Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 19

Gov. Christie's Administration Does the Right Thing on NYPD Surveillance

Since I had plenty negative to say about my governor in this weekend's column, it is only fair to call attention to the fact that Gov. Chris Christie's attorney general has concluded that the New York City Police Department's surveillance activities in New Jersey were legal and appropriate. Given the public spat he got into with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and other New York officials, Gov. Christie had a powerful incentive to try to influence the investigation (conducted by his appointee) to the NYPD's detriment. He obviously did not, and for that he is to be commended. More details here. 

Christie Is Not One of Us

I feel something washing over me. I’m standing in New Jersey, so it’s probably red ink. No, wait a minute -- it’s glowing ink! It could only be one thing: more conservative hagiography about the Garden State’s GOP governor.

Chris Christie is so not one of us that articles like “Christie Is One of Us” -- a new contribution to the genre, from National Review’s Noah Glyn -- are churned out regularly as the governor’s smitten admirers, from Ann Coulter to NR staffers, labor to convince us of what they’ve convinced themselves of: that an ostensibly gruff, internally milquetoast, progressive-lite, pro-Islamist Republican must be the second coming of Ronald Reagan because he has managed to make a basket-case blue state marginally less of a basket case. And “marginally” is the operative word. Glyn’s valentine to Christie is unfortunately timed. It was published just as Moody’s declared that Christie’s claim to have put New Jersey’s fiscal house in order is grossly overstated. More on that in a bit.

Mr. Glyn contends that I was “unfair” in portraying Mr. Christie as a “tough-talking moderate” whose record does not match his rhetoric. I’d realize Christie is really a “tough-talking conservative,” Glyn asserts, if only I were one of “the citizens of New Jersey who know him best.”

#ad#As it happens, I am a citizen of New Jersey, so my reasons for examining his record closely go beyond my day job. It is based on that examination that I see Christie as wildly overrated. Sure, his YouTube smackdowns of overmatched lefty hacks are catnip for the Right. The routine gets old fast, though. The tantrums have become as mundane as “Pass the salt.” Christie now erupts not only at teachers’-union drones but at NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, New York congressman Pete King, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, anti-sharia “crazies” who resist Islamic supremacism, all those “completely intellectually dishonest” conservatives who think Romneycare may not have been a fabulous idea, and, one infers, just about anyone who happens by when Governor Grumpy is having a bad day#...#which seems to be often. Plus, there’s not much rain in them big winds: Christie’s bully-boy études do not drown out his nonstop symphony to “bipartisanship,” nor obscure that it is “compromise” with the Left that sends him into (not infrequent) frissons of self-adulation.

To be sure, Christie is a very talented politician and a deft extemporaneous speaker. He has done some good things in a heavily Democratic state dominated by municipal unions. He is certainly, as blue-state governors go, better than average. That does not make him a conservative, much less the “consistent conservative” of Glyn’s portrayal.

On that score, Glyn’s reliance on Quinnipiac’s recent poll misses the point. The university was polling the governor’s job approval, not his adherence to conservative principles. I have my problems with Christie, but I’d probably have been among the 59 percent of New Jerseyans who approve of the job he’s done.

But job approval is relative. When Christie sought the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2009, I preferred Steve Lonegan, who actually is a consistent conservative. I was deeply disappointed when Christie made like a Democrat and attacked Lonegan’s conservative proposals: a flat tax, a $5 billion spending cut, and the shuttering of government agencies. It was what you’d expect from a cardboard cut-out northeastern GOP moderate proponent of progressive taxation and the welfare state -- which is exactly what Christie has proven to be. Still, Christie was clearly preferable to the loathsome incumbent Democrat (and now part-time Obama bundler, full-time embezzlement suspect), Jon Corzine.

#page#Politics is not about getting everything you want; it’s about choosing between available alternatives. My choice in New Jersey, a union-dominated Democratic-machine state, is the hard Left’s unsustainable statism or the more realistic Christie’s moderate (but ultimately unsustainable) moderate statism. That’s no contest. But neither is public approval (especially in this state) a testament to Christie’s conservatism. At a new high of 59 percent, a plateau at which he surely will not stay (Farleigh Dickinson puts it at 56 percent), Christie’s approval rating is just a few points higher than the national approval rating of President Obama, who also remains popular in our blue, blue Garden State.

