Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 38

Lawless Hospital ... and State Hospital

To follow on Matt Bowman's post, I am hoping Governor Christie will assert himself on this issue of forcing nurses to perform abortions. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey is a state institution, created by the state legislature in 1970. And, as Matt asserts, it is a lawless hospital -- and not just because coercing nurses to assist abortions against their conscientious objections is a blatant violation of state and federal law. Historically, UMDNJ is a corrupt institution.

Not long ago, UMDNJ was the target of a federal investigation involving Medicare fraud, no-bid contracts (sometimes entailing no work, either), illegal campaign contributions and lobbyist payments (a no-no for a public institution), and thoroughly politicized decision making (as opposed to judgments made on the basis of sound medicine). You can read some of the gory details here. As is common in cases involving corporate entities -- where an indictment would be a death-warrant, inevitably harming innocent employees as well as the actual wrongdoers -- the United States Attorney for New Jersey opted to offer UMDNJ a deferred prosecution agreement. The U.S. Attorney's name was Chris Christie. In the now-governor's customarily blunt style, he had this to say at the time (December 2005):

It is my policy to inform targets of a federal investigation that they are targets. Now I'm here to tell you that the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey is a target of a federal investigation. I have enough evidence to indict the university.

We no longer have any faith in your ability to fix any of the problems that have led to the conduct in the case.

But let there be no mistake about it and I want to tell each one of you face to face -- if we cannot reach an agreement [on the terms of a deferred prosecution], I will do my job and prosecute this entity.

It is not my intention to be critical of Gov. Christie. To the contrary, I can attest that he has been a very busy, basically sleepless guy the last several days -- a real champ in riding herd over the public utilities that are over-stretched trying to deal with the aftermath of a storm that turned out to be very damaging and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. For all I know, the situation at UMDNJ has not been brought to his attention yet.

Nevertheless, this is a very serious matter, made all the more so by the fact that the hospital has a history of criminality and of currying political favor. As Matt points out, UMDNJ is heavily reliant on federal funding from what is the most militantly pro-abortion administration in history. (According to the UMDNJ website, the amount is about three times the staggering $60 million per annum that Matt posits. UMDNJ represents that in fiscal year 2010, federal agencies provided 46 percent of its whopping $372.5 million in external funding awards -- apparently including two-thirds of its $195.7 million in external research funding awards.) With respect, I'd suggest that the Governor must assert himself, light a public fire in his inimitable way under the right derrieres, and make sure both that these nurses' freedom of conscience is protected and that the people who put this noxious policy in place are held accountable. 

Napolitano: On Elibiary, I Know Nothing, I Know Nothing ...

Last week, I posted about allegations that Obama DHS appointee Mohamed Elibiary had exploited his privileged access to confidential state law enforcement databases to obtain intelligence reports from Texas's Department of Public Safety that he then tried to shop to media outlets as a story smearing Rick Perry as -- you guessed it -- an "Islamophobe."

Fortunately, rock-ribbed Rep. Louie Gohmert is on the case. At a House oversight hearing, he grilled DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano about Elibiary. Video is here. She professes not to know anything about the matter -- or about how a guy who appears at a conference honoring Ayatollah Khomeini, who praises Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, and who condemns the Justice Department's successful prosecution of the Brotherhood's Hamas financing network (the Holy Land Foundation case), somehow winds up on the DHS advisory council that helped devise the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy.

Fast & Furious: Evaluation of Investigative Tactics Is Precisely DOJ's Job

Sometimes it is hard to decide what is more irritating about the Obama/Holder Justice Department: the outrageous things they do or the way they insult your intelligence when rationalizing their malfeasance.

As Robert's post indicates, criminal division chief Lanny Breuer is apparently being offered up as the fall-guy on Fast & Furious. He's also the official assigned the unenviable task of explaining such things as why the Justice Department did not put a stop to the reckless gun-walking strategy in the course of reviewing wiretap applications which explained it. According to Josh Gerstein's report (to which Robert links), Breuer testified to a Senate committee that Main Justice has "only one" role in reviewing wiretap applications: "to ensure there is legal sufficiency to make an application" to intercept communications -- to ensure that the government's petition to the federal judge is, he said, a "credible request." He maintained that it is the job of the district offices actually carrying out the investigation "to determine that the tactics that are used are appropriate"; Main Justice, says Breuer, has to rely on those prosecutors in the field and is not there to second-guess them.

That is absurd. The reason federal law requires a sign-off by the Attorney General (or his designee at Main Justice) before a wiretap application may be made to a court is precisely to evaluate the tactics used in the investigation in order to render an informed judgment that electronic eavesdropping is warranted. Most investigative techniques do not require Main Justice approval; the investigations are overseen by supervisors in the relevant district U.S. attorney's office (and by supervisors at the FBI or other investigative agencies actually doing the investigating). Wiretaps are different -- Congress requires Attorney General approval. That is because wiretaps are intrusive, resource-intensive and very expensive, so the law demands that the Justice Department exercise meaningful supervision.

More to the point, a wiretap application cannot have what Breuer calls "legal sufficiency" unless Main Justice evaluates the tactics being used. The federal wiretap statutes (called "Title III" for short, and codified at Title 18, U.S. Code, Sections 2510 et seq.) expressly direct that before a wiretap may be authorized, the application must set forth "a full and complete statement as to whether or not other investigative procedures have been tried and failed or why they reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous." The judge cannot authorize the wiretap unless he finds that the Justice Department has made a convincing showing in this regard.

That is, there is a bias against wiretaps in the law. If other investigative techniques are succeeding in gathering enough evidence to prosecute, or could succeed if tried, the Justice Department is not supposed to ask for, and the court is not supposed to permit, electronic surveillance. Therefore, when it asks a court for permission to plant a bug, the Justice Department is legally required to explain what investigative tactics have been used to that point, how well they have succeeded, why they have been deficient, and why other techniques would not work. This is a key part of what the application must demonstrate in order to be legally sufficient. To be concrete, let's say you've got a mafia or terrorism investigation. Justice explains to the court that it has been trying to monitor the suspects, but you can't hear what they say by watching them, and the witnesses they've approached are afraid to talk; these mobsters or jihadis are not going to spill the beans just because they get a grand jury subpoena, and that it is too perilous (and unlikely) for an undercover FBI agent to try to infiltrate their top hierarchy; thus, because bugging the phones the bad guys use, or the locations where they meet, is the only practical way to advance the investigation, taps should be authorized.

