On Wednesday, John Brennan, US President Barack Obama's assistant
for homeland security and counterterrorism, made a quick trip to Israel
to discuss Hezbollah's massacre of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria
last week.
Hopefully it was an instructive
meeting for the senior US official, although his Israeli interlocutors
were undoubtedly dumbstruck by how difficult it was to communicate with
him. Unlike previous US counterterror officials, Brennan does not share
Israel's understanding of Middle Eastern terrorism.
Brennan's
outlook on this subject was revealed in a speech he gave two years ago
in Washington. In that talk, Brennan spoke dreamily about Hezbollah. As
he put it, "Hezbollah is a very interesting organization."
He
claimed it had evolved from a "purely terrorist organization" to a
militia and then into an organization with members in Lebanon's
parliament and serving in Lebanon's cabinet.
Brennan
continued, "There are certainly elements of Hezbollah that are truly a
concern for us what they're doing. And what we need to do is find ways
to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build
up the more moderate elements."
Perhaps in a
bid to build up those "moderate elements," in the same address, Brennan
referred to Israel's capital city Jerusalem as "al Quds," the name
preferred by Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords.
Brennan's
amazing characterization of Hezbollah's hostile takeover of the
Lebanese government as proof that the terrorist group was moderating was
of a piece with the Obama administration's view of Islamic jihadists
generally.
If there are "moderate elements," in
Hezbollah, from the perspective of the Obama administration,
Hezbollah's Sunni jihadist counterpart - the Muslim Brotherhood - is
downright friendly.
On February 10, 2011,
Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made this
position clear in testimony before the House Select Committee on
Intelligence. Clapper's testimony was given the day before then Egyptian
president and longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign from
office. Mubarak's coerced resignation owed largely to the Obama
administration's decision to end US support for his regime and openly
demand his immediate abdication of power. As Israel warned, Mubarak's
ouster paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood's ascendance to power in
Egypt.
In his testimony Clapper said, "The
term 'Muslim Brotherhood' is an umbrella term for a variety of
movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely
secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a
perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the
political order in Egypt, etc."
Watching
Clapper's testimony in Israel, the sense across the political spectrum,
shared by experts and casual observers alike was that the US had taken
leave of its senses.
The slogan of the Muslim
Brotherhood is "Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the
Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the path of Allah is our
highest hope."
How could such a high-level US official claim that such an organization is "largely secular"?
Every
day Muslim Brotherhood leaders call for the violent annihilation of
Israel. And those calls are often combined with calls for jihad against
the US. For instance, in a sermon from October 2010, Muslim Brotherhood
head Mohammed Badie called for jihad against the US.
As
he put it "Resistance [i.e. terrorism] is the only solution against the
Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and
Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it."
Badie
then promised his congregants that the death of America was nigh. In
his words, "A nation that does not champion moral and human values
cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has
had His say, as happened with [powerful] nations in the past. The US is
now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its
demise."
The obliviousness of Brennan and
Clapper to the essential nature of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood
are symptoms of the overarching ignorance informing the Obama
administration's approach to Middle Eastern realities.
Take, for instance, the Obama administration's policy confusion over Syria. This week The Washington Post
reported that the Obama administration lacks any real knowledge of the
nature of the opposition forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian regime.
Whereas one senior official told the paper, "We're identifying the key
leaders, and there are a lot of them. We are in touch with them and we
stay in touch," another official said that is not the case.
As
the latter official put it, "The folks that have been identified have
been identified through Turkey and Jordan. It is not because of who we
know. It's all through liaison."
The fact that
the US government is flying blind as Syria spins out of control is
rendered all the more egregious when you recognize that this was not
inevitable. America's ignorance is self-inflicted.
In
the 16 months that have passed since the Syrian civil war broke out,
the administration passed up several opportunities to develop its own
ties to the opposition and even to shape its agenda. Two examples
suffice to make this clear.
First, in October
2011, according to the Beirut-based Arabic news portal al Nashra, Dalia
Mogahed, Obama's adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of
Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon's Maronite Patriarch Bechara
Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at
the White House. According to al Nashra, Mogahed canceled the meeting
at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt.
