With those preliminaries aside, a few thoughts:

1) It’s become clear that Breivik’s political views were drawn in large part from the writings of “anti-jihad” writers in Europe and the U.S. I’ve written about many of these writers in the past — folks like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy — and it’s fair to say that I don’t have much sympathy for their views; I think they’re ignorant, bigoted, and frequently hysterical. But ignorance, bigotry, and hysteria are very different from the mass murder of innocent civilians. So while it’s perfectly legitimate to fault the Gellers and McCarthys of the world for fostering an atmosphere of apocalyptic alarmism about Islam, let’s be clear that none of them has ever legitimated or called for anything resembling Breivik’s actions.

2) But if the “anti-jihadists” are within their rights to object to being tarred with Breivik’s actions, one would nonetheless hope that the atrocity in Norway would prompt some degree of introspection on their part — some reflection on how it was that this person (however crazy or evil) took their work as justification for mass slaughter. Unfortunately, such introspection has been in short supply. Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy have typically glib responses, in which they breezily deny that there might be any connection between Breivik’s politics and their own.

Their arguments are unconvincing and in places downright silly. Can Steyn actually believe, for instance, that just because Breivik’s victims were white Christians the entire Islamophobia angle on the killings is therefore simply a distraction? As even a cursory skimming of Breivik’s writings will show, Breivik’s main criticism of the European ruling elite is that they are too decadent, relativist, and multiculturalist to stop the threat from Muslim immigrants. (They’re “supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe,” he writes at the beginning of his manifesto.) Perhaps this might ring a bell for Steyn, since he’s written a book arguing precisely the same thesis. (It’s also striking how many of the keywords — “lack of cultural self-confidence,” “national suicide” — are the same.) Insofar as we can perceive a motive for Breivik’s attack, it appears to be that the mass slaughter of the future Norwegian political elite would be a shock that would force Europe to awake to the Muslim threat.

3) As always, the double standards involved in the treatment of Muslim and non-Muslim terrorists are highly revealing. Molly Ziegler Hemingway, for instance, attacks the media for labeling Breivik a “Christian extremist.” He may be both a Christian and an extremist, Hemingway suggests, but there’s little evidence that his Christianity was a central cause of his rampage — he’s more of an extremist-who-happens-to-be-Christian. This is a fair point, but it’s striking that such logic virtually never gets applied to Muslim militants — “radical Islam” is trotted out as an all-purpose explanation regardless of the militant’s specific beliefs and grievances. (Witness the Fort Hood shooting, where the right was eager to downplay all of Nidal Hasan’s concrete political grievances and to focus on his religion as the sole and sufficient cause of his rampage.)

Similarly, it’s been revealing to see so many of the “anti-jihadists” draw a strict differentiation between violent and non-violent forms of politics, and suggest that even if Breivik shares many of their political goals, his use of violence utterly differentiates him from them. Again, this may be a fair point — but it’s precisely the distinction that they frequently deny when it comes to Muslims. Andy McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad, for instance, argues at great length that the threat from Muslim violence is largely a red herring, that the more insidious threat is from religious Muslims pursuing their goals peacefully through the political process, and that these peaceful Muslims (or “peaceful” Muslims, to adopt his gratuitous use of scare quotes) should essentially be viewed as no different from the terrorists. Of course, applying the same logic to the anti-jihadists would suggest that there’s little distinction between a McCarthy on the one hand and a Breivik on the other. If McCarthy and his compatriots don’t like this conclusion (which I myself don’t share) then perhaps they should reevaluate the premises that led them to their Islamophobic alarmism.

As it happens, I agree with the Corner-ites’ opposition to Graham’s proposal, if not their hysteria about the ongoing Islamization of the West. But it’s worth looking a little more closely at the logic of Graham’s proposal. Graham and his close ally John McCain have frequently tried to cast themselves as a “vital center” on issues of torture and civil liberties, but in fact they have proved themselves to be reliably right-wing on these issues; in particular, Graham has been a vocal opponent of civilian trials for terror suspects and of accountability for Bush-era officials involved in the torture of detainees. His belief that the First Amendment might have to be sacrificed in the name of the war on terror is not some out-of-character lapse of cultural confidence; rather, it’s of a piece with his generally stated view that fighting terror should take precedence over civil liberties at home.

