The Smoke Break

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They Didn’t Die For Islam

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Religious freedom?  Religious tolerance?  Of course.  America’s very foundation is based upon it.

But religious law?  Never when it goes against the fundamental liberties and rights contained in the Constitution.

Yet there are those Muslims who think that because they have chosen to live in America they may practice every abhorrent and often misogynistic aberration of Sharia law.  For example:

    • Marriage between men and girls as young as 6 years old
    • Multiple wives
    • Strict dress code
    • So-called “honor” killings of those same wives and daughters
    • Rape
    • Animal cruelty (bestiality is acceptable, even how-to documented but for men-only, but walking Fido in public is a no-no since owning a dog is considered a sign of “moral” corruption)
      • Halal slaughter of animals for human consumption (trust us, it ain’t the least bit kosher)
    • Forced conversion

Many of those Muslims continue to insist it is somehow their right to do any or all of these things here in America and, using the same twisted logic that gave them the bright idea to erect a mosque where their more blatant brethren murdered over 3,000 people, the majority of them Americans, 15,000 Islamic supremacists are having a convention this weekend in Connecticut to learn how to counter the rising push in America against their extremist ideology.  They would like nothing better than to redefine Sharia law within the common lexicon as a simple “misnomer” and are trying to hide behind the American right to freedom of religion.  (A particular freedom, it must be noted, that does not exist within Islam and the practice of Sharia as partially noted above.  But if you don’t believe us,  just ask Christians still living anywhere with a Muslim majority or close to it.)

Connecticut was one of the original 13 colonies and sacrificed much to give us the country in which we live today.  To say it is a slap in the face to see it overrun with supporters of terrorism this weekend is an understatement.  The brave military men and women of the United States have fought for over 200 years for liberty, not for its denial through the brutalization and slavery that is Islam and Sharia law.  Americans honor them this weekend; every one of them who have fought and especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

 

Lessons Of Two Evils

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The following two pieces bear sharing in their entirety.  They make the current situation in Egypt quite clear and so I find myself at a loss for words to describe the disappointment and even the despair with which I have been viewing the Obamanable Adminstration’s push to reward Islamic jihadists at the cost of what will surely be a great many innocent lives.

Salim’s article has also put into perspective something I’ve been trying to get my head around for a while now.  The family who runs a local smoke shop here are Catholic immigrants from Iraq, naturalized American citizens who cherish the foundations of this beloved country and one evening the youngest sister and I were loosely discussing politics and terrorism.  She shared with me some of the horrors of the first-hand accounts they had received about the attack last October on Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean Catholic cathedral in Baghdad and then said something that, at the time, I thought a bit odd.  That despite the evils that accompanied his dictatorship, the one thing Saddam Hussein had done right was to keep religious peace in Iraq and Catholics, like their family, had always felt safe and free to worship.  After his removal, this protection ceased and so it is that so many Christians have fled the country; literally fleeing for their lives.

I’m certainly no fan of dictators but when, as Salim points out below, “there is an absence of a culture that embraces and supports individual freedom” then until such a culture develops one must choose between the lesser of two evils.  And it is abundantly clear that the Muslim Brotherhood has never been and is not now the lesser.  With its ties to violence from the start – from embracing Sharia law to underground work with the Nazis and implication in the assassination of Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser and the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat with numerous untold murders in between – its original credo that “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations” makes the claim that members should use non-violent means to achieve its ends merely sheep’s clothing.

It is abundantly clear the Obamanable Administration has an inordinate fondness for sheep.  Such fondness now puts all of us in peril.

So now, the articles. 

By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency

Last Updated: February 5, 2011 2:00am

 History lessons are useful, and when events are in flux it is the past that can shed light on what the future might hold.

 Autocracies, as I have indicated in recent columns, have shelf life. But there are caveats in any generalization, and the shelf life of any particular autocracy could get extended beyond its expiry date.

 The current crisis in Egypt erupted with surprising speed for President Hosni Mubarak. The public demonstrations demanding an end to his 30-year rule has undermined him and very likely, as he has himself indicated, will end his presidency.

