Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 60

ShariAmerica

My column this weekend is about the Obama administration's infatuation with those loveable, "largely secular" "moderates," the Muslim Brotherhood -- who did not exactly get the Paul Ryan treatment when the president invited them to one of his speeches.

To get a succinct read on the state of U.S. policy regarding the Islamic ummah, you should really have a good look at Roger Kimball's post at Pajamas (on his blog there, Roger's Rules). It boils down to two rules:

1. You don’t burn the Koran, because if you do, Muslims might go on a killing spree.

2 You do burn the Bible, because if you don’t, Muslims might go on a killing spree.

As Roger explains, this is not the contradiction it seems to be -- not if you have accepted the sharia premise that Islam must reign supreme and that other religions, and their adherents, represent a form of life that is less than fully human.

This is explained in greater detail by an excellent 12-minute video included at the end of the post, from the website AnsweringMuslims.com, which relates the startling difference between our government's condemnation of the burning of the Koran (sorry, the Holy Qur'an) and our government's direction that bibles be torched.

Change you can believe in -- or else ...

The Audience Is Listening

There is always great intrigue in Barack Obama’s speeches. Not much heft, mind you, but substance is not the point. In this Chicago-style presidency, what is said is often less telling than who is invited to hear what is said. That’s where you find out who is in and who is out.

Count Rep. Paul Ryan among the outs. The GOP budget guru got a coveted invitation to hear the president outline his new vision for escaping the economic catastrophe wrought by his current vision. The speech was much anticipated, because it was Ryan’s own ambitious plan to slash trillions in spending that roused Obama from his customary crouch in the tall grass.

Ryan was reeled in by the suggestion that the invitation was an olive branch, a White House concession that he had grappled responsibly with a monstrous problem and that a gracious, cooperative presidential response was in order. But it was a setup. The Chicago mob strategically seated Ryan a few paces from the lectern, whence the don went Al Capone on him. The congressman was made into a prop, Exhibit A in a presidential tirade that mocked his plan and his party as scourges of the elderly, the destitute, and the chronically ill.

#ad#It wasn’t that way in Cairo in June 2009. That was when al-Azhar University -- the font of Sunni theology and training ground for the virulently anti-American clerics who green-light jihadist terror -- sponsored his eagerly awaited oration on U.S. relations with the Muslim world. As usual, the speech was specious: a whitewash of the legacy of Islamic savagery, the expurgation of violent injunctions from Islamic scripture, historical ignorance of the Jewish claim to Israel, and even the adoption of “resistance” as the euphemism for Palestinian terrorism -- a touch that must have brought a smile to the faces of Hamas and the president’s pal Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO mouthpiece turned Columbia professor.

More interesting than the speech, though, was the guest list. The Obama administration made a point of inviting prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood. And they didn’t get the Paul Ryan treatment. This really was an olive branch, more like the Corleones having the Tartaglias over for a sit-down. The ramifications rumbled through both Egypt and the United States.

The Mubarak regime fulminated. The Brotherhood was at that time a banned organization -- having attempted to murder one of Mubarak’s predecessors and succeeded in offing the other. Now, of course, after more than two years of what passes for Obama’s foreign policy, gone is Mubarak -- a despot to be sure, but a staunch American ally against terrorism, and one who kept the peace with Israel for 30 years. Poised to fill the power void is the Brotherhood, anti-American Islamists who seek to disappear Israel (for starters) but who lull progressive elites by smearing the catnip of democratic rhetoric over their pursuit of a sharia state.

Still, we don’t control Egypt. We have to take it as we find it, and that means taking it as a predominantly fundamentalist Arab Muslim society where, unavoidably, the Brotherhood enjoys a strong following. Our own country is quite something else. It is in the management of domestic affairs that Obama administration’s Brotherhood outreach is veering from the outrageous to the downright scandalous.

