Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 22

Britain’s House (of Lords) Islamist Places £10 Million Bounty on Obama and Bush

What a proud day for the world’s most important alliance. MEMRI reports that during a recent visit to his native Pakistan, Lord Nazir Ahmed, a member of the British House of Lords, announced that he was putting up a bounty of £10 million for the capture of President Barack Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush. 

The bounty is an expression of solidarity with the Pakistan-based jihadist organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, for aid in the capture of whose chief (Hafiz Muhammad Saeed) the United States has announced a $10 million reward. Lord (ahem) Ahmed regards the U.S. bid as "an insult to all Muslims" and a "challenge [to the] dignity of the Muslim ummah." The ummah is the notional worldwide community of Muslims -- and here you thought members of Parliament represented Britain.

In 1998, Ahmed became Britain's first Muslim life peer. Thank you Tony Blair.

That's why he's the one and only Rush!

"If I had a daughter, she would look like Ann Romney."

Holder Meets Sharpton

Eric Holder rode in on the stench of Marc Rich and will ride out on the stench of Al Sharpton. He’s spent the three-plus years in between branding Americans as “cowards” on race matters; investigating the CIA; coddling CAIR and the New Black Panthers; green-lighting voter fraud; swaddling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Bill of Rights; and converting the Justice Department into a full-employment program for the Lawyer Left and its Gitmo boutique. But now he’s hit the big time.

This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder -- sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan. The Sharpton record was succinctly catalogued on the Corner by Victor Davis Hanson: inciting murderous riots; slandering Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals; libeling a state prosecutor in the course of championing Tawana Brawley’s fabrication of a racial “hate crime.” Yet there was Holder, ladling cringe-making praise on Sharpton for “your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill.”

#ad#Holder is currently in “partnership” with his fast friend on the highly charged Trayvon Martin case. In the days before the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement official lionized the CEO of the nation’s racial-grievance industry, Sharpton had been in Florida, threatening that his “action network” -- as in “direct action,” the community-organizer’s stock-in-trade -- would “move to the next level” if authorities in Sanford, Fla., failed to arrest George Zimmerman, the man (or, if you prefer the New York Times Agitator’s Glossary, the “white Hispanic”) who shot Mr. Martin, a black 17-year-old.

With such notches on his belt as Crown Heights and Freddie’s Fashion Mart, there’s not a lot of mystery involved when the Reverend Al starts conjuring “the next level” of “action.” Still, never what you’d call a master of subtlety, Sharpton -- between inciting mobs with demands to “arrest Zimmerman now!” -- expressly threatened to “occupy” the city of Sanford.

The nation’s chief federal law enforcer reacted to these threats of lawlessness with paeans to Sharpton’s besotted history. Beyond that, Holder has been doing plenty of agitating on his own. He bragged to Sharpton’s crowd that he’d ordered his Justice Department to open an investigation into the Martin shooting three weeks ago. He stood ready, he vowed, to file “civil rights” charges if warranted by “the facts and the law.”

Just one problem: Nothing about the known facts comes close to triggering federal jurisdiction. Holder’s “civil rights” hooey is based on fiction: a tale manufactured by NBC News, the flimflam artists who doctored the audiotape of Zimmerman’s call to the police, stoking public outrage with a report that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin.

The case at hand involves the excruciating loss of a 17-year-old’s life. We do not know exactly what happened. We do know, however, that there is virtually no chance Martin’s race was the cause of his killing. Quite apart from Zimmerman’s lineage -- which the Times would be reporting as “Hispanic,” not the newfangled “white Hispanic,” if he had been on the receiving end of fired shots -- Zimmerman is of a mixed-race family. Not only does he have black relatives, he has reportedly donated his time to tutor black children. He seems to have used tragically poor judgment in the chain of events that led to Martin’s death, but there is no indication that he is a racist or that his overeager actions were motivated by racial bias. In the context of the case, Martin’s race is sheer happenstance. Its principal relevance is the divisive opening it presents for opportunistic racialists such as Sharpton and Holder.

Race is a dubious constitutional basis for federal intrusion into state law enforcement. The framers saw policing as a state matter-- that’s why there was no U.S. Justice Department for the first 83 years of constitutional governance. One needn’t be blind to slavery and structural racism to understand that 21st-century Florida has moved beyond these blights on the nation’s history. There is zero reason to believe that, without Eric Holder hovering, Florida’s police, prosecutors, and citizens could not be trusted to do justice.

