Obama campaign meets with Islamic Radicals

Hat Tip to Erick @ RedState

NBC News is reporting the Obama campaign in September had several meetings with "several controversial Muslim activists."

The meeting included Mahdi Bray, a supporter of Hezbollah and Hamas. "In a 2004 interview, he called the Israeli assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader an 'unlawful, cowardly and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism.'"

Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) attended.

Likewise,

Chicago-based lawyer Mazen Asbahi also attended the meeting. He is the Obama campaign’s former Muslim outreach coordinator, who abruptly resigned in August after the Wall Street Journal and websites that track fundamentalist Islam began questioning Asbahi’s involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups.

And here we were worried about Obama's ACORN ties.

Internet fuels emergence of violent Islamist groups in the United States

Internet fuels emergence of violent
Islamist groups in the United States

By Katherine McIntire Peterskpeters@govexec.com

The violent Islamist terrorist threat has evolved and expanded since al Qaeda planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and radicalization of disaffected Muslims and recent converts to Islam is increasingly occurring here in the United States. Yet the federal government has "no cohesive and comprehensive outreach and communications strategy in place to confront this thread." Those are among the findings of a new report by the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The report, "Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat," is the first in a series of reports to be issued jointly by the majority and minority staff and is notable for its bipartisan conclusions.

The report points out that both Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about the growing threat of "homegrown" extremists in February before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. According to McConnell, evidence suggested the radical and violent segment of the Muslim population in the West was growing, although the cells detected thus far in the United States have been less sophisticated than those in Europe or elsewhere overseas. Through Internet connections, however, these groups were bound to become more sophisticated and capable without having to travel overseas for training, he said.

The study examines al Qaeda's online media operation and identifies four highly sophisticated production centers that use cutting-edge technology to produce a range of products, including online magazines, official statements, news updates, white papers and even poetry.

Once content is created by one of the production centers, it is funneled to a clearinghouse before it is posted on the Internet. "One of the most active Internet clearinghouses today is the al-Fajr Media Center, which was established in January 2006. Like the production centers, al-Fajr is almost entirely virtual. The approval process for dissemination is unclear, but once approved, content is moved from al-Fajr to preapproved Web sites. On a daily basis, al-Fajr issues a host of material, including statements from violent Islamist groups taking credit for attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria and elsewhere," the report stated.

The clearinghouses perform two key functions: They ensure the authenticity of the message, which is essential to maintaining the movement's strict interpretation of Islam and its long-term goal to destroy the West; and they facilitate the near-instantaneous dissemination of new propaganda, according to the report.

"The propaganda regularly produced by this process finds its way to literally thousands of violent Islamist Web sites across the Internet, many of which are either 'mirrored' versions of one another, or 'simply bulletin boards' that disseminate the same material created by the production houses," the report said.

Charles Allen, chief intelligence officer and undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the Homeland Security Department, said in a May 6 speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that al Qaeda "has ratcheted up the speed and accuracy of translated statements openly marketed to U.S. and English-speaking audiences." Al Qaeda's objective, Allen said, "is to gain wide Muslim support, empathy, financing and future recruits."

The growing sophistication of al Qaeda's Internet campaign poses a serious threat and has the potential to erode the United States' cultural and community characteristics (especially the integration of Muslims into American society) that have thus far discouraged violent radicalization. Left unchallenged, al Qaeda's message espoused over the Internet will drive more individuals in the United States through the radicalization process and encourage them to conduct actual attacks, the Senate committee report noted.

Nonetheless, testimony the committee received showed that, "no federal agency has been tasked with developing or implementing a domestic communications strategy."

Perhaps the most significant outreach effort has come from Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which meets regularly with religious and ethnic community leaders in five major cities and tries to address the concerns of participants. Yet the effort is not part of a governmentwide outreach effort, nor does the office coordinate with the FBI, which has substantial contact with communities throughout the country via its 56 field offices. Neither the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office's program nor the FBI's own outreach program is designed to counter violent Islamist ideology.

