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Slander, Blasphemy & Censorship

Willful Blindness: Senate Hearing on Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism

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BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | June 28, 2016

UPDATE:  5:37-42 PM.  Sen. Cruz:  Three closing observations.  One, the KKK is bigoted and evil and has no place in civilized society, but the idea that this could somehow be extended to the Christian faith is implausible as proven by Dr. King.  No faith has the right to murder anyone, and we should speak harshly against anyone who claims otherwise.

Two:  After hearing Mr. Haney’s testimony that some 867 documents were deleted as a result of a purge, it saddens me that none of my Democratic colleagues asked a single question about the purge.  Apparently, the Orwellian censorship of law enforcement and intelligence materials is not a concern to my colleagues.  The Senate has a long history of holding the executive responsible in spite of party.   We should express real concern about a censorship and editing of law enforcement materials.

Three:  Not a single one of my Democratic colleagues asked questions or expressed concerns about why the administration has failed to respond to red flags, and has failed to connect the dots.  Not a single question from the Democratic side of the aisle focused on why didn’t we successfully act to prevent these attacks.


UPDATE:  5:35 PM.  Sen. Coons:  These three hours have been wasted, but I would like to mention Donald Trump’s awfulness one more time.


UPDATE:  5:33 PM.  Mr. German:  FBI agents are not swayed by political correctness, will always look into credible charges.


UPDATE:  5:30 PM.  Sen. Coons:  Isn’t it the case that many things that look like ‘radicalization’ look exactly like ‘being a faithful Muslim’?  Ms. Khera:  “That is correct.”


UPDATE:  5:26 PM.  Both Mr. Cohen and Ms. Khera have called their conservative opponents “unAmerican” now for ideas about how to fight terror.  It is the only use of the word in a hearing devoted to terrorists who actually want to destroy the United States.


UPDATE:  5:16-20 PM.  Sen. Richard Blumenthal:  What objective evidence is there of ISIS inspiring attacks?  Mr. McCarthy:  We know the organization has called for jihad in the United States, but I would suggest that it is the ideology more than the organization that is doing the inspiring.  Dr. Jasser:  Just as you cannot deal with radicalism in Syria without dealing with Assad, we need a coherent domestic and foreign policy aligning American Muslims with the right side of the battle inside the House of Islam.


UPDATE:  5:13 PM.  Sen Cruz:  Is the literal erasing of “jihad” from the training materials linked to repeated failures to stop radical Islamic attacks?  Mr. McCarthy:  I think so, and it is generally reckless to ignore ideology in investigations.


UPDATE:  5:10 PM.  Sen Cruz:  “The only reasonable conclusion of this hearing is that this deliberate and willful blindness is costing American lives over and over again.”


UPDATE:  5:08 PM.  Sen Cruz reads the Orlando pledges of allegiance to ISIS into the record.  “The words that were omitted were ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdad’… ‘the Islamic State.'”


UPDATE:  5:05 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  We need to go after the root cause, and our Muslim reform movement is doing that.  We need to separate the faith of Islam from the political Islamism.  At the core of Islamism is the Islamic State.  We need to teach Muslims that it is preferable to die for America instead of the Islamic State.


UPDATE:  5:01 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  Here is a sharia manual from the 14th century that is endorsed by al-Azhar University and other leading figures.  It endorses jihad and violence against women and sexual minorities.  It states that Islam requires supplanting the US constitution with its own legal code, which is incompatible with sharia in many ways.  Some percentage of people who believe in this will become jihadists.  Some larger percentage will create safe spaces for their ideology to grow.


UPDATE:  5:00 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  Sharia-supremacism is really a political ideology, not a religion as we understand it in the West.  Also, these hearings have convinced me that we are really underestimating the size of the problem.

