“Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” — Golda Meir
Representative Peter King (R-NY) has been holding hearings in the Homeland Security Committee, which he chairs. With Weinergate, the economy, the foibles of the Republican presidential candidates and Afghanistan much of the hearings went unreported in the main stream media.
King’s committee has been delving into the activities of various radical
Today he left refers to this era as the “McCarthy Era” and labels any investigations into Un-American activities as “McCarthyism” It should be pointed out McCarthy, as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, had no direct involvement with this House committee. McCarthy was the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. Senate, not the House. Since McCarthy was a Republican the left loves to blame Republicans for all the perceived evils of the era such as the prosecution of the infamous “Hollywood 10” for perjury. It was HUAC (mostly under Democrat control) that did most of the investigating and charged the Hollywood 10 with lying to Congress.
On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties.[9][10] It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr., and therefore known as the Dies Committee.
In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project. In 1965–1966, however, the Committee did conduct an investigation into Klan activities under Chairman Edwin Willis.
On June 17th former federal prosecutor and author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America Andrew McCarthy wrote a somewhat critical article on King’s efforts:
“Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, has been a good friend to those of us who work to protect American national security. In launching an investigation into the ideology that fuels the Islamist threat against the United States, he has had the courage to go where Congress has been too intimidated to go before. Still, with the second round of his committee’s hearings on “radicalization” having been completed, it is necessary to question his approach.
The committee has kept on the sidelines the peerless analysts Steven Emerson and Robert Spencer, who were sounding the alarm before most people in this country knew there was an Islamist threat — very much including most people in our government. King holds the work of these experts in high regard. Yet, he has decided the public’s understanding is better served by calling as his main witnesses (a) Muslims, who can give a firsthand account of what goes on in their communities, and (b) law-enforcement officials, current and former, who’ve designed and carried out what passes for the counterterrorism strategy followed by police agencies throughout the country — basically, terrorism investigations and Muslim outreach.
There are serious problems with this approach. Hearing from Muslims is obviously important, but to limit the committee to their input on what’s happening inside the Islamic community is to fall for the fallacy that you have to be a member of the group to grasp and explain the group’s dynamics. If that were true, why would anyone care what King’s analysis is? Congress is not a Muslim body, so why would its insights be any more valuable than those of experts like Emerson and Spencer?
Moreover, while the Muslim community in the United States includes many patriotic Americans, it also includes Islamists who seek to undermine our country. The latter adhere to “taqqiya”, a principle that endorses misrepresentation when necessary to advance the Islamist cause. This principle’s operation is not mitigated by putting these people under oath at hearings, because their fidelity is to sharia, not American law — if they think it will help to lie, they will lie.
Recall the testimony of King’s very first witness back in March, CAIR’s favorite congressman, Keith Ellison (at least, I think that’s the name he’s going by these days — he’s used several in his checkered past, well documented by Powerline’s Scott Johnson). As Matt Shaffer recounted on the Corner, Ellison — a hard-Left Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives — gave the committee a weepy account of American bigotry against a Muslim American who died heroically trying to save lives on 9/11. Not surprisingly, Ellison’s story was riddled with falsehoods. To be sure, there is value in watching some of these characters dodge, dissemble, and demagogue. But they are a big part of the challenge we face, so it’s foolish to make them our window into the Muslim community.”
Ellison’s district is loaded with radical Islamists, mainly from Somalia, who have been learning jihad in the mosques. CBS News reported June 2, 2011 that the militant suicide bomber who killed peacekeepers in Somalia was trained in Minnesota:
“A man who carried out a suicide bomb attack at a peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu this week was a Somali-American from Minnesota, the militant group al-Shabab said Thursday.
The group identified Abdullahi Ahmed, 25, of Minneapolis as the man who bombed the African Union base in the Somalia capital on Monday. The attack killed two AU troops and one government soldier. In a report on its website, al-Shabab said Ahmed moved to Somalia from Minneapolis two years ago.
The report purported to quote Ahmed before his death saying that he wanted to carry out the attack because of abuses by Christians in Muslim countries.
If the report is confirmed, Ahmed would become at least the third Somali-American to have carried out a suicide bombing in Somalia.
Somali Islamic insurgents — some with links to al-Qaida — have been recruiting young Somali men in America and other countries, raising fears that the recruits could be trained up to attack foreign targets.