In 2008, not long before Obama’s Cairo speech, the Brotherhood was proved to be the prime mover in the biggest terrorism-financing conspiracy ever prosecuted by the Justice Department -- specifically, by the Bush-era U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas. Five defendants were convicted in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case of routing tens of millions of dollars to Hamas during the intifada. As its charter attests, Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. Since its creation in the late 1980s, Hamas’s sustenance has been the top priority of the Brotherhood’s U.S. operatives, including Mousa abu Marzook, who actually ran Hamas from his Virginia home in the early 1990s.

Using documents seized by the FBI from a Brotherhood leader, prosecutors proved that the organization considers itself to be engaged in a “grand jihad” (the title of my book on the subject). The goal, in the Brotherhood’s own words, is to destroy Western civilization from within by sabotage. The Brothers seek to accomplish this through companion organizations they’ve embedded in the West, groups like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations).

#page#That is why prosecutors designated those groups, along with some of their members, as unindicted coconspirators in the HLF case. As the evidence showed, HLF, ostensibly an Islamic charity, was a piggy bank for Hamas. Not only was it run out of the office space jointly shared by ISNA and NAIT, money for Palestinian jihadists was routed through an HLF account that ISNA and NAIT maintained. Moreover, CAIR was created in the mid-1990s largely because changes in U.S. counterterrorism law made life difficult for groups already on record as Hamas sympathizers. With a clean slate and camouflaged as a civil-rights organization, CAIR would use media savvy to promote the Islamist agenda.

#ad#All of this information about the Brotherhood and its American tentacles was very fresh when Obama spoke in Cairo. It was not rumor, innuendo, or “Islamophobia.” It was evidence that had convinced a jury to convict several members of a terror-financing conspiracy. Yet, once the Obama administration took the helm, not only was there no further action taken against the unindicted coconspirators; Obama’s outreach to the Brotherhood in Egypt was coupled by similar outreach to the Brotherhood’s American accomplices. Indeed, in July 2009, just a month after the Cairo speech, the White House dispatched Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s old Chicago friend and close political confidant, to be the keynoter at ISNA’s annual convention.

Among the most disturbing lines in Obama’s Cairo speech had been the absurd assertion that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation” of zakat -- loosely translated as “charitable giving.” As I explained at the time, American law actually places no restrictions on Muslim charitable giving. What is prohibited is material support to terrorism. It is well known that many purported Islamic charities are, like the HLF, fronts for financing terrorism. Unfortunately, it is not as well known in the United States that, in Islamist ideology, one of the eight legitimate categories of zakat is funding for those fighting in Allah’s cause -- e.g., jihadists such as Hamas. (I told you it was loosely translated.) That is, using charities to finance terrorism is not a scam that pulls the wool over contributors’ eyes; it is mainstream Islam -- a fact we would know if the government hadn’t spent the last 20 years insisting that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.

Obviously, there is only one way to ease what the president disingenuously portrayed as U.S. legal restrictions on Muslim charitable giving: The Justice Department would have to suspend material-support prosecutions against Islamists who use Muslim charities as conduits for terror financing. In other words, DOJ would have to stop bringing cases such as the HLF prosecution.

Have you noticed any cases like that in the last two years? Me neither.

And now, just in case you were wondering whether that’s a coincidence, we have even more reason to know it is not. At Pajamas Media on Thursday, terrorism researcher Patrick Poole broke the news that the Obama Justice Department has put the kibosh on the Dallas U.S. attorney’s plan to bring follow-up terror-financing cases against some of the unindicted coconspirators from the HLF case.

Relying on “a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice,” Poole reports that a top CAIR official and several other HLF accomplices have been spared from indictment thanks to the intercession of attorney general Eric Holder’s minions. There is said to be a mountain of evidence collected over the course of a decade, but the political decision not to prosecute means it may never see the light of day -- and these Islamist organizations and their operatives will be able to continue passing themselves off as moderate Muslim champions of social justice, just like the Brotherhood.

Poole asked why his source was coming forward at this point. The answer was chilling:

Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

As the Obama administration’s rough treatment of Representative Ryan shows, it’s not a comfortable time to be a member of Congress who starts asking a lot of questions this president doesn’t want to hear. Fortunately for the economy, it appears that Ryan is not backing down. For the sake of our security, though, somebody up on the Hill better step up. It is past time to ask: What on earth is this administration’s infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood?