[Bruce Cornibe writes:] Islam is more than just a religion but also a political philosophy which advocates for the totalitarian ideology of Sharia law, a direct threat to our U.S. Constitution. Some of the conflicts between Sharia with U.S. and Western values include:

Equality under the law is not one of the principles of shariah. Discrimination against women is institutionalized, such that women’s voice and role in society is strictly curtailed.

Religious liberty is strictly curtailed, available only to a few named faiths and only if they submit to rulership by Muslims.

Freedom of conscience is lost, as no one may convert to the faith that seems right to them unless it is Islam, and then never can they change their minds. Their children will never have the right to return to the old faith, or to change faiths themselves. Members of other religions not named by shariah may be put to death.

Andrew C. McCarthy from National Review concisely sums up the responsibility of the U.S. government in regards to national security saying:

As a matter of law, it remains true that the first obligation of the federal government is national security, particularly protecting the lives of Americans and the homeland. It is also true that aliens outside the United States do not have a right to enter the United States, nor do they enjoy Bill of Rights protections under the Constitution.

It should come as no surprise then, that there is considerable legal and historical precedent for excluding from our country aliens who have exhibited an affinity for foreign enemies of the United States, hostility to the Constitution, and hostility to the government of the United States.

Moreover, it has historically been the goal of our immigration law and policies to promote assimilation and fidelity to American constitutional principles on the part of newly admitted aliens. To this day, aliens about to be naturalized as U.S. citizens are required to take an oath to defend the Constitution and renounce allegiance to any foreign sovereign.


UPDATE:  4:58 PM.  Ms. Khera:  Law enforcement should certainly investigate any mosque where there is evidence of crime.


UPDATE:  4:57 PM.  Sen. Graham:  The whole point of these hearings is to ask the question:  Have we gone too far the other way by refusing to ask these questions about radical Islam?


UPDATE:  4:56 PM.  Sen. Graham:  If I had to create a hero for these times, it would be an American Muslim who would take the fight overseas to these bastards.


UPDATE:  4:54 PM.  Sen Graham:  The guy who shot up Orlando went to the same mosque as the guy who did a suicide bombing in Syria.  What are the odds of that if the mosque isn’t a problem?


UPDATE:  4:49 PM.  Sen. Lindsey Graham:  Given that you agree that there is a debate in the Muslim community, Ms. Khera and Dr. Jasser, shouldn’t America side with the Muslims who agree with our values?  Most Muslims agree that “radical Islam is not for them.”


UPDATE:  4:45 PM.  Sen. Durbin:  Let’s ban guns for anyone on one of those watch lists that Mr. German was calling bloated and full of false-positives a few minutes ago.


UPDATE:  4:40 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  The things that Federal investigators are being told to ignore are the very things they would be asked to prove at trial.


UPDATE:  4:38 PM.  Mr. Haney:  Verbs like “slaughter” and “push away” are more frequent in the Koran even than “jihad.”


UPDATE:  4:35 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  “I think the biggest problem you have is the imputation of bigotry and bias to fact.”  It is simply a fact that there are calls to violence in the scripture, he continues.  It is possible to read the scripture in other ways, as Dr. Jasser does.  But “are we really going to put our head in the sand about whether they’re there?”


UPDATE:  4:32 PM.  Sen. Sessions:  What about going into mosques and asking if homosexuals can worship there, like they used to do with blacks in churches in the South?  Dr. Jasser:  There is a “bigotry of low expectations” that we don’t hold Muslims to the same standards as everyone else.  The President chose a mosque to visit that “is in the 13th century” when it comes to gay rights and women’s rights.


UPDATE:  4:30 PM.  Sen. Sessions:  The SPLC used to be about condemning radical groups like the Klan — just like these radical Islamic groups.  If they’re opposed to the American Constitutional order, shouldn’t they be challenged?