#page#There is, moreover, grave reason to believe Holder’s looming involvement will taint the case. In fact, it is already tainting the case.

Put aside the absence of a race angle in this particular case. We know that the Obama-Holder Justice Department practices racial discrimination in enforcing Congress’s race-neutral civil-rights statutes. That is clear from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s investigation of the New Black Panthers voter-intimidation case-- brought by the Bush DOJ but dismissed by Holder’s minions, in consultation with far-left activists, even though the government had already prevailed. Anything Holder’s department does under the rubric of civil-rights enforcement exacerbates this profound offense against our constitutional commitment to equal protection under the law for all citizens, regardless of race.

Furthermore, controversial cases that stir passions and bring out the rabble-rousers demand that high law-enforcement officials provide adult supervision. Not every wrong is a criminal wrong. Responsible prosecutors respect this premise as the Constitution’s safe harbor for the innocent; it is not a mere inconvenience to be maneuvered around. Doing justice means justice for everyone, including the suspect. While it may be news to Mr. Holder, that proposition holds even if the suspect’s name is not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If negligence, even lethal negligence, has occurred, its victims are not without a remedy -- they can sue civilly. The criminal law, however, is not the solution to every legal problem, and its invocation where it has no place is monstrous.

#ad#The Justice Department’s conduct in the Martin case has been emblematic of Holder’s tenure: an exercise in hardball politics, not faithful law enforcement. In this case, a responsible attorney general would stay his hand. There appears to be no possibility of a federal crime. If such a possibility arises, the generous statute of limitations on civil-rights violations means there is no rush, and the “dual sovereignty” doctrine assures that there will be no double-jeopardy bar against a federal prosecution once the state’s work is done. The feds should just butt out for now: Let Florida’s system work.

And keep quiet in the meantime. We expect grand juries and petit juries to deliberate over cases in secret. The law requires that, because juries are supposed to decide without fear or favor, based on unvarnished evidence not outside agitators. In stark contrast, Holder has thrown the enormous weight of the Justice Department behind the mob. He is not seeking justice; he is pressing his thumb on the scale.

And it’s working. When Trayvon Martin was first shot to death nearly two months ago, state authorities sensibly opted not to charge George Zimmerman with murder. It wasn’t that they were looking to excuse wrongdoing. It was that the evidence was insufficient to prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

Plainly, there was a lack of criminal intent: There was obviously no premeditation; and, alternatively, the facts do not remotely suggest that Zimmerman acted with a “depraved mind regardless of human life”(e.g., the savage indifference of a man who fires into a crowd, heedless of the consequences). To the contrary, the known facts indicate (a) Zimmerman’s concern that Martin was acting suspiciously (the depraved do not call the police, as Zimmerman did, before shooting), and (b) a struggle in which Zimmerman may well have been severely beaten and, in any event, would have a strong basis to persuade a jury that he shot in self-defense.

In advancing that argument, Zimmerman would be aided by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives the law-abiding latitude to use guns for protection. The wisdom vel non of “Stand Your Ground” is beside the point. I happen to agree with National Review’s editors that the anti-gun lobby’s attack on Florida’s statute is unpersuasive. But regardless of who is right, ex post facto principles dictate that criminal cases be resolved based on the law in existence at the time of the conduct at issue. A criminal case may be the reason for subsequently changing laws like “Stand Your Ground,” but the Constitution does not permit a criminal case to be shored up by a midstream change in the law.

#page#A prosecutor cannot prove murder without being able to prove mens rea (the state-of-mind element of the offense). To file a murder charge without first establishing mens rea would be unethical and violate due process. So, initially, the Florida authorities did not. But there followed over six weeks of race-baiters fanning the flames of rage. If a U.S. attorney general has any role in such circumstances, it is to call for calm, assure people that the professionals are doing their duty diligently, and urge that the process be allowed to play out. Holder, instead, decided to go Sharpton -- except he’s a Sharpton with subpoena power, as well as the raw power to threaten Florida with a civil-rights investigation that would portray its police and prosecutors as racially insensitive obstacles to social justice.