Neither prosecutors nor the people at Main Justice who review wiretap applications can make these representations to the court without assessing: the direction and goals of the investigation; the law-enforcement tactics that have been used to that point in the investigation; what those tactics have accomplished; how useful those tactics have been in gathering evidence and moving the investigation toward its goals; why those tactics are not as promising as electronic surveillance; and how electronic surveillance might complement them to lay bare the entirety of the criminal scheme the Justice Department hopes to prosecute.  

Over my 18 years as a prosecutor, I worked on many wiretap investigations. Main Justice approval was never a rubber-stamp. It was not unusual for those who reviewed applications at Main Justice to disagree with the prosecutors handling the case in the field about whether electronic surveillance was warranted. Sometimes, those disputes had to be resolved at the level of the district U.S. attorney appealing directly to the Deputy Attorney General or the Attorney General. Obviously, Mr. Breuer is presuming that most people in America -- and, indeed, most people in Congress -- do not really understand how the wiretap approval process works. But to anyone who has actually been through that process a few times, Breuer's claim that Main Justice does not second-guess investigative tactics is laughable.

Cain

We just got back home after several days of no power. Catching up on what's been happening, I can't understand why our side is giving the Politico/Cain story any sunlight. 

I'm not a Cain guy. There is a lot to like about him, and I could easily see myself voting for him against President Obama -- which is the same thing I say about several of the GOP candidates, none of whom has won me over yet. But this sorry Politico episode seems to me to have little to do with Cain and everything to do with how content we are to live in the Left's world.

This controversy is the perfect storm of (a) media hypocrisy: given the bar set by Clinton/Edwards/Ted Kennedy/et al., the worst possible case of what Cain is accused of -- if you draw every conceivable negative inference against him -- doesn't come close to being a story, yet the lefty media energetically dig into Cain after having buried the exponentially worse Democrat scandals; (b) the special bull's-eye fitted on black conservatives: their example of self-reliance and independent thinking makes them such a threat to the "social justice" narrative that, when it comes to destroying them, anything goes; (c) sexual harassment: a social-engineering caprice the arbitrary standards of which can turn routine -- not admirable, often unsavory, but entirely unremarkable -- human behavior into legal ruin; and (d) the litigious nanny state: with human life hyper-regulated and legal fees hyper-expensive, ordinary human behavior becomes grist for extortionate lawsuits that parties settle on the cheap because the cost of fighting is prohibitive -- and later, these parties end up sounding like jackasses if asked about the suits, at least in part because, if you say something strong in your defense, you risk violating the standard reciprocal confidentiality provision and thus reopening the whole expensive, embarrassing business.  

I'm not sure how conflicting Cain's statements about this nonsense are, and I frankly don't care. Cain's made a number of conflicting statements on matters of substance (e.g., negotiating with terrorists, abortion, the propriety of killing al-Qaeda's Anwar al-Awlaki, etc.). We've got abundant basis to probe how consistent he is, how deep his convictions are, and what all that says about his suitability -- just like we ought to be probing conflicting positions taken by other candidates. But on the Politico sensation-out-of-nothing report, the real story is how confident the Left is that it has set the terms of (and the traps in) our public debate. Unfortunately, that confidence seems well placed.

Islam or Islamist?

Islam or Islamist? That is the question. Is the term “Islamist” a politically incorrect fabrication to dodge the inconvenient truth that Islam itself is inherently and inevitably chauvinistic and totalitarian? Or is it a necessary distinction to draw: denominating supremacist Muslims striving to impose on societies a classical, rigid construction of Islamic law, distinguishing them from authentic Muslim moderates who elevate reason, embrace pluralism, and take sharia as spiritual guidance rather than the mandatory law for civil society?

I think we have to separate Islamists from Islam. My friend Robert Spencer disagrees. As NRO readers may know from my reviews of some of Robert’s books and my frequent references to his invaluable work at Jihad Watch, I hold him in high esteem. On this question, however, he is mistaken. And because how we answer the “Islam or Islamist?” question critically affects how we respond to the profound threat posed by supremacist Muslims, we must answer it correctly.

#ad#A little background is in order. My column last weekend was a defense of Robert, and of David Horowitz, against the “Islamophobia” charges recently leveled at them by the Center for American Progress. There, I pointed out that “I regularly use the term ‘Islamist’ rather than ‘Islam’ to draw a distinction between the ideology of the enemy and Islam as it is practiced by most American Muslims, and by millions of Muslims throughout the world.” I added that Messrs. Spencer and Horowitz do likewise -- an assertion I made because, among other reasons, I was sure I’d seen the term “Islamist” or “Islamism” in the September 30 essay they jointly published here on NRO. In fact, it is in the title of that essay, “Rational Fear of Islamism” -- but titles are often the work of editors, not authors.

As recounted in the Corner earlier this week, Robert e-mailed me after the column appeared to offer this correction: He does not use the term “Islamist.” In his view, the “Islam/Islamism distinction is an artificial one imposed by the West, with no grounding in Islamic history, theology, or law.” Coincidentally, it turned out that while I was busy writing my column for that weekend, Robert was penning “Islam and Islamists.” In it, he expanded on this very argument. To use the term “Islamist,” he asserts, is to incorrectly imply “that Islam itself, in its authentic form, has no requisite political aspect, and no incompatibility with Western values or democratic government.”

My seminal disagreement is with Robert’s premise that there is and can be but a single authentic form of Islam. As readers of The Grand Jihad know, I struggled mightily with the “Islam or Islamist” question. It is the subject of my book’s second chapter, which asks whether our challenge is appropriately labeled “Islamism” or whether that label is a cop out, side-stepping the grim reality that Islam itself is and will always be the West’s problem.

Obviously, the West will never arrive at a successful defensive strategy unless we correctly identify the threat. So, should we focus our attention on those Muslims for whom imposition of sharia -- Islam’s supremacist politico-legal system -- is an inseparable part of their ideology? Or, in the alternative, should we come to the reluctant conclusion that this mandate to impose classical sharia, with its laws governing all aspects of life, simply is Islam? As I concluded in the book, there are too many non-supremacist Muslims to write off Islam; our target must be the supremacists. “Islamist” is a label suitable to the essential task of distinguishing our Muslim enemies from our Muslim allies -- declared and potential.

