On Monday, CAIR’s daily “American Muslim News Briefs” mailing contained no fewer than three shots at King:

Rep. King Turns Dispute with Mosque into Personal Vendetta

King Hearing Witness: ‘We Are at War with Islam’

Video: GOP Rep. Bashes Islam, First Muslim in Congress

You might get the idea from this that King’s hearings are actually going to do some good. After all, if the Hamas group CAIR is angry, King must be doing something right. Yet last week I called King’s hearings a “show trial” after King told Politico that he was “not planning to call as witnesses such Muslim community critics as the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer.” I wrote that “for King not to avail himself of Emerson’s knowledge and Spencer’s scholarship is an astounding case of willful blindness.” Even worse, King (R-NY) said he was going to call Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN).

I support increasing awareness of the jihadist threat in our midst. Who more than I? But when Politico reported that King, who is the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, plans to take “testimony primarily from Muslims” during his upcoming hearings, I thought, why? The media considers it its mission to take its spin primarily from Muslims. The cultural elites are constantly haranguing us with the Islamic supremacist narrative of calling any candor or criticism of jihad “Islamophobia.”

Islamophobia amounts to the enforcement of blasphemy (sharia) laws. In Muslims countries the punishment for “blasphemy” is death. In the West, the punishment of “blasphemy” (candor aboutIslam) is character assassination. News is edited, rearranged, and altered to deliberately omit the motive behind attacks on nations and non-Muslims, whether it’s Russia, Egypt, Lebanon, Thailand, Nigeria, Somalia, India, Pakistan…or Fort Hood, Texas.

What we need is sunlight, not more obfuscation.

Do we really expect Muslims to stand up in front of Allah and America and rat out their brothers, knowing what we know about the ummah and what the Qur’an commands? If the West can’t stand up to Islamic supremacism, can Muslims? They live in Muslim communities. Their life and their families would be under death threat almost immediately after they testified.

So why is Hamas-tied CAIR so upset? Is CAIR going after King in spite of his capitulation? No. They are going after him because he conceded.

The Islamic supremacists sense King’s weakness. They see that he is anxious to accommodate them and to avoid bad publicity, despite his earlier statement that he didn’t care about being called a bigot if that was the price of exposing jihad activity in America. And so they are going in for the kill. This is what they do. We see this over and over again in Islamic history. It is an Islamic pattern: they treat every concession as surrender in installments. The record of the “Palestinian” peace talks with Israel is a primary case in point. The accommodation of Muslims in Europe, leading those Muslims to grow more aggressive and demanding every day, is another example. Appease jihad and they go for the jugular.

Representative Ellison and other Muslim Brotherhood proxies will make a dog-and-pony show out of King’s hearings — much the way the 9/11 civilian trials that Obama wanted to hold in New York City would have been a propaganda bonanza for the Islamic supremacists. They are brilliant at this game. Nobody obfuscates better. They have been waging this war in the information battle space for 1,400 years. They have perfected it.

And we haven’t even realized that a war is being fought on that front at all

Steven Emerson (who later apologized to King) and Robert Spencer (who didn’t), both of whom King named as not going to testify, criticized King for his choices of witnesses in these hearings. That will ease the pressure on King as well: if he is getting criticism from both sides, it plays well for him in the mainstream media.  I do not believe that that was his strategy, but that is the law of unintended consequences. It makes him look “moderate.”

And Emerson’s apology, as well as the dhimmi sheeplike approval of his hearings coming from other conservatives despite the Muslim Brotherhood presence, shows that the right will always have his back no matter how stupid and counterproductive his hearings are shaping up to be. Yet the time to speak out about King’s witness list is now, before the hearings, not later: if the point was not made up front, it would have done little good to point it out afterwards. If conservatives speak out after the hearings, the media meme will be, “You see, the GOP had their hearings, we proved them racists, and now these Islamophobes are whining about witnesses.” The defects in King’s witness list had to be pointed out up front, because it is a fatal mistake.

I am still perplexed as to why King would throw them under the bus publicly before the hearings even began. Why smear our very best people, the leaders of the counter jihad movement? That is so…CAIR.

Some anti-jihadists are holding out hope for another set of hearings after King’s Muslim Brotherhood show. I highly doubt that will happen — not after this. Opportunity only knocks once. And on this issue, less often than that.

So why doesn’t King call Emerson and Spencer, as well as other voices for freedom like Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan? Because they’re “extreme,” as CAIR says? I do not consider the defense of freedom “extreme.”