#ad#Florida got the message. After the original prosecutor and police chief stepped aside under blistering political heat for declining to indict Zimmerman, the governor appointed Angela Corey, an elected state attorney of apparent ambition, as a special prosecutor. She decided not to continue with the grand jury -- which would have required submitting the weak case to members of the community. She has now unilaterally filed a second-degree-murder charge against Zimmerman, based on an affidavit that is so laughably devoid of probable cause that commentators across the ideological divide -- from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz-- have panned it as incredibly weak and grossly irresponsible. It is agitprop, not law -- it makes murky mention of a “struggle” but meticulously avoids mention of the injuries sustained by Zimmerman; and it invokes the ambiguous but explosive word “profiled” while failing to explain what it means, or to clarify that, absent any racial component (and none is alleged), profiling is perfectly legitimate. Police do it all the time to avoid harassing innocent people.

You can thank Eric Holder. He has a gun to Florida’s head, and he is standing his ground.

It is quite amazing that Holder is in a position to do so. His prior tenure as Clinton deputy attorney general -- a record of corrupting the pardon process, politicizing the Justice Department (even to the point of arranging commutations for convicted FALN terrorists), and misleading Congress -- made it embarrassingly obvious that he was not fit to be attorney general. Yet, Senate Republicans ignored warnings to this effect and marched in merry lockstep with Democrats to confirm him overwhelmingly.

Now, so predictably, Al Sharpton is smiling. We have no justice and no peace.

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

The Other Hillary Still Just As Appalling

As a fitting follow-up to Nina's post on the U.S. government's shocking indifference to the persecution of Christians by Muslims, let's shift to something the Obama administration cares passionately about: the good will of Muslims who wear on their sleeves their hatred for Israel.

In a story that's gotten very little attention, involving a town hall meeting in Tunisia last weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked how the U.S. could expect people in Muslim countries like Tunisia and Egypt to trust American politicians given that, during the U.S. election season, those politicians cozy up to their "enemy" (in context, an obvious reference to Israel) and "run towards the Zionist lobbies").

Mrs. Clinton responded that she thought this was "a fair question." Really? And the answer to this fair question? Madame Secretary explained that these Muslims who regard Israel as their enemy should understand that "a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention." She also thought they'd find it comforting that President Obama "will be reelected president" and that if people in Tunisia and Egypt just "watch what President Obama says and does" they'll realize they don't need to worry.

Appalling but, by now, not surprising. See CNS News, here, for video & transcript.

Report: Obama State Department Barred Inspection of Muslim Brotherhood Delegation

As I discussed in last weekend's column, the Obama administration received a Muslim Brotherhood delegation in Washington last week and, shortly afterwards, announced that it would be giving $1.5 billion in American taxpayer dollars to the new Egyptian government that the Brotherhood will dominate.

What I didn't know, but what Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism has now uncovered, is that the Obama State Department ordered the suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk the Islamists into our country. IPT reports:

The State Department broke with normal procedures last week when it ordered the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) not to conduct a secondary inspection on members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) on their way to visit government officials and think tanks in the United States.

This happened despite the fact that one member of the delegation had been implicated – though not charged – in a U.S. child pornography investigation, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has learned.

According to senior enforcement sources and documents reviewed by the IPT, investigators had information tying Abdul Mawgoud Dardery to the pornography investigation that was based in Pennsylvania. He was the senior member in the four-person FJP delegation which held court with academic groups and met with senior officials at the White House and State Department last week. (For more on what they said, click here.)

The FJP recently won a plurality of seats in recent elections to determine makeup of the next Egyptian Parliament.

Before returning to Egypt, Dardery lived in the United States long enough to attain legal permanent residency, known as a green card. That status lapsed after he left the country for more than six months. The child pornography investigation took place during Dardery's time here and was noted in his immigration file. It surfaced when CBP officials learned of his pending visit.

A U.S. official familiar with immigration procedures told the IPT that extra inspection is standard operating procedure when a foreign visitor has been tied to criminal or terrorist activities. "Secondary inspections" involve going through the visitor's baggage and viewing the contents of computers and other electronic devices to search for evidence of illicit activity. Agents would typically search other members of the party to ensure Dardery did not hand off his computer equipment to an associate to avoid detection.

In addition, the Brotherhood's relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas would have triggered extra scrutiny for the incoming delegation. But that "secondary inspection" never happened, a law enforcement source said. The State Department ordered CBP not to do it.