#page#Lest you think I’ve secretly hit the Saudi-funding jackpot, there is no lushly endowed sinecure at Georgetown or Harvard in my future. My conclusion that our focus has to be Islamism, rather than Islam, is fraught with skepticism. Yes, there are hundreds of millions of moderate Muslim people; but have they really come up with a coherent Islamic ideology that separates mosque and state? Not a foot-stomping claim that Islam must yield to modern sensibilities, but an argument based in Islamic doctrine itself? And even if they have developed such a theory, or at least could conceivably do so in the future, will it be compelling enough to compete with, nullify, and marginalize supremacist, political Islam -- which, however much this dismays us, has the advantage of reliance on clear scriptural commands?

#ad#Without question, Robert is correct that the political and supremacist aspects of Islamic doctrine, which flesh out the ideology many of us call “Islamist,” trace their origins to Mohammed. As he further observes, they are taught by the classic schools of Islamic jurisprudence, which undoubtedly explains their power and endurance for over a millennium.

Nevertheless, while many millions of Muslims adhere to these doctrinal components, it is also true that many millions of Muslims do not. Most of the latter simply ignore them, but others labor to develop theories aimed at countering and discrediting political, supremacist Islam. This is seen in the United States, for example, in the work of Zuhdi Jasser and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. At Princeton University’s James Madison Program, Australian academic Abdullah Saeed recently delivered a lecture arguing that resort to the Koran and episodes in the life of Mohammed can eventually undermine the classical rendering of sharia. (The lecture has been published in First Things, under the title, “The Islamic Case for Religious Liberty.”) On the international stage, the LibForAll Foundation has just released an English translation of The Illusion of the Islamic State, a compendium edited by the late Islamic scholar Abdurrahman Wahid. Once the president of democratic Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country by population, the influential Wahid also led Nadlahtul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim organization, with over 40 million members. NU and other Indonesian moderates are clashing directly with the Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that Islamic scripture does not require the establishment of a caliphate or the imposition of sharia jurisprudence (i.e., fiqh) as governing law. Sharia, they contend, is a matter of private conscience.

I am very confident that Robert is correct about classical Islam. I’ll go further: When I read these competing works, I come away less than convinced. Sometimes it feels like I’m back at the Blind Sheikh trial, looking in vain for the scholar who proves that the emir of jihad has it all wrong: Authoritative Islamic scripture and recognized canons of fiqh do not really endorse the terrorizing of unbelievers, subjugation of women, and killing of apostates and homosexuals, and that all those well-meaning people who say the Blind Sheikh is lying about Islam -- perverting it, hijacking it -- have been right all along. Alas, you never find that scholar. Parsed closely, the negative critiques against Islamists accuse them of being “too literal,” of lacking nuance, or not appreciating that the horrific provisions of scripture need to be “contextualized” -- understood as applicable to their time and place, of little or no relevance in today’s very different world. Such critiques cede a lot of ground -- too much for my comfort level. I want to believe these arguments will be enough someday to refute the supremacist, political Islam that has been endorsed for centuries by renowned Islamic scholars -- the Islam that has been shrewdly developed as a practical political program for decades by the Muslim Brotherhood. But I am doubtful.

#page#Still, it is presumptuous to imply that Muslims who don’t adhere to classical Islam are not really following Islam. In the aforementioned “Islam and Islamists,” Robert insists that Islam is inherently and necessarily political, and that its political program has always been the “union of religion and the state.” The denial that this is and must be so, he contends, is “the wishful thinking of Western analysts who do not wish to face the implications of the fact that these ideas represent mainstream Islamic thinking.” I think that is wrong, and I say this as someone who has been about as adamant as one can be that we must face the implications of the fact that Islamism is a mainstream interpretation of Islam -- in many places, the mainstream interpretation.

To be sure, there is a good deal of wishful thinking going on. As Robert says, too many Western analysts turn a blind eye to the palpable nexus between Islamic doctrine and supremacist, political Islam. But to say a set of ideas represents “mainstream” thinking is not the same as saying it is the only conceivable way of understanding a doctrine.

#ad#To take a fairly obvious example, the U.S. Constitution is a social compact in a single document -- its four corners making it infinitely more easily knowable than Islamic doctrine, which comes to us from a variety of different sources (the Koran, hadiths, biographies of Mohammed, etc.). Yet, there are several different schools of constitutional interpretation, and a few of them (e.g., originalism and the “organic Constitution”) have enough of a following to be called “mainstream” even though they are quite different from -- you might even say diametrically opposed to -- one another.

While Robert is correct to point out that the classic schools of Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence promote supremacist, political Islam, that does not mean other understandings do not exist and cannot be developed. As noted above, Nadlahtul Ulama has tens of millions of members and pointedly rejects supremacist, political Islam. Whether one finds NU’s theology persuasive is beside the point. These people are Muslims, and they sincerely believe Islam does not require a political dimension -- indeed, they say politics disserves the spirituality they see as Islam’s core. I don’t believe it is our place to tell them they are wrong.

This is steeply uphill. The classical schools are the most influential, and their authoritarian sharia has a built-in fortification: It holds both that departures from consensus constitute apostasy and that apostasy is a capital offense -- with the death penalty having been meted out enough times, with enough Islamic approbation, to put reformers and their followers on notice that their work is very risky indeed. Still, modification happens, and has happened, all the time with all manner of doctrines. Can it really be that Islam is the only doctrine in the history of the world that is immune from even the possibility of alteration and evolution? There is nothing I am more skeptical of than that proposition.

Robert coined the marvelous phrase “stealth jihad.” Well, the reason the Muslim Brotherhood must be stealthy in conducting its sharia campaign in the West is its awareness that there would be widespread rejection, including by Muslims, if it were completely open about its supremacist designs. Even in Islamic countries, sharia regimes often back down when Islamic law’s most noxious features surface. Afghanistan quietly reversed course when the West expressed outrage over its efforts to put two apostates to death. The Iranians are still threatening to stone a woman for alleged fornication, but they haven’t done it yet -- public opinion has brushed them back. When King Abdullah was embarrassed several weeks ago by the revelation that a woman had been sentenced to scourging for driving a car, the sentenced was quietly vacated. The Saudis, it is worth noting, outlawed slavery in 1962 even though (as Robert observes) the practice is explicitly approved in the Koran. Yes, slavery is still quietly practiced, but the formal ban in a country where sharia is the law of the land demonstrates that sharia can be changed, just as it can be (and has historically been) mitigated or suppressed by factors like culture and law.