 But the Egyptian state over which Mubarak has presided since Oct. 6, 1981 — the terrible day when President Anwar Sadat was gunned down by soldiers with links to the terrorist offsprings of the Muslim Brotherhood — remains more or less intact.

 Mubarak’s Egypt, in the language of political science, fits the description of the authoritarian-bureaucratic state in which military officers and civilian technocrats hold the commanding heights of the economy and security.

 Mubarak, as president, is only the third public face of an Egypt that emerged out of the military coup of July 1952, which overthrew the monarchy established in 1805.

 The man behind the coup was Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, and on his demise in 1970, succeeded by Sadat, followed by Mubarak on Sadat’s death.

 Egypt is the Arab world’s largest Sunni Muslim state and, hence, a balancing power since 1979 to Shiite Iran’s regional ambitions. Al-Azhar, the mosque-university in Cairo, is also Sunni Islam’s highly respected centre of religious authority.

 The internal foe of the Egyptian state is the Muslim Brotherhood. A political movement founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood has sought to merge its jihad-based ideology with mainstream Sunni belief expounded by Al-Azhar.

 Since Nasser’s crackdown on the Brotherhood and execution of some leaders, such as Sayyid Qutb, the movement has worked hard to adapt to changing circumstances even as it consolidated its relationship with and financial support from Saudi rulers.

 What remains unchanged is the Brotherhood’s goal of establishing a Sunni theocracy, and support for its affiliates in the region, such as Hamas in Gaza, towards achieving similar end.  In the long history of Egypt, and in the Arab world, there is an absence of a culture that embraces and supports individual freedom. Arab politics has no example of an individual such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel with unquestionable credentials of a democrat and a liberal providing leadership for a democratic alternative.

 It is also ironic that the traditional doctrine of Sunni Islam taught in Al-Azhar gives preference to order — even when order is despotic as it has been in Muslim history — over anarchy.

The misfortune of Egyptians is to be squeezed between the military’s iron fist and the Brotherhood’s ideology. In such circumstances, it is a delusion to expect democracy to sprout unattended in the desert of Arab autocracy without self-sacrificing leaders to prepare the grounds.

 Egypt survived the immense ignominy of defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel and Sadat’s murder. It will likely ride the present crisis, and this is not to be decried when the alternative is Muslim Brotherhood acquiring power.

 salim.mansur@sunmedia.ca
 

A Moving Letter from Salim Mansur

Claire Berlinski, Ed. · 12 hours ago

Salim Mansur sent me the link to his latest column about Egypt. It is excellent, but what struck me even more was the note he sent me with it. I asked his permission to publish it, which he kindly granted me. 

Dear Claire:

Below is my column from today on Egypt. Since I do not have an opportunity to write in public more than one column per week, I am limited to what I can say. Extremely distressed by the crew in Washington, and in most European capitals. Media is so corrupted by left-leaning thinking that there is not much of an analysis to be expected in the media that is now competing with facebook, twitters, etc. The dumbing down of thinking is itself a huge problem the West is facing now as it tries pathetically to undertstand/explain politics and history of other cultures when it no longer has faith in its own civilizational values. I despair, and so I follow Samuel Pepys who confined himself to his diaries while London burned and I am trying to devote my time to reading and writing of my own (that of course I might not be able to publish, and even if published few will read).

I am more convinced now, as I wasn’t when Paul Kennedy wrote about the rise and fall of great powers, that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time, they find nothing odd that they are pushing for the Muslim Brotherhood to be taken into governing when everything needs to be done to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out even as one carefully negotiate the long historic transition of Arab societies from tribal autorcracy and military dictatorships to representative rule and constitutionally limited government. I read you when I can, and I wish that you and others like you were closer to the main media control in the West, or in government.

Take care, and God bless.