#ad#In the post Glyn targets, my point was that Christie would be a poor choice as Mitt Romney’s running mate -- a conclusion with which Glyn actually agrees. If the objective in making the pick is to improve Romney’s chances by balancing the ticket with someone more conservative than Romney, that purpose would not be served by selecting a near-clone of Romney. Another moderate northeastern GOP governor with a soft spot for socialized medicine is not going to energize tea partiers and other Romney-indifferent conservatives. Furthermore, my principal contention in the post, not mentioned by Glyn, was that Christie has been adamant about not being ready to be president. Given that readiness to assume the office is generally taken to be the salient qualification for the No. 2 slot, Christie would seem to be unsuitable on his own account. In any event, my main purpose was not to trash Governor Christie -- as a governor for New Jersey, he may be the best we can do at the moment. My post addressed the claim, still making the rounds, that he’d make a good veep choice.

But if Mr. Glyn wants to make this about Christie’s record, fine. Let’s begin with the centerpiece of Glyn’s critique, which purports to address my complaints about what he gently calls “Christie’s differing views on Islam in America” -- but what would more accurately be described as Christie’s Islamist sympathies.

I have to say Glyn “purports” to address my complaints because, although he correctly says they are “my main bone of contention,” he studiously avoids describing them. As Glyn must know -- because it is linked to in my post -- I have laid out my objections to Christie’s (literal) embrace of Islamic supremacists in exacting detail. To summarize, not only did Christie appoint to the state bench a lawyer named Sohail Mohammed, who, besides slandering the Justice Department’s prosecutions of (now convicted) jihadists, served as a board member of an Islamic-supremacist organization (the American Muslim Union); as U.S. attorney, Christie also personally championed a Hamas operative named Mohammed Qatanani and, more shockingly, put his federal office in the service of that operative, in opposition to the federal government’s worthy effort to deport him. Reportedly, U.S. Attorney Christie physically embraced Qatanani, praising him as “a man of great good will,” at an Islamic center in Passaic that was closely linked to the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing case -- which the Bush Justice Department was prosecuting at that very time. (Indeed, Qatanani’s predecessor as imam of the mosque was one of the defendants convicted in the HLF case -- and Qatanani praised and prayed for all those defendants while calling for the end of the “occupation” by Israel and the U.S. of, respectively, Palestine and Iraq.)

Instead of outlining the extensive case I’ve made, Glyn changes the subject to Pamela Geller’s bracing declaration that Christie has taken the Garden State on “its first step to becoming a sharia state” -- as if that were an accurate synopsis of what I’ve said. Was Ms. Geller’s statement bombastic? Well, no more so than Christie’s typically sulfurous outburst, upon being called on the Sohail Mohammed appointment, that those who dared question him were bigoted sharia “crazies” who opposed the appointee just because he is a Muslim. But regardless, the case I made was not bombast. It was built on facts that Glyn fails even to mention, much less attempt to refute.

#page#Glyn's account of the objections lodged against Christie in a recent NRO column by Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, two conservative experts on Islamic supremacism, is incomplete. Glyn implies that Pipes and Emerson took issue only with Christie’s bloviating against the NYPD’s surveillance of New Jersey Muslims.

In reality, the NYPD issue was only one facet of a broad indictment against Christie’s Islamist sympathies, which Pipes and Emerson corroborated with extensive citations to supporting materials, as is their wont. It also included Christie’s aforementioned support of Qatanani; his appointment of Sohail Mohammed; and his endorsement of the firing of a state employee for burning three pages of the Koran while off duty at a demonstration (the employee got his job back upon successfully suing the state for violating his constitutional rights). Pipes and Emerson did not merely “disapprove of Christie’s outspokenness against the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim college students in New Jersey,” as Glyn puts it. Here’s what they actually said:

Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the [Department of Homeland Security], state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

#ad#Glyn even gets wrong the sliver of the Pipes-Emerson column he discusses. Christie blasted the NYPD surveillance in a manner that, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin points out, echoed the objections of Islamist organizations like CAIR -- complaining about the law-enforcement attention given to Muslim businesses and mosques. I suppose it is understandable that a pol who hugs a Hamas guy at a Hamas-friendly mosque would feel that way. But to most of the “us” that Glyn claims Christie is “one of,” the NYPD surveillance seems like a pretty good idea. Yet, when New York Republican Pete King said as much, Christie (natch) said King was just a know-nothing congressman who was using Christie’s name to get himself on TV, not a famous former prosecutor of terrorists like Christie.