We do not have to be delirious optimists to grasp these things. After all, change is not a one-way street -- it can be regressive, too. As I argued in The Grand Jihad, President Wahid grossly underrated the numbers and influence of Muslims who subscribe to supremacist, political Islam. He also ceded significant ground in arguing that the “virulent” ideology of the Wahhabists and Salafists is “literal” and “simplistic.” It is hard to discredit something as a perversion of Islam when you are conceding its basis in written scripture, even if you add, as Wahid did, the caveat that its rendering of scripture is “selective.”

#page#That virulent Islam is ascendant in the world today. Despite the good work of Nadlahtul Ulama, it is gaining strength in parts of Indonesia. It is rolling over Europe and making inroads here in America. It is a profound threat. To assert that there can be other interpretations of Islam -- constructions that adapt to Western norms -- is not to claim that such constructions will inevitably succeed or that Islamism’s sharia agenda will cease to be a profound threat. It is not to give Islam a pass: Even if Islam is capable of benign interpretations, it quite naturally spawns supremacist interpretations -- interpretations whose influential adherents, such as Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, echo Robert’s conclusion that their Islam is the only Islam. To draw the Islam/Islamist distinction is not to claim that everything is coming up roses or that this story must eventually have a happy ending.

#ad#Nevertheless, the question raised by Robert’s unyielding position is whether there are, and can be, other viable interpretations of Islam. The answer is yes. They are not as cogent as we’d like them to be, and they do not compete with classical Islam as effectively as we wish. Most of the time, they are less a refutation of classical Islam than a choice -- conscious or unconscious -- to ignore its supremacist, political elements. But even a passive choice can change a doctrine or a social system, and can do so even if the ignored elements remain on the books.

We see that with our own law: political decisions about which statutes get enforced and which do not can effectively nullify the latter over time. Repeal is more often achieved by inaction than by a formal process -- inaction does not require an airtight theory why some law or standard is no longer honored; all you need is inertia. Once the political will to enforce a standard has evaporated, most any post facto rationalization will justify it -- even one that barely passes the laugh test. If Muslims came to a consensus position that mosque and state would henceforth be separated, or that aggressive jihad was no longer an acceptable way to impose sharia, it would be immaterial that these positions represented a less than compelling exegesis of their scripture.

My argument with Islam’s Western apologists is not that this kind of evolution is out of the realm of possibility. It is with their absurd insistence that it has already happened. Not just that it could conceivably happen -- about which there are lots of reasons for pessimism -- but that it has already happened. This is not only self-evidently untrue; it may be fatally counterproductive. By failing to shine the light of inquiry on supremacist, political Islam -- by failing to force Islamists into the position of publicly acknowledging and defending their noxious beliefs -- we deprive pro-Western Muslims of the platform they need to promote reform and marginalize the supremacists. This only empowers faux moderates like the Muslim Brotherhood, enabling them to push sharia as if it were unthreatening and promote Hamas as if it were an ordinary political party.

That, however, is a different problem from the one Robert’s position poses. He is essentially saying that if it is not supremacist and political, then it is not Islam. That not only closes the door on any potential reform, it risks antagonizing pro-Western Muslims. There are many of them and they have no desire to impose sharia on civil society -- even if they are less vocal about that than we’d like. Given that they nevertheless see themselves as faithful Muslims, I do not see what purpose is served by telling them that Islam is incorrigibly supremacist and political.

From a tactical standpoint, we want such Muslims as our allies, and we certainly want to see them make inroads against the Islamic supremacists. That makes the Islam/Islamist distinction a worthy accommodation. It does not deny that classical Islam is the source of Islamism. But it does two important things. First, it identifies as “Islamist" those Muslims who hold to the supremacist and political aspects of Islam -- and it is very useful for us to see those people for what they are. Second, it acknowledges interpretations of Islam that reject these political and supremacist elements: They are plausible, they are legitimately called “Islam,” and we want them to thrive. That is not a prediction of success, but it is a significant show of support.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Did Obama appointee access confidential database in effort to smear Perry as an "Islamophobe"?

At PJM, terrorism researcher Patrick Poole reports that Mohamed Elibiary, an appointee on President Obama's Homeland Security Advisory Council, is in hot water with the Texas Department of Public Safety (TDPS). The issue is whether Elibiary used his privileged access to a state law-enforcement database to acquire intelligence reports and then tried to shop them to the media, urging that they showed rampant "Islamophobia" at TDPS under Governor Rick Perry.

Poole says no story was published because, according to one press source, there was "nothing remotely resembling Islamophobia" in the leaked reports. The source told Poole, "I think [Elibiary] was hoping we would bite and not give it too much of a look in light of other media outfits jumping on the Islamophobia bandwagon."  

The Islamophobia bandwagon was the subject of my column last weekend. Seems there are plenty of Islamists and Leftists climbing aboard.

Elibiary, you'll no doubt be stunned to learn, was also on the Obama DHS's working group on "countering violent extremism." That's the brain-trust that helped devise the new Obama counterterrorism strategy I outlined (here and here) a few weeks back -- the one that envisions having law-enforcement pare back their intelligence-gathering activities and take their marching orders from "community partners." I call the new strategy "factophobia."

As noted by Poole and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Elibiary's history includes an appearance at a conference honoring Ayatollah Khomeini; condemning the Justice Department's successful prosecution of a Hamas-financing conspiracy designed by the Muslim Brotherhood (the Holy Land Foundation case); praise for Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb; and an aggressive email exchange with Rod Dreher in 2006 (when Dreher, at the Dallas Morning News, countered Elibiary's praise for Qutb), in which Elibiary reportedly called Dreher "a Klansman without a hood" [ACM: I think that means "Islamophobe"] and warned him: "Treat people as inferiors and you can expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe or something."

Who better could President Obama possibly choose to help formulate counterterrorism strategy? Actually, once you read the strategy, I think you'll agree that he made a perfect choice.

Our Libyan Adventure

‘Are you suggesting that we would be better off with the Qaddafi dictatorship still in effect?” asked Chris Wallace, browbeating presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

And why shouldn’t he? After all, the Fox News anchor had just gotten Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Lindsey Graham to perform the requisite “Arab Spring” cartwheels over the demise of Libyan strongman Moammar Qaddafi. Apparently, when leading from behind ends up leading to a vicious murder at the hands of a wild-eyed mob, even folks who once got the sniffles over fastidiously non-lethal waterboarding can feel good about pulling out their party hats.