The first known American suicide bomber in Somalia, Shirwa Ahmed from Minneapolis, blew himself up in October 2008 in the northern breakaway republic of Somaliland as part of a series of coordinated explosions that killed 21 people.
In September 2009, insurgents including an 18-year-old from Seattle, drove two stolen U.N. cars into an AU base and detonated them. Twenty-one people were killed.
At least 20 Somali-Americans are believed to have joined al-Shabab. U.S. authorities have warned that a Somali-American who seeks training from al-Shabab could return to the United States to carry out an attack.”
Somalian Muslims in MinnesotaMcCarthy continues:
“Today’s hearings were not focused on the mosques, though. They homed in on radicalization in American prisons. Far be it from me to suggest that jails are not a concern, but the premise of the hearing was that “radicalization” is helped along by the fact that inmates are a captive audience. To the contrary, the Yerushalmi-Kedar study demonstrates that the purveyors of Islamist ideology do not need a jail setting; they find a comfortable home in four out of every five mosques in the country. Their success, right out in the open in Islamic communities, mirrors the experience of Muslim populations overseas, where, for example, more than 80 percent of Egyptian and Pakistani Muslims desire to live under sharia and to insulate their countries from Western influences.
No, the problem is not radicalization in the prisons. It is our overly optimistic concept of “radicalization.” The very use of that term implies that mainstream Islamic doctrine must be moderate and peaceful, and therefore that heterodox “radicals” would need a coercive setting, like a jail, to inculcate their violent, anti-Western corruption of that doctrine. In fact, the worrisome interpretation of Islam is not radical. It is the dominant construction of Islamic doctrine, even in the United States. That doesn’t mean all Muslims will buy what the “radicals” are selling, but it does tell us why “radicalization” is so prevalent.
If your approach to the problem is wrong, your solutions are apt to be counterproductive. To prove that point, look no further than this New York Post report lauding the committee’s focus on prison radicalization. It relies on a New York City Police Department study on homegrown threats, which laments the lack of imams in federal and New York jails — only ten in the federal system just a few years ago for nearly 200,000 inmates, and just 40 for the state’s 67 prisons. If we could just fill the jails with chaplains from among those legions of moderate imams, the thinking goes, then inmates would no longer be subjected to “radical” Islam.
But the Yerushalmi-Kedar survey underscores that the imams are the problem, not the solution. The moderate ones appear to be outnumbered about 4-to-1. Indeed, the NYPD study highlights longtime prison chaplain Warith Deen Umar, a firebrand who praised the 9/11 jihadists as “martyrs.” If we look at Islam as we find it, rather than Islam as the government wishes it were, we might very well conclude that Umar is more the rule than the exception. After all, he has hardly been ostracized just because the authorities finally booted him from the chaplain program. He remains an influential presence on the American Muslim scene, featured, for example, as a speaker at the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) annual convention in 2009.
ISNA, the most significant Islamist organization in the United States, was shown to be a coconspirator (unindicted) in the Justice Department’s 2008 Hamas-financing prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation, a case that laid bare the Muslim Brotherhood’s ambition to destroy the United States from within. ISNA’s history of Brotherhood ties and Hamas support doesn’t stop thousands of Muslims from attending its conventions. And why should it? It doesn’t stop the Obama administration, either: The headline speaker at the 2009 convention at which Imam Umar appeared was none other than Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s close friend and adviser.” (Emphasis added).
While President Barack Obama and his administration continue to portray Egypt’s oldest radical Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, as being more akin to the Rotary Club than to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, many counterterrorism experts believe he and his administration are making a big mistake.
These experts believe that proponents of radical Islam are still capable of creating an Egyptian caliphate or worse and that giving them billions of U.S. dollars will only hasten the creation of another Iran in the Middle East.
Taking a page from the American leftists’ handbook, the Muslim Brotherhood changed its name to the more benign Party of Peace and Freedom. It’s the same tactic used by the American group ACORN which now uses several different names but has the same principles pulling the strings. For example, one new name being used by ACORN is New York Communities for Change. And the head of NYCC’s national organization is former ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis.
The Muslim Brotherhood, aka al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 and since then grew to become Egypt’s largest Islamist group. The Brotherhood has influenced — and continues to influence – Islamist movements throughout the globe with its modus operandi of Islamic charity work concealing its more sinister advocacy of Islamic jihad.
The group’s leadership claims its goal is to spread Islamic morals and good works, but it appears to be more involved in politics. When first created, the Brotherhood’s leader al-Banna’s first operation was to release Egypt from British occupation and control and cleanse Egypt of the infidels’ so-called stranglehold on the Arab world.
