Ruthie Blum
Excerpted from an interview of STEVE EMERSON, Executive Director, Investigative Project on Terrorism Steven Emerson’s delicate delivery belies the pungency and punch of his words. Whether this is the result of having heard it all and said it all in every possible forum is not clear. In fact, delving beneath the surface of radical Islamic activity only to discover additional layers with each dig, could just as easily have the opposite effect on one’s demeanor - particularly when the information being uncovered is pooh-poohed in some fashion or, when its disseminator is dismissed as alarmist at best, and anti-Muslim at worst. But Emerson — an investigative journalist turned NGO director - doesn’t appear to be perturbed on a personal level. It’s the public response to what he claims is a pernicious network of terrorist cells within the United States, fronted as humanitarian organizations, that gets to him.
“The US government, the media and the intelligentsia are witting and unwitting enablers of radical Islam,” says Emerson, a best-selling author, whose books include American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002) and Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (2006), and creator of the prize-winning documentary film Jihad in America (1994).
In Israel last month to speak at the seventh annual conference of the International Institute for Counter-terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Emerson, who founded and heads the Washington DC-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, gave The Jerusalem Post an overview of the situation he believes will only really be solved when Islam undergoes a genuine reformation.
In an hour-long interview at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv on the eve of the conference, Emerson, so, punctuated this sentiment by pointing to the Dolphinarium across the street — the site of the 2001 suicide bombing that left 21 people dead and more than 100 wounded. “What we’re looking at,” he says, poker-face intact, “is the marker of where ‘lesser jihad’ was carried out against young Israelis at a discotheque.”
... Blum: Here you are at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism and you have General Wesley Clark as the keynote speaker at the ICT conference. How do you feel about that?
Emerson: Clark is not someone for whom I have much respect, since he’s been championing the notion that we should be talking to Iran and Syria, effectively rewarding them for their terrorist activities. He has also spoken about being nicer to terrorists. In fact, in 2004, when he was running for president, he sent a tape of an address to a radical Muslim convention greeting participants as though they were members of the Rotary Club. Now, this was a combined group of Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America, both of which have long been affiliated with radical Islamic groups, and whose previous conventions have been full of invectives for the US and Israel, replete with calls for jihad. Had Clark cared to do any due diligence, he would have discovered the extremist ideologies of these groups. But either he didn’t bother to investigate, or he simply bought into the propaganda that these two groups were “moderate.”
Blum: How do you rate Israel’s response to terrorism?
Emerson: Israel responds in the same way most Westerners respond. If there’s blood in the streets, they respond. If there’s not, they don’t. That’s why Yasser Arafat was touted as a “man of peace,” when all he was was a terrorist thug. His legacy will be the introduction of the greatest amount of arms and explosives into the most concentrated territory in the world on both sides of Israel’s border. So, now Israel has three Lebanons.
This is not only Arafat’s legacy, but also that of the Israeli politicians and of former US president Bill Clinton, who brought them together, and whose advisers for seven long years deliberately averted themselves to the consistent and massive violations of the Oslo Accords by Arafat and his henchmen.
Blum: What about incumbent President George W. Bush — whose own legacy will include backing Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Egypt’s control of the Philadelphi corridor and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s being supported as a moderate?
Emerson: Indeed, Abbas is not capable of doing anything - not even tying his own shoelaces — let alone controlling any security force or representing anybody other than himself and his family. It’s a charade that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is propping up. That Bush has bought into the malarkey is partly a function of Israeli leaders’ blinding him to the cold reality.
Blum: Why would he allow himself to be blinded?
Emerson: He was getting hit over the head by the press and politicians who kept saying that he wasn’t “engaged” - a euphemism for putting pressure on Israel - propounded by the likes of [former US ambassador to Israel and current Brookings Institute fellow) Martin Indyk and [former Mideast envoy and current director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross. (Still the darlings of naive uninformed, “negligent” American Jewish establishment groups deliberately buying into the same nonsensical confrontational-avoiding lies – Jsk). This euphemism, “engaged” has re-surfaced as a result of Bush’s being besieged on Iraq. Needing a foreign policy victory that Rice said she could deliver, Bush went along with it. And, he lost control of his agencies.
... Blum: Has Bush, perhaps, relinquished his earlier convictions -those that dominated his speeches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?
Emerson: He goes back and forth - one minute denouncing “Islamo-fascism,” another saying that peaceful jihad has been hijacked by those who “pervert” Islam. What crockery! Jihad is jihad.
... Blum: Where does Iran come into all of this, and how do you explain the Bush administration’s talk of negotiating with President Mahmoud ?
Emerson: Iran plays a vicious role in world affairs, though it is not the spiritual center of jihad; that still resides in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, certain terrorist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, could not exist without the training and funding they receive from Iran. The reason the US suddenly decided to invite Iran to negotiate was repeated pressure from the anti-Israel types — i.e. the Council on Foreign Relations, so-called Middle East “analysts” and the media - who kept saying that no harm could come of talking to the Iranians.
Well, harm does come from talking. You wouldn’t have sat down in 1933 with the Nazis. Yet, that’s exactly what’s being done today. Iran is being given legitimacy by coming to the table - Which is exactly what Iran wants — not to reciprocate the gesture by any agreement on its part to lower the temperature - but to use the talks as a cover for continuing to carry out covert activities against the West.
... Blum: Where US policy vis-à-vis Iran and radical Islamic terrorism is concerned, will it make any difference whether a Democrat or a Republican wins the next presidential election?
Emerson: It might make a difference. In the debates so far, several of the Democratic candidates have been taking the military option off the table, whereas few Republicans have. .... The ultimate question is whether any president has the guts to do what is necessary. And, what is necessary is military action to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities. This doesn’t mean the massive carpet bombing of urban centers. It means the pinpointing and elimination of underground facilities, with the purpose of retarding the nuclear program. It’s an issue of buying time. But then, Israel’s whole existence has been one of buying time.
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