The speed of our surrender is nothing short of astounding.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of Infidel, a deeply personal account of her disillusionment with and rejection of her Muslim upbringing, as well as her latest book Nomad, which chronicles her continuing journey. She also collaborated with late film director Theo Van Gogh on the short documentary film Submission, the release of which resulted in the brutal assassination of Van Gogh by a homegrown Dutch Islamic jihadist and ultimately drove her from the Netherlands because of her inability to find adequate security there. She continues to be an outspoken critic of the subjugation and mistreatment of women under fundamentalist Islam, and the AHA Foundation which she founded aims to combat “several types of crimes against women, including female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor violence, and honor killings.” These would seem to be fairly non-controversial goals, especially in a pro-feminist Western society, but they received a rather chilly response that night from the tolerant progressives of Santa Monica.

During the interview portion of the evening, I was struck by how quiet the room was. Statements made by Ms. Ali that in most cities in middle America would have received applause were met with a respectful but stony silence. When the floor was opened for questions from the seemingly stunned audience, one after another of Santa Monica’s finest political thinkers rose unsteadily from their chairs to ask a question that might allow them to hold onto their deeply-held and carefully nuanced progressive beliefs in the face of someone who must have seemed to them to be an untouchable figure, a woman born in Somalia who left Islam and became an atheist, as well as an unrelenting critic of the injustice and violence that is routinely taught in the Muslim world.

In response to a lady who asked passionately if it was not true that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had created more terrorists than they had thwarted, Ms. Ali calmly replied that the jihadists of course used these wars as propaganda for recruitment, just as they would use any situation for recruitment, since they are in the business of destroying free societies and bringing them under submission to shari’a law, and that no matter what the West did, the jihadists would recruit and terrorize.

One very confused and shaken white-haired gentleman could barely form a question, stammering that he had “great respect” for her but disagreed with almost everything she said. As he rambled on, many of his colleagues began to call at him “What’s your question?” and “No speeches, ask a question!” He finally concluded with a semi-coherent plea along the lines of, “Well, how do we deal with these extremists?”

Ali replied that once you have decided to “deal” with the jihadists, you have legitimized their demands of submission, and that you cannot “deal” with fanatics who wish to destroy your nice free society with bike paths and reusable shopping bags and replace it with a totalitarian theocracy. She went on to object to the vague use of the term “extremists,” asking “Extremists of what?” If we were talking about white supremacists, or radical Marxists or Communists or any other “-ists” that used terrorism and violence to bring about their goals, we would not hesitate to identify the ideas behind their philosophy that drove them to such ends. Why should we hesitate to confront the fact that these particular killers are driven by their fanatical religious beliefs?

She deftly fielded a question about the “perversion” of Islam by fanatics by proclaiming that she was more concerned about the perversion of the word “liberalism,” because of the willingness of many Western liberals to accept and excuse some of the most heinous criminal acts committed by practitioners of the Muslim faith, like arranged marriages, spousal abuse, subjugation of women by force, denial of education to females, and female genital mutilation in the name of multiculturalism and a so-called “respect” for other civilizations. American liberals, she said, appear to be more uncomfortable condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. This led her into a repudiation of multiculturalism, and how, despite some honorable intentions in its origins, it had mutated into a belief system that actually denies access to the freedom and justice guaranteed by the American Constitution by allowing injustice to continue within protected minority communities by not encouraging them to assimilate and become full Americans.

In response to a question about how long America should stay in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said it was her hope that the Americans would stay for 50 or 100 years, if that is how long it took to modernize those societies, even while acknowledging that there did not seem to be the political will for such an effort to be sustained.

The best question of the evening came from a young man who simply asked what would be the best way to bring about an “Enlightenment” in the Muslim world. She replied that the best way would be to ask them questions about their religion and cause “cognitive dissonance” among those who blindly follow the violent exhortations of their imams. I actually laughed out loud when she used those words, as the cognitive dissonance occurring at that moment in the Track 16 gallery was practically audible. I could swear I heard the word “What?!?” thudding over and over again in the formerly comfortable brains of those around me.

The only applause of the night (!) signaled the end of the evening, and as I lined up to have my book signed by Ms. Ali, I was struck by how short the line was. Out of the 150 to 200 people I guessed were in attendance, only about 25 or so lined up to greet this remarkable individual. As I made my way down the line, I passed pockets of fervent discussion, and caught fragments here and there. I overheard one rather agitated gentleman say, “I just think there are problems in this country that she just doesn’t understand! I mean, what’s the difference between a fanatical mass-murdering Taliban regime and a mass-murdering evangelical Christian in the White House, which this country voted in for eight years?!?”

