Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 20

Breaking: Czar Blowing Off G-8 Meeting

Putin pushing his own Reset Button ... but he has some flexibility now that he's been "re-elected" so he's sending Junior in his place.

So lemme get this straight ...

Obama is done "evolving" on gay marriage but he's still evolving on federalism?

Muslims in Moderate, Tolerant Indonesia Silence Irshad Manji, Demand Her Deportation

The Jakarta Globe reports that the courageous Islamic reformer, Irshad Manji, was stopped from speaking in Indonesia on Saturday. A Muslim supremacist group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), protested that Manji (who is gay) was promoting homosexuality among Muslims. She was actually trying to discuss her new book, Allah, Liberty and Love. The police halted the event after 15 minutes. 

Apparently this leading newspaper in the world's largest Islamic country (by population) does not have as firm and nuanced a grasp on Islam as American intellectuals and U.S. government officials. The Globe describes Irshad as "a critic of traditional mainstream Islam" who instead advocates a "progressive interpretation." Don't the folks running this rag realize that Islam already is progressive and tolerant and moderate and peaceful and all things bright and beautiful? 

The report adds that Ms. Manji had to be escorted from the Salihara cultural center in South Jakarta under heavy guard. The FPI is now calling for her to be thrown out of the country. By the way, reliable studies and polling indicate that Indonesia is, in fact, one of the most tolerant Islamic countries in the world -- considerably more so than what even al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri now calls "the Arab Spring countries." 

UPDATE: Irshad Manji was stopped from speaking again today at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, due to a protest by hundreds of Muslims. Jakarta Globe again has the details, here. (Thanks to Andy Bostom.)

The FBI's Muslim Outreach Follies

Patrick Poole has the lowdown.

The Christie Boomlet

I am not as a big a Christie fan as some of my friends here and, with due respect to Bob Costa's sources in Trenton and elsewhere, I think there's a good chance that a Romney decision to tap the Garden State gov would demoralize rather than energize the base. The base is conservative and Christie is a tough-talking moderate.

The people talking about how Christie would "energize the base" are GOP-establishment figures. While Christie certainly excites them, that is different from exciting the base. It is telling that what makes them swoon, as one told Bob, is Christie's "pragmatism." In these matters, "pragmatism" is usually code for "not beholden to a set of principles." However alluring this form of "pragmatism" seems inside the Beltway, the GOP's conservative base blames it for the mess we're in. 

Governor Christie may also be the kind of personality who wears thin pretty quickly -- whose glib, between-the-eyes style is enticing from a distance but gets less attractive as you examine his record and find that it's more luke-warm than his heated presence suggests. (And, on things like confronting Islamic supremacism, it is downright disturbing.) Christie certainly would not help Romney with wary conservatives. He'd reinforce their suspicions about Romney -- viz., that Romney figures he can now etch-a-sketch away his primary-season appeals to conservatives and focus on independents because conservatives are hot to beat Obama and have no place else to go.

But all that said, shouldn't it be dispositive that Christie has said, repeatedly and adamantly, that he is not ready to be president? (See, e.g., here.) When it comes time to pick a veep, presidential candidates reliably say that the number-one thing they are looking for, and that the country needs, is someone who is ready to be president from day-one. Christie has told us in no uncertain terms that he is not that guy -- and his appeal is said to be that he speaks his mind with refreshing honesty. Plus, a big part of the critique on Obama is that he was not up to the job. How does Romney advance that argument, in the most consequential decision he will make before Election Dau, by choosing someone who, by his own admission, is not up to the job? 

Compulsory Blindness

A few years back, I wrote a book called “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.” It was about being on the “front lines,” so to speak, of the battle against Muslim terrorism. I put “front lines” in quotes because, though the terrorists saw themselves as fighting a doctrinally ordained war of armed combat, we were treating them as mere criminals -- such that our idea of a battlefield was the federal courthouse, and our idea of a commander was, well#...#me.

Misapprehending the dimension of the challenge -- that it was war, not crime -- was only one part of the story. The real willful blindness was government’s failure to examine the nature of the challenge. This, of course, involves the question of why things happen. To duck that question was reckless. A failure to understand the terrorists’ rationale made it impossible to grasp how pervasive the security problem was, how likely it was that additional mass-murder plots were in the offing, what kinds of targets were vulnerable, and what should be done to try to prevent attacks.

Still, things were better 20 years ago. If the book were to be written about today’s counterterrorism approach, I’d have to call it Compulsory Blindness: A Surrender to Violent Extremism.

#ad#See, however wayward our approach in the Nineties may have been, it was still possible to tell the truth, to fashion an accurate depiction of the phenomenon. To be sure, in the Clinton years, there was plenty of feel-good “Religion of Peace” drivel coming out of the White House, the State Department, and Main Justice. But back then, willful blindness was the familiar, tacit kind of conscious avoidance: Officials who should have known better passively avoided learning basic, uncomfortable facts. For the most part, though, they did not affirmatively obstruct those who were more industrious.