The State Department issued a cable specifically barring Customs officials from carrying out any inspections of Dardery and the other members of the delegation on their arrival at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. The immigration official described this action by the State Department as "extraordinary."

Beyond the State Department's prohibition on conducting extra scrutiny of Dardery and members of his delegation, the State Department barred US Customs officials from carrying out even the standard inspection mandated for foreigners arriving from Egypt, where an enhanced security program is in place as a result of the 9-11 attacks.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 with the goal of establishing a worldwide Islamic state through jihad and martyrdom. The group is considered the parent of all Sunni terrorist groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Al Qaeda Digs the 'Arab Spring'

The terror network, in the course of warning the Brits to protect Abu Qatada, a leading jihadist who's been fighting extradition to Jordan, suggested that he instead be allowed to go to an "Arab Spring country."

Robert Spencer has the details. Britain has been trying to deport Qatada for years but has been stymied by -- what else? -- lawfare. In January, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that he must not be sent to Jordan because of the possibility that evidence procured by torture could be used against him ... despite Jordan's promise that he would be given a fair trial. Obviously, the Lawyer Left, Euro Division, knows best. In related news, the ECHR has deigned to permit London to extradite a handful of terrorists the U.S. has been seeking for eons, including two suspects wanted in the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 14 years ago. Of course, the court added that there should be no extradition yet because a few more rounds of appeals may be needed, just to make sure ...

No, Mark ...

I've had my say and I'd like to let it go at that, but since you've portrayed me as having argued pretty much the opposite of what I argued, that won't do.

I, too, am fond of Derb, learn a great deal from most of what he writes, and regret his loss -- though not so much that I think he and the public debate have been wronged. Regarding the racialist double-standard, however, I never suggested, nor do I believe, that "them's the rules and we just have to accept it." I've condemned the racialism of the Obamas, Eric Holder, and plenty of others who make race (and knock-offs like "Islamophobia") their full-field theory for explaining all phenomena. And I've got the grievance industry scars to prove it. What I said in the post to which you refer was that we ought to heap on the Left's race hucksters the same "disgust" as is currently being heaped on Derb. My point is that, in condemning what is condemnable, we have to condemn all of it, not that we should tolerate the skewed status quo. If that is "insouciance," then you and I are working off a different definition of insouciance.

I am not insensitive to the concerns you raise. There is a global campaign to repress free expression, and that argues for giving speech an even wider berth than usual. But it doesn't mean anything goes or that opinion journals should no longer have standards. For NR to have and enforce them is not a surrender to the Left. I get a steady diet of the kind of crap David Weigel is experiencing. So do you. It means nothing. We take it from its source and carry on, unmoved. There is a world of difference, though, between the need to be able to discuss uncomfortable facts about IQ and incarceration, on the one hand, and, on the other, to urge race as a rationale for abandoning basic Christian charity.

To decide, as NR has, that the latter is beyond the pale is not unreasonable -- even if reasonable minds can differ over whether the penalty was too extreme. Either way, the parameters of the public debate will not change one iota over this episode. If one is considering drawing in public some sensible inferences from crime data, I suspect he won't shrink from doing so just because the "avoid being a Good Samaritan" advice is now explicitly suicidal rather than just obviously suicidal. And if MSNBC suddenly came to its senses and fired Sharpton, or if the Justice Department -- instead of pandering to Obama's base about "civil rights" violations -- opened up an investigation of the Trayvon Martin race-mongers for the federal offense of soliciting violent crimes, I wouldn't hand-wring over the specter of tightened constraints on the marketplace of ideas. I would applaud. 

Derb

I would prefer not to comment on NR's cutting ties with Derb, but alas ...

Long before I had anything to do with National Review, I was envious of Derb's talent as a writer and thinker. Over the last few years, I've gotten to know him a bit. He is charming, fiercely witty company. All that said, racialism is noxious regardless of who practices it. It is wrong that what is a day at the office for the Left's racialists becomes a hanging offense in Derb's case. But that is a summons to disgust over the former, not a defense of the latter.

We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency toward every person -- no matter what race, no matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations -- or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone. To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration of E Pluribus Unum.

Yes, NR is a journal of opinion, and that entails vigorous disagreement about countless things. But that has never meant all opinions are equally entitled to exploit this platform -- or, in Derb's case, his connection to this platform. He is not being silenced: NR is not the government, I don't believe the magazine is responding to any sort of government pressure, and what has happened here has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Derb remains free to express his views and he'll surely find a market for them. But NR is equally free to say: Not here.

