Monday, April 21, 2008

U.S. Intelligence


Understanding Islamist Ideology is the Key to Winning the So-called War on Terror

By de Andréa

American outreach efforts with the Muslim world have been nothing short of a disaster, because we continue seeking partners among those who foster anti-American sentiment and who facilitate, rather than rebuke the agenda of Islamist ideology.

If the disturbing intelligence estimates are true, the threat from a reconstituted al Qaeda is at its highest point since 2001. While U.S. military, intelligence, and law enforcement actions have combined to thwart al Qaeda, its safe haven in Pakistan's remote tribal areas has allowed the terrorist band to regroup with a new generation of battle-tested leaders.

The war on terror
Al Qaeda's attention increasingly is drawn to Europe, which has been the victim of terrorist attacks planned in the tribal areas that transcend the Afghan-Pakistan border, and is a much closer and accessible target of these terrorists than is the United States. In the past year, frightening plots in Spain, Germany, and Denmark, have been thwarted.

Last fall, officials arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turkish immigrant who allegedly were plotting bombing attacks at Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt International Airport. The suspects who trained at an al Qaeda-affiliated camp in Pakistan, were found with enough explosives to make bombs bigger than those used in the London transit bombings and the 2003 attack in Madrid.

Danish police arrested eight suspects last September for allegedly planning a terrorist attack and storing unstable explosives in a densely populated residential area of Copenhagen. The suspects were targeting the Nørreport train station, Denmark's busiest, which serves 300,000 people each day.

None of this should make us complacent in the hope that al Qaeda has taken its sights off of America. A robust and successful counter-terrorist policy made up of intelligence gathered by the FBI, asset forfeitures, and designations by the Department of the Treasury, and other work by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies within the intelligence community have combined to keep us at least temporarily safe from another attack.

The war on Ideology
Al Qaeda and Hammas are clearly the most significant operational terrorist threats to this country, but they must be seen in the context of what drives them – a demonic extremist ideology with the agenda of world conquest and oppression. This was the agenda of Islam in the first millennium AD and is still the agenda of Islam today -- The biggest flaw in this nation's national security policy is that it is focused specifically on countering acts of terrorism and not countering Islam’s worldwide oppressive ideology that has spawned al Qaeda, Hamas, Wahhabism, Salafi, Mujahideen, Hezbollah, Islamic-Jihad, etcetera. While a few in government may even be cognizant of this much, there are still dangerous limitations to their basic comprehension of Islam.

Even the most Informed, fall just short of recognizing what Islam is and always has been, which is an all encompassing religious theocracy that is demonically driven to bring all the worlds people under the domination of Islam, and only then, according to the Quran there will be peace. This is where the deceptive religion of peace comes from, a world at peace under the control of the Islamic rule of Sharia law.

That is why I am critical of Karen Hughes, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. During her tenure, the U.S. government chose to embrace the very people who foment and foster terrorism and high levels of anti-American sentiment all over the world. Hughes and her staff held meetings with the very people who should be avoided and denounced for their public, anti-American and pro-terrorist stances; she embraced individuals and groups with long histories of support for terrorists and sought advice from individuals who are on record as being supportive and friendly with terrorists and terrorist causes.

This, and the following, exemplifies the benevolent nature of the western culture in its quest for good in the midst of all the bad, the continuous pursuit of a diamond in the rough, hoping against hope that there must be some Muslims that aren’t too Islamic.-- Muslims that do not subscribe to the conversion or murder of infidels, or the practice of Sharia law, or those bent on accomplishing the agenda dictated in the Quran of world domination and the ultimate goal of restoring the 12th Caliphate to rule the world. The sad truth here is that this description of the ideal western Muslim is a Muslim that exists only through Western Eyes. If such a Muslim were actually to exist, he would quite simply not be a Muslim. We are in fact chasing our tail here.

For example, the recent decision to appoint an American observer to the Organization on the Islamic Conference (OIC), a group with a history of support for terrorist organizations and the causes championed by terrorists, rather than denounce the OIC for what it is, is extremely dangerous. Under Karen Hughes, the State Department has met with leaders of various Muslim Brotherhood-front organizations in the United States, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), currently an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas fundraising case in Dallas. ISNA publications have consistently supported Hamas including top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook.

The State Department is hardly alone. The Department of Justice also has worked with ISNA, even as it labels ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in an ongoing Hamas-financing case in Dallas, and as evidence in that case shows ISNA is part of the Terrorist Egyptian based Muslim Brotherhood. The Department of Homeland Security had an information table at ISNA's fall convention, set up adjacent to the radical Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, which seeks to reestablish the 12th Caliphate of the Umma, (the leader of the World Nation of Islam)..

