REPORT ON “SHARIA THE THREAT TO AMERICA”….RUFFLING ALL THE RIGHT FEATHERS
Posted By Ruth King on September 17th, 2010
NRO — The Corner
That’s the name of a report I’ve been working on for several months, along with a team of national security experts led by Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, Generals Jerry Boykin and Ed Soyster, Claremont’s Brian Kennedy, and serveral other notables. The idea was to try to replicate the “Team B” of a generation ago, which questioned U.S. policy regarding the Soviet Union (particularly detente). It’s far from a perfect analogy — for one thing, we were not invited by the government to render a second opinion and consequently were not given access to classified information. But that’s not much of a hurdle. As I’ve argued in The Grand Jihad[2] and Willful Blindness,[3] the information Americans need to know is ready to hand — the problem is that people in the ruling class choose not to deal with it.
The report is now available at the CSP website, here.[4] It’s about 180 pages long, but it starts with an executive summary, prefaced by an introduction I wrote with Director Woolsey and Gen. Soyster. (We turned the intro into an essay,[5] published Wednesday by the Washington Times – as noted in the NRO web briefing). The ”Team B – II” report is also being published[6] in segments at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace site. Frank just did his radio show (“Secure Freedom Radio”) on the report, featuring[7] interviews with Gen. Boykin, me, and a couple of other members of the team, my friends Diana West and Steve Coughlin.
At a press conference on Capitol Hill yesterday afternoon, we presented the report to three members of the House who have been stalwarts on the challenge posed by Islamist ideology, Trent Franks (R., AZ), Pete Hoekstra (R., MI) and Michele Bachmann (R., MN). You can find coverage at Fox,[8] CBN,[9] and by Connie Hair[10] at Human Events.
_____________________________________
One of the members of our “Team B” on the aforementioned report on the sharia threat is Patrick Poole, one of the country’s most informed authorities on the Muslim Brotherhood. He has an article[2] at Human Events this morning about ruffled feathers at the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association.
What is the CMSA? As Patrick explains, it’s an internal Hill group organized to assure bipartisan congressional leadership that sharia and Islamist ideology are nothing to fret about. And why shouldn’t our top lawmakers listen to them? After all, CMSA is best known for its Friday services at the Capitol, for which the group brought in to lead prayers none other than Anwar al-Awlaki — the al Qaeda recruiter who ministered to the 9/11 hijackers, inspired the Fort Hood massacre, and may well have had a hand in the attempted Christmas bombing of a airplane in Detroit.
In one video clip of Awlaki leading prayers (the clip was unearthed[3] by Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism), Patrick notes that we see Nihad Awad,[4] a founder of CAIR[5] (the infamous Muslim Brotherhood off-shoot[6] identified by the Justice Department as an unindicted coconspirator in the recent Hamas financing case); Randall “Ismail” Royer,[7] a CAIR official now serving a 20-year sentence after his terrorism conviction; and CMSA founder Jameel Alim Johnson, a one-time chief-of-staff to Rep. Gregory Meeks (D., NY). (Johnson tried in 2007 to arrange an Islamic conference on the Hill that was cancelled by Congress’s sergeant-at-arms when it was determined that some of the Islamists on Johnson’s dance card were known to be on terrorist watch lists.)
The influence of the CMSA raises nary an eyebrow in the halls of government, yet a report suggesting that we might want to take a harder look at the ideology that fuels the threat against our nation is thought controversial. All the more reason why we need the report.
|
|
Comments are closed.
