Two key national security nominations by President Obama are up for confirmation following Congress‘ recess this week: former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense, and John O. Brennan, the president’s key counterterrorism adviser, to be the director of the CIA. Both candidates have had to address issues based on their past and current activities and associations. Troublingly, a number of questions still remain unanswered.

One explosive issue is a report by John Guandolo that broke last week on Tom Trento’s “TrentoVision Show” and also was carried by Glenn Beck on Feb. 11. The report stated that Mr. Brennan was converted to Islam while CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia from 1996 to ‘99. Let’s be clear: In America, a man’s religion can never be a condition to his holding a government position. It is protected by both the First Amendment and Article 6 of the Constitution. Therefore, even if it is true that he converted, Mr. Brennan’s religion should not be an issue.

However, according to Mr. Guandolo — a former SWAT team leader at the FBI, counterterrorism and Muslim Brotherhood specialist and Marine platoon commander — what should be an issue was the Saudis’ targeted recruitment of Mr. Brennan to the ideology of Islam while he was serving as the CIA station chief in Riyadh. This was not just a conversion but a political act by a foreign intelligence service.

If verified, this would indicate Mr. Brennan’s susceptibility, whether witting or unwitting, to manipulation by a foreign intelligence entity. It’s interesting that no counterintelligence alarm was triggered at the time that this alleged conversion was occurring. Most likely, that’s because at that time the sophisticated Islamic objectives driving the global jihad movement by the Muslim Brotherhood were not understood by those who witnessed his “conversion.”

As Clare Lopez, from the Center for Security Policy, has pointed out, our counterintelligence defense system is broken. The Muslim Brotherhood’s core threat doctrine — the ideology of Islamic jihad and Shariah law — is seen as benign. Mr. Brennan’s activities as the president’s top counterterrorism adviser have been at the forefront in the Muslim Brotherhood effort in the United States. The Brotherhood has succeeded in convincing the U.S. government to remove from official documents and training curricula all references to Islamic doctrine, Shariah law and scriptures that relate them to terrorism. Further, scheduled lectures on the true threat from Islam have been canceled, and instructors have been barred from future presentations.

Mr. Brennan’s track record of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood both domestically and abroad allowed the jihadist enemy access to the highest level of government under the stealth guise of “nonviolent outreach partners.” For example, terrorists like Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has been linked to Hamas; and leaders from the Islamic Society of North America, unindicted co-conspirators from the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008, work with national security staff providing input to U.S. counterterrorism strategies. That is hardly comforting.

It cannot be denied that U.S. policy on Islam, Shariah law and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular has undergone a sea change during the time Mr. Brennan has had influence on our national security. Certainly, Mr. Brennan cannot be confirmed until a full vetting has taken place.

With regard to Mr. Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense, clearly full disclosure about his past and current financial arrangements must be provided. His position on our defense budget and his appearance on Al-Jazeera where he characterized the United States as a bully in world affairs is more than troubling. As an aside, Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, which has now been revealed as a major contributor to the Atlantic Council when Mr. Hagel was the chairman, according to Cliff Kincaid, the director of the Center for Investigative Journalism.

Mr. Hagel’s position on the defense budget, as well as his likely support for U.S. nuclear reductions beyond the latest level of 1,500 weapons, also should raise serious concern. This is particularly true in light of North Korea’s recent nuclear test explosion and Iran’s continued drive to achieve nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, Gen. Vicktor Esin, former chief of staff of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, stated in a Wall Street Journal interview on Feb. 11 that Russia estimates China has 1,600 to 1,800 warheads, not the 300 to 400 that our intelligence community attributes to them. Mr. Hagel’s stated position on direct negotiations with Iran with no preconditions is also of concern, as is his position on our only true ally in the Middle East — Israel.

These and other matters must be fully vetted before either nomination for these critical positions can be confirmed.

Originally published in the Washington Times by Adm. James “Ace” Lyons (Ret.)

Originally posted at Center for Security Policy By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

The truism that you know someone by the company they keep has rarely been more true than with respect to the Obama administration and its burgeoning ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. Just this weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the latest member of Team Obama to consort with sworn enemies of the United States when she sat down with the newly installed Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi.

