The War Party's New Torchlight Parade

Contrived Controversy: Protesting the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

The most powerful patron of radical Islam is not Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. It is the government headquartered in Washington, D.C., which for more than a half-century has diligently cultivated Islamic terrorism. Yet millions of Americans are suffering what amounts to a collective loss of bladder control over the purported threat embodied in the proposed Cordoba House -- the Islamic equivalent of a YMCA -- in New York City.

Allowing the "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built, insists Newt Gingrich, would be tantamount to "surrender" in a struggle against those implacably committed to our destruction. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, a New York crony capitalist who anointed himself a paladin of the Tea Party movement, has made opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" the central plank of his campaign. Paladino, who has profited handsomely from government's redistribution of wealth, promises that if elected he will confiscate the property used for the Muslim Community Center through eminent domain and use the land to erect a war memorial.

Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy insists that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- the Kuwait-born U.S. citizen who leads the Cordoba Initiative -- is pursuing a "stealth jihad" as a fellow-traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Ground Zero project is a test of America's resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within," maintains McCarthy.

 

According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA) the problem isn't the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. Rather, it's the fact that the government ruling us permits the existence of mosques anywhere in the United States. 

Since "every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruiting center for jihad," Muslims "cannot claim First Amendment Protections," maintains Fischer (who, in addition to supporting case-specific abolition of the First Amendment, has previously called for the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee as well).

Rather than focusing exclusively on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the AFA and like-minded organizations have instigated a nation-wide campaign to protest construction of Muslim houses of worship in more than a half-dozen states. Like McCarthy, Fischer treats Imam Rauf as an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, which (according to Fischer) is "at the heart and center... the soul of Islam in America."

Here's a quick digest of the charges leveled by Fischer, which are typical of this manufactured controversy:

Islamic houses of worship serve as recruiting centers for soldiers of jihad, who will kill and die on behalf of Sharia Law. Many Islamic clerics, including Imam Feisal, are joined at the hip with the Muslim Brotherhood -- the most powerful element of the international Islamic terrorist network.

Jihadist at work? Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (right).

Stipulating that those concerns are genuine, and that the proper course of action would be to target the greatest offenders first, the campaign to shut down the global jihad should target the United States Government -- and the Republican-dominated Evangelical Churches that serve as military recruiting stations for the Regime in Washington.

During the past decade, a Middle Eastern nation of roughly 30,000,000 people once ruled by a secular government succumbed to Sharia Law. The predictable results of that catastrophe included a dramatic increase in religious violence, such as the persecution of professional women whose dress and conduct are now seen as unacceptable. More than half of the Christian population of that country -- which includes congregations tracing their roots back to the original disciples -- was driven into exile. 


That nation is Iraq, which suffered for decades under Washington's loathsome subcontractor Saddam Hussein before Saddam's employer decided to remove the middleman.

For a dozen years after the 1991 Gulf War -- which followed the Washington-instigated Iraqi assault on Kuwait, which itself was a sequel to the Washington-abetted Iraqi war with Iran -- the country was suffocated by a murderous embargo punctuated with the occasional terror-bombing. After being softened up for more than a decade, Iraq was invaded and occupied by U.S. troops who killed and died in order to install an Islamist government whose new constitution formally enshrines Sharia Law.

When American jingoists offer misty-eyed tributes to the soldiers who died in the course of "liberating" Iraq, it could be said that they are, in effect, praising the efforts of men and women who are martyrs to the cause of Sharia Law.  

This outcome is not an historical anomaly. For the past six decades, the Anglo-American elite (with Washington assuming the senior partner role after World War II) has assiduously promoted the most violent strains of revolutionary Islam, often -- but not exclusively -- as a strategic weapon in the context of the Cold War. 

Professional revolutionary: Afghani.

The Muslim Brotherhood -- which grew out of the late-19th Century agitation of Persian-born professional revolutionary Jamal Eddine al-Afghani -- has long been one of the Anglo-American elite's most important strategic assets, as well as the talent pool that was used to staff the deadliest terrorist network in the Muslim world.


While he was superficially the most devout and pious of Muslim believers, Al-Afghani, writes Robert Dreyfuss in his valuable book The Devil's Game, "a heterodox thinker who was a Freemason, a mystic, a political operative, and above all ... someone who believed in the `social utility of religion.'" 

After serving as a Russian agent in the 1860s, Afghani defected to the British. He was in London's employ when he made a disciple of an Egyptian Sugist named Mohammed Abduh. 


During the 1870s, Afghani and Abduh used Cairo's storied Al-Azhar mosque as a recruiting center for a revolutionary network, which gathered cadres from throughout the Middle East and Europe. Afghani also founded a lodge of his Arab Masonic society, which became the headquarters of what Egyptian police called "young Thugs" -- a description invoking India's notorious Thugee Cult, an oath-bound fraternity of murderers. 


