RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration is the Hallmark Cards of Brothers’ Day, having done so much to bring it about: courting Brotherhood satellites in the Middle East from Day One, doing tireless “outreach” to Brotherhood organizations in the U.S. (including “hundreds” of meetings with CAIR by the count of one administration official), and helping the Brothers spread the Islamist Ascendancy Arab Spring from Egypt to Tunisia, Libya, and — coming soon, at an intervention near you — Syria. So grateful is the Brotherhood’s Egyptian mothership that its future plans include a new capital city, al-Quds (what the Zionist enemy calls “Jerusalem”) . . . which just happens to be the favorite city of John Brennan, Obama’s national-security adviser and assassinations czar.

President Obama rushed in to join the Palestinian Authority and his good friend Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister, in congratulating President-elect Mohammed Morsi. But what better way to mark this momentous occasion than a Brothers’ Day greeting card?

There is, for example, the one Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has just sent to Obama Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano. In the spirit of the times, Secretary Napolitano’s crack agency took a time out from not enforcing the federal immigration laws to issue a visa to a member of Gama’at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group), the Egyptian terrorist organization headed by the “Blind Sheikh” — Omar Abdel Rahman. It was the Blind Sheikh who started up the Islamic Group’s jihadist cell branch office of same in the New York metropolitan area in the late Eighties. That IG branch office bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.

Eight years later, after al-Qaeda came back to finish the job, Osama bin Laden publicly credited the Blind Sheikh with authorship of the fatwa that green-lighted the operation. The fatwa, which the IG’s emir issued from the American prison where he is serving a life sentence, did have that nuance and subtlety for which Abdel Rahman became globally renowned after earning his sharia doctorate at Egypt’s storied al-Azhar University:

Muslims everywhere to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.

The visa in question was granted by Napolitano’s minions to the Islamic Group’s Hani Nour Eldin. Interestingly, one rationale for creating the Department of Homeland Security — a sprawling blob of ever-expanding federal agencies that the bipartisan brotherhood of Big Government insisted would make us safer after 9/11 — was to correct the appalling visa-issuance practices that allowed the Blind Sheikh (and most of the 9/11 hijackers) to settle in the U.S. (as a religious worker!) after entering multiple times despite being on terrorist watch-lists. (As noted here before, I recount these infuriating lapses in Willful Blindness, as well as in this 2008 Commentary essay.) Under the guise of consulting with the Islamists who will soon be ruling the Brotherhood’s New Egypt, our post-9/11 Obama-style security means we no longer get duped into letting terrorists sneak into the country — now, we invite them in.

Chairman King does not think this is such a hot idea. After all, when we say the Islamic Group is a “terrorist organization,” we’re not just making conversation. Put aside for the moment the IG’s record of atrocities (many of which I recounted here, including the vicious 1997 murders of dozens of tourists in Luxor), committed for the express purpose of extorting the United States into releasing the Blind Sheikh. The IG is a formally designated terrorist organization under federal law, which means providing it with assistance is a serious felony crime — material support to terrorism — for which an offender can be sentenced to severe prison time. There are no exceptions in the statute for bureaucratic do-gooders. Just like there are no exceptions in the material-support statutes for lawyers, such as the Blind Sheikh’s attorney, Lynne Stewart, who is serving a lengthy jail term for providing material support to terrorists: Specifically, she used her access to her client to communicate his commands to . . . the Islamic Group.

Naturally, when Mr. Eldin got into the country to discuss governance in the Brotherhood’s New Egypt, courtesy of the Obama administration, he took the occasion to lobby Mr. Brennan’s deputy on the IG’s top priority — the Blind Sheikh’s release and repatriation to Egypt. Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism has the details, although there’s no word on whether Obama officials told the terrorist organization’s operative that the president would have “more flexibility” after the November election.

Representative King’s greeting card asks the Obama administration to explain why and how its national-security apparatus let Eldin into the country. Unfortunately, the congressman makes a wayward concession: after sensibly observing that it seems outrageous to enable an operative of a designated terrorist organization to enter our country, King oddly states: “I am aware that there may be legitimate diplomatic reasons to grant a member of a designated terrorist organization a visa to visit the United States, such as for example in furtherance of peace negotiations.” Actually, that would be an entirely illegitimate reason: The government, at least ostensibly, follows a policy of not negotiating with terrorists for the commonsense reason that doing so encourages more terrorism. Still, as King points out, we are not negotiating peace with the IG — Obama has, instead, given the terrorist group an opportunity to directly petition his administration for the release of its murderous emir.

Happy Brothers’ Day.