Despite official, media and academic efforts to portray Morsi – and, for that matter, the Muslim Brotherhood more generally – as the kind of people with whom the United States can safely deal in the evolving Middle East and here, the determination of such Islamists to impose their supremacist Islamic doctrine of shariah worldwide could not be more palpable. Their hostility to America, Israel, Western civilization and other infidels goes back to the founding of the organization in 1928 and is rooted in its guiding program – shariah – and it is absolute and unwavering. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves or deliberately deceiving others.

While it cannot be confirmed at this writing, presumably Mrs. Clinton was accompanied on her travels as usual – particularly in the Middle East – by her Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin. That would be all the more probable given that Ms. Abedin has myriad family ties to the Brotherhood. For example, her mother, Saleha Abedin, is a leader of the organization’s secretive women’s auxiliary, the Muslim Sisterhood, in which she serves along with Mohammed Morsi’s wife, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud.

The presence of an individual with such associations in the seniormost ranks of the State Department at a moment when the Obama administration is assiduously “engaging” with the Muslim Brotherhood has raised concerns on Capitol Hill. To their credit, five legislators, led by Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, have asked for a formal inquiry into the role Ms. Abedin and perhaps others have played in the adoption of problematic policies favorable to the Islamists.

For her troubles, Rep. Bachmann has recently been assailed by one of her colleagues – the self-styled “first Muslim congressman,” Keith Ellison. The congresswoman responded Friday with a detailed – and devastating – 16-page, 59-footnote letter (http://bachmann.house.gov/uploadedfiles/letter_to_rep._ellison.pdf) to Mr. Ellison’s rash charge that there was no basis for concerns about Ms. Abedin.

The documentation provided also lays bare the established connections between several Muslim-American organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood. The upshot of Rep. Ellison’s foray is that he has inadvertently called attention to the bad company he keeps – namely, with various known Brotherhood front groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Meanwhile, as Secretary Clinton headed off to Jerusalem, reportedly to assure Israeli leaders that Mr. Morsi means no harm to the Jewish State, a very different message is conveyed in a document (http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/3431.htm) currently making the rounds. It is the transcript of an endorsement given at the kick-off rally of the Morsi campaign by one of his supporters, Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi. As the candidate looked on beaming, Higazi declared: “…The dream of the Islamic Caliphate is being realized, Allah willing, by Dr. Muhammad Mursi and his brothers, his supporters, and his political party – that of the United States of the Arabs….The capital of the Caliphate – the capital of the United States of the Arabs – will be Jerusalem, Allah willing.”
Rep. Bachmann and her colleagues also asked for investigations into the role being played in shaping U.S. policy by the president of ISNA, Imam Mohamed Magid. As documented at www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com, that senior Brotherhood operative has been an advisor to President Obama, feted at the White House, State and Treasury Departments, literally embraced by the Justice Department and used as the vehicle for serial apologies by the Pentagon. Counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole has dubbed Magid Team Obama’s “Diversity Czar.”
The fact that the Obama administration is keeping such company is made all the more appalling by the kind of company Czar Magid keeps. For example, as Mr. Poole observed, at a recent ISNA “Diversity Forum” in Dearborn, Mohamed Magid presented CAIR-Michigan executive director Dawud Walid with a “diversity award.” It speaks volumes about Walid’s actual “sensitivity” to others that he is on record (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDS-BWqWORw&feature=share) justifying the destruction of Jews. The Investigative Project on Terror’s Daniel Rogell reported last month that, in an anti-semitic rant, Walid asked rhetorically “Did Muhammad order the killing of Jews?” He subsequently answered, “Muhammad didn’t order it. Sa’ad ibn Mu’aadh [one of his followers] ordered that punishment. It was a correct one. (Emphasis added.)
Another award handed out by Mohamed Magid’s organization recognizes “community service” and is named for one of ISNA’s founders, Mahboub Khan. It happens that Mr. Khan is the father of someone else who has long been keeping company with Magid and his fellow Islamists – a controversial member of the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union (ACU) named Suhail Khan. The younger Khan once declared at an ISNA conference, “What are our oppressors going to do with people like us? We are prepared to give our lives for the cause of Islam….I have pledged my life’s work…to work for the umma [Muslim nation.]”
Not only can you gain insights into people by the company they keep. When it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamists, it is downright dangerous to do otherwise.