Salim

For what it’s worth, my response:

Dear Salim:

We’ve entered into advanced insanity now. It’s casually noted by the endlessly babbling talking heads that yes, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership has said it would tear up the peace treaty with Israel, but really, worrying about that just shows that all one cares about is Israel. Does it occur to no one that in an Israeli-Egyptian war (my God, just typing that is so horrible), it is not just Jews who would die? And that indeed, the very logic of the anti-Israeli propaganda so often advanced — that casualties in such violence fall disproportionately upon Israel’s adversaries — suggest what this would mean for the very Egyptian people these nitwits claim to care about so deeply?

I do Muay Thai as a hobby, and my gym is full of young Turkish boys of about draft age. Lovable kids, full of themselves and bravado and youth and life and good health. Muslims all, of course. Cheerfully accommodating the middle-aged Jewish American woman in their midst who unaccountably seems eager to do such an unlikely sport. It’s Egyptian boys of about the same age, all young and just as full of sweet puppyish life, who would be sent to fight a war that the Ikhwan is now loudly telling the world it craves. They would die in the tens of thousands before ever having a chance to go to school, fall in love, raise a family. Like young boys have always died in wars these wicked old fools somehow always survive. To point this out is now Ikwhanophobic, in the newly-coined term, and I did not imagine that a word could annoy me even more than “Islamophobic,” but I suppose life always has the capacity to surprise us.

Warmly,

Claire

The Enemy Within: Islamic Jihadists Controlling U.S. Anti-Terrorism

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PJTV’s Bill Whittle has posted a very disturbing look at how U.S. counter-terrorism efforts are being controlled by the Islamic jihadists.  Sources within the intelligence community have stepped forward to present some of the details about the liberal progressive politically-correct mindset that is driving an operational model that directly endangers America.

You can watch the interview here (you may have to register first) but I find the information contained in it so unsettling and important that I took the time to transcribe the interview.  Key points have been highlighted.

BILL WHITTLE:  Hi, I’m Bill Whittle from PJTV and I’m standing in front of what is very likely the most photographed structure on the face of the earth.  Inside the White House sits the President of the United States of America; the most powerful man in the world.  The President bears enormous responsibilities, and primary among them is to defend the citizens of the United States of America.  We’re here in Washington today to speak to a Department of Defense analyst and counter-terrorism official who, requesting anonymity, has made some very remarkable charges.  Charges that both the political and the military structure of the highest levels of our government are infiltrated by the very agents of the enemy against which we find ourselves fighting today.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, you were given an assignment from the Joint Chiefs, essentially from the upper levels of the Pentagon, to understand what the Islamic jihadi enemy’s ideology and operational methods might be.  Is that a fair statement?

DoD Analyst:  Yes.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  What did you discover?

DOD ANALYST:  Well, I was expecting to find that, well, there was some basis to the jihadi arguments that their jihadist warfare, that there were competing arguments and that we could leverage these competing arguments but because they were claiming Islamic laws as basis for their actions we had to start there.  And over a long period of time I ended up collecting a large body of Islamic law, an enormous amount of it available in English, and realized that if Islamic law is the criteria by which you measure legitimacy or illegitimacy you can’t show that the moderates have a doctrinal basis for the position they hold, and you can’t show that on the statement of the law the radicals are wrong. 

I was expecting to find competing views that had some merit. I was expecting to find that the moderate view would be the dominant view, and we’d have to figure out how to make these arguments so that people in the Middle East would know what it was, and could not find it.

Now, I could find that you’re not allowed to fight a jihad you can’t win, and that’s a limiting factor, but when you get to actually what published Islamic law says, it supports the radicals and what they say.  And you come to find, after you kind of get a sense for the language of jihad, and the language of how Islamic law works, that it’s pervasive, even in the U.S. Muslim community.

BILL WHITTLE:   So you got out, you do this research that you were tasked to do by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense; you come back and you say to them, “It’s the radicals that appear to have the doctrinal basis, not the moderates.”

DOD ANALYST:  That’s correct.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  Well, presumably, this would be an interesting piece of information for our Defense department to have.  What were the consequences of you coming back with this information?

