I
gave a speech yesterday morning at the National Press Club on the Muslim
Brotherhood and why we need to worry about our government’s growing coziness
with it. I spoke for almost an hour and then there was an extensive Q&A.
C-SPAN covered it, and you can watch here. (The text of my
speech is here --
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/08/09/our-government-and-the-muslim-brotherhood-my-speech-in-washington/)
Dana
Milbank, the leftist columnist of the Washington Post,
covered the event — though you can judge for yourself whether his account
of it in the paper today accurately reflects what I actually said. It would
take too long, and is not worth the time, to react all of Mr. Milbank’s
meanderings. I do want to address two contentions he makes, however:
1.
Ms.
Abedin is an inconsequential official being subjected to “guilt by
association.”
I
guess we’ve come a long way since John McCain first claimed that the concerns
about Huma Abedin’s ties to Islamists were “unspecified and unsubstantiated.”
Those concerns have now been so overwhelmingly proved that apologists have to
change tacks. So now the argument is, “Well, all right, there are many
connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, but Ms. Abedin is
a victim of ‘guilt by association.’” Mr. Milbank tries to make that fly
today.
Remember,
we are not talking about an indictment here. When people are being evaluated
for their suitability for appointment to high public office and access to
national-security information, the whole process is about associations
– that’s why, for example, the form
all candidates for security clearances have to fill out exactingly probes a
person’s background, relations and associations.
I don’t expect Milbank to agree with me on this point — although he certainly seemed to think
background and associations were pretty significant when Sam Alito was
nominated to the Supreme Court). Still, given that I specifically addressed
the charge in the speech, he might at least have given readers my take on the
“guilt by association” canard:
The
five members [of the House of Representatives who have asked for five
executive branch inspectors-general to investigate Muslim Brotherhood
influence at their agencies] have not made accusations of criminal
wrongdoing. The critics who say they are relying on “guilt by association”
are absurdly mixing apples and oranges.
Our
bedrock principle against “guilt by association” has to do with criminal
prosecutions — we won’t tolerate someone’s being convicted of a crime and
having his freedom taken away just because of who his friends are, or what
his associates have done. But “guilt by association” has nothing to do with fitness for
high public office. High public office is a privilege,
not a right. Access to classified information is a privilege, not a right.
You need not have done anything wrong to be deemed unfit for these
privileges.
It
is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about
whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you
would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests
of the United States. It is about whether the American people can have
confidence that you are likely to act in the public interest rather than out
of bias, favor, or intimidation. It is about whether there’s a reasonable
chance you could be compromised — not whether you have been
compromised.
In
making his guilt-by-association claim, Milbank mentions that he questioned me
yesterday (you can see it on the C-SPAN video), but he fails to note that I
did not accept two premises that he asserts as if they were fact rather than
his (implausible) opinion. The first is that Ms. Abedin is a person of no
substance as far as the State Department is concerned — he describes her as
Secretary Clinton’s “personal aide” whose job is “helping her boss with suits
and handbags and logistics.” That’s a pretty demeaning suggestion. Ms. Abedin
is actually the deputy chief of staff to the U.S. secretary of state; she is
a top adviser . . . and not just on handbags.
Milbank
also claims I conceded Ms. Abedin is not a policymaker. You can see for
yourself what I actually said. My concession was that the person ultimately
responsible for Obama-administration policy is President Obama, and that the
person who shapes and executes the president’s policy at the State Department
is Secretary Clinton. Neither of them, I acknowledged, needed Huma Abedin to
make them sympathetic to Islamists — they are their own people and have
extensive records. Nevertheless, I also argued that second- and third-tier
officials and advisers like Ms. Abedin “have very influential positions . . .
because they have a lot to say about how policy gets shaped and executed.”
That seems pretty elementary. Does Milbank really think that, say, Rahm
Emanuel had an inconsequential position in the White House because he was
just a top staffer and it’s the president who made all the policy — was
Emanuel just advising Obama on handbags?
2.
The
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs has nothing
to do with the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda.
Milbank
also belittles Ms. Abedin’s connection to Abdullah Omar Naseef, a major
Muslim Brotherhood figure and a financier of al-Qaeda, by claiming that the Journal of
Muslim Minority Affairs, which Naseef founded and
which Ms. Abedin worked at for twelve years, was an inconsequential sideshow
that focused on such issues as “The North African Heritage of the Hui
Chinese” and “Muslim Mudehar Women in Thirteenth Century Spain.” This is a
frivolous contention.
To
begin with, let’s say a Bush administration official had had a longstanding
business relationship with an al-Qaeda facilitator — and we won’t even get
into whether the business relationship occurred in the context of
longstanding, intimate relations between the the facilitator and the Bush
official’s family. Is there any way that Dana Milbank would be saying, “Hey,
wait a minute, let’s not make an issue of that. After all, the business
relationship seems to have nothing to do with the Islamist agenda.”
More
significantly, Naseef’s journal, of which Ms. Abedin was an assistant (and of
which one or the other of her parents has been chief editor since its
inception in the late Seventies), actually has a great deal to do with the
Islamist agenda. As I said in yesterday’s speech, the journal promotes the
fundamentalist version of sharia championed by the Muslim Brotherhood,
Naseef, and Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist.
Now,
does it publish essays like the two Milbank alludes to? Sure. When I was
investigating the Blind Sheikh, I learned that sometimes he was interpreting
sharia to exhort terrorism and other times he was explaining sharia’s
instruction on matters like diet and hygiene — the latter did not diminish
the former.
On
this score, after poring over many editions, Andrew Bostom has just written a
rumination
on the journal’s worldview. It is lengthy, but I’d recommend all of it.
Suffice it to say that, if we looked only at the last issue (April/May 2012)
of the journal, it features two essays that champion what Bostom accurately
describes as (a) “the global hegemonic aspirations of major 20th-century Muslim
Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, such as the eminent Muslim Brotherhood
theoretician, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), and Abul Hasan Nadwi”; and (b) “the more
expansive application of Sharia within Muslim minority communities residing
in the West, with the goal of replacing these non-Muslim governing systems as
advocated by contemporary Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, [Sheikh]
Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Tahir Jabir al-Alwani.” (I’ve written at NRO about
Alwani, here.)
Both
these essays are lavishly praised by Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, who is the
journal’s editor and Ms. Abedin’s mother. As Bostom demonstrates, they are
representative of the journal’s historic output and consistent with Dr.
Abedin’s oft-stated views.
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An attempt is made to share the truth regarding issues concerning Israel and her right to exist as a Jewish nation. This blog has expanded to present information about radical Islam and its potential impact upon Israel and the West. Yes, I do mix in a bit of opinion from time to time.
Friday, August 10, 2012
My Speech on the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘Guilt By Association’
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