RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tulsi Gabbard has just been appointed as the Director of National Intelligence. She has criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel since October 7, 2023. She has spoken out about Islamic terrorism. She is a Hindu — she was sworn in as a congresswoman on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita — and that may mean she is aware of what the centuries of Muslim rule meant for the Hindus of India.

She was once a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, and even ran for president in 2020 in the Democratic primary. But since then she has had a road-to-Damascus conversion, and become a Republican. More on Tulsi Gabbard can be found here: “Trump selects Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence,” by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, November 13, 2024:

…Gabbard, a military veteran, has been critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israel since Oct. 7. She has been vocal against Islamic terrorism and has expressed strong support for the Jewish state, including at a speech at a Christians United for Israel conference during her time in Washington.

To see how far she has come, consider that in the past she voted against a House resolution condemning the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution opposing Israeli settlements. In 2019 she refused to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for antisemitic comments about U.S. support for Israel and voted for a resolution sponsored by Omar that aimed to defend the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. But Gabbard has since then clearly expressed her opposition to the BDS movement and voted for anti-BDS legislation. And in 2020, she even supported Bernie Sanders, a severe critic of Israel, to be President. But that was a world away from Tulsi Gabbard today; the former Democrat has been appearing at rallies for Donald Trump.

By 2022, she had moved rightward. In October 2024 she stood by Donald Trump at a rally and announced that she was joining the Republican Party. She explained that she found she agreed with the Republicans on the most important issues, including immigration. She described the Democratic Party as “unrecognizable” from what it had been twenty years before , and she attacked the “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologue” in the party.

She has said that anti-Israel college protesters are “antisemitic” and have become “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization.” On October 7, 2024 she posted on Instagram that “Hamas’s horrific attack against Israel one year ago today that took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis at a music concert and in their homes, is a stark reminder of the ongoing short and long term threat of Islamist terrorism that continues to spread around the world today. Their goal is to establish a global Islamist caliphate, where all must live under their sharia law. Many leaders in the west have promised to defeat this threat and failed, because they refuse to acknowledge that it must be defeated ideologically and militarily.”

No longer a Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard has emerged as one of those — there have not been many — who have been warning about the Islamic threat not just to Israel, but to the entire West. Her own identity as a Hindu may have made her more alarmed about the Muslim threat to the world — after all, 70-80 million Hindus were killed by their Muslim rulers in Mughal India. She has repeatedly praised India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has taken a hard line against Muslims who attack Hindus and their temples.

Even when she was a Democrat, she focused on Islam. In a February 2015 interview on Fox, Gabbard responded to questions about then-President Barack Obama’s administration’s refusal to use the phrase “Islamic extremism.” She stated, “I think that what’s important is we look at some of these messages and some of these threats that are being posed by different groups…by identifying the single common element amongst them…groups who are fueled by this radical Islamic ideology then once that’s identified, we understand it, then we can come up with a winning strategy to defeat it both militarily as well as ideologically.”

In a March 2016 interview with Rediff News, Gabbard again criticized Obama for not identifying ISIS as “Islamic” and “Islamic terrorists” and their ideology as “Islamism.” She stated that it is “critical that we accurately define our enemy and its ideology. The ideology shared by ISIS, Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations is ‘Islamism.’ Distinct from the religion of Islam, Islamism is a radical political ideology of violent jihad aimed at establishing a totalitarian society governed by laws based on a particular interpretation of Islam.” She is not prepared to publicly recognize — privately is a different matter — that what she calls “Islamism” is simply Islam, undiluted. It is not “distinct from the religion of Islam.” Were she to do so, it would only open her up to a chorus of cries about “Islamophobia.”

That’s okay. Tulsi Gabbard knows what Islam is all about. And that realization is no doubt what is driving CAIR crazy.