RUTHFULLY YOURS

…….There was quite a stir during the Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions this week, when, to the delight of so many observers, the famous Bozo the Clown showed up to question Senator Sessions on Tuesday. Bozo didn’t bring along his big red nose, or his face paint, or his large shock of red hair, so we all got to see that his real identity is that of U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D–Connecticut). But even without the costume, there was no mistaking that we were witnessing the well-practiced performance of a bona-fide, veteran clown, as Bozo Blumenthal stammered his way—with proper clownish awkwardness—through the notes that had been prepared for him by whoever is in charge of prepping buffoonish Democrat clowns for Senate hearings. And we can’t really blame poor Bozo for the vacuousness of his “charges” against Sessions, given that the job description for clowns does not—so far as anyone can tell—require one to actually know what he’s talking about. Making strange sounds and goofy faces is enough.

Bozo Blumenthal played his part to perfection when he confronted Sessions with the fact that the senator had previously expressed great admiration for David Horowitz, even though the latter has said, as Bozo noted, that “all the major Muslim organizations in America are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood”; that “80 percent of the mosques are filled with hate against Jews and Americans”; and that “too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes.”

With regard to the first quote, poor Bozo apparently has no idea that in May 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood itself produced a highly revealing “Explanatory Memorandum” outlining its “General Strategic Goal” in North America. This document was written by Mohamed Akram Adlouni—a member not only of the Brotherhood’s governing Shura Council, but also of its Planning Committee, its Special Committee, its Curriculum Committee, and its Palestine Committee (which provided funds and manpower for Hamas). Asserting that the Brotherhood’s mission was to carry out “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying … Western civilization from within,” the Memorandum advocated the use of stealth measures to impose Islamic values and customs on the West in a piecemeal, incremental fashion. Moreover, it listed some 29 likeminded “organizations of our friends” which sought to realize that same Muslim Brotherhood objective. Among those 29 organizations were groups that remain, to this day, among the most influential Islamic entities in America today. They include:

• the International Institute of Islamic Thought, whose co-founder promotes global Muslim rule based on Sharia Law;
• the Islamic Circle of North America, which, as terrorism expert Steven Emerson notes, “openly supports militant Islamic fundamentalist organizations, praises terror attacks, issues incendiary attacks on western values and policies, and supports the imposition of Sharia”;
• the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which has often defended extremists and invited them to speak at its annual conferences (which routinely draw tens of thousands of attendees);
• the ISNA Fiqh Committee, whose leadership includes individuals who have praised Islamic suicide bombers and co-authored a fatwa declaring that Muslims’ conversion out of Islam constitutes “high treason” punishable by death;
• the North American Islamic Trust, which, at the 2007 trial investigating allegations that the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation had engaged in the illegal financing of terrorism, was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” and a “membe[r] of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood”; and
• the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada, whose campus events frequently feature speeches by Jew-haters and jihad-supporters, and whose leaders have been arrested and convicted on a wide array of terrorism-related charges over the years.

Also on the Brotherhood’s 1991 list of “friends” was the now-defunct Islamic Association for Palestine, the Hamas-affiliated parent organization of the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Moreover, there are other major Muslim Brotherhood allies that weren’t named in that 1991 Memorandum. One of these is the Muslim American Society (MAS), whose former Secretary General personally told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 that Brotherhood members had not only “founded MAS,” but constituted about 45% of MAS’s active members. Another is the Muslim Public Affairs Council, whose founders were members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and were closely allied with the Brotherhood’s original creator, Hassan al-Banna.

The list could go on and on, of course, but don’t tell Bozo Blumenthal any of this, lest he feel compelled to wipe his trademark, self-satisfied smirk off of his face.

Bozo’s displeasure with David Horowitz’s assertion that “80 percent of the mosques [in the U.S.] are filled with hate against Jews and Americans” is also problematic, since the statement happens to be true. According to Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani’s January 7, 1999 testimony before a State Department Open Forum, Islamic extremists had already gained control of “more than 80 percent of the mosques in the United States.” This, said Kabbani, “means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to 80 percent of the Muslim population, mostly the youth and the new generation.” In his personal investigation of 114 American mosques, Kabbani found that “ninety of them were mostly exposed … to extreme or radical ideology, based on their speeches, books and board members.”

Similarly, a 2005 report from the Center for Religious Freedom asserted that “Saudi publications on hate ideology fill American mosques.” Three years later, a report by the International Assessment and Strategy Center indicated that the highly radicalized ISNA was supplying educational and support services to about 1,100 of the approximately 1,500 mosques in North America. And in 2011 the “Mapping Sharia in America Project,” sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, conducted a random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. and found that: “51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all…. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts.”

Again, don’t clutter Bozo Blumenthal’s mind with any of this. Nor should anyone call his attention to the fact that David Horowitz’s statement about African Americans in the criminal-justice system is likewise entirely accurate. To put the quote in its full context, Horowitz once wrote the following:

“If blacks constitute just under half the prison population, for example, one cannot be allowed to insinuate that the black community might have a problem when it comes to raising children as law-abiding members of society. Oh no. Such a statistic can only be explained by the racism of a criminal-justice system that is incarcerating too many blacks. Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the so-called civil rights leadership, from the racist bloviator Al Sharpton to the urbane Urban League president Hugh Price. In the intimidating atmosphere that this consensus creates, to suggest the obvious—that too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes—is to be identified as an apologist for racism and perhaps a racist oneself.”

Not a word—not a syllable—of that quote is untrue. Black incarceration rates are in fact a direct result of actual black crime rates. How do we know this? Because each year, the Census Bureau conducts a monumentally extensive National Crime Victimization Survey wherein crime victims nationwide identify the perceived race, sex, age, etc. of the perpetrators who have victimized them. As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald explains: “In fact, the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.”

Of course, all of this would be far too much for Bozo Blumenthal to take in. He’s much better suited for self-congratulatory displays of moral preening and mock outrage—preferably while donning his big red nose. Perhaps the next time he’s asked to participate in a Senate confirmation hearing, Bozo Blumenthal can lend more dignity to the proceedings than he did this time around. He could do that by simply slouching back in his chair, scratching his belly, and belching every-so-often.