#ad#Imagine, then, the gall of Bachmann. The Minnesota Republican persisted in finding the cankers on the Arab Spring smiley face.

The most obviously ugly of these is that a throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!” battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator -- to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.

The murder was facilitated by NATO forces operating under false pretenses: Claiming they were merely protecting civilians, they set about hunting down Qaddafi, only to help usher in a new era of Islamist governance. The bill for NATO’s services was willfully footed by the Obama administration -- which had previously funded the Libyan regime on the oft-repeated grounds that Qaddafi was a valuable counterterrorism ally, but which then initiated a war against Qaddafi in the absence of any provocation or American national-security interests. NATO’s war of aggression is already inuring to the benefit of America’s Islamist enemies. What’s not to celebrate?

Though Representative Bachmann made the case gamely, she eventually withered. Mr. Wallace has previously intimated that she is a “flake” (Wallace’s word), too often out of step with Beltway wisdom. And who wouldn’t want to be in step with Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, and Barack Obama? Washington wisdom is fickle -- one day you’re a Qaddafi booster, the next day you’re switching your bets to the Muslim Brotherhood. But no one wants to be a flake. So Bachmann finally got with the program and admitted, “The world certainly is better off without Qaddafi. I agree with Lindsey Graham.”

I don’t. Yes, Qaddafi was a creep. If we lived in a static, zero-sum world where the killing of a single creep equaled a net decrease in global creepiness, that might be cause for cartwheels. But the world is dynamic. When one leader is ousted, another takes his place. Even if the leader happened to be a tyrant with a yellowing résumé of anti-American terrorism, it matters what his status is when the Arab Spring comes a-callin’. It matters who replaces him and how that transition comes to pass. The changing threat environment matters. The example we set, what it tells others about our principles, matters.

To borrow Mr. Wallace’s phrase, I am not “suggesting that we would be better off with the Qaddafi dictatorship still in effect.” I am saying it outright. If the choice is between an emerging Islamist regime and a Qaddafi dictatorship that cooperates with the United States against Islamists, then I’ll take Qaddafi. If the choice is between tolerating the Qaddafi dictatorship and disgracing ourselves by lying about the reason for initiating a war and by turning a blind eye to the atrocities of our new Islamist friends -- even as we pontificate about the responsibility to protect civilians -- then give me the Qaddafi dictatorship every time.

#page#

Just to review what happened here: Qaddafi was not merely ousted. He was not “brought to justice,” as our government likes to put it when, say, the president of Iraq is captured and handed over to a foregone conclusion of a death-penalty tribunal; or when the emir of al-Qaeda gets the swifter due process of a ruthlessly efficient military strike. Those sorts of killings represent transparent wartime combat: The president makes the case that American national security is imperiled, Congress authorizes military attacks, and our armed forces violently subdue the enemy. It is not pretty, but it is honorable.

#ad#That cannot be said about Libya. In “leading from behind,” our government went rogue -- to the evident satisfaction of the formerly antiwar Left. Obama claimed to be keeping the peace and protecting civilians while waging an unauthorized offensive war against Qaddafi’s government -- a regime with which the United States was at peace; a regime with which the United States had made a great show of arriving at friendly relations; a regime to which the United States (urged on by such official emissaries as Sen. Lindsey Graham) had provided foreign aid, including assistance to prop up Qaddafi’s military; a regime to which the Obama administration, including Secretary Clinton’s State Department, had stepped up American taxpayer subsidies -- including aid to Qaddafi’s military and contributions to charitable enterprises managed by Qaddafi’s children.

Protecting civilians? Please. We jumped in as a partisan on the side of the Islamists, who sported violent jihadists in their ranks and among their commanders -- including al-Qaeda operatives whose dossiers included a stint at Guantanamo Bay and the recruitment of jihadists to fight a terror war against American troops in Iraq. While NATO targeted Qaddafi, the rebels rounded up black Africans, savagely killing many. (See, e.g., John Rosenthal’s reporting on summary executions, lynching, and a beheading -- but be forewarned that the accompanying images are deeply disturbing.)

When the Islamists finally began seizing territory, which they could not have done without NATO, they raided weapons depots. In Qaddafi’s Libya, his regime controlled the materiel; once the “rebels” swept in, weapons started going out -- to other Islamists, like al-Qaeda in Northwest Africa and Hamas in Gaza.

And now that the Islamists have won, the first order of business, naturally, was to install sharia -- Islam’s politico-legal framework that oppresses non-Muslims, women, homosexuals, and apostates. To install sharia, by the way, is the reason jihadists engage in violence -- it is the prerequisite for Islamizing a society. On Sunday, before a crowd still giddy over Qaddafi’s murder, Transitional National Council leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil proclaimed, “This revolution was looked after by Allah to achieve victory.” Allah will thus be honored, he elaborated, by making sharia the “basic source” of Libyan law. Polygamy for men has already been reestablished, and lenders have been banned from collecting interest on loans. Happy democracy!

Qaddafi had last attacked the United States almost a quarter-century ago. Before that, he’d endured punishing retaliation for his Reagan-era terror attacks. The Bush 43 administration had declared these hostilities settled. The two governments resolved outstanding claims -- much to the chagrin of those of us outraged by the moral equivalence drawn between Qaddafi’s terrorist aggression and President Reagan’s righteous response.

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But a deal is a deal -- as the Left is quick to remind us whenever the U.S. makes international agreements that end up disserving American interests. In this instance, we were told the deal had been a good one. Qaddafi abandoned his advanced weapons programs and began providing what the Bush and Obama administrations regarded as vital intelligence -- vital, no doubt, because Libya is rife with Islamists who despise America and the West. Indeed, on a per capita basis, more Libyans traveled to Iraq to join in the jihad against American troops than nationals from any other country. Our government even took Libya off the list of state sponsors of terrorism because, as the State Department put it in 2008, Libya had become “an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism.”

#ad#In the last several years, the Libyan regime never even threatened, much less attacked, American interests. Qaddafi spoke glowingly of Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and of President Obama, the Bush and Obama administrations embraced him and supported his regime. There was nothing close to a casus belli for the United States to launch a war against his government. The rationalization about the regime attacking civilians is nonsense: Qaddafi never stopped repressing Libyans in the years we were allied with him, and our aid to him only increased; Libya is a brutal society in which Qaddafi’s demise will not stop the internecine savagery; and we don’t intervene when hostile governments in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere repress their citizens.

