by Jerry Gordon (July 2007)
This was the week not to be believed in our Nation’s Capitol: a President buttering up Islamists in full view of a feckless press six years after 9/11 and hundreds of billions spent on a war without a name.
Eli Lake in his New York Sun article of June 20th pointed out the current Bush push to make nice with the Islamists began last fall, when newly elected Democratic House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland made an inspection trip to Egypt and found himself in the garden of the U.S. Embassy chatting it up with leaders of the Moslem Brotherhood.
Witness the tableau of President Bush going once more to the Islamic Center of Washington to preside over a new initiative: becoming a Dhimmi. Yes, that’s what I said, a Dhimmi. Someone who obsequiously abides by the rules of subjugation under Muslim Sharia law. How did he do it? For starters he went to the Islamic Center of Washington - a Saudi financed and built Dawa institution - on the occasion of its 50th anniversary to make several important announcements.
One announcement was that Muslims were really tolerant folks just like the Jews, Presbyterians and Buddhists whose sanctuaries lay within a stone’s throw of this Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC.
Then he reminded the audience of the findings of the recent Pew Research Center Survey of American Muslims:
We must encourage more Muslim leaders to add their voices, to speak out against radical extremists who infiltrate mosques, to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund acts of violence, and to reach out to young Muslims — even in our country and elsewhere in the free world — who believe suicide bombing may someday be justified.
The second message was the ‘importance’ of resolving the Israeli -Palestine conflict.
The third was announcing the appointment of a Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) composed of 56 Islamic states around the globe. Bush said:
“We admire and thank those Muslims who have denounced what the Secretary General of the OIC called ‘radical fringe elements who pretend that they act in the name of Islam.’ The special envoy’s mission,” Bush said, “would be to listen and learn”.
As Steve Emerson has chronicled in a National Review On-line Op ed, “Radical Outreach” the OIC has supported Palestinian and Hezbollah terrorists, welcomed Hamas military leaders and provided Iranian President Ahmadinejad with a special platform for his anti-Israel, anti-Semitic rants such as “wiping Israel and Jews off the map of the world.” This is the same OIC that perennially votes as a block in the U.N. General Assembly to adopt anti-Israel, some would say, anti-Semitic resolutions every session, year in and year out.
Cheering the President’s remarks about the outreach to OIC Islamists were the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) . Both of these are Moslem Brotherhood fronts according to our Justice Department. They are also listed as unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorist financing plot.
The buzz among policy wonks around Washington this week concerned what candidate the White House would choose. This proposed Special Envoy to the OIC will be as one wonk opined “either weak or powerful” as the President wanted to make him. Among the ‘better’ names mentioned were:
• Zhudi Jasser; moderate Muslim, former Naval officer, physician and columnist and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy;
• Amir Taheri, Iranian born noted journalist, author and syndicated columnist;
• Fouad Ajami , renowned Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East studies at John Hopkins Washington, DC Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, noted author and commentator;
• Farid Ghadry, head of the Reform Party of Syria
The last time we saw Bush at the Washington Islamic Center was six years ago just after 9/11, when another tableau showed The President in the company of ‘suits’: Muslim professionals-doctors, dentists, community leaders, all espousing a doctrine of “Islam as the religion of peace”. The White House spinmeisters thought the Islamic Center photo-op would be viewed by newspaper readers as Muslims are really people like us. All this touchy feely stuff on display at the Washington Islamic Center, while 15 of the 9/11 perpetrators were Saudi nationals. Meanwhile, the White House secretly gave the ‘all clear’ to send large numbers of Saudi nationals home via chartered flights without so much as a bye your leave from the befuddled FBI. Some of these flights we now learn may have been chartered by Osama bin Laden to get kith and kin out of harm’s way.
So yes, this was hugger mugger week for Muslims in our Nation’s Capitol. Hugger mugger you say. What’s that? It’s the term you probably read as a child in those Beatrix Potter stories meaning disorderly clandestine confusion.