The
White House canceled the meeting days after Rai visited with then
French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. During that meeting Rai
angered the French Foreign Ministry when he warned that it would be a
disaster for Syria's Christian minority, and for Christians throughout
the region, if the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is
overthrown. Rai based this claim on his assessment that Assad would be
replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Islamist regime.
And
nine months later it is obvious that he was right. With Syria's civil
war still raging throughout the country, the world media is rife with
reports about Syria's Christians fleeing their towns and villages en
masse as Islamists from the Syrian opposition target them with death,
extortion and kidnapping.
Then there are the
US's peculiar choices regarding the opposition figures it favors. Last
August, in a bid to gain familiarity with the Syrian opposition,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with opposition representatives
at the State Department. Herb London from the Hudson Institute reported
at the time that the group Clinton met with was dominated by the Muslim
Brotherhood. Members of the non-Islamist, pro-Western Syrian Democracy
Council composed of Syrian Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Druse, Assyrians
and non-Islamist Sunnis were not invited to the meeting.
Clinton
did reportedly agree to meet with representatives of the council
separately. But unlike the press carnival at her meeting with the Muslim
Brotherhood members, Clinton refused to publicize her meeting with the
non-Islamist opposition leaders. In so acting, she denied these would-be
US allies the ability to claim that they enjoyed the support of the US
government.
The question is why? Why is the
Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies?
Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere?
In
an attempt to get to the bottom of this, and perhaps to cause the
administration to rethink its policies, a group of US lawmakers, members
of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees led by Rep. Michele
Bachmann sent letters to the inspectors-general of the State, Homeland
Security, Defense, and Justice departments as well as to the
inspector-general of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. In those letters, Bachmann and her colleagues asked the
Inspectors General to investigate possible penetration of the US
government by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.
In
their letters, and in a subsequent explanatory letter to US Rep. Keith
Ellison from Rep. Bachmann, the lawmakers made clear that when they
spoke of governmental penetration, they were referring to the central
role that Muslim groups, identified by the US government in Federal
Court as Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, play in shaping the
Obama administration's perception of and policies towards the Muslim
Brotherhood and its allied movements in the US and throughout the world.
That
these front groups, including the unindicted terror funding
co-conspirators, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and
the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), play a key role in shaping
the Obama administration's agenda is beyond dispute. Senior
administration officials including Mogahed have close ties to these
groups. There is an ample body of evidence that suggests that the
administration's decision to side with the hostile Muslim Brotherhood
against its allies owes to a significant degree to the influence these
Muslim Brotherhood front groups and their operatives wield in the Obama
administration.
To take just one example, last
October the Obama administration agreed to purge training materials used
by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and eliminate all
materials that contained references to Islam that US Muslim groups
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood had claimed were offensive. The
administration has also fired counterterrorism trainers and lecturers
employed by US security agencies and defense academies that taught their
pupils about the doctrines of jihadist Islam. The administration also
appointed representatives of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned US Muslim groups
to oversee the approval of training materials about Islam for US
federal agencies.
For their efforts to warn
about, and perhaps cause the administration to abandon its reliance on
Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Bachmann and her colleagues have been
denounced as racists and McCarthyites.
These
attacks have not been carried out only by administration supporters.
Republican Senator John McCain denounced Bachmann from the floor of the
Senate. Republican Senator Marco Rubio later piled on attacking her for
her attempt to convince the administration to reconsider its policies.
Those policies again place the most radical members of the US Muslim
community in charge of the US government's policies toward the Muslim
Brotherhood and other jihadist movements.
It is
clear that the insidious notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a
moderate and friendly force has taken hold in US policy circles. And it
is apparent that US policymaking in the Middle East is increasingly
rooted in this false and dangerous assessment.
In
spearheading an initiative to investigate and change this state of
affairs, Bachmann and her colleagues should be congratulated, not
condemned. And their courageous efforts to ask the relevant questions
about the nature of Muslim Brotherhood influence over US policymakers
should be joined, not spurned by their colleagues in Washington, by the
media and by all concerned citizens in America and throughout the free
world.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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