In Nomad, Hirsi Ali states unequivocally that Christianity and Islam are definitely not equivalent, if for no other reason than Christianity’s willingness to tolerate questioning and even blasphemy without issuing death sentences, and actually calls for a “strategic alliance” between secular people –atheists like herself, Richard Dawkins, and others –and Christians in order to combat the oppression inherent in an unenlightened, unreconstructed Islam (Nomad, pp. 240-241). If this man had asked Ms. Ali his ridiculous question, she could have answered it handily. So why didn’t he? Why was he huddled in the farthest corner of the room spewing his nonsense to his nodding compatriots? What about Ayaan Hirsi Ali had flummoxed him and his fellow travellers into circles of insular outrage?

Well, she was black, so they could not dismiss her as a racist; she had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands and the United States, so they could not call her an ignorant provincial hick; she was an avowed atheist, so they could not call her a Christian bigot on a crusade against peaceful Islam; and she was multi-lingual, articulate, and brilliant, so they couldn’t just call her stupid. All the pejoratives they usually apply to people who disagree with them wouldn’t work, and so they were left to confront her ideas, and those ideas stripped them naked, rent their garments of superiority and condescension into tatters at their feet, and left them angry and confused, whining to each other in the corners of the room, unable to say anything to her face. Their favorite weapons, ad hominem name-calling and sneering condescension, were disarmed.

Ms. Ali, flanked by 3 or 4 pleasant-looking but serious suits, a private Secret Service force necessary to protect her from the religion of peace, signed my book as I stammered out an inadequate “Thank you so much for your courage.” She smiled and said, “Thank you very much.”

Not a very scintillating exchange I know, but as I left the gallery that evening, I realized that the real crux of the matter, and the truly paralyzing aspect for the liberals around me, was simply that — her courage. To the Hollywood community, a community that did not even have the courage to list Theo Van Gogh during the 2005 Oscar ceremony as one of the people in film who had died that year, a woman willing to continue espousing her deep convictions after being threatened with death by the same people who had murdered her colleague was utterly confounding. And for someone like me, a person who writes from behind a mask, not even for fear of death but of the economic retribution I might face from the supposedly tolerant community in which I live and work, the evening I spent in a room with Ayaan Hirsi Ali was all the more humbling.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Hollywood coward

Author’s Note: This article includes three images that clearly denigrate Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. So there is absolutely no question about the provenance of these images, I would like to direct all readers to Wikipedia’s authoritative write-up on the matter. These images were included in a dossier that aggrieved imams living in Denmark took with them to the Middle East specifically to stoke outrage at a dozen cartoons published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The images include an amateurish doodle identifying Mohammed as a pedophile, a dog humping a prostrate praying Muslim (with the caption, “This is why Muslim pray five times a day”), and a photocopy of a French comedian in a pig-squealing contest (with the phony caption, “Here is the real image of Mohammed”). It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism. The images below may indeed give offense, not just to Muslims but also to people of all faiths and even atheists. If they do, remember who created and distributed

******

The deadline for submitting work to Reason’s Everybody Draw Mohammed contest has passed; winners will be announced at Reason.com on Thursday, May 20.

All that remains is anticipation, both of the artwork that will be displayed and the possible threats of violence that will likely follow. Or should that be “the likely threats of possible violence”?

Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it’s worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (via con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.

Who can blame her? People have been killed for representing Mohammed in ways that displeased Islamic terrorists. People have been punched and kicked and forced into hiding. No wonder, then, that Norris, like Galileo in front of a Catholic tribunal, apologized to ”everyone of the Muslim faith who has or will be offended” by her drawing (visible at the right). This conditionally unconditional language is the language of the forced penitent, of the prisoner in a totalitarian world, of the sad sack on the Catherine Wheel who will say anything, will confess anything to get off the rack. We all understand exactly why such language is being used: The threat of violence.

Attacking iconoclasts (meant here in its literal meaning) has been a constant throughout human history. It’s one of the great dividing lines, like laughter and face-to-face copulation, that separates man from beast. Indeed, I’m betting it was a fundamental element of even pre-human history. Can we doubt seriously that some gang of Neanderthals didn’t crush the skulls of others who decorated cave walls in “offensive” ways? In the 20th and 21st centuries alone, all sorts of human expression have led to brutality and murder. The ground of Europe and Asia and all the continents with the (possible) exception of Antarctica is fertilized with the blood and bones of martyrs who have done nothing more than make tangible their thoughts in words, music, and pictures. Yet even in a country like ours that threatens consenting adults for making dirty movies with effective life sentences, or in European countries where speech codes imprison malefactors for “hate speech,” there is a massive gulf between “mere” censorship and death threats, between the answering of “bad” speech not with more speech but with the blade, the bullet, or the bomb.

