by Philip Haney
Informed, alert communities play a critical role in keeping our nation safe. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is committed to strengthening hometown security by creating partnerships with state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments and the private sector, as well as the communities they serve. These partners help us reach the public across the nation by aligning their messaging with the campaign’s messages and distributing outreach materials, including Public Service Announcements (PSA’s).29
In fact, the “See Something” campaign was doomed to failure from the start, simply because the “something” – the indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime – we were supposed to be looking for were never adequately explained, nor were any clear guidelines ever provided for what we were supposed to “say.”
GOING GLOBAL
While the “Great Purge” came about amid pressure from Muslim Brotherhood front groups, President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, Egypt, on June 4, 2009, was the inaugural public announcement that the United States was going to reset its relationship with the Muslim world.
Now, we were going to redefine the threat to exclude its originators. We would no longer publicly acknowledge that Islam has anything to do with the mayhem and violence seen around the world. Instead, we would have to find a new explanation for why things are happening. It wouldn’t be Islam. It would be lack of jobs, colonialism, anger at past policies, the Internet.
At the United Nations on March 24, 2011, non-binding Resolution 16/18 was adopted, titled “Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.” Point 5(f) calls for “adopting measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief.”30 This language is distressingly similar to the Pakistan Penal Code, which includes death penalties for a variety of draconian blasphemy charges, including any form of verbal defamation of Muhammad or the religion of Islam.31
On July 15, 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared at the inaugural Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance in Istanbul, Pakistan, where she welcomed the resolution:
I want to applaud the Organization of Islamic Conference and the European Union for helping pass Resolution 16/18 at the Human Rights Council. I was complimenting the secretary general on the OIC team in Geneva. I had a great team there as well. So many of you were part of that effort. And together we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression, and we are pursuing a new approach based on concrete steps to fight intolerance wherever it occurs. Under this resolution, the international community is taking a strong stand for freedom of expression and worship, and against discrimination and violence based upon religion or belief….
The Human Rights Council has given us a comprehensive framework [i.e., Resolution 16/18] for addressing this issue on the international level. But at the same time, we each have to work to do more to promote respect for religious differences in our own countries. In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance. We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.32
Five months later, on December 12, 2011, the State Department hosted a series of closed-door follow-up meetings to augment the inaugural “Istanbul Process” on Islamophobia, only this time the proceedings were held in Washington, DC.
According to Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, director of cultural affairs at the OIC general secretariat and spokesman for the OIC secretary general:
OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Mehmet İhsanoğlu launched a process, known as the Istanbul Process, in July 2011, together with the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, as well as with leaders of OIC and non-OIC member states, to build consensus on confronting Islamophobia.
Similar meetings were held later in Washington and London as part of the Istanbul Process, and now the US, UK, the African Union, the Arab League and the OIC are moving in a circle, subscribing the process and taking it forward to discuss the issue specifically. The OIC is going to hold the next event focusing squarely on the issue of criminalizing denigration and deciding on whatever actions need to be taken on the basis of Article 20 of the [December 16, 1966] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).33
Since countries within the OIC already have blasphemy laws in place, it appears that Clinton willingly submitted to the Istanbul Process, in partnership with the OIC, to implement measures in the West against speech or expression that negatively stereotypes Islam and Muslims.
The proceedings continue to this day. The Second Session of the Istanbul Process, which opened December 3, 2012, was hosted by the UK and Canada at the Canada House in London. The third was hosted by the OIC in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 21, 2013. The fourth took place March 24–25, 2014, in Doha, Qatar, and the fifth in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, June 3–4, 2015.
Meanwhile, on October 5, 2012, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights convened in Rabat, Morocco, and released a document titled “Rabat Plan of Action on the Prohibition of Advocacy of National, Racial or Religious Hatred that Constitutes Incitement to Discrimination, Hostility or Violence.” Known today as the Rabat Plan of Action, its recommendations included:
• Being alert to the danger of discrimination or negative stereotypes of individuals and groups being furthered by the media.
• Avoiding unnecessary references to race, religion, gender and other group characteristics that may promote intolerance.