—  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.

Re: As I Was Saying

Mike, the sad thing about that is not that the Speaker seems to think subtle jabs will do it. It is how dismissive he is about "campaign speech" -- as if labeling something as "campaign" rhetoric is license for a politician to make any claim that his audience wants to hear since no one should really take it seriously.

I don't think a guy who campaigns on a "Pledge to America" but gets his back up over the suggestion that he and his party should actually honor the promises in the pledge is in a very good position to snicker at someone else's "campaign speech." 

Hanoi Jane post

I've corrected the prior post, which had an incorrect attribution.

More Politicized Justice

Earlier today, I pointed to Patrick Poole's report (at Pajamas) alleging, based on information from an anonymous DOJ official, that the Obama/Holder Justice Department has quashed investigations against Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamist organizations -- including a top CAIR official -- designated as unindicted co-conspirators in a major Hamas financing prosecution. Alas, there's more DOJ news to share -- more of the same, that is.

At the Examiner, J. Christian Adams has a disturbing article on the Civil Rights Division that Attorney General Holder boasts of having "reinvigorated." You may recall Chris as the DOJ lawyer who resigned after Holder aides attempted to prevent him from honoring a request by the Civil Rights Commission that he testify in the Commission's investigation of DOJ's dismissal of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case. 

He recounts that, under Holder's "reinvigorated" CivDiv, DOJ has prevented Amazon from debuting the Kindle because it was not in Braille; attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS; and demanded that the city of Dayton hire black police officers who had failed the competency examination. 

Moreover, remember the case we recently heard about in which DOJ decided to sue an Illinois school district on behalf of the rookie teacher -- a Muslim -- who demanded three weeks off at the end of the semester to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca? Turns out the lawyer DOJ tapped to lead the case, Varda Hussain, came to the CivDiv from the Venable law firm in Virginia, which permitted her to volunteer 500 hours of her time bringing wartime lawsuits against the United States on behalf of three Egyptian terrorists held as enemy combatants at Gitmo (a feat for which Venable gave her an award in 2006).

DOJ has also tapped Aaron Schuham of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a rabidly anti-religion organization, to take the helm at a CivDiv unit in charge of . . . protecting religious liberty.

Further, DOJ has tapped Jonathan Smith, formerly of Prisoners Legal Services and the D.C. Legal Aid Society -- groups Adams describes as anti-police and anti-prison guard -- to head the unit that brings civil-rights lawsuits against police departments and prisons.

Adams suspects that this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's hard to know for sure because -- I know you'll be shocked to hear this -- Holder is stonewalling on a Freedom of Information Act request for the resumes of all new Obama hires in the CivDiv. The Bush Justice Department provided similar information about its hires to the Boston Globe within three weeks of the paper's 2007 FOIA request. By contrast, Holder ignored Pajamas' requests starting about 10 months ago -- such that Pajamas finally sued in January (the suit is pending).

Over a year ago, I penned a Broadside for Encounter called How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice. Things have only gotten worse -- as predicted before Mr. Holder's confirmation.

GOP Whip McCarthy Staffer: Republicans who oppose the CR are like Hanoi Jane Fonda

From the National Journal's Reid Wilson:

A top aide to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy on Thursday suggested Republicans who have problems with the continuing resolution hitting the floor Thursday are committing a sin akin to Jane Fonda heading to Vietnam.


In an email to chiefs of staff sent Thursday morning, Pete Meachum, McCarthy's director of member services, forwarded a link to a Weekly Standard post praising the continuing resolution. Those who are using opposition to the resolution to better position themselves are hurting the fight, he implied.


"For the handwringers out there, buck up," Meachum wrote. "For those seeking other office please campaign at home, not on the backs of your colleagues." 
Meachum linked the last four words to this website featuring photos of "Jane Fonda A.K.A. Hanoi Jane."