There comes a point in any society’s existence where it must ultimately, to paraphrase Martin Luther (who himself was more than happy to see opponents put to death), dig in its heels and say here we stand, we will do no other. We don’t need to be perfectly consistent philosophically or historically or theologically to assert what is special and unique not just about the United States, with its bizarre and wonderful articulation of the First Amendment, but the greater classical liberal project comprising not just the “West” (whatever that is) but human beings in whatever town, country, or planet they inhabit. And at the heart of the liberal project is ultimately a recognition that individuals, for no other reason than that they exist, have rights to continue to exist. Embedded in all that is the right to expression. No one has a right to an audience or even to a sympathetic hearing, much less an engaged audience. But no one should be beaten or killed or imprisoned simply for speaking their mind or praying to one god as opposed to the other or none at all or getting on with the small business of living their life in peaceful fashion. If we cannot or will not defend that principle with a full throat, then we deserve to choke on whatever jihadists of all stripes can force down our throats.

This is not about U.S. foreign policy, or trade policy, or aid to Israel or Egypt, or the creation of a Palestinian homeland. This is about the right to have the conversations that might inform all that and more. We live in a time of paradox: Never before have so many been so empowered to speak their own minds, to produce and consume whatever form of expression when they want, where they want. The impact on those seeking to regulate and control thought is as predictable as it is depressing and, ultimately, ineffective: Whether they are governments or corporations or religious or ideological groups, they want to stamp out the ability of people to say and think for themselves.

Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It’s a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. It’s a rebuttal to the notion that we should go limp in the clinches precisely because bullies and bastards can punch or blow us up. It’s a rebuttal to the mentality evinced in the recent interview between liberal intellectual Paul Berman and Joel Whitney in the May 2010 issue of Guernica, where the sound you hear in the background is the sound of the interviewer pissing his pants:

Guernica: In the short term, don’t we want to avoid triggering something like that [the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist terrorist] with incendiary language? Isn’t it mere prudence?

Paul Berman: [Scriptwriter and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali] didn’t trigger it. They triggered it. What she did and what she continues to do is to go to those people and people who might sympathize with them, and rebuke them. The whole meaning of her career is to say, “There’s a serious problem. I’m gonna deal with it by speaking to it directly. And I’m not gonna mince my words, I’m gonna make an argument.” I think this is great. Some of the arguments that she makes are not my arguments, some of them I would disagree with; my impression is that if I were Dutch I’d be in the Labor Party. I wouldn’t have moved to the other party. And so it’s not that I’m following everything that Ayaan Hirsi Ali says. But I follow the main thing. I follow that totally. The main thing is [that] she is saying to people, “I, Hirsi Ali, am thinking for myself and I want you to think for yourself.” And the way to think for yourself is not to revere authority, the way is not necessarily to guard your tongue. The way is to speak your mind.

Guernica: So to put scriptures on a naked woman’s body in her film was not incendiary or reckless, in your reading, it was merely direct.

Paul Berman: That film is not even one millimeter a violent film. And the purpose of the film is to make the viewer recognize that violence against women is being committed by fanatics in the name of Islam. This should be opposed. And she’s done a brilliant job of opposing that. As a politician, she brought to the Dutch Parliament the issue of honor killings. She proposed to Parliament that the police make records of honor killings, which is the first thing the police department had to do to recognize and solve the problem. She brought about a significant reform. And I’m guessing that quite a few women are alive today as a result of this reform.

Guernica: So she’s not only not responsible for Van Gogh’s death, but she’s saved uncounted lives.

Like Berman, I don’t agree with everything Hirsi Ali says (read this remarkable interview she gave Reason, in which our interlocutor teases out more than a little contradiction within her own views). For starters, I reject emphatically what might be called a fundamentalist atheism, which always and everywhere fingers religion and religiosity as the motive force in all that is bad with human beings and human history. To me, that sort of comprehensive reaction is no different than Islamists or Christians or whomever sees the Jews or the Masons or whatever as the villain in every passion play. But Berman is right, not just about the film Submission, which is as incendiary as an After School Special about recycling programs, but the larger idea that we should apologize for triggering violence in serial killers. Why not blame J.D. Salinger for the shooting of John Lennon by a deranged reader of The Catcher in The Rye?

Our Draw Mohammed contest is, hopefully, an exercise in truth-telling. It’s not about revelation, of course, of divinely inspired Truth with a capital “T.” It’s an existential thing, a participatory thing, a living thing. And it’s not something that I expect those inclined to violence in the face of free expression to understand.

Nor do I expect them to realize they are part of the problem they hope to bludgeon into submission. Consider this tremendous irony. For all the discussion about whether it is forbidden to figure Mohammed in visual form (an art form that has a long and glorious Islamic history), three of the most gratuitously insulting images of the Prophet ever disseminated were not created by devil-horned Jews or American women wearing pantsuits or even Danish or U.S. cartoonists. No, they are the work by imams residing in Denmark who went on an outrage tour of the Middle East after Jyllands-Posten published its dozen cartoons in the fall of 2005. Some sources suggest that it is precisely these three fake images, on display in this very blog post as a public service and testament to free speech, that ignited the furor that lit the fuse that ultimately begat Draw Mohammed Day.