• Raising awareness of the harm caused by discrimination and negative stereotyping….
At the same time, international human rights standards on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred still need to be integrated in domestic legislation and policies in many parts of the world.34
The Istanbul Process culminated a thirteen-year-long process that began in 1998, when the fifty-seven-member OIC won a majority approval in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as well as the UN General Assembly in New York, for annual resolutions on “combating defamation of religions.”
During the entire arduous process, critics continued voicing their concerns, warning that the defamation-of-religion concept was not only contrary to international law and free speech, but also left the way open for draconian, sharia-based blasphemy laws, such as those in Pakistan, which are frequently invoked to justify killing journalists and moderate politicians.
However, both the White House and the State Department disregarded these concerns, choosing instead to submit to the demands of the OIC to criminalize “Islamophobia” and defamation of religion.
It was the culmination of seven years of effort within the Obama administration to extend American-style civil rights and civil liberties to foreign nationals who do not have America’s best interests in mind, conducted in blatant disregard for the Constitution and the self-evident freedoms and liberties endowed by our Creator.
8
PRIMARY ACCESS
In the summer of 2012, five members of Congress wrote to the acting inspector general of DHS, raising the provocative claim that the Muslim Brotherhood was infiltrating Washington.
The Congress members – Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Trent Franks of Arizona, Thomas Rooney of Florida, and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia – were w
idely ridiculed by angry and indignant members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, as well as the establishment media and major Muslim Brotherhood front groups, such as CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
I had a front-row seat, because I knew the Congress members, with the exception of Rooney, and because I was an active-duty DHS CBP officer with a specialty in the subject that caused so much controversy.
It was an opportunity, similar to the Holy Land Foundation convictions, for our nation’s leaders to evaluate the effectiveness of our counterterrorism policies, and, in both cases, they failed to seize the moment.
On June 13, 2012, the five Congress members sent signed letters to the inspectors general of five major agencies, charging that Muslim leaders from groups intent on “destroying Western Civilization from within” were being invited into the highest chambers of power to shape and enforce national security policy.1
The recipients were Charles Edwards of the Department of Homeland Security, Lynne M. Halbrooks of the Department of Defense, Michael E. Horowitz of the Department of Justice, Harold W. Geisel of the State Department, and I. Charles McCullough III of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The lawmakers pointed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, as a possible Muslim Brotherhood influence on US policy. They asked the inspectors general at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State to investigate, prompting Democrats and Republicans to rush to Abedin’s defense.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank suggested the researchers and lawmakers who presented evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood ties of Abedin and her family were motivated by racism. He commented in a column that it’s “hard to escape the suspicion” that the charges have “something to do with the way she looks and how she worships.”2
Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, called the request for an investigation of Abedin and her family “sinister” and “nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American and a loyal public servant.”3
Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress, accused fellow Minnesota lawmaker Bachmann of failing to provide evidence to support what Muslim Brotherhood front groups were calling a “witch hunt” against Muslims in the US government.4
On July 19, 2012, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner denounced Bachmann’s accusations. “From everything that I do know of [Abedin], she has a sterling character and I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous,” Boehner told reporters during a briefing.5
CAIR joined the fray. On July 24, 2012, CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad sent a letter to Bachmann, saying, “We remain eternally grateful that, like Sen. Joseph McCarthy before you, your power is limited, enumerated and constrained by our nation’s constitution. Your letters challenging the loyalty of patriotic American Muslims based on discredited anti-Muslim conspiracy theories can only be described as devoid of a sense of decency.”6
Two days later, Bachmann was scolded by Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, who was described by Politico as “incredibly angry.”7
The Muslim Public Affairs Council held a press conference August 6, 2012, in front of the Republican National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, DC, calling on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to rebuke Bachmann.8
But did these five members of Congress have a reason to be concerned?
The Muslim Brotherhood’s internal Explanatory Memorandum, entered into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial, said its members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”9
Should we at least take them at their word and examine whether or not they might be trying to implement such a plan?
