Stop Watching You? Why?

Robert Spencer

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The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced in a press release Monday that “on Saturday, October 26, CAIR will join thousands of civil rights activists participating in the ‘Stop Watching Us’ rally against mass surveillance at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.”

The ralliers will demand “that Congress provide transparency, accountability and reform of the NSA’s mass domestic surveillance that collects and stores the phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.”

Congress should indeed provide transparency, accountability and reform of the NSA’s mass domestic surveillance that collects and stores the phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States. There is no reason for the NSA to be conducting surveillance on such a massive basis; it is a symptom of the pervasive refusal to face the reality and magnitude of the jihad threat. Because the NSA cannot admit that there is a particular threat coming from people who would be likely to frequent mosques and Islamic centers, it has to conduct surveillance on virtually everyone.
However, the chief opponents of this effort have been Leftist and Islamic supremacist groups that have opposed every counter-terror measure that has ever been proposed, as well as libertarian groups that persist in the delusion that if American power is removed from Muslim countries, the jihad against the U.S. will cease. CAIR’s press release claims:

The rally is supported by the StopWatching.us coalition, a group of more than 100 public advocacy organizations and companies from across the political spectrum. Coalition members include the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Access, ACLU, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Code Pink, Demand Progress, EFF, Fight for the Future, Free Press, FreedomWorks, the Libertarian Party, Mozilla, Public Knowledge, reddit, Restore the Fourth, Students for Liberty, ThoughtWorks, and many more.
The Atlantic Wire has called the StopWatching.us coalition “perhaps the most diverse collection of groups in the modern history of American politics.”…

These groups, particularly ones like the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have considerable power and influence in Obama-era Washington, and are likely to be in a position to know whether or not this surveillance is proving to be effective in identifying and stopping jihad plots. That they oppose it is telling, since they’ve always opposed effective counter-terror measures.
Likewise, the pivotal role of Glenn Greenwald and other manifestly pro-jihad hard Leftist “journalists” brings out another aspect of this whole affair: CAIR, for which Greenwald is an eager stooge, not only wants the NSA surveillance ended, but is also campaigning against NYPD surveillance of mosques, and any and every program that impedes the steady advance of the jihad.
That doesn’t make me in favor of the NSA surveillance — but if free people manage to end it, it will have to be succeeded by realistic and legal law enforcement procedures to protect us from Islamic jihadists and supremacists. Nothing is much less likely, but it needs to be stated anyway in case sanity ever returns to the public discourse.
Right now, however, the Obama Administration has shown itself to be far more concerned with a chimerical terror threat from “right-wing extremists” than with the actual one from Islamic jihadists. In April 2013 “the U.S. Army listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism along with Al Qaeda and Hamas during a briefing with an Army Reserve unit based in Pennsylvania….The incident occurred during an Army Reserve Equal Opportunity training brief on extremism.”

The list was headed “Religious Extremism”; topping it was “Evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian),” followed by “Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt/Muslim)” and then “Ultra-Orthodox” (Israel/Judaism),” making for a politically correct trifecta of the three main monotheistic religions. Also on the list were “Al Quaeda [sic] (Transnational/Islam)’; “Hamas (Palestinian/Islamist)”; Abu Sayyah [sic] (Philippines/Islam)”; “Ku Klux Klan (U.S/Christian)”; and “Catholicism (U.S./Christian),” among others.

The list also included “Islamophobia” as a form of “religious extremism” – apparently based on the by-then mainstream assumption that those who opposed the global jihad and Islamic supremacism were Christian fanatics motivated only by some quest for religious one-upmanship.

The idea that there was any factor unifying these disparate groups was howlingly absurd, and the list would have been laughable if it had not come from the U.S. Army. Apparently this politically manipulative and ridiculous nonsense was what replaced the truthful information about Islam and jihad that had previously been found in counterterror training material.

The danger therefore is that this NSA surveillance will be used against patriotic Americans who oppose the regime, rather than against those who threaten the safety and security of Americans, and who are working at “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house” — in the words of a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document outlining its strategic goals for the United States.

That is why the NSA should be reined in, but not so as to allow jihadists a free hand. It should be replaced by sane and Constitutional, albeit politically incorrect, surveillance of the sources of the genuine threat. Of course, for that to happen, there would have to be a sea change in Washington, and a fundamental alteration in the outlook of both major parties. Nothing, however, is less likely to happen than that.