Which is worth keeping in mind come May 20 and every day after. Because the cause of free expression, just like the misguided, pathetic, and ultimately-doomed-to-fail attempts to shut it down, is a long, hard slog that begins again every day the sun rises.

Terrorist Faisal Shahzad had substantial connections to the Taliban, reached out to the Taliban, was influenced by Yemeni terror leader Anwar al Awlaki, made at least a dozen return trips to Pakistan since arriving in the United States in 1999, and he bought a one way ticket with cash to Pakistan.

Now we find out that he was “blogging” and asking for jihad as far back as 2006 but that the Obama Administration took him off the terror watch list anyway.

Terror expert Walid Phares weighed in on the confessed Times Square bomber today in an interview on FOX News:

To be clear, Shahzad was actually commenting on terrorist websites and not actually blogging.

Earlier this week it was discovered that Shahzad was posting on terror websites since 2006.

FOX News reported:

FoxNews.com has uncovered several dozens of postings by a man named Faisal Shahzad on radical Islamist Salafist websites devoted to a variety of different jihadist sects.

Experts suspect this is the same Faisal Shahzad whom authorities have charged with plotting to explode a massive car bomb in New York on Saturday. If so, then he has been educating himself on the Internet for years on the legitimacy of holy war.

Shahzad visited numerous websites devoted to ideological discussion of Islamism and Shariah law. His apparent online posts date back to at least 2006 — three years before the Times Square suspect became a naturalized American citizen.

“If the person on these websites is indeed the suspected bomber, the postings show that he was intellectually thinking about engaging in jihadism for a few years,” said Dr. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Knowing that, the ideology of jihadism often has inspired violence and terrorism…

“These can be coined as Islamist Salafist websites where lots of material is posted, including theological, ideological and political texts and blogs,” Phares said, noting that he saw discussions about fatwas, jihad and other Islamist causes on these sites.”

As Walid Phares said in an interview on FOX and Friends earlier in the week, Faisal was no lone wolf:

“When a guy makes a phone call, he’s no longer a lone wolf. A lone wolf is somebody who doesn’t tell anybody else about the issue. He doesn’t share that information. He made phone calls… He may be deployed as a lone wolf. It is much easier to send one terrorist as 10 terrorists. But, he is not alone with conducting terror.”

If the Obama Administration removed a guy like Faisal Shahzad from the terror watch list sometime after 2008, just what does a guy have to do to make Team Obama’s list?

Claims that detainees were being mistreated there were false. Capt. Pete Hegseth of Veterans for Freedom served at Guantánamo during the time that Newsweek and other liberal sources were spreading false claims that U.S. guards had “defiled” copies of the Koran. These false reports circulated throughout the world and sparked riots among Muslims.

Capt. Hegseth served a year at “Gitmo” with the New Jersey National Guard. He supervised guards at the detention facilities. He set the record straight. The only time their Korans were besmirched was when the detainees themselves threw human waste on their guards. Gitmo was never Abu Ghraib. No photos of abuse by guards ever came out of Gitmo, because there was none.

But if, after all is said and done, sensible voices in Congress do not prevail, then I have a recommendation for where the detainees should be held and tried. Adak was an important naval installation throughout the Cold War. It’s an island in the central Aleutians, that thousand-mile chain off Alaska.

Adak has many facilities that were in use by the Navy that could be retrofitted now for detainee trials and long-term detention. Adak’s climate is severe. It’s cold. It’s overcast much of the time. During some snowstorms, “whiteout” conditions prevail. Then, it’s dangerous for any personnel to venture outside of buildings unescorted.

A number of U.S. Senators are pressing the administration for the names of political appointees to the U.S. Justice Department who previously served as counsel to the Guantánamo detainees. We deserve to know who those public officials are. We deserve to be assured that none of these lawyers are involved in the decision to close Gitmo or to give civilian trials to jihadists.

This is not suggested in spite. As Lincoln said, “I shall do nothing in malice.” The business he was in was too weighty for that. That should be our watchword, too.

For our military guards and their families, there is this consolation. Many of the Navy families who spent two-year tours on Adak recall their time there with fondness. The severe weather conditions and the remoteness of the island station bred a real fellowship among the hardy folk who called Adak home. We owe these self-sacrificing Americans our respect and our gratitude. Adak would not be a punishment assignment for them.