Regarding Abedin, she worked for an organization founded by her family, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), established in 1979 by a Saudi citizen named Abdullah Omar Naseef. In 1988, Naseef also founded the Rabita Trust, a known financier of al-Qaeda. About one month after the 9/11 attacks, the US Treasury Department identified Rabita Trust as a terrorist organization and froze its assets.
In 1996, Abedin joined IMMA’s editorial board, where she remained as an assistant editor until 2008. She also was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muslim Student Association.
The five Republican lawmakers were simply pointing out that security clearance guidelines for federal employees state that a “security risk may exist when an individual’s immediate family, including cohabitants and other persons to whom he or she may be bound by affection, influence, or obligation are not citizens of the United States or may be subject to duress.”10
The guidelines also express concern for any “association or sympathy with persons or organizations that advocate the overthrow of the United States Government, or any state or subdivision, by force or violence or by other unconstitutional means.”11
These few facts alone should be enough for any of our elected officials to be concerned. At the very least, they are entitled to straightforward, honest answers to their simple questions.
As an aside, all federal employees must go through a background clearance. Part of the process includes a very detailed set of questions about family background, travels to foreign countries, and business dealings with foreign nationals. Failure to disclose this information can disqualify an applicant from federal employment.
In 2009, the WND Books best-seller Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America featured an internal CAIR memo written in 2007 that called for infiltrating the “judiciary, intelligence and homeland security committees” by, among other things, “placing Muslim interns” in Capitol Hill offices. The book also uncovered new evidence that CAIR directly funded Hamas and al-Qaeda terrorist fronts.12
When the book was released, Rep. Sue Myrick, R-NC, cofounder of the bipartisan House Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, pointed out at a press conference in Washington that groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America “have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”13
Myrick also exposed the absence of a formal vetting process by Congress for screening radical Muslims invited to work, pray, or speak at the Capitol.
Al-Qaeda leader Awlaki, for example, participated in weekly prayer sessions at the Capitol after 9/11.14 He also was a lunch guest of military leaders at the Pentagon within months of his assisting the 9/11 hijackers.15
NO CONCERN
As the firestorm spread across Capitol Hill and into the media, with the Muslim Brotherhood groups cheering on the sidelines, imagine what it must have been like from the perspective of a federal law enforcement officer with subject matter expertise in the Muslim Brotherhood network in America.
During more than forty-five meetings with members of the House and Senate and their staff, I have provided information to many lawmakers, including Bachmann and Gohmert, who took their oaths of office very seriously and were willing to risk their careers by making an unpopular stand. Through the summer of 2012, I watched with amazement as they faced open, public criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal from their own colleagues, from misinformed media people, and from the cynical leaders of Muslim organizations with well-established ties to Islamic supremacist groups. It was painful watching leaders in Congress, such as John Boehner and John McCain, humiliate themselves in public, making one misguided pronouncement after another, but never actually addressing the concerns that were raised in the letters. I recall thinking, If I could just set them down in front of a computer terminal and show them how to access information in our
lawenforcement databases, it would take less than two minutes for them to confirm everything the five members of Congress were alleging.
For some, probably much less two minutes.
Watching the media circus on TV also made me wonder how I had managed to survive almost ten years inside one of the agencies that had received the lawmakers’ letter. If my own elected officials, with higher access to classified material than I have, couldn’t seem to tell their right hand from their left, then what chance did I have?
Nonetheless, I remained undeterred and vowed to continue seeking a way to alert my countrymen to the threat, within the structure provided by our constitutional republic.
A few months later, a prominent Egyptian weekly political magazine essentially affirmed the claims outlined in the letters, reporting that six American Muslim leaders with significant influence on US policy were Muslim Brotherhood operatives working inside the Obama administration.
Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef, in a December 22, 2012, article asked whether “these six characters” in the Obama administration had turned the White House “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world, to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”16
The Egyptian article was translated and reported by Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, which said that, while the story was largely unsourced, it was significant because it raised the issue to Egyptian readers, to the Muslim world in general, and to analysts in America.
The individuals named or suggested in the Rose El-Youssef article were Arif Alikhan (or Ali Khan), assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the US special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam Al-Marayati, cofounder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council; Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America; and Eboo Patel (Abu), a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.