I am sorry to see it happen, but I don't think NR can be blamed for emphatically distancing itself from opinions people here find more harmful than illuminating.

Unemployment Rate Or Unemployment Reality?

Through the magic of Washington Math and the Obama Labor Department, the metric "unemployment rate" has become as nonsensical as "jobs created or saved" by the stimulus. The Obamedia creates a free campaign ad out of the purported drop from 8.3% to 8.2% (i.e., from appalling to marginally less appalling), but meantime millions have been added to the black-hole category of "Not In the Labor Force" -- people who are so discouraged that they are not looking for work. That number is at an all-time high: 88 million. Thus the labor force participation rate, at under 64%, is lower than it's been in 30 years. Mish Schedlock concludes, "Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%." 

Instead of giving the Left ammunition by bizarrely implying that our outlook is improving, maybe the Romney campaign could give some thought to breaking through the fudged "unemployment rate" chatter. Something like:

Total Population of Germany: 82,000,000

Population of U.S. Not in Labor Force: 88,000,000 

Obama Funds the Egyptian Government

In October 2010, on the eve of the Islamic revolution that the media fancies as “the Arab Spring,” the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood called for jihad against the United States.

You might think that this all but unnoticed bombshell would be of some importance to policymakers in Washington. It was not. It is not. This week, the Obama administration quietly released $1.5 billion in foreign aid to the new Egyptian government, now dominated by a Brotherhood-led coalition in parliament -- soon to be joined by an Ikhwan (i.e., Brotherhood) luminary as president.

It is not easy to find the announcement. With the legacy media having joined the Obama reelection campaign, we must turn for such news to outlets like the Kuwait News Agency. There, we learn that, having dug our nation into a $16 trillion debt hole, President Obama has nevertheless decided to borrow more money from unfriendly powers like China so he can give it to an outfit that views the United States as an enemy to be destroyed.

#ad#This pot of gold for Islamic supremacists is the spoils of a Brotherhood charm offensive. Given the organization’s unabashed goals and hostility towards the West, it was U.S. policy, until recently, to avoid formal contacts with the Brotherhood -- although agents of the intelligence community and the State Department have long engaged in off-line communications with individual MB members. By contrast, the Obama administration from its first days has embraced the Ikhwan -- both the mothership, whose leaders were invited to attend Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo despite its then-status as a banned organization under Egyptian law, and the Brotherhood’s American satellites, which have been invited to advise administration policymakers despite their notorious record of championing violent jihadists and repressive sharia.

Obama has overlooked the MB’s intimate ties to Hamas, which self-identifies as the Ikhwan’s Palestinian branch and is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. Administration officials have absurdly portrayed the Brothers as “secular” and “moderate,” although the organization, from its founding in the 1920s, has never retreated an inch from its professed mission to establish Islam’s global hegemony.

The administration further hailed the Brotherhood’s triumph in post-Mubarak legislative elections and made a point of abandoning the policy against formal MB contacts -- though, in now-familiar Obama fashion, it simultaneously claimed that this “outreach” broke no new ground. And this week, the White House hosted a Brotherhood delegation to “broaden our engagement” with Egypt’s new political actors, as an administration spokesman put it. In this, Obama officials were quick to exploit the cover they’ve gotten from the transnational-progressive wing of the Republican party: The administration spokesman stressed that “Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham and others have met with members of the MB during their visits to Egypt.”

The useful-idiot brigade also includes the “House Democracy Partnership,” a bipartisan cadre of congressmen that traipsed over to Egypt on its recent tour of the “Arab Spring” countries. On the agenda was a confab with Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s newly announced presidential candidate.

Shater is Washington’s new darling. That much is clear from an unintentionally hilarious dispatch from the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick, who portrays the Brotherhood as America’s “indispensable ally against Egypt’s ultraconservatives.” Sure, they may be the world’s leading exemplar of what Kirkpatrick gently calls “political Islam,” but our policy geniuses reckon the Brothers are much to be preferred over the “Salafis” -- reputedly, the more hardcore Islamic supremacists. As the Times elaborates, the Obama administration is alarmed by the rise of a charismatic Salafist, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, who has shot to second place in the polls. Shater, the theory goes, could overtake Ismail and lead Egypt in the Brotherhood’s more “pragmatic direction.”