Well, maybe I don’t know as much about prosecuting terrorists as does the governor, with his all his vast experience, but I vaguely remember that defendants often connected at Muslim businesses and were urged to commit terrorist atrocities at mosques -- where, in addition to plotting attacks, jihadists also stored and exchanged weapons. I also seem to recall local police and FBI agents’ being upbraided by an angry public after both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11 because they failed -- out of fear of being accused of profiling, bigotry, etc. -- to investigate what was going on in certain Islamic communities that everyone knew were hotbeds of fundamentalism.

Maybe Christie started to remember that, too; or maybe he just calculated that he’d gotten himself on the wrong side of the surveillance debate. Whatever the case, he retreated, lamely implying that his beef was not really with what NYPD did but with the fact that they’d failed to inform him -- Christie having been Jersey’s U.S. attorney when the NYPD surveillance began.

Glyn buys this feint hook, line, and sinker. This is the other side of the story: Even if Christie did not know what the NYPD was up to, the local police in New Jersey did. NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has explained that Newark police officers accompanied NYPD cops on the surveillance operations and were fully briefed. (The then-director of Newark’s police department denies that his officers participated but admits that he received NYPD’s extensive report; his former deputy admits that the locals showed the NYPD around Newark but -- shock, shock -- claims they had no idea why they were doing it.)

#page#Christie’s beef is the same one the FBI and the Justice Department grouse about constantly: The NYPD insists on operating outside the federally controlled Joint Terrorism Task Force structure. That is, because New York City remains the jihad’s top terror target, because the failure of the feds to share intelligence is legendary, and because many terror plots targeting the city are hatched outside the city (such as the 1993 WTC bombing, almost all preparations for which were carried out in, yes, New Jersey), Ray Kelly’s department does not permit the FBI and the Justice Department to control or limit its counterterrorism investigations. At best, even if we give Christie the benefit of the doubt on channeling CAIR’s “Islamophobia” campaign, he is being petty over a turf battle.

Most of Glyn’s remaining portrayal of Christie as a “consistent conservative” is mistaken -- even apart from its conspicuous failure to mention Christie’s squishiness on illegal immigration and Second Amendment rights. Yes, Christie is to be commended for state-pension reforms, but he has neither dealt realistically with the magnitude of the problem nor actually balanced the budget.

#ad#New Jersey has an unfunded pension liability of over $41 billion. To “balance” the budget (as the state constitution requires), Christie is doing what his spendaholic predecessors have done: He is pretending that he is not required to make the state’s full pension payment. (What do you suppose would happen to a CEO in a private-sector, SEC-regulated business who tried that?) He has skimped on more than $5 billion -- money he is spending on government programs (or, as he puts it, “core services”). The pension bomb is kicked down the road, to explode on some future governor, who will have to make the tough choice Christie is ducking: pay the mounting debt, slash pension benefits, or drastically cut other spending.

Christie also claims to have “balanced” the budget without raising taxes. That is true only insofar as income taxes are concerned. But the real problem in Jersey is property taxes. They are among the highest in the country and have risen sharply on Christie’s watch. To be fair, Christie was right to slash state rebates that lessened the pain: Property taxes are a local issue, and the rebates effectively subsidized the out-of-control municipal spending. By reducing the rebates, Christie appropriately encourages property owners to rein in their local governments. That’s as it ought to be. Moreover, as Glyn notes, Christie got the legislature to cap local property-tax increases at 2 percent -- not exactly a boon to home owners who need tax decreases, but better than we were doing under Christie’s predecessors. But it is disingenuous to tell homeowners who are paying more that their taxes haven’t been raised. And it is irresponsible to pretend, as Christie does, that New Jersey can reduce taxes and achieve fiscal sanity without paying down its mushrooming debt and radically slashing the size and scope of government.

Truly laughable is Glyn’s claim that Christie’s response to Obamacare shows he is a “consistent conservative.” Unlike Republican governors across the country, Christie declined to sign New Jersey onto the multi-state lawsuit against the “Affordable Care Act” (now being weighed by the Supreme Court). His handwringing about needing more time to study the 2,000-page statute and being reluctant to expend state funds on the suit were insincere: Christie is an accomplished lawyer, the issues are well known, and the filing fee would have set the state back by only $1,000.