Today, though officially banned and subject to frequent repression, the Brotherhood led public opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party of President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power since 1981.
While the Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, claim they support democratic principles, one of their stated aims is to create a state ruled by Islamic law, or Sharia. Their most famous slogan, used worldwide, is: “Islam is the solution”.
The initial friction with Egyptian authorities caused a change in their ideology. One of their new leaders, Sayyid Qutb, advocated the use of jihad (struggle) against the jahili (ignorant). While he wished to start with Islamic nations, he also wished to cause radical transformation in Western countries.
His 1965 diatribe titled Milestones — which outlined a strategy for jihad -- found a number of disciples in several radical Islamist groups, including Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda.
While many members of the Muslim Brotherhood joined the anti-Mubarak protests, they kept their presence as secret as possible. The group avoided putting their traditional slogans on placards and signs during the demonstrations.
However, once Mubarak stepped down and the interim government took control, the Muslim Brotherhood openly sought a more active role in forming a new government.
While Obama’s White House and his national security team accept the view of a more moderate Brotherhood, counterterrorism experts such as Steve Emerson and Walid Phares point to a political platform published by the Muslim Brotherhood in 2007. The platform called for a council of religious scholars to be set up to approve all laws passed by Egypt’s civilian institutions. The platform also stated that Christians or women could not become president or prime minister.
Sadly, Sharia law has tremendous popularity among Egypt’s so-called moderates within the Muslim Brotherhood. They claim they want only an Islamic frame of reference for legislation, while conservatives noted that Article 2 of the constitution states: “Islam is the religion of the state and the principles of the Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation.”
In a related story the Washington Post reports that activist cry foul over the FBI’s probe of terrorist activities in Chicago tied to both Islamists and the communist party:
“FBI agents took box after box of address books, family calendars, artwork and personal letters in their 10-hour raid in September of the century-old house shared by Stephanie Weiner and her husband.
The agents seemed keenly interested in Weiner’s home-based business, the Revolutionary Lemonade Stand, which sells silkscreened baby outfits and other clothes with socialist slogans, phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries.”
The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.
The probe — involving subpoenas to 23 people and raids of seven homes last fall — has triggered a high-powered protest against the Department of Justice and, in the process, could create some political discomfort for President Obama with his union supporters as he gears up for his reelection campaign.
The apparent targets are concentrated in the Midwest, including Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.
Investigators, according to search warrants, documents and interviews, are examining possible “material support” for Colombian and Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. government as terrorists.
The apparent targets, all vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America, deny any ties to terrorism. They say the government, using its post-9/11 focus on terrorism as a pretext, is targeting them for their political views.
They are “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders,” said Michael Deutsch, a Chicago lawyer and part of a legal team defending those who believe they are being targeted by the investigation.”
This is an unusual investigation that does not primarily involve Islamists. Instead, it is focused on elements of the old international communist networks that many people mistakenly thought had faded away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those under investigation are suspected of providing support to foreign terrorist organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Middle East, a Marxist group. The Post called them “Colombian and Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. government as terrorists.”
The investigations came into public view last September when the FBI raided the homes of several “activists,” as the Post called them. Some lived in Chicago.
The Post suggested that investigations of labor union activists might jeopardize their support for Obama’s 2012 presidential run. Indeed, it could therefore threaten his re-election bid, if investigations determine that the activists did more than “cross paths” with the President.
Deep inside the article, in the 29th paragraph, we find out that some of the “activists” are associated with a group known as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Marxist-Leninist organization. Burke is a member of the FRSO, which the Post admitted was “far left.”
The obvious question is why Obama, as a state senator in Illinois, would ever have “crossed paths” with such people. The answer goes beyond just union support for the candidate. The “far-left” networks that include the FRSO, the Communist Party USA, the New American Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America backed and even spawned Obama’s political career. Don’t forget that Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a fundraiser for his first run for political office. The same networks also backed CIA Director Leon Panetta’s career when he was a congressman from Santa Cruz, California (where he had an association with Hugh DeLacy). This helps explain why Obama would pick Panetta, with no intelligence background, to run the intelligence agency. They are cut from the same cloth.