Yet, President Obama invaded without congressional authorization -- just consultations with the Arab League and a Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians, not for war against Qaddafi or regime change. Even as Obama paid lip-service to this charade, promising Americans there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” he dispatched covert intelligence operatives to guide the Islamists. Senator Graham -- Qaddafi’s tent guest and military-aid supporter in 2009 -- wondered aloud why we couldn’t just “drop a bomb on” our erstwhile ally and “end this thing.” No congressional approval? No U.N. mandate? No problem. “I like coalitions,” Graham explained to CNN, “it’s good to have the U.N. involved. But the goal is to get rid of Qaddafi.#...#I would not let the U.N. mandate stop what is the right thing to do.”

The right thing to do? So hot was the senator to off the dictator that he even proposed that the president unilaterally declare Qaddafi as an enemy combatant so we could kill him without violating a longstanding executive order prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders. That might have been a swell idea but for the inconvenience that Qaddafi did not qualify as an “enemy” or a “combatant” under the governing statute -- a law that happens to have been written by Senator Graham. Of course, if there had been a case that Qaddafi’s regime had become America’s enemy and that war was needed to overthrow him, the administration could have made it to Congress. The president never even tried -- such an argument would have been frivolous.

That is not to say the administration was above frivolous legal claims. President Obama overruled administration lawyers who ever so gently pointed out that his sustained war-making ran afoul of the War Powers Act -- a suspect piece of legislation, but one the administration was loath to ignore given Obama’s support of it (at least until he became the president whose hands it tied). Not to worry: Obama reached outside his Justice Department to find his trusty State Department counsel Harold Koh -- the former Yale Law School dean, War Powers Act enthusiast, and incessant critic of the cowboy militarism of George W. Bush (you may recall Bush as the president who used to get Congress’s blessing before attacking other countries). Presto: Koh rationalized that invading Libya, dropping bombs on it, and trying to kill its leader didn’t quite rise to the level of “hostilities” -- suddenly, a very elusive concept. Party on, dudes!

Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized -- not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.

--- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Islam v. Islamism ... again

My column over the weekend undertook to defend my friends David Horowitz and Robert Spencer against the allegations of "Islamophobia" leveled at them by the Center for American Progress, an influential Leftist think-tank. In the column, I pointed out that I make a habit of using the term "Islamist" (or "Islamism") to distinguish the aggressive and often violent sharia agenda of America's enemies from "Islam" as it is practiced by millions of Muslims -- in America and elsewhere -- who are not Islamic supremacists and who do not seek to impose Islamic law on civil society. I added that Messrs. Horowitz and Spencer also draw this distinction. In making that claim, I was quite certain that I had seen the term "Islamism" in the essay they jointly wrote for NRO a few weeks back. In fact, the word appears in the title of that essay, "Rational Fear of Islamism" -- although, for all I know, the title could have been written by the editors rather than the authors.

Robert emailed me over the weekend. While he seemed to agree with most of what I'd written, he offered this correction: He does not use the terms "Islamist" and "Islamism." In his view, the "Islam/Islamism distinction is an artificial one imposed by the West, with no grounding in Islamic history, theology, or law." Coincidentally, I now see that, at Jihad Watch, he posted a piece called "Islam and Islamists" on Friday (i.e., the day before my column was published), fleshing out his views on this subject. 

I respectfully disagree with Robert (which will come as no surprise to readers of my last book, The Grand Jihad). I think it would be worthwhile to explain why, and I will do that in an upcoming column. The point of this post is to provide a clarification: Robert Spencer does not use the terms "Islamist" and "Islamism" for the reasons explained and elaborated on in the Jihad Watch post I've cited, above. I regret saying otherwise.

The error does not alter my contention that CAP's charge of "Islamophobia" is without merit. Again, there is nothing phobic about fearing the nexus between Islamic doctrine (as classically rendered in, for example, the sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller) and the threat Muslim terrorists and stealth jihadists pose to the West. Moreover, the fact that Robert sees the Islamic doctrine in question as Islam rather than as one credible interpretation of Islam (which I call Islamism) hardly makes his concerns irrational.

Fears and Smears

‘From a purely academic point of view, this translation is superior to anything produced by orientalists in the way of translations of major Islamic works.” Taha Jabir al-Alwani was writing about Reliance of the Traveller, the English version of Umdat al-Salik, the classic manual of sharia (“Islamic Sacred Law,” as the cover of Reliance puts it). Alwani is no lightweight in these matters. His specialty is fiqh -- Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he has been a member of the Islamic Fiqh Academy in Saudi Arabia and is renowned among orientalist scholars in the West as president of the Fiqh Council of North America.

More significant, he was writing in his capacity as president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Headquartered in Virginia, IIIT is an Islamist think tank created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s.

#ad#I was reminded of Dr. Alwani when reading the latest hit job against my friends David Horowitz and Robert Spencer, authored by the Center for American Progress. Directed by Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, CAP is a lushly financed leftist think tank that profoundly influences the Obama administration -- indeed, Podesta oversaw the Obama transition after the 2008 election. CAP’s sugar daddy, George Soros, has made a cottage industry out of whitewashing Islamist ideology. This enterprise has lately produced a lengthy ad hominem rant called “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.”

Islamophobia is a neologism coined by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is as practiced at the art of deception as any organization on Earth. It should come as no surprise, then, that Islamophobia is a smear, intended to discredit a phenomenon that, in truth, is neither a phobia -- i.e., an irrational fear -- nor concerned about Islam in general. The phenomenon, instead, is a quite rational disquiet about Islamists -- fundamentalist Muslims, some of whom are violent jihadists and some stealth jihadists. They seek incrementally to implant sharia principles in the West.

Islamist organizations abound in the United States. Like IIIT, many of them are affiliated with the Brotherhood and collaborate regularly with leftist organizations such as CAP. Reciprocally, CAP, like many in the Obama administration, advocates the Brotherhood’s acceptance as a legitimate political party.

The Islamist groups purport to speak for the broader American Muslim community, but this is about as true as the claim that Occupy Wall Street speaks for 99 percent of Americans. Nevertheless, Islamist groups punch way above their weight, because they are lavishly financed, and they get red-carpet treatment from government officials -- a bad habit the Obama administration has exacerbated but certainly did not originate.