The dirty little secret is that Christie is an Obamacare enthusiast -- which is no doubt why he so staunchly defends Romneycare. As recently detailed by Mike Proto of Americans for Prosperity (whose New Jersey chapter is run by Christie’s aforementioned nemesis, Steve Lonegan), the governor has walked the tightrope of quietly facilitating Obamacare without overtly embarrassing his conservative rah-rah chorus. Not only has Christie shrunk from the court challenge; before the ink from Obama’s signature was dry, Christie joined Democratic governors in the rush to claim federal funds that Obamacare doles out to states that set up its hyper-regulated “high-risk” insurance pools. Apparently, Christie had studied the statute enough to know New Jersey’s haul could be $141 million; but with conservatives demanding a fight to overturn Obamacare, most Republican governors refused to apply.

#page#The health-insurance-exchange legislation that Glyn applauds Christie for vetoing was passed, in part, because Christie had signaled support for Obamacare -- which is also why Obama’s Health and Human Services Department sent seemingly compliant New Jersey an $8.5 million down payment. Christie’s veto came on the last possible day, only after weeks of conservative grumbling, and with a conciliatory message to Obama that “my Administration#...#stands ready to implement the Affordable Care Act if its provisions are ultimately upheld” by the Supreme Court. As Cato’s Michael Cannon observes, even if the justices uphold Obamacare, there is no requirement that states create its pernicious “exchange” bureaucracies. But Christie’s eagerness to submit is no surprise to Garden State conservatives. Proto notes that Christie speeches echo Obama’s desire for universal health insurance, and the governor consistently supports funding increases for “FamilyCare” -- New Jersey’s version of the “public option,” which now extends taxpayer subsidies to families at 350 percent of the federal poverty level.

#ad#The brute fact is that, while Christie is not a hardcore statist, he is a mild progressive -- which is to say, a “compassionate conservative” in the Bush mold who wants to make government “work,” not drastically reduce its size and scope. The governor likes government, particularly its “investments” in everything from green-energy boondoggles like his Offshore Wind Economic Development Act (because “climate change is real” and it is time to “defer to the experts” who say it is anthropogenic) to the creation of new state bureaucracies within existing state bureaucracies to provide government services for children and the elderly.

Thus, though New Jersey’s fiscal outlook continues to be bleak, with looming tens of billions in unfunded liabilities, Christie has just proposed to increase government spending. Not to worry though, because the governor insists, “We have left the dark times.”

Well#...#not exactly. To justify his increased spending, Christie did what progressives do: He declared we can afford all this government (and soon more) because, thanks to his bipartisan leadership, Jersey’s condition is so improved that growth will soon soar to 7.4 percent, with tax revenues consequently surging. This week, however, Moody’s burst his balloon. The investors’ service projected growth at only 3 percent for fiscal year 2013 -- about what it is now -- and surmised that the governor had significantly overstated revenues in trumpeting the state’s supposed recovery. (In 2011, Christie’s second year in office, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded New Jersey’s credit rating to Aa3 -- only California and Illinois rank lower.)

Then the next shoe dropped: The state’s legislative budget officer (New Jersey’s analogue to the federal CBO) announced that revenue would fall $1.3 billion short of Christie’s projections -- prompting the governor, with his usual grace, to inveigh, “Why would anybody with a functioning brain believe this guy?” and to belittle the budget officer as “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” By the next day, at least some functioning brains decided “Dr. Kevorkian” wasn’t so inept after all: Christie’s state treasurer conceded that revenues would come up nearly $700 million short of what Christie projected just two months ago. The treasurer also mentioned in passing that Christie will fill part of the gaping budget hole by diverting $260 million in transportation funds to other spending needs#...#and then borrowing $260 million in order to preserve the transportation spending. Christie, in fine Keynesian fettle, explains that this government spending cannot be cut because it is necessary to put people to work -- New Jersey’s unemployment rate, at 9.1 percent, being even worse than the nation’s.

Borrowing more millions to pay current operating expenses -- heaping more exorbitant debt, with interest, onto the backs of New Jersey’s children -- is exactly the practice Christie lambasted his statist predecessor over. He promised to bring it to an end. But now the dilemma: Christie wants to keep his conservative cheerleaders cheering by cutting income taxes while preserving his “reach across the aisle” cred by not only maintaining but expanding the welfare state. As always, the “have it all” fantasy relies on the mirage of epic growth. When that growth inevitably fails to materialize, a governor can either get real or start playing budget voodoo with borrowed money. The “consistent conservative” has made his choice.

I’m far from the first to observe that there is much less to Chris Christie than meets the conservative ear. A blue state could -- and usually does -- do a lot worse than Christie for its governor. But if “Christie is one of us,” then a lot of “us” aren’t.