It is not exactly news that the Obama presidency is determined to go to unprecedented lengths to mollify, appease and otherwise pander to what it calls the “Muslim world.”  But the question has begun to occur:  At what point do these efforts cross the line from a misbegotten policy to one that is downright anti-American – hostile to our values, incompatible with our vital interests and at odds with our Constitution?

The evidence is rapidly accumulating that we have reached that point. Our representatives in Congress must have the courage to re-discover a lost vocabulary, one that is conscious of the fact that subversion of our counter-terror institutions—[and, indeed, our very understanding of the threat we face]—is a goal of our enemy in the War on Terror. The danger entailed cries out for congressional oversight, and corrective action.

What is needed is a new select committee modeled after the much-vilified, but ultimately vindicated, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  (This vindication is comprehensively documented in Yale University Press’ groundbreaking Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, and expanded in M. Stanton Evans’ 2009 Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies .  Members of Congress and their staff can only benefit from reading these studies to have a better understanding of the history of their own institution.)  Such a panel needs a mandate to investigate in particular the extent to which the Obama administration’s anti-American activities reflect the success of the toxic Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan) in penetrating and subverting both U.S. government agencies and civil institutions.

Consider a few examples of what appear to be such successes:

On June 30, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the Obama administration will “welcome…dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.”

As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has observed, Eric Holder’s Justice Department appears to have basically stopped prosecuting alleged material support for terrorism. That was certainly the practical effect when it blocked prosecutors from bringing charges against Muslim Brotherhood fronts listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation money-laundering case.

Such dereliction of duty would seem to be the practical upshot of President Obama’s  much-ballyhooed “Muslim outreach” speech in Cairo in the Spring of 2009 when he pledged to eliminate impediments to zakat.  Mr. McCarthy has noted that the only impediment to such Islamic tithing is the prohibition against the sort of material support to terror that is commanded by the Islamic political-military-legal doctrine known as shariah – which requires 1/8th of zakat to underwrite jihad.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported on 8 July that prosecutors in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia have asked a federal judge to reduce the twenty-three-year sentence of convicted terrorist and al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi.  Before he was arrested for plotting with Libyan dictator the assassination of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Alamoudi was one of America’s top Muslim Brotherhood operatives.

In that capacity, this self-professed “supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah” helped found and operate dozens of MB front organizations.  One of these, dubbed the Islamic Free Market Institute, had the mission of influencing and suborning the conservative movement.  During the Clinton administration, Alamoudi was given the responsibility for selecting, training and credentialing chaplains for the U.S. military and prison system.  (Not to worry about the obvious peril associated with such an arrangement:  After his arrest, Alamoudi’s responsibilities were transferred to the nation’s largest Muslim Brotherhood front, the Islamic Society of North America.)

It is not clear at this writing what the justification for reducing this al Qaeda financier’s sentence might be, or to what extent his prison time will be reduced.  We should all be concerned though that such an individual might be turned loose in our country.  Even more worrisome are reports that the Muslim Brotherhood is making a concerted effort to get the rest of their operatives and allies out of U.S. prisons, as well.

Then, there is Hillary Clinton’s announcement in Istanbul last week that the United States would find common ground with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on a resolution that the OIC has been pushing for years aimed at curbing free speech that “offends” Muslims.  The United States has already co-sponsored one somewhat watered-down version of this initiative at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The Islamists who see the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference as a kind of new caliphate uniting and advancing the interests of all Muslims (the ummah) will not be satisfied, however, with anything less than the realization of their ultimate objective: an international directive to all United Nations member states to prohibit and criminalize expression that is deemed offensive by the MB, OIC or other shariah-adherent parties.

To “bridge” the gap between the OIC agenda and our constitutional freedoms, the OIC is pressuring Secretary Clinton to agree that we join Europe in considering the “test of consequences,” not just the content of speech.  That way lies censorship and submission.

