interesting -- at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner -- because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) -- an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than#...#Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

#page#In McCainWorld, these are what are known as “a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations.” But I digress. Clearly, these significant Muslim Brotherhood connections are of scant interest to Speaker Boehner, who has decided the problem is not the Brotherhood connections but the people who are shedding light on the Brotherhood connections. Nevertheless, since Boehner purports to be all about cracking down on wasteful government spending, at least when he’s not signing off on deals to extend President Obama’s credit card by another trillion or three, I thought I might ask whether the State Department’s Fulbright Scholar Program aroused his curiosity ever so slightly.

Fulbright, by its own account, is “the government’s flagship program in international educational exchange,” promoting “mutual understanding” between the U.S. and other countries. In the 2010–2011 academic year -- the year of the Union for Good’s “Freedom Flotilla,” if you need a time marker -- one Fulbright scholarship was awarded to a lucky chemistry student from Qatar. Her name is Siham al-Qaradawi, and she just happens to be the daughter of Sheikh Qaradawi.

#ad#Now, besides despising America and having lots of global academic connections (at least in countries where he’s not banned), the sheikh happens to be a very wealthy man -- the sharia-advisory business can be very profitable. And while the sheikh’s daughter is said to be an exceptional chemist, the world is full of exceptional chemists. How is it that Qaradawi’s daughter gets the State Department prize? I’m just wondering, and wondering if Speaker Boehner is wondering.

Oh, one last thing. Obviously, Huma Abedin does not make Obama-administration or State Department policy. Policy is made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton, and they hardly needed Ms. Abedin in order to have pro-Islamist leanings.

Nevertheless, since Secretary Clinton’s tenure began, with Huma Abedin serving as a top adviser, the United States has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood in myriad ways. To name just a few (the list is by no means exhaustive): Our government reversed the policy against formal contacts with the Brotherhood; funded Hamas; continued funding Egypt even after the Brotherhood won the elections; dropped an investigation of Brotherhood organizations in the U.S. that were previously identified as co-conspirators in the case of the Holy Land Foundation financing Hamas; hosted Brotherhood delegations in the United States; issued a visa to a member of the Islamic Group (a designated terrorist organization) and hosted him in Washington because he is part of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary coalition in Egypt; announced that Israel should go back to its indefensible 1967 borders; excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from a counterterrorism forum in which the State Department sought to “partner” with Islamist governments that do not regard attacks on Israel as terrorism; and pressured Egypt’s pro-American military government to surrender power to the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood parliament and president just elected by Egypt’s predominantly anti-American population.

So I was hoping maybe the speaker could explain to us: Hypothetically, if Huma Abedin did have a bias in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, and if she were actually acting on that bias to try to tilt American policy in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, what exactly would the State Department be doing differently?

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