[Bruce Cornibe writes:] President Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist group which listed Dr. Ben Carson on its “extremist watch list” in 2014 because of his support on traditional marriage, wants to change the narrative from the danger of Islamic terrorism to the threat of far-right extremism. This is disingenuous at best. The New America Foundation’s drones database reveals that the number of deaths due to “violent jihadist attacks” compared to “far right wing attacks” since 9/11 is 94-48. If one adds the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the violent jihadist number goes up dramatically. Radical Islam is a completely different threat than white supremacism and has global networks and connections neo-Nazi sympathizers wish they had. The public needs to marginalize groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center who only seek to defame conservatives rather than reveal actual dangers to Americans.


UPDATE:  4:26 PM.  Mr. German:  Don’t forget that we invaded Somalia because Americans have always invaded other countries when its members felt like “becoming part of a big adventure,” and we have “treated that as a normal part of American life.”  Extremism is in response to that.


UPDATE:  4:24 PM.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar:  Our Somali Muslim community is wonderful, and is suffering from all this hateful rhetoric against Islam.  Also, we Democrats won Michele Bachmann’s seat thanks to support from the Muslim community.


UPDATE:  4:18 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  When you don’t treat the disease, and just treat symptoms, you are likely to kill the patient.

 


UPDATE:  4:16-17 PM.  Sen. Mike Lee:  Dr. Jasser, how plausible are the administration’s suggestion that things like poverty and lack of opportunity are behind Islamist terror attacks?  Dr. Jasser:  “When you point to the moon, the idiot looks at the finger.”


UPDATE:  4:13 PM.  Mr. German:  Terror watchlists lack due process and are riven with problems, as well as bloated and full of false alarms.


UPDATE:  4:11 PM.  Mr. German:  When I was working under cover in neo-Nazi groups, there were a lot of people who said a lot of things I didn’t like.  I had to focus on the handfuls of people who were violating the law rather than just being hateful. (So can we infiltrate radical Islamic groups, like Sen. Cruz suggests, to find these handfuls?)


UPDATE:  4:07 PM.  Mr. Jasser:  Notice that the Saudis also practice this “death cult” at home, through beheadings in the name of Islam.  We need to engage Muslim reformers over the problems with Islam.


UPDATE:  4:06 PM.  Ms. Khera:  My opponents on this panel are helping ISIS make propaganda.


UPDATE:  4:05 PM.  Sen. Coons:  I’d like to propose that we talk about how awful Donald Trump is.


UPDATE:  4:00 PM.  Sen. Cruz:  DO you agree with the legal director of your organization that there is “no such thing as radicalization in the Muslim community?”  Ms. Khera:  The real threat is “vulnerable individuals” who are “seeking a sense of purpose.”  Sen. Cruz:  “Again, do you agree?”  Ms. Khera:  “Ideology is not the center, or even part of the center of causation.”


UPDATE:  3:58 PM.  Ms. Khera:  Public officials should not describe this as a problem of “jihad” or “radical Islam” because it plays into ISIS’s propaganda game.  Also, it’s grossly inaccurate to suggest that terrorism is a form of jihad or radical Islam.


UPDATE:  3:56 PM.  Sen. Cruz:  Is it your position, Ms. Khera, that references to Islam such as in the 9/11 report are offensive?  Ms. Khera:  Not only are they offensive, they make us less safe.


UPDATE:  3:55 PM.  Mr.  Haney:  There is no such thing as a lone-wolf terrorist.


UPDATE:  3:53 PM.  Mr. Haney, responding to Sen. Cruz’s question:  Yes, I was ordered to purge references to radical Islam.


UPDATE:  3:51 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  In 1996 I received the nation’s highest counter-terror award for pointing out the connection between the ‘blind sheikh’s’ religious authority and terrorism.  Today, that would wreck your career.


UPDATE:  3:49 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  “A sensible national security policy cannot regard evidence as if it were hate speech.”


UPDATE:  3:48 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  The real issue for us today is “sharia supremacism” which is not really a religious but a political movement.


UPDATE:  3:47 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  There may not be a “true” Islam.  The various factions have been fighting for a thousand years.