Steyn and McCarthy profess to be shocked — shocked! — that the Bill of Rights might be abridged for American citizens as a result of what’s going on “over there.” But in fact, Graham’s proposal is rather mild compared to the views of, say, John Yoo, who suggested in a notorious October 2001 memo [PDF] that the President during wartime can override the Fourth Amendment — and by implication, the entirety of the Bill of Rights — at will, provided he deems it necessary for the war effort. (Graham at least seemed to be proposing that the First Amendment should be restricted through legislation rather than presidential fiat.) Of course, Yoo’s analysis has since been repudiated by the Justice Department, and he was later reprimanded by an internal Justice Department report investigating his conduct during the Bush years. But since leaving the Bush administration he’s been welcomed with open arms by the American right — not least, National Review, which has brought him on board as a contributor along with Steyn, McCarthy, and Stuttaford. If Steyn and McCarthy, at least, have expressed any misgivings about Yoo’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. (Stuttaford is more reliably libertarian.)

Like much of the American right, Steyn and McCarthy seem to have no objection to rescinding the constitutional rights of American citizens provided it only happens to “them” (brown people with funny names) and not to “us” (nice, patriotic white people). They might want to consider, however, whether this is really a tenable line — or whether, as Graham’s proposal suggests, the slope is more slippery than they would allow.

Emerson’s investigations into Muslim radicalism in the U.S. have made him a darling of hardline critics of Islam like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Andy McCarthy, despite critics’ charges that he peddles an overly alarmist line that verges on Islamophobia. (Emerson achieved some notoriety in 1995 for suggesting, in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, that the attack was the work of Muslim radicals.) It will be interesting to see whether these apparent improprieties cause Emerson’s admirers to back away from him.

But new evidence suggests that this was precisely the intention of at least some of the authors of the report. Alex Kane at Mondoweiss has more background on David Yerushalmi, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) general counsel who was one of the authors of the report and who was featured at Wednesday’s press conference in the Capitol marking its launch. (Richard Silverstein and Charles Johnson have previously looked into Yerushalmi’s unsavory record.)

What does Yerushalmi believe? Let’s take a closer look.

On Muslims:
– “It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”
–”The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.”
–”The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.”
–”No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.”
(From the website of Yerushalmi’s group, SANE. Yerushalmi has since made all its content password-protected, but these statements are available here.)

On African-Americans:
–”There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”
(Yerushalmi has since tried to scrub the article in which this statement appeared from the public record, but Charles Johnson provides a link to it.)

On Jews:
–”The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society. I will ignore the Leftist version of the Jewish problem… But the Jewish problem for conservatives is a different and quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate.”
–”Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all ‘progressives:’ a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a ‘historical’ march to the World State…”
–”…one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.”
(Once again Yerushalmi has attempted to remove all record of these statements from the Internet, but they have been preserved here.)

It strikes me that Pete Hoekstra et al may have some explaining to do as to why they’ve gotten in bed with this character.

The central problem with the report is that the authors identify “sharia” with the most literalistic and brutal versions of sharia, and therefore fail to understand what the term might actually mean to the bulk of Muslims worldwide. (When Matt Duss asked Gaffney at Wednesday’s press conference to name any Muslims scholars or theologians who had been consulted in the writing of the report, Gaffney was unable to produce any names.) As a result their prescriptions would amount in practice to a criminalization of virtually any form of Islam.

Here are some of their policy recommendations (p. 143 of the report):

“…extend bands currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah.”

“Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.”

“Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.”

“Immigrations of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.”

I am not a scholar of Islam, but any competent one will tell you that sharia is a far broader term than the “Team B” authors seem to think it is – it basically refers to Islamic religious precepts in general, to the point of being virtually synonymous with Islamic religious practice. As a result any practicing Muslim, no matter how moderate or extreme, will consider himself or herself to be “sharia-compliant” according to their own understanding of what sharia requires. This does not, of course, mean that they will endorse the brutal hudud penalties that have become the most notorious symbols of sharia to non-Muslims, that they will seek to impose these precepts on others, or that they will seek to make them the law of the land. But to demand that a practicing Muslim to renounce sharia is tantamount to demanding that they renounce Islam itself.

This is precisely what the report’s recommendations demand, whether or not it’s what the authors intend. Any Muslim who “espouses” or “adheres to” sharia – that is, any practicing Muslim – will thereby be banned from government or military service, prohibited from immigrating to the country, and even opened to prosecution for sedition. The only Muslims immune from this witch-hunt are those “who are willing publicly to denounce shariah” – a surefire recipe for the creation of conversos and crypto-Muslims, but hardly one consistent with the First Amendment.