It was not the only event of Muslim hugger mugger this week. There was the exquisite timing of the release of a report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on being ‘sensitive’ to the needs of domestic Muslims. The Report was launched with great flourish at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars . The Chicago Council on Global Affairs report unveiled at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington had recommendations such as “sensitivity training for Homeland Security, military and the FBI”. Conspicuous by his presence at the unveiling of this report was Salam Al-Marayati, Executive Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Al Marayati is your average terrorist supporter and Muslim fundamentalist. The President of the Wilson Center is none other than Lee Hamilton , former venerable foreign affairs expert in the U.S. House of Representatives before his retirement, vice-chair of the 9/11 Review Commission and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group with James Baker, III.
This was followed by a panel before Senator Lieberman’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee composed of Chicago Council on Global Affairs co-task force directors, former Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin and Ethan Allen, Inc. CEO, Farooq Kathwari, a Kashmiri Muslim.
Business Week in October 2001 profiled Kathwari. He spoke about the loss of his young ‘romantic’ son Ifran in Afghanistan in 1992. According to one report he was “believed to have joined with Jihadists (who were connected to either Jaish Mohammed or Lashkar e Taibar), and died while carrying out an attack in Afghanistan”. Then, there was Kathwari’s castigation of Nina Shea’s report on Saudi texts in American Mosques released by Freedom House in 2005, when he was on the board. Kathwari resigned in a huff about Shea’s analysis as being ‘untrue’ and ‘racist’. The directors at Freedom House scrambled to ask him to return and Shea decamped to the Washington office of the Hudson Institute.
How do troubled observers of this mating dance between official Washington and the Islamist both here and abroad view this development?
Here is a sample of what some of them said:
Steve Emerson in his National Review On line piece had this comment:
In his wrongheaded outreach to the OIC, the president aligns with those who think the West is responsible for Islamic terrorism. It was the fascist Muslim Brotherhood that gave birth to terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Hamas, and it is the absence of a reformation that keeps the Muslim world boiling and in regression.
Diana West in a Washington Times op-ed entitled “Dhimmification on the March” had this comment:
There Imam Bush goes again. I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Qu’ran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam. Jailed Jihadi cleric Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. “Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Qu’ran”?
No. He’s just leader of the Free World, a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.
Then there’s this from moderate Moslem Zhudi Jasser, who was denied a slot on the U.S. International Religious Freedom Commission by domestic Islamists because of his heterodox non-Sharia views:
Mr. President… The words of encouragement and admonition to Muslim organizations to lead the charge against radicalism are too vague. The reality is that the priorities, ideologies, and minority politics of the current agenda of the Islamic organizations the administration has courted and which attended last Wednesday’s press conference are far from being on the right page in this conflict.
Walid Phares, noted Middle East authority on Jihad,had this comment in a Front Page symposium “Strategies of Death”:
There are still politicians and opinion-makers…who do not perceive the conflict as with Jihadism. Such a systemic error of analysis is having an impact on understanding the strategies of the Jihadists; actually it is helping the latter strategically.
What should anyone make of this sudden opening to Islamofascists by the Bush Administration? One thing is self evident, the appalling ignorance of core beliefs of Radical Islam including intolerance of ’the Other’. Basic civil and human liberties are what we cherish here in America. ‘The war with no name’ is the 21st Century War against Islamofascism. The Executive and Congressional leaderships are like the blind feeling the elephant in the room fearful of calling it what it is. Strange for me personally, I witnessed 9/11 in Manhattan six years ago and I knew instantly what it was: a War by Jihadis against us. Mired as we are in political correctness and tolerance, we are fearful of people who harbor primordial hatred of us. Where is the ghost of filmmaker Frank Capra, the Hollywood director, when we need someone like him? Capra put out those stirring “Why we Fight” propaganda films during WWII. Given what has occurred in Washington we need a Capra to tell this story before it is too late. Up to now few have done that effectively.
Let’s get to work to defeat them.