The Pentagon recently gave conscientious objector status to a Muslim soldier who claimed that, according to shariah, it was impermissible for him to kill his co-religionists in places like Afghanistan.  No one has explained how the Pentagon proposes to square its acquiescence to that stance with the oath every serviceman and woman takes to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

For that matter, it is hard to see how Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Holder and, indeed, their boss, President Obama, can deem actions like the foregoing as consistent with their oaths of office.  At best, they are acquiescing to far-reaching concessions to the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk.  At worse, they are enabling the MB’s efforts to destroy the West from within.

So pervasive now is the MB’s “civilization jihad” within the U.S. government and civil institutions that a serious, sustained and rigorous investigation of the phenomenon by the legislative branch is in order.   To that end, we need to establish a new and improved counterpart to the Cold War-era’s HUAC and charge it with examining and rooting out anti-American – and anti-constitutional – activities that constitute an even more insidious peril than those pursued by communist Fifth Columnists fifty years ago.  Critics of a new select committee with such a mandate have an obligation to propose another approach to address this manifestly growing problem.

(Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.)

Yesterday’s poorly reported National Public Radio Morning Edition story, “Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee,” demands a fact-check critique. The NPR report alleged that the head of Ohio’s Muslim outreach program Omar al-Omari was wrongly terminated due to a law enforcement briefing on political Islam.  We needed to issue several corrections:

NPR Claim #1: “Federal officials familiar with the case say Omari was singled out because he distinguished between extremist Muslims and mainstream Muslims in his outreach and training programs.”

Fact Check #1: Many of the materials Omari had written, including his Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture, and a brochure titled ‘Agents of Radicalization‘ were slanted towards a pro-radical Islamic view and support a revisionist history which blames America for many of the Middle East’s problems.  In the Guide, Omari defines jihad as:

Jihad doesn’t mean holy war, as many people are led to believe. It actually means a struggle to achieve excellence. It’s the struggle Muslims face in life which varies from the Greater Jihad where a person is obliged to struggle within him/herself to overcome evil and establish good, to the Lesser Jihad which is the struggle in daily life. As Muslims are obliged to maximize their potential in order to be the best citizens they can be, jihad is the vehicle that lifts them to the challenge.  The term holy war is a European concept that began with the Crusades and was extended to Islam by the West.

In an interview with The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Zuhdi Jasser, Muslim President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was highly critical of Omari’s publications:

Jasser describes the two publications as “full of factual inaccuracies” including the assertion that 66 percent of American Arabs are Muslim (close to three-fourths are Christian). Alomari also “misses the core problem: political Islam.” Instead, he indulges in “bizarre revisionist history” which “seeks to portray Muslims as victims.”

The United States is engaged in “a war of ideas” with radical Islam. Regarding jihadists, “you would hope that [Alomari] would say that these are corrupt thugs who have hijacked our faith,” Jasser told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. But instead he “describes [terrorism] as a response to what the West has done.”

The material Alomari’s agency is putting out is “classic Islamist propaganda” which suggests that “these thugs who kill people in restaurants and shopping malls will stop if we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jasser said. “In fact, they’ll find another grievance in a year or two.”

The brochure “Agents of Radicalization,” was printed but then copies were destroyed because Omari had listed as “organizations we are working with” a list that included numerous unindicted co-conspirators from the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: “Some of the organizations we are working with,” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA) Muslim American Society (MAS) Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) Muslim Student Association (MSA).” Many of these groups were listed as unindicted coconspirators in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, US vs Holy Land Foundation.

Omari’s brochure on radicalization was never distributed, according to a source within the Department:

Thousands of copies were printed up by the department (at taxpayer expense, of course). Some copies had been provided to some of our partner agencies. As boxes of these things were getting ready to be shipped out, our director was contacted by some counter-terrorism officials and told that the brochure was promoting groups that the FBI and other agencies were trying to distance themselves from (like CAIR).

According to a report by counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, Ten Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat,

“When [Omari] organized a forum on “interfaith dialogue” for the department in August 2009, the two lone Muslim representatives included a local imam, Hany Saqr, who was identified in the Holy Land Foundation trial as one of the top Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the nation; and CAIR-Ohio president Asma Mobin-Uddin.”

NPR Claim #2: “Omari lost his job with the state of Ohio, though not because of claims that he had ties to terrorism…his employment application was incomplete. He hadn’t listed all of the schools where he had worked before taking the job with the state of Ohio.”