#page#What the Times neglects to tell you is that Ismail, the extremist, is actually an Ikhwan guy. His father was a popular Islamist and he has already run for office twice as a Brotherhood candidate. These impeccable Islamist credentials make him broadly appealing not only to Salafists but to Brotherhood enthusiasts, as the Hudson Institute’s Samuel Tadros details in the best report to date on state of the Brotherhood in the aftermath of the revolution. (It is found in the latest edition of the essential series, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.) There is little substantive daylight between Ismail and Shater -- the Brotherhood and Salafists disagree mainly on the pace of change, not the direction.

And what about Shater? The Times dutifully reports that he embodies “the Brotherhood’s pragmatic focus on stable relations with the United States and Israel and free-market economics.” But what is most pragmatic about him and his Brothers is their understanding of Western opinion elites -- gullible, biddable, and desperate to believe Middle Eastern Islam, which the Brotherhood exemplifies, is unthreatening. The Brotherhood’s actual agenda is to destabilize the United States and destroy Israel. And touching as the Times’ newfound fondness for free-market economics may be, the Brotherhood’s goal is to smash the Western model and impose sharia economics -- a major component in a program whose totalitarian elements may have some allure for the Obama Left but which few Americans would regard as “free.”

#ad#Shater is the MB’s “Deputy Guide.” He is a revered figure: jailed by the Mubarak Regime for much of the past two decades and regarded as the “Iron Man” of the Brotherhood movement. Naturally, the Western press -- the folks who package the Brothers as “moderates,” “pragmatists,” and even “secularists” -- render Shater as a “businessman.” But he happens to be the businessman the Brotherhood has tasked to shape its comprehensive strategy for post-Mubarak Egypt. The Ikhwan refer to this as “the Nahda Project” -- the Islamic Renaissance.

It turns out that a year ago in Alexandria, Shater delivered a lengthy, remarkable lecture, “Features of Nahda: Gains of the Revolution and the Horizons for Developing.” The Hudson Institute learned of the lecture, which is now available on YouTube, and this week released the first installment of a translation. Speaking in Arabic to like-minded  Islamists rather than credulous Congress critters, Shater was emphatic that the Brotherhood’s fundamental principles and goals never change -- only the tactics by which they are pursued. “You all know that our main and overall mission as Muslim Brothers is to empower God’s religion on earth, to organize our life and the lives of the people on the basis of Islam, to establish the Nahda [i.e., the ‘renaissance’ or ‘rise’] of the Ummah [the notional global Muslim nation] and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate people to God on earth.” He went on to reaffirm the time-honored plan of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, stressing the need for both personal piety and internal organizational discipline in pursuing the goal of worldwide Islamic hegemony.

Moreover, even as the Times portrayed him as America’s salvation from a Salafi-controlled Egypt, Shater was cutting a deal with what the Associated Press described as “hard-line Salafi scholars and clerics.” In exchange for their support, he promised to form a “council of clerics” that would review all legislation to ensure that it complies with sharia.

No one should be remotely surprised. As Samuel Tadros outlines in his essay, the Egyptian Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has released a 93-page platform that proposes to put every aspect of human life under sharia-compliant state regulation. The document is unmistakably anti-Western and virulently anti-Israeli in its orientation -- structuring civil society on the foundation of “Arab and Islamic unity”; making the “strengthen[ing] of Arab and Islamic identity” the “goal of education”; making treaties (including, of course, the Camp David accords, by which the secular, pro-American Sadat regime made peace with Israel) subject to approval by the population (i.e., the same people who just elected Islamists by a landslide); and describes Israel, “the Zionist entity [as] an aggressive, expansionist, racist and settler entity.”

This is the Muslim Brotherhood -- the rabidly anti-American organization President Obama has courted for nearly four years and on whom he just decided to rain down a billion-and-a-half more American taxpayer dollars. It was two years into Obama’s term that Shater’s superior, MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi, delivered a fiery sermon --- in Arabic, of course -- reminding Muslims of “Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme and the infidels’ word will be inferior.” Applying this injunction, Badi exclaimed that jihad -- which he called “resistance” -- “is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny.” Wounded by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States, Badi pronounced, “is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.”

Sounds like an indispensable ally to me.

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