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

From Democracy to Sharia

A few weeks ago, amid the “Arab Spring” giddiness, a Shiite mosque opened in Cairo. This was big news. Among Egypt’s 80 million people, there are only a few thousand Shiites. It’s a 90 percent Sunni country, with even Christians vastly outnumbering the Shia. So, in their euphoria over the mosque’s inauguration, Shiite clerics heralded this Husseiniya (as Shiite mosques are known) as a symbol of rapprochement. The mosque would bridge the sectarian divide: a Shia center in this bustling Sunni city, yet a house of worship, thus emphasizing what unites rather than divides Muslims in one of Islam’s most important nations.

Such stories were once the hallmark of the Arab Spring narrative. “Democracy” was in the air. The corrupt, cancerous, pro-American dictator was gone. With their yearning hearts now sated by freedom, Egyptians would pull together, the light of liberty guiding them to prosperity.

The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism -- which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.

#ad#News of the mosque’s demise arrived shortly after a report entitled “Neocons vs. Islamophobes” by the leftist e-magazine Salon. Foreign-policy correspondent Jordan Michael Smith was good enough to appoint me leader of “what might be called the ‘to-hell-with-democracy’ strain of thought” in “the American conservative movement.” And if anything needs an Arab Spring, it must be the American conservative movement. We Islamophobes haven’t even had an election yet, much less gotten one of those mellifluous sharia-constitutions the State Department likes to write for its emerging “democracies,” and yet here I am the leader! And a “relentless” leader, too -- scalding the Muslim Brotherhood on behalf of a cadre that allegedly includes such luminaries as John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, and Frank Gaffney.

In our struggle “to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam,” we are said to be “vying” with “another faction among the right-wing that is equally powerful . . . the neoconservatives.” Counting among their number such heavyweights as GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, they are portrayed as “rather admirably insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood be given a chance.” After the tumultuous Bush years, my friends Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill Kristol must be having a good laugh: It may have taken a motley crew of despicable Islamophobes, but the Left has suddenly decided that neocons may not be the root of all evil after all.

For all its pretensions to sober analysis, the Salon hit piece usefully demonstrates how nonsensical policy debates about the Arab Spring have become. There is no common understanding of basic terms. “Islamophobia” was coined by the Muslim Brotherhood and seamlessly adopted by its Western confederates. Taken literally, the word would mean “irrational fear of Islam” -- and thus it would rarely need to be spoken, Islamic supremacists having given us much to fear quite rationally. But in common parlance, to sneer “Islamophobe” is like what sneering “neocon” has hitherto been: lefty demagoguery -- in this case, the belittling of anyone who is critical of Islam and its sharia framework, regardless of how colorable the critique.

Most people know an insult when they hear one. When it is rank character assassination posing as argument, people of good will tune it out. More consequential, though, is the degrading of the term “democracy.”

As applied to the “Islamophobes,” Mr. Smith’s invocation of “democracy” -- as in, to hell with it -- is an outright perversion. Like the giants of neoconservatism, critics of Islamic supremacism (what Salon gently calls “political Islam”) are lovers of democracy. We believe the world would be a better place if every country adopted it. We agree the United States ought to be its promotional beacon. But that is mainly because when we speak of “democracy,” we mean American democracy. That is a culture of liberty so deeply rooted in the United States that it predated by a couple of centuries the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and the first federal elections.

#page#Salon quotes the superb Jamie Fly, director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, as explaining that the key to the course of the upheaval in Egypt is whether its eventual government “respects the democratic process and doesn’t try to subvert the system.” This does get to the nub of what divides conservatives. Much as I admire Mr. Fly, democracy is not a “process,” it is a culture. It cannot be installed by a “system.” Processes like popular elections and constitution-writing are democratic only when democracy’s principles have become ingrained in a society.

That is an evolution that can and should be promoted, but it cannot be rushed. And the less democratic tradition there is in a country -- or, for that matter, a civilization -- the longer the evolution will take. If you try to hasten it by having the processes and the system drag a resistant society along, you don’t get democracy. You get the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the Brotherhood’s way of thinking, as best articulated by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination.” It’s a process, a conveyance, not a culture. In the case of Turkey, it was popular elections that enabled Erdogan to seize power and gradually transition a society away from democracy. In the case of Egypt, it is popular elections that have installed the Brotherhood and other Sunni supremacists, enabling them to orchestrate the much less challenging transition from an Islamic culture to a sharia state.