"Efforts that rely on relatively uncoordinated outreach to American-Muslim communities and fragmented communications strategies must be improved. Indeed, the most credible voices in isolating and rejecting violent Islamist ideology are those of Muslim community leaders, religious leaders and other nongovernmental actors who must play a more visible and vocal role in discrediting and providing alternatives to violent Islamist ideology," the committee concluded.

Suicide by tolerance

Columnists

Suicide by tolerance
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, January 28, 2008

Walt Kelly, the cartoonist and satirist once had his famous character Pogo say, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

In the clash between the West and Islam, that is increasingly true. We are our own worst enemy.

Those of us who care about the survival of Western civilization occasionally rage about the way Muslim organizations feign outrage in the media at the tiniest slight. We grind out teeth when those organizations file human rights complaints against the writings of the likes of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. We warn against our governments permitting the implementation of shariah law and against the insidious teachings of radical imams at mosques and Islamic community centres on our own continent.

But really, could radical Islamists take over unless our elites let them?

True, the Alberta human rights complaint against Levant was brought by something called the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC), and the one against Steyn was initiated by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), both of which make it look as if Muslims are behind these attacks on our free speech.

Yet would either grievance have gone anywhere in the absence of government-sponsored, tax-supported agencies that encourage vocal advocacy groups to lodge formal complaints against their foes, and then pay their way?

Imagine the fleeting lives of such complaints in the absence of laws -- passed by liberal Western politicians, not professional Muslim cause-pleaders --granting them legitimacy?

The Syed Soharwardys (ISCC head) and Mohammad Elmasrys (CIC boss) of the world might rail on to a sympathetic reporter or two about the indignations the Levants and Steyns are causing their religion, but without the backing of modern Western governments and the politically correct functionaries who pull their levers, open their money spigots and crack their whips, such complainants would be trees falling in the forest with no one there to hear. For most readers, listeners and viewers the response would be turn the page, switch the station, flip the channel.

It wasn't the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIRCAN) that sent chief CIBC economist Jeff Rubin for Muslim sensitivity training three years ago after a bank financial report offended the particularly pugnacious, litigious Muslim organization. It was Rubin's fearful, PC bosses at CIBC.

Yes, CAIR-CAN, the CIC and the ISCC delight in taking full advantage of the official avenues open to them to criticize and intimidate their foes, but they didn't create those avenues and there is little they could do if our governments and politically correct corporations decided to close them tomorrow.

The best example of what I mean surfaced this week from the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency ( BECTA).

Shoo Fly publishers of Newcastle has produced a very innovative, interactive software version of the Three Little Pigs -- a 3D book designed to encourage young children to develop critical thinking abilities. It has won several awards, but was not approved by BECTA because "the use of pigs raises cultural issues." In particular, the company was told, "Judges would not recommend this product to the Muslim community," out of concern the pig images would be upsetting.

British papers were instantly filled with headlines such as "PC gone mad! Muslims devour Little Red Riding Hood."

But, of course, Muslims had done no such thing. Indeed, the Muslim Council of Britain told the Daily Telegraph, "We are not offended by that at all," and called on British schools to welcome the books.

I am not saying radical Muslims pose no threat to our way of life. Of course if fundamentalist Muslims had their way we would all become converts, or at the very least servile dhimmi living at the whim of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims who protested in the Western world two winters ago against the Danish cartoons of Muhammad were not driven by our own PC elites to take to the streets carrying signs with slogans such as "Death to those who dishonour the Prophet."

Still, their fundamentalist vision would go nowhere legally, culturally or politically without our governments, politicians, bureaucrats and experts bending over backwards to appear sensitive and reasonable.

Call it suicide by tolerance. The West-ern world with its institutions of democracy and the rule of law, with its advances in science and medicine, its progress in individual liberty, its historic devotion to reason and its developments in culture and the arts will disappear because its own elites could not be proud enough of its achievements to defend it from within.

lgunter@shaw.ca