As I outlined in The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, the Muslim Brotherhood is engaged in a “civilizational jihad” against America, Europe, and Israel. There is no need to take my word for it: Islamists are quite blunt about this fact when they speak among themselves. The title of my book, in fact, is drawn from the words of an internal Brotherhood communiqué seized by the FBI, a memo in which the Brothers describe their work in America as a “grand jihad” aimed at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

It is no secret that the Brothers intend, as their leading jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, puts it, to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Moreover, they believe this can be done mostly without violence, through a sedulous campaign of voluntary apartheid (integrating with but not assimilating into the West) and the infiltration of sharia principles into our law and our institutions. One need only open one’s eyes to see that Islamists are acting on these intentions, and one need only glance at Europe to know that their strategy can work.

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There is nothing phobic about being concerned over this. And although Islamist ideology is undeniably a mainstream interpretation of Islam in many Islamic countries, that is not the case in the United States -- or, for that matter, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world by population. Contrary to the Brotherhood smear that the Left blithely retails, justifiable anxiety over the Brotherhood’s designs is not a generalized fear of Muslims.

Naturally, this does not stop the CAP report from liberally applying the “Islamophobe” smear to Horowitz, Spencer, and other conservative commentators. I’m also mentioned in the report, something I learned about only a couple of days ago, when the castigation of Horowitz and Spencer was brought to my attention. Ordinarily, I’d sit through an Obama speech on Solyndra’s solar-bright future before I’d waste my time reading a Soros-funded report about a Soros hobby-horse. But David and Robert did read it, and responded forcefully. That prompted a reply from CAP’s Matthew Duss, a co-author of the “Fear, Inc.” report.

#ad#Duss’s screed is the CAP report in small compass: long on character assassination, short on substance, disingenuous in relating its targets’ position on Islam (as opposed to Islamist ideology), and woefully incomplete on Islamic scripture. That’s to be expected, and I’m sure it will be a big hit at the many confabs where Islamists and leftists gather. More offensive is CAP’s plea that National Review go lefty and turn Horowitz and Spencer into non-persons. CAP is basically the Obama administration’s brain -- where could NR and the Right possibly get more well-meaning advice about who should have credibility in our movement?

As precedent, Duss purports to rely on Bill Buckley’s famed ejection of the Birchers. The comparison is noxious, but typical. It was only a few years ago that a CAP offshoot (“Campus Progress”) absurdly slandered Horowitz as a racist because he, like the vast majority of Americans, was opposed to the notion that Americans who had nothing to do with slavery should pay slavery reparations to people who were never slaves, 137 years after the abolition of slavery. (CAP might have considered stepping up to the plate for those still living in slavery in Saudi Arabia and Sudan, Islamic countries where the Koran’s express approval of slavery enables the institution to endure.)

Horowitz, of course, is a former radical leftist who became a conservative of singular eloquence. With his intimate knowledge of how the progressive project works, David is his era’s most consequential detractor of the Left, which has only slightly less contempt for its apostates than does Islam (on which more momentarily). Spencer, the longtime director of the invaluable Jihad Watch, is a scholar of sharia who works tirelessly to expose the global Islamist threat and to track the sundry collaborations of Islamists and leftists. To equate their carefully documented, amply supported critiques of Islamism to Robert Welch’s lunatic claim that Dwight Eisenhower was a closet Communist is contemptible.

It is not my burden to refute what Duss has said about Horowitz and Spencer. As one would expect, they have done that ably, here and . Nor is there benefit in spending much time on what Duss claims is “the actual argument made in ‘Fear, Inc.,’ which is that they, along with a small cadre of self-appointed experts and activists, promote the idea that religiously inspired terrorism represents true Islam.” I have said any number of times that I do not presume to say what “true Islam” is, or even if there is a single true Islam. What the true Islam may be is irrelevant to U.S. national security; what matters is that Islamist ideology -- which fuels both the terrorist threat and the Muslim Brotherhood’s multi-faceted civilizational jihad -- is a mainstream construction of Islam to which many millions of Muslims adhere. If they believe it and act on it, it is a threat regardless of whether it is an authentic expression of “true Islam.”

I’ve pointedly and repeatedly observed that our government could not have thwarted terrorist attacks without the assistance of patriotic Muslims who’ve worked against the violent jihadists. And, like Horowitz and Spencer, I regularly use the term “Islamist” rather than “Islam” to draw a distinction between the ideology of the enemy and Islam as it is practiced by most American Muslims, and by millions of Muslims throughout the world. We can make a sober concession that Islamist ideology draws on Islamic scripture without leaping to the conclusion that it is the only legitimate interpretation of Islamic scripture.

The most risible aspect of CAP’s Islamophobia smear is that it cavalierly sells out the Muslims it pretends to defend. As the commentators CAP vilifies are wont to point out, among the most persecuted victims of Islamist ideology are Muslim women, Muslim homosexuals, and patriotic American Muslims who, in the tradition of E Pluribus Unum, want to empower their fellow Muslims to assimilate and enjoy Western civil-rights norms -- in sharp contrast to Islamists, who regard encouraging Muslims to assimilate in the West as a “crime against humanity.” Duss, however, tells us not to worry about sharia’s compatibility with “a modern society,” because its more unsavory features are not reflected in the practice of Islam by most American Muslims, whom Duss describes as “Sharia-adherent.”

Of course, the problem is that American Muslims are being encouraged (and in some cases, coerced) into fundamentalist sharia -- to which most of them are certainly not adherent -- by Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as IIIT, which CAP is abetting, whether knowingly or not. (See, e.g., the signatures of IIIT and CAP, along with various other organizations, on this 2009 letter advising President Obama on democracy promotion in the Middle East, also available on the Muslim Brotherhood website, here.) That brings us back to Dr. Alwani and the English translation of Reliance of the Traveller.

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The IIIT president’s lavish praise for the translation, which he called an “eminent work of Islamic jurisprudence,” was not idle. It was written in an IIIT report that is included in the preface of Reliance as an endorsement of the manual’s rendering of sharia. The purpose of the translation, Alwani explained, is to make this faithful interpretation of sharia “accessible” to English speakers who are not fluent in the original Arabic. “The book will be of great use,” he elaborated, “in America, Britain, and Canada,” among other countries. Echoing IIIT’s commendation is the certification that immediately follows from the Islamic Research Academy at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the ancient and profoundly influential seat of Sunni learning.