The Brotherhood should be seen as anything but a potential partner. It should be designated from a counterintelligence point-of-view as a foreign power, an enemy, and a threat to the national security of the United States. The Muslim Brotherhood has stated clearly that it considers the United States to be its enemy, despite the deceptive claims by some that there exists a moderate wing of the movement that somehow does not support the movement's core goals, agenda, and ideology of Islam.

The U.S. government’s quest and the State Departments in particular, to seek out moderates in the Arab and Muslim world is an exercise in futility. What we have done is simply embrace and promote those who claim to speak for all Muslims, but parrot the themes of anti-Americanism, victimology, and grievances that seek to place the blame for all the world's ills on U.S. foreign policy.

Organizations, individuals and institutions in the Muslim world are reflexively anti-American and pro-terrorist, or, at minimum, apologists for terrorism. They should be denounced and driven off of American soil. All organizations with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood need to be treated for what they are: fascistic, paternalistic organizations that seek to destroy the West and facilitate the return of the Caliphate.

Congress should require the lead agencies and departments in the so-called Global War on Terrorism (most notably the FBI, CIA, and DHS) to fully and formally educate all counterterrorism personnel in the proclaimed Islamist ideology of the Nation of Islam, and the global Islamist tyrannical movement. This ideology is easily accessible in the Quran and Islamic religious texts and treatises such as Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. This has not been instituted at any agency in the more than six years after 9/11, this is inexcusable.

Instead, U.S. actions have been counterproductive, empowering Islam at a time when it could have challenged its ideology and the terrorist groups that it has spawned. Contact with government agencies effectively anoints the groups as enablers of the Muslim-American community to introduce Sharia law, change the culture of a liberated and free America to be replaced by the oppressive theocracy of Islam. This policy, which continues to this day despite the criminal connections of many of these organizations, can only end in disaster for the interest of the United States both domestically and abroad.

When pondering this matter, it is important and instructive to consider the Danish cartoons controversy. With the exception of a handful of courageous news outlets, the American media refused to republish the cartoons, claiming that "respect for religious values" overrode the principle of free speech. For everyone else, free speech, the bedrock of western civilization, was suddenly thrown out the window at the first sign that many in the Muslim world were offended and retaliatory violence was possible. The U.S. State Department denounced the publication of the cartoons as "unacceptable speech," hate crimes if you will.

This censorship and intimidation continues each day in a disturbingly growing volume. Critics of Islamism and extremism who have written books, or as yours truly, spoken out, or published cartoons deemed "offensive" to Islam, have had their lives permanently changed – facing death threats and being forced underground or behind the protection of 24-hour security details. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian and a friend of Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch filmmaker murdered for producing a film deemed "offensive" to Islam) has been forced to live under 24-hour protection and in hiding in her homeland and in the United States where she stayed for a year. Geert Wilders, another Dutch parliamentarian, produced a short film called "Fitna" that included images of the Quran being burned and has called for the banning of the Quran. For this admittedly offensive to some, but protected, transgression, Mr. Wilders has had to live in hiding under around the clock protection. His film was blocked by various websites, although anti-Christian and anti-Semitic films can be seen on YouTube and thousands of other sites routed through servers in the United States and Europe.

Canadian writer Irshad Manji has received death threats for her criticism of Islamic terrorism and discussion of Islamic reformation. More recently, Syrian-born American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan has been forced into hiding after an appearance on Al Jazeera prompted a condemnation from Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Sultan generated ire by condemning violence tolerated and sanctioned by some Islamic scholars in debates on Al Jazeera. Qaradawi said Sultan "has insulted Islam.” Subsequently, an Arabic newspaper published an advertisement sponsored by a group called "The Messenger of Allah Unites Us."

Islamist grievances such as these are not valid. Other "grievances" include Israel's existence, the so called separation of church and state (which seems only to apply to Christians anyway), secularism, pluralism, the absence of Islamic hegemony, the classification of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups, and any perceived "insult" against Islam.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Unless we are prepared to accept severe restrictions on free speech, legitimize terrorist groups, allow the introduction of Islamic law in the U.S., prohibit any criticism of Islam, and propose the destruction of Israel, or basically give-up our freedom to the theocracy of Islamic ideology, nothing we do will ever satisfy the ‘grievances' of the Islamic believers. And unless we recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be decoupled from the larger Islamic threat, a counter-terrorist focus on al Qaeda or looking for a moderate Muslim in the Islam camp, it is only destined to fail…

de Andréa

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