#ad#To critics of Islam as we find it in the Middle East, democracy promotion is highly desirable, but it is best achieved by pressuring Islamic societies to adopt the culture of liberty. It involves large rations of humility about what it will be possible to achieve -- and how quickly. It accepts that just as the Left is wrong to blame America for every problem, so are others wrong to expect from America the solution to every problem. It calls for the steeliness to tell Islamic societies, “Sure, we’d like to be friends, but we’re not desperate to be friends. We are more than willing to cut you off if you prefer not to civilize. We are more than able to punish you if you threaten us. And we are not of the mind that punishing you somehow obligates us to move in for a thankless decade or two, spending lives that are too precious and money we don’t have to fix your dysfunctional country.”

The alternative view says we have interests in this part of the world and it is far better to be on the ground trying to influence the outcome, however imperfectly. Maybe democratic processes cannot instantly democratize culture, but they can steer it in the right direction. This is an honorable position, and admirably American in its optimism.

Nevertheless, it ignores the significant downsides. When democracy promotion becomes more about processes than principles, it clothes anti-democrats like Erdogan in the raiment of democratic legitimacy. This is self-defeating. It empowers pretenders to obstruct or reverse the progress of liberty.

Moreover, the notion that democracy is procedural, not substantive, and therefore that sharia needn’t be repealed for liberty to flourish, is not changing Islamic society for the better; it is changing our society for the worse. Islam is not budging on sharia-based suppression of speech it deems offensive -- particularly speech that examines or challenges Muslim strictures. But we are forfeiting free expression in craven appeasement of Islamic supremacism. When we send our troops overseas, for example, it is to defend our way of life. Consequently, when Senator Graham suggests that free speech -- our way of life -- should be curtailed so that dubious Islamic nation-building projects are not derailed by mercurial Muslim violence, it is not democracy promotion. It is democracy destruction.

It is the sort of thing that happens in the Arab Spring, when Egyptian Shiites buy the rhetoric but the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections.

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

ABC News: Trayvon Martin Had Drugs in His System -- Autopsy

The report is here. 

The report neglects to mention that in the 911 tape, George Zimmerman reported to the police dispatcher that Martin seemed suspicious to him because it seemed Martin was "on drugs or something."

Like the injuries to Zimmerman, the prosecutor's affidavit does not mention that Zimmerman's suspicion about Martin was confirmed by the autopsy. As I noted a few weeks back, it just asserts that Zimmerman "profiled" Martin. A disgrace.

Droning on . . . in Turkey

U.S. feeds drone intel to Islamic supremacist government of Turkey, which uses it to accidentally kill 34 civilians. Solution: Let's just sell them the drones -- that way, they can not only handle the air strikes but do the intel gathering themselves and (bonus!) share it with their friends the Iranians. Not kidding.

Droning on ... in Turkey

U.S. feeds drone intel to Islamic supremacist government of Turkey, which uses it to accidentally kill 34 civilians. Solution: Let's just sell them the drones -- that way, they can not only handle the air strikes but do the intel gathering themselves and (bonus!) share it with their friends the Iranians. Not kidding.

Springtime in Syria

Those lovable anti-Assad, er, rebels expel all families from a Christian village in Hama. Robert Spencer has details, translated from Arabic of a UPI story.

Re: Krauthammer 'Goes Hard Left'

I happened to watch Dr. K's outburst last night regarding the use of drones for domestic law-enforcement surveillance purposes. My great admiration for him notwithstanding, this was not his finest hour.

It's not my primary purpose to make an argument in favor of drone use. But his argument against it -- to wit, that a drone is a "weapon of war" and we don't use the military for domestic law-enforcement purposes -- was extremely weak. There are lots of surveillance techniques that have application in both military and domestic contexts; we don't shun them in the latter because of the former. My recollection is that Charles ultimately approved of the Bush warrantless surveillance program and -- putting aside the question of whether judicial warrants should have been obtained -- he spoke favorably about the use of the NSA's advanced technology to ferret out potential terrorist communications. The fruits of national-security surveillance, whether it's done with the blessing of the FISA Court or not, have long been admissible in criminal proceedings; being able to leverage potential criminal liability is one of the best ways to convince terrorist insiders to cooperate and provide us with life-saving intelligence. I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't use such techniques domestically because they are also effective in gleaning battlefield intel. Moreover, regarding Charles's posse comitatus objection, you don't need the military to operate a drone -- the FBI and other agencies can master it quite easily.