Nevertheless, on Tuesday, the Senate voted 100-0 in favor of Panetta’s
The accusations that DeLacy was a communist were well founded and are now generally acknowledged by party historians; "Other techniques of public-health education were employed by WCF leader and secret Party member Hugh DeLacy, who organized meetings around public-health issues while a member of the Seattle City Council. DeLacy was still contributing to the Communist Party USA's West Coast paper, People's World as late as 1967 [Source: Wikikey]
Obama and Panetta were players in the “progressive” community, which since the days of Henry Wallace, presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, has had a red tint. Obama had his own communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member under FBI investigation for 19 years, while Panetta gave DeLacy, who had traveled to China to meet with Soviet and Chinese intelligence agents, sensitive reports on U.S. military matters. Any notion that Panetta had no awareness of DeLacy’s Communist affiliation was obliterated when Panetta in 1983 inserted a tribute to DeLacy into the Congressional Record, praising his resistance to “McCarthyism.”
Once upon a time the FBI used to investigate candidates for federal employment by analyzing Character, Associates, Reputation, and Loyalty to the United States. The first letters in those words make up the acronym CARL. By the standard of “A”—Associates—Panetta flunks. But so does Obama.
Another sensitive case involves Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and wife of disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner. Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack have reported that Arab newspapers have revealed
It may also be the case that the FBI never investigated Abedin’s background.
As the FBI does not vet presidential candidates for national security purposes, we know there would have been no FBI investigation into Obama’s own background, associations, loyalty, and overall fitness for office. The FBI only probes those being considered for some federal positions under the president. They should have therefore investigated Panetta. But there is no indication that he was ever properly vetted. Now he is confirmed as Secretary of Defense because conservative Republican Senators were apparently afraid of being accused of McCarthyism for questioning his past associations.
On the other hand, the “progressives” are raising hell with Obama and want him to rein in the FBI. They want to further emasculate the agency charged with ferretting out subversives and terrorist support networks.
As the Post noted, “nine members of Congress have written letters to the administration” complaining about the FBI probe of Burke and other activists. The Post even noted that another one of the targets of the investigation, a union organizer named Tracy Molm, managed to arrange a meeting with Holder himself.
One of these congressional members is Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison, the foremost critic of Rep. Peter King’s hearings into radical Islam in America. “Shortly after the raids,” Ellison said, “I made inquiries to the FBI field office for more information. FBI Special Agent Boelter confirmed that an investigation was ongoing. He informed me that due to the pending nature of the investigation, he was prohibited from sharing any further information. However he gave me assurance that the purpose of the searches and service of subpoenas was not to punish or to suppress protected First Amendment activity.”
Pro-Marxist activist Medea Benjamin has said she managed to have a few words with Holder as well to complain about the probes. She is with the Code Pink group that travels to Gaza to meet with the terrorist group Hamas. She is also a staunch ally of Adam Kokesh, the “Russia Today” TV star who openly admits that he functions as a paid Russian agent of the Vladimir Putin regime.
Holder is receptive to this kind of appeal because of his friendship with Obama and record as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration for facilitating pardons and clemency for terrorists from the Puerto Rican FALN and Weather Underground. It is this record that puts the current investigations by the FBI in serious jeopardy.
The Post article has to be seen as a signal to Holder from those around Obama that he must act quickly to close down these investigations before they get too close for comfort to the Oval Office. First, however, he has to make sure that the congressional investigations don’t get too close to Holder himself. It won’t look good for the Attorney General to be personally implicated in knowledge of the federal gunrunning schemes (Fast and Furious) now under Congressional investigation that provided weapons to Mexican narco-terrorist cartels. The evidence already shows that federal authorities let guns fall into the hands of known criminals.
Amendment, June 21 at 1515 hours. Fox News reports that two men have just been arrested for planning attacks on military recruiting offices in the Seattle area:
“Two men have been arrested in a plot to use machine guns and grenades in an attack on a military recruiting station in Seattle that also houses a daycare, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday.
Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, also known as Joseph Anthony Davis, of Seattle, and Walli Mujahidh, also known as Frederick Domingue Jr., of Los Angeles, were arrested Wednesday night.
They were scheduled to make initial court appearances Thursday on terrorism and firearms charges.
The building, the Military Entrance Processing Station on East Marginal Way in Seattle, also houses a daycare. Recruits for all military branches are screened and processed there.
Agents became aware of the plot through someone the men tried to recruit as a participant and monitored the plot. The weapons the men purchased had been rendered inoperable, the government said.
Investigators said they have video and audio recordings of the men discussing their plans to attack the station.”
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