UPDATE:  3:46 PM.  Mr. McCarthy:  How could ‘the blind sheikh,’ who was not just blind but largely incapable of physical effort, successfully command mass murder?  Answer:  his degree in Islamic scholarship from al-Azhar University gave him the authority to command murder.


UPDATE:  3:44 PM.  Mr. Andrew C. McCarthy:  I want to begin by remembering loyal American Muslims who helped us infiltrate radical groups after 9/11.


UPDATE:  3:43 PM.  Mr. German:  Ideas cannot be killed and ideologies cannot be destroyed, as proven by the fact that winning World War II does not mean that there aren’t neo-Nazis today.


UPDATE:  3:41 PM.  Mr. Michael German:  A lot of these radical Muslim groups are fighting each other, you know.


UPDATE:  3:36 PM.  Mr. Gaubatz:  The reason Islam-oriented terms were purged from training materials was that Muslim Brotherhood advocates were brought into the Obama administration’s counter-terror training process.


UPDATE:  3:34 PM.  Mr. Gaubatz:  “The Muslim Brotherhood agenda is no different from al Qaeda or ISIS.”


UPDATE:  3:32 PM.  Mr. Chris Gaubatz:  It was proven in Federal court that Hamas was an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that ISNA (The Islamic Society of North America) is a Muslim Brotherhood organization that financially supports Hamas.


UPDATE:  3:31 PM.  Mr. J. Richard Cohen:  Duke University study suggests that Muslim communities in America are so alienated that they are about to stop cooperating with law enforcement regarding terrorism.


UPDATE:  3:26 PM.  Mr. Haney:  Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America is engaged in an unconstitutional attempt to impose sharia law in the United States.


UPDATE:  3:24 PM.  Mr. Haney:  ‘By the way, take a look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s logo.’

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UPDATE:  3:24 PM.  Mr. Haney:  In September of 2012, the administration pulled over sixty records from the National Terrorism Center tied to both Orlando and San Bernardino’s terrorist attacks.


UPDATE:  3:22 PM.  Mr. Haney:  A number of people connected to the largest terrorism trial in American history were invited to join the administration’s Countering Violent Extremism task force.


UPDATE:  3:21 PM.  Mr. Philip Haney:  I was ordered to purge “820 plus” documents on the Muslim Brotherhood network from Federal security databases, and do no more research into the matter.


UPDATE:  3:18 PM.  Ms. Khera:  US military veterans went out of their way to be kind to this one Muslim child who was afraid they were coming after her, and that was heartwarming.


UPDATE:  3:16 PM.  Ms. Farhana Khera:  It is a dark moment when “candidates for President” (like Sen. Cruz) call for additional law enforcement patrols in Muslim neighborhoods, which make Muslim neighborhoods “less safe.”


UPDATE:  3:12 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  Stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups like the “subversive” CAIR.  Open investigation into their radical ties.


UPDATE:  3:11 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  In Orlando, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, security officials had every opportunity to stop attacks — but held off because they could not move on attachment to radical Islam alone.


UPDATE:  3:09 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  Our organization exists to “separate mosque and state” in the manner of American founders.


UPDATE:  3:07 PM.  Dr. Jasser:  “America was formed out of a debate against theocracy.”


UPDATE:  3:07 PM.  Dr. Zudhi Jasser states that he is a devout Muslim taking time away from his family during Ramadan because he considers the refusal to address radical Islam to be the top threat to peace and the nation.


UPDATE: 3:00 PM.  Sen Cruz:  Orlando killer told his co-workers he was aligned with al Qaeda.  No wonder al Qaeda is now telling its advocates to “avoid targeting places and crowds where minorities are generally found” to avoid giving the Federal government the opportunity to call it a “hate crime” instead of jihad.