We might be charitable to the “Team B” authors and argue that they’re simply ignorant: not understanding what sharia actually means, they have identified it with its most extreme manifestations, and therefore wrongly believe that by asking Muslims to renounce sharia they are simply asking them to renounce radical Islam. A less charitable explanation would be that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are seeking to outlaw Islam itself.

Fortunately, this particular incident did not end in violence. One has to wonder what would have happened, however, if the man — rather than explaining that he was not a Muslim — had described himself as a Muslim and a proud one at that. The way that the crowd rapidly turns on a random passerby, presumably egged on by descriptions of sharia-promoting Muslims out to erect a “victory monument” at Ground Zero, is a sign of the ugly mood that those of us disturbed about the mosque controversy have been warning about. Let’s hope that it does not take an actual tragedy for those responsible for the most unhinged Islamophobic rhetoric to see where it is leading and get control of themselves.

In the wake of the backlash, Cheney’s defenders seem to have decided to drop their original allegations that the DOJ lawyers were active al-Qaeda sympathizers (the clear upshot of the ad’s question “whose values do they share?”) and instead portray the controversy as a mere transparency issue. It’s not that they are accusing the DOJ lawyers of being a pro-Qaeda fifth column, the Keep America Safe crowd now tells us, but simply that they think the public has a right to know that backgrounds of all government officials.

If Keep America Safe was hoping to moderate its image, however, Andy McCarthy didn’t get the memo. The former prosecutor and frequent National Review Online contributor (also a fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies) weighed in on Saturday, writing that “I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist”. He later softens the accusation slightly, suggesting that “the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists.” On the contrary, I would think that the question of whether the U.S. Department of Justice is “pro-Qaeda” is in fact highly relevant.

This is, of course, not the first time that McCarthy has wandered off the reservation. As National Review has attempted in recent months to impose some semblance of intellectual standards, and purge the outright nutters and conspiracy theorists from the “respectable” right, McCarthy’s colleagues have frequently been forced to scold him publicly for indulging in tropes from the lunatic fringe. (I’ve recounted some of McCarthy’s exploits here and here.)

In October 2008, at the height of the presidential campaign, McCarthy penned the all-time classic “Did Obama Write “Dreams from My Father” … Or Did Ayers?,” which suggested that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers may have been the real author of Obama’s first book. This forced fellow NRO contributor Jonathan Adler to remark that McCarthy’s accusations were “outlandish” and “nutter-territory stuff”. In June 2009, in the wake of Iran’s post-election crisis, McCarthy suggested that Obama was intentionally siding with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad against the protesters, because “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” He speculated that Obama’s first choice would have been to “issue a statement supportive of the mullahs,” but because this was politically impossible he settled for “the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.” This prompted National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to step in and tersely dismiss McCarthy’s allegations.

The kicker came in July 2009, after National Review published an editorial attempting to squelch the “birther” phenomenon once and for all. While the editors were likely hoping to increase their respectability by silencing the far right (just as magazine founder Bill Buckley famously expelled the John Birch Society from the mainstream conservative movement), McCarthy quickly put to rest any hopes that the birthers would go quietly into the night. McCarthy responded with a long critique of the editorial. As I wrote in July:

While conceding the craziness of the allegation that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was a fake, McCarthy raised a host of new allegations against the president. These include, in no particular order: that Obama was secretly adopted by his mother’s second husband; that he was a secret Muslim in his youth (although McCarthy concedes that he is now a “professed” Christian); that he was (and remains) an Indonesian citizen; that he made a “mysterious” trip to Pakistan in his youth; that he intervened in the 2006 Kenyan election in an attempt to install “a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law”; finally, that his pitching abilities mark him as “something less than Sandy Koufax.”

This time, it was NRO contributor Kevin Williamson’s turn to step in and try to talk sense into McCarthy; he accused McCarthy of making common cause with “kooks…[who] engage in intemperate, paranoid, hysterical speculation, and not always from the best of motives.”

Somehow, I doubt if McCarthy’s latest intervention is going to do much to help Keep America Safe’s sagging fortunes. The real questions: when will the right stop treating him as its go-to guy for stories related to detainee policy, and when will mainstream media outlets like the New York Times stop treating him as a credible source? The Times ran a lengthy profile of McCarthy in February which contained no mention of its the man’s history of nutty statements — a history that makes clear that he is, to be perfectly blunt, a crank.