As Dr. K seemed to concede, we already have lots of surveillance techniques in domestic use that are at least as intrusive as drones would be. His objection to drones is not logical -- it is sheer emotion. It just doesn't feel right to him because of the drone's association with battlefield operations (including kills). It wasn't much different from listening to the complaint that Bush was "shredding the constitution": In the right setting, it's a great applause line, I suppose -- and Charles's protest certainly seemed to ring their chimes on the ol' Fox News set last night. But it doesn't tell us anything analytical so that we can make an informed judgment about whether the use of some technique in a particular set of circumstances is appropriate or inappropriate.

There is a considerable body of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that applies to this subject. Even if the Framers never considered drones, the underlying search principles still inform us: Is the surveillance capable of searching private areas for which the police would otherwise need a warrant? Can it be limited to public areas where people have no expectation of privacy, where cops patrol even if there is no suspicion of criminal activity, and where drone surveillance would not be any different in kind from surveillance cameras (which are increasingly ubiquitous)? Is the use of a drone reasonable under the circumstances (i.e., is there some serious crime or threat, or do they want to use drones to see who's running red lights)? What are the possible ways the executive branch can abuse the technique, and can this potential be discouraged short of an outright ban?

It may be that we ask all the familiar search-and-seizure questions and decide that drones are overkill. Or maybe they're fine, at least in some circumstances and with some legislative privacy protections (the kind that attend other very intrusive search techniques). But why would you take off the table a potentially effective search method, for all purposes and for all time, just because it's been used effectively in the military context -- particularly when, in counterinsurgency strategy, where we seek not to conquer enemies but protect populations, there is already considerable blurring of the line between military and law-enforcement functions?

Western Sharia

Ismail Belghar, a 36-year-old Muslim man living in Australia, assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed his sister-in-law. The victim, a 25-year-old Moroccan named Canan Kokden, had dared to take her older sister, Mrs. B, to the beach without Belghar’s permission. This heinous effrontery was amplified, Belghar later recounted for police, when Mrs. B thereupon “displayed her body,” sustaining the shoulder sunburn that tipped him off.

To Australians, this may have been, well, just a day at the beach. For Belghar, though, it was an “abhorrent” offense against sharia, Islam’s legal code and comprehensive societal framework.

The telltale burn is also starting to show on the West’s shoulders, our courts of law. Australia has not changed Belghar, but the Belghars are changing Australia.

Innately, Islam is not moderate -- just ask Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who rejects as “ugly and offensive” the very term “moderate Islam.” Instead, Islam can be moderated, but only by a culture that is self-confident and self-assertive. Alas, that is no longer Western culture. So, the more Muslims immigrate, the less the West is moderating Islam. It is Islam that leaves its mark.

#ad#In the usual endearing family way, Belghar telephoned his sister-in-law to convey that he was a tad rankled: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach!” Afterwards, happening upon Ms. Kokden at a shopping mall in New South Wales, he angrily confronted her, slapped her face, and dragged her to the railing of an over-ground parking lot. As he seemed ready to hurl her to the traffic below, her brother (Kokden’s chaperone at the mall) finally stirred himself to intervene, tackling the assailant. Belghar was charged with attempted murder, among other crimes.

As night follows day, Belghar’s defense counsel argued that his client could not get a fair trial because Australians are too Islamophobic: Once informed about the nature of the allegations and the fact that he is a Muslim, jurors would surely leap to the crazy, bigoted conclusion that Belghar was probably guilty of this “honor beating” -- which, in fact, he was. Just as he was, precisely, motivated by his Islamic beliefs.

Enter the jurist assigned to the case, the pitch-perfectly named Ronald Solomon. He ruled that, yes, Belghar would be compelled to stand trial, but also that the case would have to be decided by a factfinder Judge Solomon could trust. No doubt you’ll be stunned to learn that this reasonable, objective, and culturally sensitive factfinder turned out to be#...#Judge Solomon himself. After all, ordinary citizens with nothing but their common sense to fall back on lack the juridical acumen needed to weigh what Solomon gently called Belghar’s “attitude,” “based on a religious or cultural bias,” that he had absolute authority over his wife.

This Solomon was splitting not just the baby but the country. As the Australian government contended on appeal, if the judge were correct, an entirely separate system of due process would be required just for Muslims. Every Islamic defendant would be entitled to evade the judgment of the community -- that judgment being the whole point of having a judicial system. Muslims would instead get their own system, bringing to bear not the judgment of the community but that of trained lawyers, specially attuned to Islam’s various eccentricities.