In a follow-up email sent an hour later, Meachum acknowledged he had crossed the line...."I sincerely apologize, my email was not approved by anyone in our office or Mr. McCarthy. Please speak to me personally if you'd like to discuss further," he wrote. . . .

McCarthy's office is clearly sensitive to this, as they emailed me within moments of this post going up: "This was a regrettable decision made by one of our staff members, who sent an email acting independently and without the approval of the office or Congressman McCarthy.  He realized it was a mistake and immediately apologized."

What can you say, it's just a very proud day.

What would Speaker Boehner say ...

If President Obama promised to propose an annual budget that would hold spending increases down to $352 million, and then plopped on the Speaker's desk a proposal that -- once carefully examined -- turned out to increase spending by $38 billion? (I won't even go to $61B or $100B.)

Would Boehner be saying the difference was no big deal? Would commentators be saying, hey, "Let's not fly off the handle, the Obama budget isn't as bad as it sounds"?

DOJ Source: Obama Political Appointees Squashed Indictment of CAIR Leader and Other Islamist Groups

My book, The Grand Jihad, is about the Muslim Brotherhood's conspiracy to destroy America and the West and how Islamists work with Leftists in and out of government. When I speak about the book, and I point out that the Justice Department showed, in its terrorism financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, that major Islamist organizations (e.g., CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, etc.) were complicit in the Muslim Brotherhood's activities (including its financing of its Palestinian branch, Hamas), the question I am frequently asked is: Why doesn't the Justice Department make them indicted co-conspirators instead of unindicted co-conspirators -- the evidence, after all, seems to be there, right?

Well, today at Pajamas, Patrick Poole appears to provide an answer to that question in an explosive report. Relying on "a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice," Pat relates that top Obama political appointees in Attorney General Eric Holder's department have squashed the efforts of line prosecutors to file charges. They've done that, Poole explains, for political reasons -- these Islamist groups (as I detail in my book) have extensive relationships with the government. Poole elaborates:

[A] number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade. But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010, memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of any particular suspect are not public.” Pajamas Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.

According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were convicted on all 108 counts. But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the source said.

ACM Note: It is important to point out that, when prosecutors worry about jury nullification, it means the government has sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on the relevant offenses -- it's just that prosecutors fear a jury would decide not to convict based on some atmospheric that makes the case smell bad. (Juries are not supposed to nullify -- i.e., acquit in a case where guilt has been proved -- but our system nonetheless permits them to do it). In this instance, the jury nullification fear is obvious, and, indeed, is the same one that plagued the Sami al-Arian terrorism prosecution: namely, if these people are promoting terrorism, why have they been allowed access to top government officials, and why are their organizations courted by government agencies? That is, there is good reason to fear juries won't convict not because the suspects are innocent but because the government's indulgent behavior toward these Islamist organizations -- its vaunted "Muslim Outreach" -- undermines its ability to demonstrate that these organizations are bad news.

Poole continues: 

It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated[.]... But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?

Poole asked his source, why are you coming forward now? Here's the source's response:

This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts [ACM - another Islamic "charity."]. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible....

We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have happened [ACM -- there was a mistrial in the HLF case before the defendants were finally convicted in a second trial], we probably would have gone through the second round of prosecutions before the change in administrations. To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on. 

Read the whole report. It's predictable, infuriating, and scary.

Re: Radio Free Boehner

Thanks, Mike, but no "victory laps" from me. Being right about our side's guys being wrong when we're falling off a cliff is not cause for celebration. 

I have misgivings about the Ryan plan. As Obama's speech yesterday shows, small government conservatives are going to be viciously demagogued no matter how earnestly they struggle to preserve entitlement programs while bringing them into line with economic reality. So I really don't understand the point: Why not dismantle them, with the caveats that there will be a period of transition (i.e., current seniors would not be affected) and, ultimately, a straight-up, undisguised welfare program for those who truly cannot fend for themselves -- for which we will pay a commensurate tax but otherwise keep our own money to fend for ourselves? It's not like the political attacks could be any worse than the insane things the Left is saying now.