When Afghani was eventually expelled from Egypt, his disciple Abduh remained, eventually rising to become the nation's Mufti (supreme interpreter of Islamic law) in 1899. Like his mentor, Abduh considered revolution to be his religion, and the Islamic faith to be a vessel for his political ambitions. Among those who fell under Abduh's influence was Hassan Al-Banna, the schoolteacher who gave tangible form to Abduh's revolutionary designs by founding the Ikhwan al-Mulimeen (Islamic Brotherhood) in 1928.

Disciple and organizer: Abduh.

Reflecting the influence of Afghani and Abduh, Banna organized the Brotherhood into cells (called "families") of five to seven members. 


The Brotherhood "was more than a movement," writes Dreyfuss. "It was a cult, it was a revivalist party, it was an intelligence operation, it was a paramilitary unit, and it was an international organization that was rapidly building branches in many Middle Eastern countries." During World War II, Dreyfuss continues, Brotherhood cadres were recruited by British, Nazi, and Soviet intelligence agencies. 



"In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands," writes Eliza Griswold in The New Republic, summarizing the findings in Ian Johnson's recent book A Mosque in Munich. "The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps; some Muslims became German soldiers, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists.... Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States."

Brotherhood founder al-Banna.

A CIA-created propaganda arm called Radio Liberty employed "many of these former Nazi sympathizers," Griswold points out. In 1953 -- the same year the CIA and MI6, working through a network of Islamic radicals, brought down the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh -- the White House hosted 27-year-old Said Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief international organizer in addition to being son-in-law to Hassan al-Banna's son-in-law, who had been assassinated in 1949.



In subsequent years, many adherents of the Brotherhood -- including former Nazi sympathizers who worked with the CIA -- affiliated with the Al-Quds Mosque in Munich. Among them was Mahmoud Abouhalima, a Brotherhood member who became a leader in the CIA-funded Afghan mujahadeen and later played a prominent role in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. 

Abouhalima, who spent the late 1980s networking with radicals among American Muslims, sponsored the 1990 visit of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in the 1993 WTC attack. Despite being on a State Department terrorist watch list, Sheik Omar was granted a visa at the U.S. consulate in Khartoum: As something other than coincidence had it, the CIA station chief personally attended to the matter by substituting for the consular official who was usually in charge of issuing visas. 

Ike and Ikhwan: Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan is at the far right, holding papers.

Like practically everyone else involved in the 1993 WTC plot, Omar had also been an asset of the U.S. Government.  The same is true of former U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Ali Mohammed, who -- according to investigators -- most likely "called the shots" in the bombing conspiracy. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- that fact, Mohammed went on to become a "privileged asset" of the FBI. 

In 2001, Mohammed pleaded guilty -- "in exchange for considerations" -- to charges arising from the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He then disappeared into the witness protection program, where he remains to this day. 


The extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood is (in Bryan Fischer's phrase) "the soul of Islam in America" reflects the tireless efforts of our rulers to nurture radical Islam as a strategic asset -- both for prosecuting war abroad and making war on us at home by terrorizing us into supporting its corrupt, needlessly bellicose foreign policy. 


In his eagerness to strip American citizens who profess the Muslim religion of their rights, Bryan Fischer offers an analogy to the recent arrest of the so-called Hutaree Militia in Michigan on charges of seditious conspiracy.  "The fact that they were a Christian militia did not stop them from being locked up,"Fischer told an interviewer. 


Had his research into the Hutaree case been more exhaustive than scanning headlines, Fischer may have discovered that the rapidly disintegrating case against that group was built entirely on the claims made by an informant-provocateur employed by the FBI. The same is true of practically every recent "terrorism" case involving American Muslims. 


If there is reason to be suspicious of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it would not be his sensible criticism of Washington's foreign policy; instead, it would be his willingness to cooperate with the FBI, which seems more interested in manufacturing "terrorist plots" than interdicting them.

Not having access to his unspoken plans and motives, I cannot say whether Imam Rauf is sincere or duplicitous in his efforts to encourage mutual respect and understanding among people of different faiths. However, I am impressed by the answer he gave in 2006 when asked what his "Ramadan wish" would be for the world:


"[I would wish that] we would remember that the two greatest commandments that God gave us through the mouths of his many prophets and messengers, including Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed  -- to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbors. It also means do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. If that can be the criterion of our foreign policy, I guarantee you that our foreign policy will be successful and wildly popular." 