Adak’s primary virtue is its remoteness. As with Gitmo, the American people would not have to worry about any escapes. It’s five hours behind Washington. One of the most pressing concerns is that jihadists whom we are holding should not be permitted to inflame other prisoners among our U.S. prisoner population.

Finally, we do not want any jihadists to attack U.S. prisons, even on a suicide mission, because this administration unwisely brought them to the mainland. Adak, like Gitmo, could be secured from such attacks.

Once again, we should not close Gitmo. But, if the Obama administration takes this unnecessary and expensive step, Adak, would be a good alternative.

According to a February 5, 2007 statement from the Department of Justice, “Benkahla was convicted of making materially false statements both in his grand jury appearances in 2004, as well as to the FBI in 2004. These false statements included his denial of his involvement with an overseas jihad training camp in 1999, as well as his asserted lack of knowledge about individuals with whom he was in contact.”

If you want to fundraise for a jailed jihadist, Dar Al-Hijrah is definitely the $40-donation-for-a-halal-chicken-dinner venue of choice.  Dar Al-Hijrah’s  jihadist credentials are impeccable:

Dar Al-Hijra is the mosque where Anwar al-Awlaki was Imam  between January 2001 and April 2002.  Al-Awlaki (bio here and here) was the senior al-Qaeda recruiter and motivator for various terrorists, including three 9/11 hijackers, the accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up  Northwest Airlines Flight 253.  Al-Awlaki may still be alive in Yemen, and after some concerns about his civil rights, reportedly the Obama administration now has him targeted as a terrorist.

And who can forget that earlier Dar Al-Hijra Imam from 1995-1999, Mohammed Al-Hanooti,  named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  In 1999, when he was still Imam at Dar Al-Hijra, he testified in support of Ihab M. Ali, who had refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the 1998 United States embassy bombings.   Al-Hanooti told the federal judge that Islamic law “gives him [Ihab M. Ali] the right to abstain from giving testimony in case it hurts him or it hurts any other Muslim.”

Or the Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Studies teacher – and Dar Al Hijra Islamic Camp Counselor -  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, convicted in 2005 of providing material support to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and conspiracy to assassinate President Bush, now serving a life sentence.  Abu Ali was also valedictorian of his class at the Saudi Islamic Academy, the Saudi Embassy-backed 900-student school in the Washington, DC suburbs, that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly urged the US State Department to shut down on the grounds that it teaches religious intolerance.

Or the Dar Al-Hijra Imam between August 2003 and May 2005, the memorable Sheikh Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, formerly a Muslim Brotherhood member and Shariah judge in the Sudan, and one of the founders of both the mosque and the Muslim American Society (MAS), who left the mosque to become the executive director of the Fiqh Council of North America.

That’s the same  Fiqh Council that on February 9, 2010 issued a legal opinion – a fatwa – against the use of full body scanners in airports for Muslims.  He’s also active in bringing Shariah law to America, as the head of the Islamic Judiciary Council of the Shari’ah Scholars’ Association of North America (SSANA).

And we cannot neglect to mention the member of Dar Al-Hijrah’s Executive Committee, Abelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, convicted in November 2007 of contempt and obstruction of justice for refusal to testify before a grand jury with regard to Hamas, and sentenced to 135 months in prison.   A major Hamas operative since at least 1988,  Ashqar was accused of opening bank accounts and maintaining U.S. records for Hamas.

Nor is Dar Al-Hijrah  just your average, friendly neighborhood mosque.  In fact, their original Constitution required their Board of Directors to  include  leaders of  Muslim Brotherhood front groups who would later be identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: “the Current Secretary General of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Current President of Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), the Current General Manager of North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the Current President of Muslim American Society (MAS).”  In 2005, when the current Imam Shaker Elsayed became Imam, he amended the mosque’s constitution to give precedence to the Muslim American Society, and now the mosque Board is run by the “Current President of the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Current MAS DC Area Chapter President, the Executive Director of MAS National Office.”  Elsayed had been Secretary General of the Muslim American Society before becoming Dar Al Hijrah’s imam.  The Muslim American Society was founded in 1993 as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was Imam Shaker Elsayed who sent the email invitation text for the February 13, 2010 fundraiser for Sabri Benkhala:

“Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:22:48 -0700
From: legaladmin@universal-justice.net
Subject: Mark Your Calendar (2/13/10): Dinner

Dear Friends of Justice,

Assalamu Alaikum. The Universal Justice Foundation is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a fundraising dinner to support Br. Sabri Benkahla by contributing to his legal fees. The event will feature Dr. Jamal Badawi from Canada, Imam Rodwaan Saleh from Texas, and Br. Sabri’s attorney John Sheldon, Esq. and will be held at Dar Al Hijrah IslamicCenter’s Main Courtyard. Tickets are only $40 and registration will be at 5:30. The program will begin promptly at 6:00 P.M., and dinner will be served early. Please arrange to purchase tickets as soon as possible because space is limited! You may buy tickets at our website www.universal-justice.net or from Sh. Shaker at Dar Al Hijrah. If neither option is convenient, please email us at legaladmin@universal-justice.net and we will arrange your ticket sale…

May Allah reward you greatly for your efforts in serving justice!