But that aside, my sense is that Rep. Ryan is a very serious guy with a very serious brain making a real adult effort to deal with an existential crisis. I'm glad he's there, and I hope leadership is taking notes.

Government Does Not Love You

The worst part about being a prosecutor was the defendants’ kids. Wives and parents would get to me, too, but nothing was worse than the kids -- especially the young teenagers, when they’re just old enough to understand what is happening, when the idea of who dad is gets overrun by the reality of who dad is.

A prosecutor’s task is to paint a convincing portrait of reality, which sometimes meant revealing the kid’s hero as the ruthless scoundrel he really was. As a human being, it sometimes made me sick to do it -- sick and angry, because the ruthless scoundrel would never be above using the kids. He’d doll up his attractive, loving family and seat them in the front row, where they could tug at the jury’s heartstrings and stare plaintively at the witnesses -- as if it were the testimony, not the conduct, that made dad a fraud, a dope-dealer, a mafioso, or a terrorist. 

#ad#I had idolized my father, and I’d lost him when I was a young teenager. As a Christian, I ached for what those kids had to be feeling as they watched me prove their fathers were monsters that juries should convict and judges send to jail for decades -- sometimes for life. But as a public official, I didn’t give a damn. As part of government, my job was not to feel but to function. It wasn’t that my feelings weren’t real. It was that they had no place in the governmental duty that has to be performed if we are to flourish as a civil society.

I’ve thought about that dichotomy a lot the last few days, ever since Pete Wehner, the former Bush administration speechwriter and policy adviser, chastised me in the pages of Commentary. Pete is exercised because, in a column last week about the increasingly dubious U.S. military expedition in Afghanistan, I bluntly asked, “Why should we give a damn about the Afghan people?”

Wehner’s argument is presumptuous -- unabashedly so. Putting on his clairvoyant’s hat, he peers into my brain and finds I am being “intentionally provocative” in advancing an “argument, presumably#...#that Afghanistan is an impoverished country located on the other side of the world, inhabited by people who are not worthy of our concern, let alone our care. If the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan and returned to their barbaric practices should be [sic] a matter of complete indifference to us.”

Maybe Wehner would not write such foolish things if he had been with me in Nairobi eleven years ago, after a jihadist bombing killed more than 200 mostly impoverished people, many of them Muslims. Maybe he’d have thought twice if he had sat with me through interview after heartrending interview with the survivors -- scores of them maimed and blinded by the sheer sadism of the Islamists.

Fueled by an ideology that has long found a comfortable home in Afghanistan, the Islamists first detonated a grenade as a distraction. That caused people to rush to the windows of their offices. When the bomb exploded seconds later outside the American embassy, victims were carved by glass shards before being crushed under brick and steel. Kenya may be an impoverished country located on the other side of the world, but I was quite sure these people merited whatever reservoirs of concern and care I could muster. Still, human feeling aside, I was there because I was a government official with a terrorism case to prepare -- not because I cared, but because I was furthering a compelling U.S. government interest.

Pete’s holier-than-thou demagoguery is misplaced. I did not grow up a person of means, and I’ve spent plenty of my private time and resources (such as they have been) agitating for those who have it worse than I do. But it’s not his suggestion that I am unfeeling because Afghans are poor people from a faraway place that most rankles. It is his confounding of personal and corporate sacrifice, framed in an airy stream of consciousness about “teleology, the purpose and design of human nature, and rights we are owed simply and only because we are human beings.”

#page#Wehner, however, misses a key point of the story: The Good Samaritan was a man, not a government. This is also the central distinction in a passage Wehner quotes, but similarly fails to grasp, from Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on Mother Teresa. It is, says Muggeridge, “man, made in God’s image” who must make decisions based on “the universal love” rather than “his own fears and disparities.” It is “life” -- human life, not the functioning of government -- that Muggeridge limns as “always and in all circumstances sacred,” as fostering concern for every sparrow that falls to the ground.