As the treatment given to its Author demonstrates, preaching the Golden Rule will always provoke the murderous hostility of the ruling elite.  Apparently, the last thing many American Christians can abide is the spectacle of an American Muslim leader who -- whatever else he may be up to -- insists that we abide by the central moral tenet of the Christian faith. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

How the War will "Follow Us Home"

Every other rationale for continuing the occupation of Iraq having failed, supporters of the war have taken refuge in what they believe to be an invincible thought-stopper: Iraq differs from Vietnam, because this time the enemy will “follow us home.”

“After the war in Vietnam, we came home and the Vietnamese did not want to follow us,” stated Arizona Senator and presidential aspirant John McCain last Sunday. “Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Mullah Omar, they want to follow us home. Their next target is Saudi Arabia, and the next target is the United States of America."

Didn't the Islamists already hit those targets?

Of course they did.

Haven't we been told by the administration that on 9-11 the Middle East “came home to us”?

Indeed we have.

Like most defenders of the Iraq War, McCain was simply spitting out words to watch them splatter. He's intelligent enough to know that he was making absolutely no sense.

The same is true of Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who regurgitated the same line during a visit to Naples, Florida last Sunday. As one press account reported, Diaz-Balart told his audience: “The war in Iraq cannot be compared to the long-fought Vietnam War, [because the] Vietnamese weren’t inclined to follow Americans home nor to attack on U.S. Homeland....”

The ranks of the Bu'ushist right, however, are filled with people just as dishonest as McCain and Diaz-Balart. Some of them – free-range chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh – are smart enough to know that they're retailing a lie. Others are apparently too stupid to realize what they're doing. One useful example of the latter is neo-con slogan-slinger Frank Salvato, who offers this recitation of the Regime's official “follow us home” meme:

“In today's conflict we don't have the luxury of simply leaving and declaring victory. This time our enemy – radical Islamists who employ terrorism as their chief military tactic – want us all to convert to Islam, live under Sharia Law or die.... This time, the enemy won't be satisfied with our soldiers simply leaving the battlefield. This time the enemy is going to follow us home.”

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure the infinitesimally small odds that the Islamists could impose Sharia Law on the United States. A much more plausible domestic outgrowth of the Iraq war – unless we end the occupation immediately and begin to repair the damage it has done to our institutions here at home – would be an epidemic of urban terrorism here at home carried out not by savagely bearded foreign Muslims, but by disaffected veterans of the war who put to use the tactics they learned from the enemy in Iraq.

Military analyst William S. Lind refers to this as the “Boomerang Effect”:

“One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.”

It's worth recalling that the deadliest pre-9-11 terror attack within the US was carried out by a disaffected veteran of the first Gulf War, an Army tank operator named Timothy McVeigh.

Yes, there is intriguing evidence that McVeigh found allies among Islamist elements within the United States, including transplanted members of the Iraqi Republican Guard.

And yes, video footage has emerged suggesting that McVeigh was receiving training from the Army in explosives and demolitions subsequent to his reported discharge date; this would lend credence to at least some of the theories in which McVeigh was a “patsy” or provocateur.

All of this, if true, actually fortifies the point I'm making, since present conditions are quite similar to – and in some ways, worse than – those that led to the 1995 OKC bombing.

The longer we remain mired in Mesopotamia, the larger will be the population of proto-McVeighs among those consigned to occupation duty there. And not all of them would be drawn from among the White Supremacist demimonde.

John Allen Muhammad, the so-called Beltway Sniper, was a fellow Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam who took part in Louis Farrakhan's 1995 “Million Man March.”

Muhammad, in turn, was wired in to a domestic gang underworld that has become organically attached to the military.

As Stars and Stripes reported last December, street gangs of various flavors – including Chicago's Gangster Disciple Nation (which has helped broker federal subsidies to urban gangs across the nation, and whose leadership encourages members to enlist) – “have gained a foothold in the U.S. Military and are using overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe....”

Gangster Disciple graffiti can be found on armored vehicles, concrete barricades, and various buildings in Iraq. There are indications that the paramilitary Salvadoran MS-13 gang is actively recruiting among children of military personnel in Europe, and it's reasonable to believe that MS-13 and other Latino gangs could find adherents among non-citizen recruits eager to use military service to acquire citizenship.

In some form or another, the war will follow us home. That's one of the unavoidable consequences of waging demented wars of aggression. When the IEDs start going off in our inner cities, chances are we won't have the Mohammedans to blame.

A quick request:

Immigration reform activist Terry Graham has asked me to pass along an urgent appeal for my readers to call their Republican elected representatives and demand that they vote against Mel Martinez's nomination to be General Chairman of the Republican National Committee. That spurious post was created in 1983 to accommodate the appointment of former Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt, a good friend of Ronald Reagan. Martinez is similarly chummy with Bush the Younger, and shares the Bushling's enthusiasm to extend amnesty to illegal immigrants.