Sincerely,

Shaker Elsayed
Founder and Chairman, UJF

Shaker Elsayed, the current Imam, and founder and Chairman of that “United Justice Foundation” fundraising organization for convicted terrorists,  is a dual citizen of Egypt and the U.S.  He stated in  a sermon at the Dar Al Hijrah in 2005, shortly after becoming Imam there and stacking the Board of Directors with Muslim American Society leaders,  that “Islam forbids you to give allegiance to those who kick you off your homeland, and to those who support those who kick you off your homeland…We do have license to respond with all force necessary to answer our attackers.”  And in the same sermon he stated, “The call to reform Islam is an alien call.”  He is also an outspoken supporter of Hamas and their objectives, including the destruction of Israel.

The Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hassan, attended Dar Al-Hijrah periodically when he lived in the Washington, DC area, up to 2009 when he was transferred to Texas, and his now infamous powerpoint presentation, “The Koranic Worldview as it Related to Muslims in the Military” is closely in line with the 2005 preaching of the current Dar Al-Hijrah Imam, Shaker Elsayed.    See for example slide 11 in that series: “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims”; the examples in slide 13; or the quote that appears to track exactly with Elsayed’s 2005 sermon, on slide 49:  “Fighting to establish an Islamic State, to please God even by force, is condoned by the Islam.”

Dar Al-Hijrah has been staffed by a series of Imams who  radicalize their members – the members don’t “self-radicalize,” as Major Hasan was said to do in the negligent report on the Fort Hood Shooting put out by the Pentagon.  The U.S. intelligence community missed the warning signals from Dar Al-Hijrah’s earlier Imam Anwar al-Awlaki; they should heed the warning signals from the current Imam, Shaker Elsayed.

More on this in days to come – including which invited elected officials could be coming to dinner at Dar Al-Hijrah in April, at their gala annual fundraiser…

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

I wanted to listen to the thoughts and fears of all those utterly insignificant individuals we never hear from on TV or in the papers- i.e. the people who actually live there, both on post and in Killeen, the civilian town that exists to serve Fort Hood. But there was more to it than that – I also wanted to gauge the level of rage on the street. You see there’s a mosque just down the road from me in Austin and I had not noticed any pitch forks or flaming torches in the night. But I didn’t want to assume that the apparent absence of angry right wing mobs outside my window meant that there weren’t any out there. That would be rushing to judgment.

***

I arrived in Killeen around noon and spent some time driving up and down the streets surrounding Fort Hood. It was a low income, mixed race area with lots of pawn shops, fast food joints and tattoo parlors, plus multiple military supply stores for soldiers wanting to supplement their kit.

The first local I spoke to was the Reverend Tracy Smith, of the Rivers of Living Waters Ministries in Killeen. Like practically everyone in the town, he was an ‘army brat’, with relatives in the military- in fact, his cousin had been participating in a graduation service when the shooting began at the Soldier Readiness Center next door: ‘My cousin, her family, they got caught up in the middle of it…and when I heard my family members were that close to it, it brought it closer to home. She had just gotten back from Iraq so she’s combat tested. But the family members aren’t, know what I mean?’

On Nidal Hasan, the Reverend Smith had this to say: ‘I heard he was going out to fight members of his own religion, so I imagine that must have been pretty hard.’ At no point however did Smith launch into an attack on Islam. When I asked whether he thought there would be mob-like retaliations against innocent Muslims, he had faith in Americans: ‘I don’t think it will happen, I hope it won’t, but there might be some small incidents involving narrow-minded people.’

Ultimately Smith was optimistic: ‘If we look at the history of America, we have always been able to rise above. An eagle always rises above the storm.’

***

My next stop was ‘America’s Heroes’, a comic book store located a few blocks from the entrance to Fort Hood. The sales clerk told me his clientele was 98% military. It makes sense: we forget how young soldiers are, or that most of them have never lived away from home before. A few of his customers had spoken about the events on base, but mainly about how long they had spent in lockdown. On Friday he had noticed much higher security around town, reminiscent of the days after 9/11, however by Saturday it was almost back to normal.

