RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tariq Ramadan was barred from the US under Bush, but Obama threw open the doors for him. Ramadan was billed as a moderate reformer. And here is the “moderate reformer” on the Brussels attacks. After the formality of condemning the attacks, mumbling that terrorism is wrong, Ramadan pivots to the same old song and dance.

We cannot, today, afford to disconnect these events with the violence, terror and death that have long been commonplace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in Africa and Asia more widely. European and American foreign policy does not happen in a vacuum, as those who target us have repeated in countless videos: You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.

Now the “war and death” that ISIS terrorists are talking about is the US and the rest of NATO pushing back against its genocide of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. Or to put it another way, American intervention against Islamic terror doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. “You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.”

But what is Tariq Ramadan really suggesting? That bombing ISIS is wrong?

We must hear those who criticize the incoherence of our allegiances and our support of dictatorships.

What dictatorships? Obama threw them overboard. And the Islamist alternative is itself a dictatorship. That’s what ISIS is.

Does the condemnable violence of their reaction mean we can ignore their arguments?

Any fair reading of State Department and general federal government laws regarding the use of classified information by federal employees makes it is clear that Hillary Clinton violated the law—both by improperly setting up her own private server, and then by sending information through it that was classified. And it is evident that Clinton went to such extraordinary lengths in order to mask her communications and shield them from the sort of Freedom of Information Act suits that now are plaguing her—and that she arbitrarily decided which of her private server emails were public and which private, and then simply destroyed thousands of them without audit.

If she is not indicted by the Obama administration for violations of federal laws or conspiracy to obstruct justice, in the future it will be almost impossible to prosecute successfully any federal employee for violating government protocols about the handling of classified information. If Clinton avoids indictment, it will make a mockery of the Obama Justice Department that sought to prosecute Gen. David Petraeus for showing his personal journals, which contained classified information, to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. The government leveraged Petraeus on the basis that he knew his notebooks contained classified information though they were not formally identified as such; Hillary Clinton knew the same about her own communications, but unlike Petraeus was sneaky enough not to admit to that fact on tape or to associates.

In 2007, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and then won a conviction against Scooter Libby, in an investigation that ostensibly began over accusations that Libby had leaked the “covert” status of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of flamboyant loudmouth Joseph Wilson, who was making wild (and later to be proven unfounded) charges against the Bush administration. Yet in a bout of prosecutorial (and politicized) overreach, Fitzgerald had known all along—but kept quiet—about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s aide Richard Armitage being the self-admitted leaker of information concerning Plame’s employment with the CIA. And Fitzgerald also either knew or should have known that Plame was not really a covert operative but instead was widely recognized to have worked at the CIA. Given such precedents, how can the Obama administration possibly determine the degree of wrongdoing of its own former secretary of State and the likely Democratic presidential nominee? The answer is that this is now a country, after all, that jails a video-maker on a trumped-up probation charge to cover up false talking points about a supposed riot of aggrieved Muslims who ad hoc showed up to kill four Americans. And it jailed Dinesh D’Souza, another video-maker, on a rather minor campaign money-raising infraction.

The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as genuine representatives of the Muslim community.

Very few American Muslims believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. A 2011 Gallup poll revealed that around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. Many in them have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

Counter-extremism work is best achieved by marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, and by working instead with the genuine moderates.

A number of Massachusetts Muslim groups, led by Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, are currently spearheading a campaign against the Obama administration’s program, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which has designated Boston as one of its pilot cities.

From the government’s perspective, Boston was an obvious choice. The city has a long, unfortunate history of producing internationally-recognized terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon; Aafia Siddiqui, whom FBI Director Robert S. Mueller describes as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator;” Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, and named by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fundraiser, and Ahmad Abousamra, a key official within Islamic State, whose father is vice-president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston branch.

During the past decade, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, officials and donors of the Islamic Society of Boston alone have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run in connection with terrorism offenses.

Despite these alumnae, a number of extremist Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have claimed that the government’s attempt to combat radicalization “targets American Muslims” and “undermines our national ideals.”

Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, who is also a director of CAIR’s Massachusetts branch, has spoken at a number of anti-CVE rallies, condemning the government’s approach as “authoritarian” because it included “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”

In response, Robert Trestan, the Massachusetts director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), points out that the CVE program “is relatively new in this country. It’s not fair to judge it yet and be overly critical.” He added: “Nothing I’ve seen or participated in has gone anywhere near proposing or suggesting anything close to surveillance, crossing the line of people’s civil rights or profiling.”

What, then, is the basis for this opposition?