Fact Check #2: Omari was fired not only for failing to list his prior employment at Columbus State Community College, “where he was fired after an improper consensual sexual affair with a student,” according to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper but also for failing to disclose his prior work for the Jordanian Minister of Labor and for lying to investigators, also reported by FOX News and first published at the online investigative journalism website My Pet Jawa.

According to reports, Omari sued the female student who had reported his illicit activities as sexual harassment to higher-ups, claiming the woman had defamed him.  He lost.

Omari is now currently suing the state of Ohio for wrongful termination, as well as other alleged discriminations he suffered while working as the Multicultural Relations Officer for the Ohio Department of Public Safety.

NPR Claim #3: According to the NPR story on the mid-April 2010 training session, “Deputy Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Columbus Division of Police stated about Omari that “I knew him really well … And I thought he was a great professional, so that was part of the reason why I was so surprised when his picture popped up in the presentation.”

Fact Check #3: Omari’s highly Islamist-influenced brochure (the one that had to be destroyed) and guide had been widely publicized after he testified to Congress on March 17 and was widely criticized – one month PRIOR to the mid-April law enforcement training session, where the trainers discussed the content of the Omari publications with the attendees.  The facts raised by the trainers about Omari’s publications were not in dispute when published in March or presented by trainers in April.  According to participants the trainers had been invited to brief by the Columbus Police Department, and far from being “suspended,” the training continued through to the end of the planned session.  The entire course of instruction was completed.

This information was available to National Public Radio by simply googling Omari’s name, but NPR’s story was not an exercise in journalism.  They’re in the whitewashing business for Islamist supporters like Omari.

Congress, on the other hand, is in the spending reduction business these days.  Exactly one year after the public exposure of Omari began, on March 17, 2011, the House of Representatives voted to stop federal funding for National Public Radio.  The vote was 228 to 192.  Not even close.

The group known as “Team B II” includes experienced defense, intelligence and law enforcement practitioners – notably, former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey; Lieutentant Generals Harry E. Soyster and William G. Boykin, the former Defense Intelligence Agency Director and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, respectively; former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet Admiral James A. Lyons; and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy.

Their letter provides a powerful rejoinder to the public address given yesterday by Attorney General Eric Holder.  While General Holder insisted that his department (and presumably other government agencies) will continue their “outreach to all communities,” Team B II warned leaders on Capitol Hill:

[There is] evidence that – thanks to misbegotten official “outreach” efforts to self-appointed “leaders” of the Muslim community – Brotherhood influence operations have been highly successful in penetrating and interfering with our law enforcement, homeland defense, military and intelligence communities’ performance of their vital missions.  If that is the case, the implications could not be more serious, and the need for corrective action could not be more acute.

Team B II’s letter cited recent revelations by one of its members, counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, who published over the past fortnight a series of explosive quotes provided by an unnamed senior Justice Department official in the course of a six-hour interview.  Particularly worrying is the allegation that a federal criminal prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals and organizations was “scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice – and possibly even the White House.”

At issue is the intended second phase of prosecutions arising from the evidence introduced in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial – the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history.  The first phase resulted in five convictions based substantially on Muslim Brotherhood documents that established the Brotherhood is explicitly engaged in a “civilization jihad” in the United States, a conspiracy to “destroy the Western civilization from within.”  These documents also identified 29 prominent Muslim-American groups as “our organizations and organizations of our friends.”  The planned second part of the Holy Land Foundation prosecution would have resulted in the indictment of some of those listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the first phase.

In a letter sent to General Holder last week, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, confirmed the charges made by Mr. Poole’s source:

I have been reliably informed that the decision not to seek indictments of the Council on American Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, the Islamic Society of North America (“ISNA”), and the North American Islamic Trust (“NAIT”), was usurped by high-ranking officials at Department of Justice headquarters over the vehement and stated objections of special agents and supervisors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas, who had investigated and successfully prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation case.  Their opposition to this decision raises serious doubt that the decision not to prosecute was a valid exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

On the occasion of the release of the Team B II letter, co-author Frank J. Gaffney Jr., whose Center for Security Policy sponsored Shariah: The Threat to America, remarked:

The Attorney General’s efforts to deflect attention from apparently well-founded charges of official misconduct must not prevent Congress from engaging in an aggressive investigation of those charges and the larger context of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Washington and across America.  It was heartening to hear Rep. Pete King declare last Sunday on Fox News that the House Homeland Security Committee and House Judiciary Committee may have to take further action to find out why the Justice Department dropped the terror finance prosecutions.  We call on those and other congressional panels – on both sides of Capitol Hill – to take up as well and as a matter of the utmost urgency investigations of the nature and extent of the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” against our government, civil society and Constitution.