The 9/11 theme was echoed a few blocks down by Lewis Smeen who ran the Military Depot store. ‘When I heard people had got killed on post, it was like a shock. After 9/11 things were starting to calm down, and now it was like: oh no, here we are again. It wasn’t the empty feeling I felt on 9/11… that was surrealistic, like- was the world ending? But this was like a reminder, that there are still crazies out there.’

Business was bad: Smeen had only seen five soldiers the entire day, down from an average of thirty or forty for a Saturday. As for Nidal Hasan, he wanted to know why so many warning signs had been missed. ‘You have to be fair and even-handed, of course. I don’t think every Muslim is like this guy, but there were warning signs.’

As for a possible backlash against Muslims in the army, Smeen was doubtful: ‘I’ve had Muslim soldiers in my shop; they’re usually with buddies or comrades. Sometimes I’ve heard talk against the war from Black Muslims, but not from Arab-Americans, with the Muslim heritage. There’s whackos of every background in the military so there may be a few incidents, but I don’t think it’s going to get out of hand.’

***

All the pawn shops in town had adopted a strict ‘no comment’ policy on the massacre, no doubt because they sold guns for personal use and did not want to get mixed up in the controversy, even though none of them had sold Hasan the arms he is reported to have used. Quantico Arms and Tactical Supply on Fort Hood Street also had a ‘no comment’, but didn’t object to me hanging around the shop, and it was here that I met two soldiers who had been on post when the shooting occurred.

The first soldier gave his name as ‘Park’. As he had spent six hours on lockdown he had found out the details of the massacre long after the rest of us living outside Fort Hood. He described in detail the boredom and disorientation of the lockdown experience, before getting on to the topic of soldier’s attitudes towards Hasan: ‘People are shocked. Down range shit happens, whatever. But if it’s a fellow soldier doing this to other soldiers, especially stateside- well, you just don’t do that to people.’

For Park it was Hasan’s rank, not his religious beliefs, that was the issue. ‘It’s not going to be easy for the young soldiers. Think about it- for most soldiers it’s their first time away from home, away from state. They’re fresh out of high school. The relationship between a junior soldier and an officer is like a son and a father- or grandfather: you can trust them, look up to them. They’ve got more education, they’ve got more training, but now it’s an officer who went out and shot everybody. You must trust him with your life- and then you get backstabbed. But it’s more than a backstab. It’s like your wife cheating on you… no, it’s more serious than that. You are deployed and you come home and your house is empty, cleaned out, everything gone. But it’s worse than that. Those kinds of things you can move up and move on, but this…?’

The second soldier, James talked about the fearful, nervous atmosphere on post after the attack and echoed Park’s feeling that some kind of scared trust had been broken. In fact, he said, it was precisely this betrayal that had fueled the anger against Hasan.

‘Yesterday there was a great outrage as to why he was still alive. There was a real pitchfork and torch mentality- especially in Killeen, among civilians… the people in the town want to see punishment.’

This had nothing to do with religion however: ‘They dislike him because he’s not an outsider, or deemed as a terrorist- I mean that’s a justified fight. No this is much different- it’s because he wears our uniform, because he’s our “superior”, and then he turns around and shoots you. That’s a betrayal.’

Some soldiers, ‘more than a few’, would now distrust all Arabs, said James. ‘But I can’t speak for them. As for me, I have no issue with Arabs as a people, or Muslims as a religion. If they’re tolerant of me I’m tolerant of them.’

***

A few hours later, I was back in Austin and the media spin was still in over drive. Nidal Hasan was being diagnosed by ‘experts’ and journalists who had never met him, and who had no knowledge of the background to the case. The NYT was in the driver’s seat, successfully resolving every controversial issue before the investigation was complete. A fantastical new condition, second hand PTSD, had been discovered, whereby the poor major, overwhelmed by listening to soldiers discuss traumas he had not experienced, simply snapped and just had to kill lots of his fellow soldiers… and other such bulshit, and on and on, ad nauseam.

It is true that we should not leap to judgment; indeed each day we learn something new about this terrible event. But the truth is that a whole series of judgments have already been made by our elders and betters in the media and in the administration, and a whole narrative has been prepared in which the killer is the victim, while the real enemy to be feared is the unwashed horde drooling and snarling in deepest, darkest America. This is obscene: of course there are bigots out there, and there always will be, but the vast majority of people can distinguish between an extremist whack-job and an honest citizen.

Meanwhile, it’s a hard life in the army. You get shot at, blown up and paid very little for your trouble. When you’re demobbed, you might wind up living in the cheap housing in Killeen, not far from Fort Hood, among the tattoo parlors and Pawn Shops. Making these sacrifices, the least you can expect is that your superior officers don’t shoot you. And so when that rule is violated, the minimum respect we owe the dead is to uncover the truth about what happened to them, whatever it may be- and however uncomfortable it makes us feel.