No one, for example, stopped me from eliciting sworn testimony from FBI agents and other experts that the concept of “jihad” stemmed from classical Islamic doctrine, and that its original meaning involved armed combat against unbelievers in order to fulfill the divine injunction to spread Islam. Regardless of what the politicians were saying in Washington, no one tried to stop us, in our New York courtroom, from proving that the terrorists had been animated by a supremacist ideology that was firmly rooted in Islamic scripture. No one prevented me from pointing out to the jury that the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman), whose various physical maladies rendered him unable to carry out terrorist acts, was nevertheless empowered to command the terrorist organization, solely because of his mastery of Islamic jurisprudence.

I marched into the courtroom every day for nine months and proved that there was an undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims. The Blind Sheikh, the jury was allowed to learn, was not a fringe lunatic; he was a globally renowned scholar of sharia whose influence over a spate of international jihadist organizations was based on his doctorate from al-Azhar University, the world’s most influential center of Islamic thought. And when I demonstrated the straight-line, undeniable logic of the evidence -- that scripture informed the Blind Sheikh’s directives; that those directives informed his terrorist subordinates; and that those subordinates then committed atrocities -- the government gave me the Justice Department’s highest award.

Today, I’d be ostracized. No longer is the government content to be willfully blind. Today, it is defiantly, coercively, extortionately blind.

#page#“Islamic outreach” started out in the post-9/11 Bush years as a well-intentioned but wrongheaded way to connect with Muslim communities: convince them to share information about jihadist elements while persuading them that America’s quarrel was with terrorists, not Islam per se. It was a wayward idea, but not fatally so. After all, outreach was just a sideline -- something the FBI, the intelligence community, and the military did in addition to, and in the service of, their more conventional methods of gathering information and evidence in order to thwart a threat.

In contrast, Islamic outreach is the ne plus ultra of Obama counterterrorism. Today, conventional methods of intelligence collection -- along with the basic premise that you need to understand what you are looking for -- are foresworn if they are deemed to interfere with Islamic outreach in any way. Counterterrorism is not national security anymore; it is pseudo-psychology. The key to making us safer is making Muslims feel good about themselves, the theory holds. This will nullify resentment, and resentment, not ideology, is the cause of Islamic aggression -- except we wouldn’t want to call it Islamic aggression because Muslims would resent that. So we must suppress all references to Islam (Islamist, “political Islam,” “Islamic supremacism,” jihad, etc.). And we must violate the first rule of good intelligence that nothing is beyond scrutiny: It is to be taken as a given that Islam is not the problem but a key part of the solution.

#ad#There are many farcical things about Islamic outreach, but the worst is that it miniaturizes the threat of Islamic supremacism. Contrary to popular wisdom, violent jihadists do not kill wantonly. It is a grave error to confuse tactical barbarism with mental dysfunction. They kill for the same reason that non-violent Muslim supremacists champion sharia, Islam’s legal system and societal framework. The rational, coherent goal of both the violent and the non-violent is to Islamize the society by imposing Allah’s law.

Islamized society is antithetical to the Western notion of free society -- it rejects liberty and equality. Therefore, the threat to us is not merely violence, or “violent extremism” (the euphemism in vogue for “jihadist terror”). Violence is just the immediate part of the threat. The overall threat is that our liberty will be eroded as sharia mores take root. Sharia is extremism, and it imperils us whether or not it is implemented violently.

Moreover, the animating supremacist doctrine is the same for everyone who hears it, even if only some are moved to violence. All who accept the doctrine have the same ultimate goal; they differ only in their methods of achieving it.

By and large, the government’s outreach “partners” are leaders of Islamic organizations, many of which are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood and al-Qaeda accept the same doctrine of Islamic supremacism. They have tactical disagreements about how to carry out the duty to spread sharia, but they are in harmony on the point that spreading it is a duty. That is why in 2008, for example, the Brotherhood’s then–Supreme Guide, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, rejected the suggestion that Osama bin Laden was a “terrorist.” He countered that bin Laden was a “mujahed” (an honorific applied to “a warrior in Allah’s cause”). Akef added that, in his “sincerity in resisting the occupation,” bin Laden was “close to Allah on high.”

If, under the guise of Islamic outreach, the government gives these Islamic-organization leaders a veto over what our agents can learn about Islam, it is giving a veto to people who believe what bin Laden believed. Even if they disagree with bin Laden’s methods, they are not going to help us discredit the ideology that causes terrorism. They are going to tell us to ignore that ideology while they go merrily on promoting it. And that it won’t incite terrorism in everyone does not mean it won’t incite terrorism in anyone.

The Obama administration has gone all in with these Islamic leaders. It is not only willfully blind to the threat, a la Clinton and Bush. Obama has made blindness compulsory. Under his direction, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and even the military are taking muscular steps to bleach training materials of any information that these Muslim leaders might find offensive, meaning: anything that explains Islamic supremacism and demonstrates the unmistakable causal relationship between Islamic scripture and Islamic terror. Disappearing along with the materials are the instructors who lecture about them. The idea is not just to airbrush Islam but to intimidate -- with the specter of taint and lost employment -- anyone who would dare challenge Obama orthodoxy.

