RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week’s syndicated column:

Even after all these years, journalist-socialite Sally Quinn still embodies a Washington way of thinking – a heart-of-Georgetown, A-list set of salon-tested assumptions “everyone” knows that provides attitudes for any occasion.

Take the surreal state of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One day, William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a highly decorated retired Army general and ordained minister, and a founding member and leader of Delta Force, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast. The next day, following a campaign to stop Boykin’s appearance by what the New York Times describes as “liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations,” Boykin was not scheduled to speak at West Point. “In fulfilling its commitment to the community,” West Point announced, “the U.S. Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.”

Quinn’s reaction? West Point didn’t go far enough. Fire whoever is responsible for inviting Boykin, she wrote in her online Washington Post column “On Faith,” because his criticism of Islam makes him “notorious.” Why, it’s nothing less than blasphemy, as everyone who is anyone would agree – and who else is there?

No one, at least not at West Point. You can bet your last bullet the replacement speaker will not have identified, studied and himself experienced jihad – in military terms, the enemy threat doctrine – as Lt. Gen. Boykin has. This makes Boykin’s abrupt cancellation an information-war victory for the Muslim Brotherhood something few in Washington or West Point will even notice.

Muslim Brotherhood? Isn’t that in Egypt? How does the Muslim Brotherhood figure into a story about West Point?

Prominent in the stop-Boykin coalition is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), known mainly for sound bite-ready spokesmen who present an Islamic point of view on TV. More important is CAIR’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood constellation of front groups as an entity founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise, the jihad terror group Hamas.

This revelation emerged during the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial in a document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood itself. It attests to the presence in the United States of multiple Muslim Brotherhood front groups, including CAIR, which remains an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The FBI cut off official contacts with CAIR in 2008.

Such information is documented in “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a book Boykin and I and 17 others, including former CIA director James Woolsey and former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, co-authored in 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book played some animating role in the Battle over Boykin at West Point, won by CAIR and celebrated in all the best bastions impregnable to fact.

That includes Quinn’s Washington Post column. Not only should Boykin’s West Point sponsor be fired, she writes, “that person should … say ‘I’m sorry.’”

If Georgetown were a revival tent, a chorus of “Amen, sister” would rise over N Street. But no. Indeed, some animus toward Boykin may form in reaction to the evangelical brand of Christianity he expresses on faith and war in churches across the country. Back in 2003, following the publication of snippets of these talks, the Pentagon investigated Boykin’s invocations of “Satan” as the enemy, and his attesting to his faith in the Christian “real God” over his enemy’s “idol.” In Georgetown, this counts as full-blown culture clash – enough to deflate the bubbles in the sparkling Vouvray.

“He has said that ‘there is no greater threat to America than Islam,’” Quinn continues, building her case. Luckily, she isn’t arguing in a Shariah-run courtroom, because her testimony would then be worth half of a man’s – one reason for Boykin’s concerns about Islam’s impact.

Then Quinn quotes “Shariah: The Threat to America”: “And in a study he co-authored, (he said) ‘most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for jihadists.’ How could this happen?” She means the West Point invitation, natch.

Quinn is quoting a description of the book by others, but never mind. What’s extremely interesting here is that she isn’t contesting the veracity of these documented claims. Conventional Washington-to-West Point wisdom is conditioned to see them as so absurd as to be beneath consideration. Doesn’t everybody? Ridiculous. Stoo-pid. Just typing them out – regardless of their accuracy – elicits guffaws of programmed outrage.

I would say the Muslim Brothers have done their public-relations job well, but frankly, this information operation was over before it began.