UPDATE:  2:58 PM.  Sen Cruz points out that the only people “trying to make sense” of Orlando are those who refuse to acknowledge the fact that the terrorist proclaimed his allegiance to the Islamic State during calls to police — only the Obama administration edited that out.


UPDATE:  2:55 PM.  Sen. Coons asserts that the only reasons the Obama administration refused to show up and testify before the committee is that they were too busy “keeping America safe.”


UPDATE:  2:51 PM.  Sen. Christopher Coons reasserts the party line:  the Islamic State “is not Islamic.”


UPDATE 2:45 PM. In his opening remarks, Cruz reveals that key Obama administration counter-terror officials declined to attend today’s hearing.


UPDATE 1:50 PM. Live-stream of the hearing is available on CSPAN-3. Follow our #WillfulBlindness twitter list for the most comprehensive, minute-by-minute coverage, featuring our CounterJihad team.


Today at 2:30 Eastern, Senator Ted Cruz will lead Congressional hearings into the damage caused to national security by the Obama administration’s attempts to downplay the threat from radical Islam. The hearing seeks to get to the bottom of the Obama Administration’s attempt to cover up the threat posed by radical Islam to U.S. national security. President Obama and other government officials have effectively diverted attention away from the global jihadist movement and covered up key linkages in various terrorist attacks.

We have seen this strategy throughout Obama’s presidency: from labeling terrorist attacks like the Fort Hood shooting as workplace violence (finally called incident terrorist attack in 2015), to the Benghazi incident when former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others initially blamed the attack on an internet video, to the recent Orlando shooting where President Obama is shifting attention away from ISIS to gun control.

There is also a deliberate attempt to characterize individuals as “lone-wolf” terrorists to disconnect the individual from a broader terror network seeking to undermine U.S. security. Further attempts to disguise the real threat is evident in President Obama’s national security strategy “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) which National Review columnist Andrew C. McCarthy describes as an effort that “…forbids the conclusion that radical Islamic ideology has any causative effect on terrorist plotting.” Therefore, any terroristic activity executed in the name of Islam essentially has nothing to do with Islam. This handicaps our military, FBI, DHS and other federal authorities from going after individuals and groups who espouse radical Islamic ideology, which is a driver that leads individuals to commit violent terroristic acts. This also allows the penetration of Muslim immigrants who hold radical Islamic ideologies through U.S. immigration.

Worse yet, our federal government is taking advice from Muslim Brotherhood operatives like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who in the document An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group explains their strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America as leading a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated.” We can’t seek national security guidance from groups and individuals who want to subvert our government and the American way of life.

Senator Cruz’s office says that the panel will specifically focus on ways that the administration has sought to undermine its own investigators.

The hearing will examine the Obama administration’s refusal to attribute the terrorist threats we face with radical Islam, hobbling our ability to combat the enemy. The hearing will specifically investigate how the federal government has not only refused to appropriately identify the specific threat of radical Islam, but has sought to undermine the people and information who have sought to highlight the threat.

Speakers will include a number of former US investigators, including Andrew C. McCarthy, a former Federal prosecutor of radical Islamic terror cases, and Phil Haney, a former Homeland Security officer who has charged that his databases on the entry of radicals into the United States were destroyed by the Clinton State Department.  Michael German, also of the FBI.  Rounding out the panel will be speakers from groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Muslim Advocates, who will defend the proposition that Islam is being mistreated by those who wish to tie it to terror attacks such as San Bernardino or the Orlando shooting.

Here at CounterJihad we will have full coverage of these hearings.  Please join us for live coverage, and be sure to tune in to the hearings themselves on CSPAN-3.

Backgrounders

UN Resolution 16/18

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Obama administration have joined in endorsing a heckler’s veto on freedom of speech in violation of America’s most deeply-held political principles.

Slander in Islamic Law — What You’re Not Allowed to Say or Know

In sharia, the word translated as “slander” is the Arabic word ghiba. It means to say anything about someone that they do not like, even though it is true.

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