DOD ANALYST:  Shock. Because what my experience brought me to was the complete unresponsiveness to facts that as a practical matter they experience every day.  I think that gives way, on a different level, to one that basically has had me believing or holding that if you have no profession…if you have no factual basis to hold a position, you have no professional basis to support it.  If you’re professionals, then you have a duty to be competent; that includes the duty to know.  And if you are national security analysts who are professionals, you’re in violation of your oath to be competent, you’re in violation of your oath to protect and defend.  It just seems they picked up our whole national security apparatus and moved it from a factual legal basis to one that supports the narratives.  But it just struck me that when you hit a certain level, and I don’t want to sound too cynical, but at the same time it seemed where the point at which your future promotion was dependent upon toeing a party line as…let me rephrase that; toeing a narrative as opposed to orienting on facts, or I witnessed a complete shutdown.  A friend of mine used to call my brief, “the redco brief” or the “guilty knowledge brief”, meaning you see this brief that clearly lays out facts that must be accounted for, and at a certain point they just stopped coming.

BILL WHITTLE:   So when officials started telling you, “Hey, we’re not interested in this; we just really don’t care to hear this,” I mean, how pervasive was this attitude?  Was it large numbers of people or one or two key individuals?  I mean, just exactly what are we looking at?

DOD ANALYST:  I can’t give you names and numbers; I have to say, in fairness, there are scores of senior people who got it and were supportive, but it seems that the organizational emphasis, the institutional emphasis, was in the other direction.  And so you would get it in terms of people who would come up and tell you, “We really support you but we can only go so far.”  You know, I supported some missions where the people who I supported made it very clear to me that using the information I used really brought success in a stunning way.  And for a while there I thought that just the sheer force of those successful things would cause some people to do a double look.  It didn’t happen.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, immediately after we concluded that interview here in the Mayflower Hotel, a second whistleblower came forward.  We received a phone call from another gentleman who’s also extremely concerned about the infiltration of radical Islam into law enforcement and defense.  Let’s go upstairs now and listen to parts of our interview with a former special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok, can you start by giving me a quick thumbnail of your professional experience?

FORMER FBI AGENT: I spent nearly 15 years working in the government with a primary expertise on the Islamic movement in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic doctrine.

BILL WHITTLE:   And which department did you work for?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  The FBI.

BILL WHITTLE:   So you were a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Yes.

BILL WHITTLE:   Ok.  You assert that we’re getting many of our cues on how to react to this terrorist threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, that essentially we’re letting our enemy tell us how to fight them.  Now, I think this is a critical point that we really need to make clear:  is this speculation on your part?  Or is this credible, factual information that you’ve been able to obtain as a former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  It’s all factual information and it’s open to the public to digest if they so desire.  These documents from the Holy Land Foundation trial are available online.  All you need to do is Google “Holy Land Foundation”.  The documents also show that every major Muslim organization in the United States is a Muslim Brotherhood front, specifically the most prominent organizations.  The two most prominent organizations in the United States, or three most prominent, are the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America).  CAIR is a Hamas entity; it is Hamas; and ISA is a huge financial entity for Hamas in the United States.  And CAIR and ISNA are the two groups that the U.S. government, including the FBI, DoD, state department, DHS, look to and utilize to do their outreach with the Muslim community in America.

BILL WHITTLE:   Can you tell us how these radical Islamic organizations interface directly with the federal government, in terms of the Defense Department, in terms of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, local law enforcement?  How exactly do these radical Muslim groups use their connections to suppress the defenses of the United States against these type of activities?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  That’s a great question.  At the national level, or the FBI and DHS, they actually are invited in by general council’s office of the FBI and DHS to sit in on brainstorming about investigative techniques that FBI agents are using in the field….