#ad#A government is not a man made in God’s image. It has functions, not a life. It is a necessary evil that undergirds and secures the liberty in which man can best find the universal love and be redeemed. Government is necessary because man is flawed; it is evil because it corrupts men and usurps liberty. That is why the American framers took such pains to limit and check its powers. Love and mercy are not bound by borders, but they are the attributes of people, not functions of government. Governments are restricted by national boundaries and national interests.

It is the progressive project to aggrandize government by humanizing it. Government becomes the life that cares and feels and exhibits concern. The real lives, the human lives, become cogs in the wheel, steered along by the general will -- the pieties of whoever happens to control the ruling class. As liberty is degraded, the individual’s freedom is eviscerated. He becomes a passenger, not an actor. He needn’t trouble himself about love and mercy. They are not redemptive; they are government’s responsibility. It is government that decides which faraway impoverished peoples win the collective’s largesse and its favor. Don’t bother the citizen about this earthquake or that Third World basket case -- he has paid his taxes.

That is not American way, though -- at least not as our society was conceived and as it ought to be. American government does determine and effectuate our morality; it performs the minimum functions we need it to perform so that our liberty is maximized. That, in turn, maximizes our capacity to live compassionate, redemptive lives.

As individuals, we may care deeply about the Afghan people -- just as we should care about people generally. It is not, however, the role of our government to care about Afghans. Our government does not exist to care; it exists to promote the freedom and security of our body politic. The actions of our public officials are not supposed to be a reflection of how those officials, guided by their private religious and ethical principles, care about their fellow human beings the world over. Public officials must faithfully perform the tasks to which they are assigned in order to fulfill government’s limited, necessary functions. That is what enables individual Americans, the most charitable people on earth, to care for Afghans as they see fit.

Personally, I should give a damn about the Afghans. That may not mean I should try to help them. It may be that I’d be doing more harm than good -- the well-intentioned Samaritan giving a dollar to a mendicant who promptly uses it to buy drugs. It may mean I should respect their choice to be part of an insular, anti-Western culture with all the resulting pathologies that entails. It may mean that, while I should have sympathy, other needy people are more deserving of my limited capacity to help. And maybe my love ought to be tough love -- the kind that’s strong enough to say, “Talk to me after you’ve cleaned up your act,” in the hope that you may be persuaded to do so.

But what I asked in the column was the very different question of why we should give a damn about the Afghan people. In context, I was clearly speaking not about Americans as individuals but as a political community acting through its government. Governments should only act in the political community’s interests, not on the basis of what Pete or I feel.

#page#The military mission in Afghanistan has devolved into something that is contrary to American interests. It was perfectly appropriate -- indeed, it was necessary -- to dispatch our armed forces to quell enemies trying to harm our country. But that is not our purpose there now. Government officials say we are there (i.e., our government is there) to protect the Afghans in what our military commanders call their war, not ours. If al-Qaeda were to reestablish Afghan havens, we have ways of striking those without having to put thousands of our young men and women in harm’s way -- ways that we use in Pakistan and elsewhere. And as for the Taliban, while Wehner worries about their barbaric practices, our government is currently paying top dollar to woo them into settlement negotiations -- the Obama administration has already come to terms with their return.

#ad#More important, the corrupt Afghan government we are propping up disserves our interests. Afghanistan remains a sharia state in which religious freedom is denied, in which former Muslims are put on capital trial for apostasy, and in which President Karzai himself -- not an obscure Florida pastor -- incited the hair-trigger of Islamist rage that resulted in the recent mass murder and decapitations in Mazar-e-Sharif. Worse still, top American military and political officials are now trying to curb our core constitutional protection of speech -- a bedrock of the individual liberty that empowers Americans to give a damn -- in deference to the Afghans’ claim of a right to riot over any slight to Islam, real or perceived.

Pete Wehner closes with a concession more telling than he seems to realize. Malcolm Muggeridge’s trenchant guidance on “the universal love,” he admits, “may not provide us with a governing blueprint.” That’s right. The universal love calls on each of us, as human beings, to care about the Afghans. But as a political community acting through its government, we needn’t give a damn.

—  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.