With news yesterday of a foiled bomb plot that allegedly ties the Iranian government to an attempt to assassinate foreign diplomats in the U.S., Republicans are now calling for escalated actions against the Iranian regime. Many have focused their talking points on describing the alleged Iranian-backed [...]]]>
With news yesterday of a foiled bomb plot that allegedly ties the Iranian government to an attempt to assassinate foreign diplomats in the U.S., Republicans are now calling for escalated actions against the Iranian regime. Many have focused their talking points on describing the alleged Iranian-backed plot as a declaration of war on the U.S. Here’s a quick rundown:
FORMER REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R-MI)
Pete Hoekstra told the right-wing magazine Newsmax that the plot allegedly coordinated by Iran constituted “acts of war”:
REP. PETER KING (R-NY)
House Homeland Security Committee Chairperson King told CNN that he considered the plot an “act of war” and said “the Iranians have crossed a red line”:
[W]e should not be, I don’t think, automatically saying we’re not going to have a military action. I think everything should be kept on the table when you’re talking about a potential attack against the United States, an act of war.
SEN. MARK KIRK (R-IL)
Appearing on a Chicago talk radio show, Kirk boosted his recent legislative attempt to collapse the Iranian currency by going after the Iranian central bank. Though Kirk didn’t endorse “military action” by the U.S., he justified a new push to move his legislation forward by saying that the Iranian government has already declared war on the U.S.:
RADIO HOST: …You believe this to be true? This is an act of war?…
KIRK: …This is pretty in-your-face by the government of Iran, to be trying to put together bomb plots inside Washington, D.C. And it’ll be now time for the Obama administration to take action.
Watch King and listen to Kirk here:
The plot itself remains merely in indictment form, and, as many commentators have pointed out, we don’t know exactly what was going in this situation, and we do know that a bold move like this would be well out-of-character for Iran’s normally very professional intelligence agencies. Considering the high stakes of possible regional conflagration, perhaps it’s best to save all the “declaration of war” talk until the facts of the case and Iranian complicity are more clear.
]]>This morning, the neoconservative opinion page of the Wall Street Journal published a little-known former intelligence analyst making claims of a vast left-wing conspiracy in the U.S. intelligence community to cover up Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Fred Fleitz‘s analysis posits – in a style [...]]]>
This morning, the neoconservative opinion page of the Wall Street Journal published a little-known former intelligence analyst making claims of a vast left-wing conspiracy in the U.S. intelligence community to cover up Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Fred Fleitz‘s analysis posits – in a style more befitting Newsmax (where he now writes) or David Horowitz‘s conspiracy-riddled site than a major newspaper — that “liberal professors and scholars from liberal think tanks” gave biased (good) reviews of the still-classified 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) on Iran because — well, basically because they’re (supposedly) liberals. Fleitz concludes:
The accusations would be hilarious if they weren’t so serious. In essence, Fleitz is writing that the consensus of the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies — that Iran has still not made the decision to build a nuclear weapon — should be thrown out and everyone should listen to him.
But Fleitz’s own tenure in government was so plagued by scandal and deeply flawed and biased analysis that it raised hackles from experts worldwide. He espoused a worldview that considers anything insufficiently edgy or hawkish enough “wimpy.” Here are some of Fleitz’s greatest hits:
– Fleitz was also reportedly involved in the leaking of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the media in retaliation for her husband’s public questioning of the Bush administration’s assertions about Iraq’s WMDs. Fleitz worked in the same CIA office as Plame and reportedly passed her name to Bolton, who gave it to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby‘s aides.
– By 2006, Fleitz made his way to the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee as a staffer under then-GOP Chairman Pete Hoekstra. In August of that year, Fleitz authored a report about Iran’s nuclear program that was so overblown that it elicited a letter of complaint about “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated information” from the U.N. atomic watchdog.
Given his record of sloppy analysis, bullying, and close association with some of the Bush administration’s leading hawks, there is a special irony in Fleitz’s complaint in the Journal that the intelligence community is “affected by the wave of risk aversion that has afflicted U.S. intelligence analysis since the 2003 Iraq War.” Perhaps Fleitz was the perfect man to write an op-ed for a paper that’s already more or less called for war with Iran.
]]>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.
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