BILL WHITTLE:   I have to stop you because, frankly, that sounds so absurd that I have to really make sure I’m understanding you correctly.  Are you saying that the radicalized Muslim groups are invited in to learn our investigative techniques?  That they are invited in to get their feedback on how we’re going to fight against them?  Is that…is that what I understood you to say?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Yes.  So for instance, in the FBI, the general council of the FBI, Valerie Caproni, invited these Muslim organizations, as well as the ACLU and other groups, in to make sure the investigative techniques and the attorney general guidelines and the way the FBI was going to implement the attorney general guidelines was ok and not offensive to these organizations.  As an investigator, and certainly speaking for many others that I know, that is…ummm…that’s nothing short of outrageous.  If you can imagine any group, whether it’s the Costa Nostra or the mafia or any kind of organized crime syndicate, certainly the Muslim Brotherhood could loosely fall under that category, certainly it’s much, much more significant than the mafia was, but to invite them in to make sure that our investigative techniques aren’t offensive to John Gotti; I mean, it’s absurd on the face of it but that’s exactly what we’re doing.

BILL WHITTLE:   Sure. Because you’re revealing in great detail exactly what your investigative and interrogation techniques are, right?  I mean, in a meeting like that you’re giving away the farm, essentially, in terms of how you’re going to be operating in order to make sure that their feelings don’t get hurt.  And then you’re essentially giving the enemy all of the details about how you plan to operate against them, right?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Certainly a significant strategic look a how we’re doing things,yes; as well as some specific techniques.

BILL WHITTLE:   Well, you’d mentioned earlier that there’s no training; that people ranging from upper-level administrators in the FBI down to some local sheriff’s deputy in some county out in the middle of Arizona, some place local, local law enforcement; you mentioned that there’s no training for these people whatsoever in terms of the real nature of the threat.  Why is that?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Well, again, I think there are a lot of pieces to that but number one is when the people advising the assistant directors, the special agents in charge in the FBI, the assistant secretaries, and the Department of Homeland Security, etc., when those are Muslim Brothers you’re not going to get training that discusses Islamic doctrine and who the Muslim Brotherhood is, their history and their influence, and their penetration operations here in the United States.  And, to boot, the people who ARE training the FBI are groups like CAIR, which is a Hamas entity and an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing throughout the history of the United States.

BILL WHITTLE:   Now I have to stop you again because this is virtually impossible for me to process.  You’re saying that the training that our counter-terrorism forces get is determined by radical Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood?

FORMER FBI AGENT:  No, I’m not saying it’s determined.  It’s given by them.  They have been in our FBI field offices, they’ve been in our FBI headquarters teaching and training our agents and our employees.

BILL WHITTLE:   Is this not too dissimilar to saying that the people who were determining the landing zones for  the D-Day invasion of Germany were Nazi S.S. officials giving out information on gunner placements, and where the best places to come ashore are; is it too far-fetched to say that? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  It’s not about analogy.

BILL WHITTLE:   And then when the plans are finalized and all of the operational details are locked and sealed up in a little envelope, and then it’s handed over to the Gestapo and hopefully they won’t do anything mean with the information.

FORMER FBI AGENT:  Right.

BILL WHITTLE:   I think that as an average American citizen listening to this information, my first response would be, “How on God’s green earth did this happen?  How did this get this far?”

FORMER FBI AGENT:  This has happened because the Muslim Brotherhood has a long-term strategy; they are well-organized with hundreds of front groups that support their public relations, their research arms, they’ve insinuated themselves into our largest universities, they have Muslim student’s associations, which is the first Muslim Brotherhood group that formed in the United States in 1963.  MSA is on every major college campus in the United States, recruiting people to the Brotherhood in our own campuses.

BILL WHITTLE:   So even something as innocuous as a Muslim student association at any American university campus, you can categorically connect those campus groups to the most virulent, radical, anti-American organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood? 

FORMER FBI AGENT:  I can say that that’s 100% legally and factually true. The evidence entered into the Holy Land Foundation trial demonstrated the Muslim Students Association was the first Muslim Brotherhood entity in the United States formed in 1963 for the sole purpose of being and establishing the Muslim Brotherhood here, and it continues today to be a Muslim Brotherhood entity that has expanded and recruits students on campuses in the United States.

I did a Google search and the NEA Foundation site has a good compilation of court documents, etc.  for the Holy Land Foundation trials. 

I will let Clare Lopez, Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies have the final word:

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.     

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Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack. We can do better than this…..much better.