#page#This is the dream, of course. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the renowned Muslim Brotherhood jurist and “Arab Spring” maestro, brags that Islam will “conquer” the West. He maintains, however, that the conquest will be achieved not by force of arms but by dawa -- Islam’s hyper-aggressive proselytism that pushes on every cultural cylinder. While the ultimate goal is to impose sharia standards on a society, “an immense barrier” can be “traversed,” Qaradawi instructs, if Western nations can be “convinced#...#of our right to live according to our faith -- ideologically, legislatively, and ethically.”

There are two very effective ways to go about this. The first is voluntary apartheid: Muslims move into neighborhoods and, once there is a critical mass, live ostentatiously and defiantly by their own mores. Life becomes sufficiently unpleasant for other habitués that they flee. Pressure to moderate and assimilate ebbs. In effect, it is the gradual assertion of Islamic sovereignty over territory -- without exploding a bomb or firing a shot.

But not all territory is physical. The law, too, is susceptible to Balkanization, and is thus the second dawa target. Here, Muslim supremacists find a willing partner: the Lawyer Left, so sympathetic to claims that Western justice systems are inherently unjust, and that the law is an instrument for social change, not an expression of the society’s unifying principles.

#ad#Increasingly, sharia-based claims are finding hospitable audiences. The Australian case mirrors one in New Jersey, where a judge denied a protective order to a woman who was being serially raped and beaten by her husband. The judge’s rationale? The couple was Islamic, and under sharia a woman is required to submit to her husband’s authority and sexual demands. It would be unfair, the judge decided, to hold the husband accountable when he was really just adhering to his cultural norms. In Dearborn, Mich., Christian missionaries were arrested on “disorderly conduct” charges after handing out copies of St. John’s gospel on a public street outside an Arab festival. The arrests were outrageous enough, but, worse, the authorities actually went ahead with a prosecution.

To point these cases out, some argue, is to overreact. After all, the system usually works. The Australian case was reversed on appeal, and Belghar ended up pleading guilty to abduction and assault charges. The New Jersey ruling, too, was reversed. And in Dearborn, the missionaries were acquitted. But the vast majority of rulings in lower state courts do not get appealed, and criminal charges are overwhelmingly settled by plea bargains. Generally, it is only trials and appeals that break into the public consciousness. However, trials and appeals, being expensive and burdensome, are rare.

That means we really have no idea how much sharia is seeping into Western law and jurisprudence. A year ago, without breaking a sweat -- i.e., by just looking at published appellate decisions -- the Center for Security Policy 50 cases across the United States in which Islamic law factored into rulings. Most of these involved domestic relations -- issues involving marriage and child custody. Yet, as a practical matter, there is no telling how extensively sharia has encroached on Western law; we know only that its reach grows as Muslim enclaves multiply.

How could it be otherwise? When not inveighing against the label (some might say the oxymoron) “moderate Islam,” Prime Minister Erdogan can be found bewailing the pressure on Muslims to assimilate in the West. “Assimilation,” the prime minister says, “is a crime against humanity.” For his trouble, Western chancelleries hail Erdogan as a visionary Islamic leader -- President Obama’s most trusted friend, with whom he finds so much common ground that Erdogan has become his go-to guy on everything from solving Syria to raising teenage daughters (or, as they are known around the White House, “senior staffers”).

When the administration is not taking its cues from Ankara, it is making common cause with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. This 57-member bloc of Muslim governments (including the “State of Palestine”) sees itself as the global caliphate under construction. Echoing Erdogan -- Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood having become two of the OIC’s most influential voices -- the OIC’s 2010 report on “Islamophobia” warned (at page 30): “Muslims should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated. Accommodation is the best strategy for integration.”

Yes, but best for whom? Sharia’s integration into Western law is not apt to be very accommodating for women and non-Muslims.

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

The Military Is Fighting For . . . Obama?

It is not the late breaking news that the current occupant of the Oval Office is the most self-adulatory president -- perhaps, person -- in our history. But, since the whole country was aware that his "evolution" on gay marriage was a con-job, I can't help but see the bracing part of his statement today as the assertion that the United States armed forces fight not for the United States but for him (Him?): 

[O]ver the course of several years, as I talk to friends and family and neighbors; when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed, monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailers who are out there fighting on my behalf, and yet feel constrained, even though "don't ask, don't tell" was gone, because they're not able to commit themselves in a marriage; at a certain point I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.