#ad#The manual is startling. To take just a few of its innumerable bracing instructions, it pronounces that:

Apostasy from Islam is “the ugliest form of unbelief” for which the penalty is death (“When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”)

Apostasy occurs not only when a Muslim renounces Islam but also, among other things, when a Muslim appears to worship an idol, when he is heard “to speak words that imply unbelief,” when he makes statements that appear to deny or revile Allah or the prophet Mohammed, when he is heard “to deny the obligatory character of something which by consensus of Muslims is part of Islam,” and when he is heard “to be sarcastic about any ruling of the Sacred Law”

“Jihad means to war against non-Muslims”

Non-Muslims are permitted to live in an Islamic state only if they follow the rules of Islam, pay the non-Muslim poll tax, and comply with various adhesive conditions designed to remind them that they have been subdued (such as wearing distinctive clothing, keeping to one side of the street, not being greeted with “Peace be with you” (“as-Salamu alaykum”), not being permitted to build as high as or higher than Muslims, and being forbidden to build new churches, recite prayers aloud, “or make public displays of their funerals or feastdays”

Offenses committed against Muslims (including murder) are more serious than offenses committed against non-Muslims

The penalty for spying against Muslims is death

The penalty for fornication is to be stoned to death, unless one is without the “capacity to remain chaste,” in which case the penalty is “being scourged one hundred stripes and banished to a distance of at least 81 km./50mi. for one year”

The penalty for homosexual activity (“sodomy and lesbianism”) is death

A Muslim woman may only marry a Muslim man; a Muslim man may marry up to four women, who may be Muslim, Christian, or Jewish (but no apostates from Islam)

A woman is required to be obedient to her husband and is prohibited from leaving the marital home without permission; if permitted to go out, she must conceal her figure or alter it “to a form unlikely to draw looks from men or attract them”

A non-Muslim may not be awarded custody of a Muslim child

The penalty for theft is amputation of the right hand

The penalty for drinking alcohol is “to be scourged forty stripes”

The penalty for accepting interest (“usurious gain”) is death (i.e., to be considered in a state of war against Allah)

The testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man

If a case involves an allegation of fornication (including rape), “then it requires four male witnesses”

The establishment of a caliphate is obligatory, and the caliph must be Muslim and male

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The IIIT was established by Muslim Brotherhood figures in 1980. Its mission is the Islamization of knowledge -- “a new synthesis of all knowledge in an Islamic epistemological framework,” as recounted in an important study, “The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States,” authored by the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World. As I’ve previously explained, the Brotherhood expressly identified the IIIT as being among “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in internal memoranda seized by the FBI and admitted in evidence at the Hamas-financing trial. It shares common leaders with the Islamic Society of North America, another Brotherhood affiliate that was shown to be complicit in the Hamas-financing conspiracy. And Dr. Alwani himself was cited as an unindicted coconspirator in the Justice Department’s prosecution against Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, who ultimately pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge.

#ad#The IIIT’s sharia -- the one it labors to make more “accessible” -- is not the form of Islam that American Muslims appear to desire. In fact, its gradual adoption, which the publication of Reliance was designed to facilitate, would make life incalculably worse for American Muslims. That is a fact of the sort that, for years, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have taken many a sling and arrow to expose. It is a fact the Center for American Progress prefers to obscure. I doubt that factophobia will prove a winning strategy, either for American Muslims or for American national security.

--- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The Justice Department and the Islamists

At the Daily Caller, Neil Munro has an important report this morning about the Obama Justice Department's continued outreach to Islamist organizations. Ken Timmerman adds further context, relating that top Justice officials -- at the urging of Islamist groups like CAIR (identified as an unindicted coconspirator at the Department's Hamas financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation) -- have ordered that federal law enforcement agencies purge their training materials of information that demonstrates the nexus between Islamic doctrine, Islamist ideology, and aggression by Islamist terrorists.

I am quoted in Neil Munro's report. While I think his central thrust is accurate and I am grateful that he is shining light on such a significant subject, there was an inaccuracy in his use of the term "Islamic" when I'm confident that I actually said "Islamist" -- and whether he misheard me or I misspoke, that is certainly what I intended. This morning, I sent Neil the e-mail below, to clarify and to explain why the distinction makes a difference. 

Neil,

Your Daily Caller report this morning, "Progressives, Islamists huddle at Justice Department", is very valuable and I hope it is read widely. One correction, though: I did not say "Islam ic  ideology" is collectivist and redistributionist, or that "Islam ic  groups" are on the same page as Leftists on many important matters. I said "Islam ist " on both counts. It's an understandable error -- we were both in a rush when we spoke by phone Thursday morning. But it is important to be accurate on this score.

 

I try to be careful to distinguish between Muslims in general and Muslim organizations that adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law (including the rejection of separation between mosque and state) and that oppose the West and Israel. I reserve "Islamic" for the former and refer to the latter as "Islamist." I do not believe Islamist organizations, which tend to have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, are representative of most American Muslims. Indeed, the worst aspect of the Justice Department's continued outreach to Islamist organizations is that it enhances their prestige. 

 

For example, the Islamic Society of North America, cited in your report as one of the groups invited by the Justice Department to attend the Wednesday meeting, was shown during the Department's 2004-08 terrorism financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case, to have colluded in the Brotherhood-led conspiracy to support Hamas. This evidence led prosecutors to designate ISNA as an unindicted coconspirator. It is one thing for the Justice Department to decide not to pursue further legal action against groups like ISNA -- a decision that may well be rooted in legitimate prosecutorial concerns about, for example, the staleness of the proof. It is quite another thing, though, for top Justice officials to be turning to ISNA and like-minded groups for advice on how our agents should be trained; for guidance about how investigations should be conducted; and for suggestions about how our law might be re-shaped to provide additional protections to law-breakers while narrowing the First Amendment rights of all Americans. It is baffling to me, as I imagine it would be to most Americans, that our top law enforcement officials solicit the views of organizations whose history of legal compliance is checkered and whose goals include making law enforcement less effective. 

 

By increasing the influence of these Islamist organizations, the Justice Department (like the executive branch as a whole) demoralizes authentic Muslim moderates and reformers. This makes their invaluable work much more difficult. It also undermines the broader community of American Muslims, who do not see Islamist groups as their representatives.

 

Best regards,

Andy McCarthy