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

How curious.  At the very moment that the threat posed to U.S. interests by the toxic Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming ever more palpable, a top Senate Democrat seems determined to suppress Americans’ understanding of that menace.

Even the New York Times is now acknowledging the obvious: the principal beneficiary of the forced departure of an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak – a double-dealing leader who nonetheless passed, in the hall of mirrors that is Mideast politics, for a reliable U.S. ally – will likely be the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic).  That means an organization explicitly committed to waging jihad to achieve the worldwide imposition of the Islamic politico-military-legal program its adherents call shariah will soon: run the most populous Arab Muslim nation; control the strategic Suez Canal, through which 5% of the world’s oil passes every day; and be armed with a vast, American-supplied arsenal of sophisticated and modern weapons.

Unfortunately, a similar outcome may be in store for Libya, whose so-called “rebels” and “freedom fighters” appear actually to be drawn from the ranks of the Brotherhood, its spin-off known as al Qaeda or other Islamist factions.  Some of those to whom we are now providing with air cover and perhaps soon armaments are said to have returned home from Iraq where they were, until recently, trying to kill U.S. forces.  Variations on the basic theme of MB fomenting and exploiting “Arab Springs” may also play out shortly across the Mideast, from Tunisia to Saudi Arabia, from Syria to Yemen.

It would seem that, under these ominous circumstances, it would behoove the Congress to maximize public exposure to the true nature and intensifying threat posed by the Ikhwan and its associates not only elsewhere, but in the United States, as well.  Instead, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, will be holding a hearing Tuesday [today] that appears calculated to obscure, rather than illuminate, this problem.

In an interview Monday on Secure Freedom Radio, Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and one of the country’s top counter-terrorism experts, described this event as “the anti-King hearing.” Whereas Rep. Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sought to assess the problem of extremism emanating from the Muslim American community, Sen. Durbin evidently hopes to promote the line touted by the Muslim Brotherhood and its myriad front groups, associates and apologists: Congressman King and others like him are the problem, not jihadist Muslims.  Instead, it is the “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” to which followers of Islam are subjected that is the real danger.

In fact, an analysis of FBI “hate crimes” data just published by the Center for Security Policy clearly refutes the notion that Muslims are being victimized in America because of their faith.  Jews are eight times more likely to be victims of such crimes.

Mr. Emerson explained that this perverse role is the rule rather than the exception with Sen. Durbin:

“He has been in bed with radical Islam for the last eight years…. He has aligned himself with the [Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front] Council on American Islamic Relations, sent them letters of congratulations, agreed to speak to their banquets, fundraised for them, and most recently paid a visit to the Bridgeview Mosque, which… is… one of the largest mosques in the United States…. It is considered the senior center of Hamas activity in the United States, led by Imam Jamal Said. [He] was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case… against the fundraisers for Hamas, all of whom were convicted.

“In [a] picture [taken at the mosque], which was printed in the Bridgeview Mosque newsletter online, it shows [Sen. Durbin] with eight people, six of whom are actually allied with Hamas. Five of whom have been listed as unindicted co-conspirators [in the Holy Land trial]. And four of whom have made statements calling for the killing of Jews.”

Scarcely less troubling are Senator Durbin’s choice of witnesses.  They include “civil rights activist” Farhana Khera, who Mr. Emerson recounts has discouraged Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement, and retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick who is a prominent participant in “interfaith dialogues” manipulated by the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Unfortunately, the narrative Sen. Durbin is advancing has been taken up by some in government who should know better.  For example, Mr. Emerson told me in his interview that Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, raised serious questions about his fitness to serve in that front-line capacity by announcing recently at a closed, $4 million conference that “al-Jazeera was his favorite television station, radical Islam was only a nuisance, a tiny problem, and that Islamophobia was the biggest problem we faced.”