The president is purging information on which, not so long ago, juries relied to convict jihadists. Notwithstanding all its willful blindness, the government used to pass out sparkling awards to the officials who stitched that information together. Now, in the era of compulsory blindness, the government stamps “Islamophobe” on your head and hands you your walking papers.

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

Pelosi's Lies About Interrogation

At the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen has a great column recalling former House speaker Nancy Pelosi's vehement denials that she was informed, in real time, that the CIA was waterboarding top al Qaeda captives -- and the fact that those denials were flat-out lies. Marc details the disclosures in an explosive new book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, by former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who personally briefed Pelosi on the matter. Worth reading Marc's post and Mr. Rodriguez's book, though it would be worth even more to hold Representative Pelosi to account.

Triple Play! Obama Blows Off Congress, Funds Palestinians, Lies About PA Stance on Israel

Friday night news dump: President Obama has decided to provide $192 million to the Palestinian Authority despite Congress's freeze on PA funding after its president, Mahmoud Abbas, attempted to declare statehood unilaterally last September, in violation of the PA's treaty commitments.

Obama's "waiver" of the restrictions on Congress's Palestinian Accountability Act was first reported in the foreign press (AFP), which is where Americans generally need to go to get news about what the U.S. administration is up to. A report from the Times of Israel is here. [Hat tip, Creeping Sharia.] The New York Times, evidently too busy reporting on how much Israel sucks, did not find this story fit to print.

White House spinmeister Tommy Vietor stated that President Obama made the decision to pour American taxpayer dollars into Palestinian coffers in order to ensure "the continued viability of the moderate PA government." He added the claim that, as the report puts it, "the PA had fulfilled all its major obligations, such as recognizing Israel's right to exist, renouncing violence and accepting the Road Map for Peace."

In the real world, the very immoderate PA has reneged on all its commitments. In addition to violating its obligations by unilaterally declaring statehood, the PA has also agreed to form a unity government with Hamas, a terrorist organization that is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The PA continues to endorse terrorism against Israel as "resistance." Moreover, the PA most certainly does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Back in November, for example, Adil Sadeq, a PA official writing in the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, declared that Israelis

have a common mistake, or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist...

In sum, everything Obama is saying about Palestinian compliance is a lie. Even if we were not broke, we should not be giving the PA a dime. To borrow money so we can give it to them is truly nuts.

Will Congress do anything about it? There is a very simple answer to this: slash the executive branch's budget. That is the weapon the framers gave Congress to rein in a corrupt, spendaholic executive branch. You could start with a treble damages rule: Obama gives $192 million to the PA against Congress's directive, Congress responds by slashing $600 million out of the State Department's budget. That would be start -- though State would still have $51 billion left over to fund the Muslim Brotherhood and its other favorite Islamic supremacists.

Islamic Democracy Revisionism

Mario, while I have great respect for Reuel, I did not find the op-ed "arresting." I found it to be more of the same.

To leave Reuel out of it and just make a more general comment, in the height of the bipartisan democracy fetish, we heard all kinds of talk about how jihadism was caused by America's embrace of dictators (as opposed to mainstream Islamic doctrine); how Islam and democracy were perfectly compatible; how the responsibility and accountability of governance would tame Islamists; and even how, as the second Bush inaugural insisted, freedom in American was somehow dependent on the spread of freedom in the Middle East. As some of us contended, none of this was sound and, predictably, things have not worked out as promised. So now the strategy, as I've said before with respect to the Obama administration's airbrushing of the Muslim Brotherhood, is to prepare the ground so that failure can be spun as success: either by redefining what democracy is so enthusiasts can argue with a straight face that we are seeing it in the current transformation; by recasting what Islamists are so they can be portrayed as "largely secular" pragmatists, or democrats who just happen to be "socially conservative"; or by theorizing that the ugliness we're now seeing is a regrettable but necessary transitional phase on the way to something truly democratic (as Westerners understand that term).

I have made myself scarce, and have to stay that way for a little while longer, because I'm finishing a book about the so-called Arab Spring. Obviously, I'll have my say soon enough, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

Rogering That!

On the subject of Mark's post, a friend sends along some helpful research, published by the Telegraph last year, courtesy of a learned imam in Morocco (bold emphasis below is in the original, which I pass along without further comment because -- well, what else is there to say, really):

An Imam in Morocco issued a fatwa stating that necrophilia is “Halal” or religiously acceptable practice in Islam. He said that a husband has the right to have sex with his dead wife.

The Imam, whose name is Zamzami Abdelbari, said that marriage remains valid even after death, which does not cancel the marriage link. He took as evidence a Koranic verse which says that Muslims believers will go to Paradise with their wives…

Sheikh Zamzami said that the husband has the right to have sex with his dead wife. He added that the husband may wash the body of his dead wife and have sex with her.

He said that the woman also has the same right but failed to explain how a woman can manage to perform sex with the corpse of her dead husband.

However, Sheikh Zamzami, tempered his most unusual fatwa by stating that necrophilia, though Halal is a disgusting act that would be best avoided.