Were the Congress and the nation more generally to adopt this narrative – to the effect that the greatest danger facing the nation emanates from efforts of those seeking to inform our countrymen about the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and other adherents to shariah, it would hand the Ikhwan perhaps its greatest bloodless victory to date: acquiescence to the sort of shariah blasphemy laws that forbid any expression that offends Islam.

This act of submission will greatly compound the willful blindness that is facilitating the Brotherhood’s stealth jihad here at home, even as it and its allies make immense strides abroad.  Will Senator Durbin’s colleagues sit idly by as he contributes to such a wholly unacceptable outcome?  Will the rest of us?

(Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.)

Posted with permission from the Center for Security Policy | Mar 10, 2011

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Yesterday’s videotaped revelations by the intrepid James O’Keefe provides welcome grist for many mills. Most obviously, it offers irrefutable evidence that National Public Radio employs elitists who are hostile to Republicans, Tea Party activists, and others derided as gun-toting, white “racists.”

The principal focus of the expose filmed last month, Ron Schiller, the network’s now-departed vice president of development and president of the NPR Foundation, declared that his organization would be “better off in the long-run” without government underwriting.

Presumably, such sentiments will make it impossible for members of Congress to justify continued public funding of the organization when the Senate considers the decision taken by the House of Representatives to zero out NPR in the latest stopgap funding measure.

What is particularly instructive, however — and highly relevant to the hearings that Rep. Peter King will convene in his House Homeland Security Committee tomorrow — is the subtext of the new O’Keefe und

ercover videos: NPR seems to have had no problem sitting down with, and apparently entertaining the offer of $5 million from, representatives of a group that explicitly described itself as a Muslim Brotherhood organization and that promoted the “acceptance worldwide” (read, imposition) of shariah (the Islamists’ totalitarian politico-military-legal program).

Chairman King has made the focus of his first hearing what he calls “extremism” in the Muslim American community. A more accurate term for what ails that population would be shariah, for it is the adherence to that supremacist doctrine that obliges its followers to engage in jihad.

As a distinguished group of national security experts observed in a new book published by the Center for Security Policy, titled Shariah: The Threat to America, we must be concerned about more than just the threat of violent jihad. After all, according to shariah, where violence is impracticable, jihadists are supposed to use stealthy (or pre-violent) means to advance the cause that O’Keefe’s fictitious Muslim Education Action Center and the myriad real Muslim Brotherhood fronts share with al-Qaeda and its ilk: the imposition of shariah everywhere and the establishment of a global Caliphate to rule pursuant to it.

In tomorrow’s hearing and, those that will presumably follow it, Mr. King and his colleagues will have an opportunity to explore the role the stealth jihadists are playing in the Muslim American community. Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have, with Saudi money and that of other enablers of jihad, created organizational infrastructures.

With help from successive U.S. administrations, they have been legitimated in their bid to be seen as the sole representatives of American Muslims. Most recently, that message was communicated tangibly by the visit paid to a prominent shariah-adherent mosque in the Washington, D.C., suburbs by the deputy national security advisor to the president, Denis McDonough. In his prepared remarks, McDonough extolled one of the top Muslim Brothers in America, Imam Mohamed Magid, president of ISNA, the largest MB front in the country.

Worse yet, this top U.S. national security official actually parroted talking points pushed out by CAIR and its ilk to suppress expression concerning the threat Rep. King knows needs to be addressed. McDonough warned that, if we choose to criticize those in the American Muslim population who encourage shariah, “we risk feeding the very feelings of disenchantment that may push some members of that community to violent extremism.”

No examination of the “response” of the Muslim-American community to the “extremists” in its midst — which is the self-described purpose of Rep. King’s hearing tomorrow — would be complete without exploring the role being played by the Muslim Brotherhood and its operatives. Here’s hoping that the evidence James O’Keefe has provided of how open to penetration and influence operations are key elements of our society will provide fresh encouragement to the chairman and his colleagues to identify and root out the Brotherhood and other shariah-adherent “extremists” in the Muslim American community.

This article first appeared at PJM.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department. He is president of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org) and host of the syndicated weeknightly show, “Secure Freedom Radio” (www.SecureFreedomRadio.com).