Act for America emailed an
excerpt of an article from The Federalist with the
email subject line “The Muslim Brotherhood is Rattled”. The Federalist
article by Ben Weingarten highlights that John Bolton’s appointment as National
Security Advisor has rattled the transnational Islamic terrorist organization
the Muslim Brotherhood (aka Ikhwan
to many Arab speaking people) because Bolton has had the correct assessment
that the terrorist network indeed should be on the State Department’s designated
a Foreign Terrorist Organization
(FTO).
Here is the Act for America email intro:
The left has made it their
mission to smear anyone who opposes violent jihad, and cast them as
"Islamophobic." Recently, former ambassador John Bolton has been the
target of such attacks because of his appointment as National Security Advisor
(NSA) to the President. This is not only an attempt to discredit John Bolton,
it is an attempt to protect the Muslim Brotherhood from finally being
designated a terrorist organization.
As patriotic American's we must
stand up and not only support the appointment of Ambassador John Bolton, but
also tell Congress it is time, once and for all, to designate the Muslim
Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Click
here to tell your local Members of Congress enough is enough.
JRH 4/6/18
***************************
John Bolton’s
Appointment Rattles The Muslim Brotherhood Echo Chamber
The Trump administration ought not to concede one inch
to those who wish to sideline the personnel and stifle the policies that would
make its counterjihadist agenda a reality.
APRIL 5, 2018
The attacks on former ambassador John Bolton following his
appointment as National Security Advisor (NSA) have inadvertently served as
some of his strongest endorsements.
First there were the hysterical cries of “neocon warmonger!”
This would come as news to the NSA-designate, who was never a “liberal mugged by reality” but
a self-identified “Goldwater conservative” from
the start; explicitly rejects the belief in
democracy-building as imperative to achieving America’s
national interest under democratic peace theory; and suggests, exaggerating for
effect, that following the removal of Saddam Hussein, as soon as
practicable he would have told the Iraqis,
“You’re on your own. Here’s a copy of the Federalist papers. Good luck.”
Although the “neocon warmonger” moniker is inapt, to say the least, maybe
it is not such a bad thing if our enemies buy this line. In fact, this may be
part of President Trump’s strategic rationale as a dealmaker for elevating a
“peace-through-strength” realist portrayed as a
cantankerous cowboy to the top of the National Security Council.
Then followed another narrative: Bolton is not only a
real-life Dr. Strangelove, but worse. He is actually an adroit bureaucrat—“crazy and dangerous.”
Then-senator Joe Biden, a man prone to malapropism, actually put it best when,
in Bolton’s retelling, Biden said of him in 2005:
“My problem with you, over the years, has been, you’re too competent. I mean, I
would rather you be stupid and not very effective.”
But the truly revelatory attacks concern Bolton’s positions
on Islamic supremacism, which reflect an understanding that jihadists pose a
mortal threat that must be countered using every element of national power. You
know these attacks are meaningful partly because they have been made under
cover of a smear campaign.
Opposing Jihadis Isn’t the Same as Opposing Islam
Bolton has been cast as an “Islamophobe” for the
thought crime of being a counterjihadist who supports other counterjihadists.
The charge of “Islamophobe” is a baseless, intellectually dishonest, and lazy
slur. Although it does not deserve to be dignified with a response, it goes
without saying that there is nothing to indicate Bolton harbors an irrational
fear of Islam, and everything to indicate he holds the very rational belief
that we must defeat Islamic supremacists who wish to subject us to their
tyrannical rule or destroy us.
“Islamophobe” is being lobbed at Bolton to try and discredit
him and ultimately scuttle policies he supports intended to strike at the heart
of Islamic supremacism. The “tell” is that the articles raising such
accusations frequently cast counterjihadist policy positions themselves
as de facto evidence of Islamophobic bigotry.
As the representative par excellence of
the position that America should exit the Iran deal, it should come as no
surprise that the Iran deal echo chamber in exile has
sprung into action in savaging the ambassador with the most outlandish of
insinuations. For the Islamophobia campaign, the lesser-recognized and perhaps
more insidious Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber has
been activated. Bolton is on record as supporting
its designation as a terrorist organization, and Brotherhood apologists and
true believers cannot abide this.
Either We Work With Terrorists or We Don’t
Recall that the national security and foreign policy
establishment has long held that as a “political Islamist” group, the Muslim Brotherhood ought to be treated
as a legitimate diplomatic partner. The theory is that we have to
choose between violent and seemingly peaceful Islamic supremacists, ignoring
the fact that their differences are tactical and strategic, not ideological.
They are all still Islamic supremacists.
Most infamously, the Obama administration supported the
ascension of Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, to
president during the Arab spring, with predictably horrific consequences in
particular for the nation’s Christians that persist even in the era of the
much-maligned counterjihadist Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Such disastrously naïve policy pushes ignore that the Muslim Brotherhood is the tip of the
Sunni jihadist spear. It’s the ideological fountainhead from which
violent jihadist groups from Hamas to al-Qaeda and ISIS spring. The “political”
element of the Muslim Brotherhood is, if anything, more pernicious precisely
because its adherents do not goose-step, guns in hand, in the public square.
No, the political arm engages in political and ideological
warfare, tactfully seeking to impose its will through policy and subterfuge.
“Social welfare” activities provide a convenient cover for the group’s ultimate
aims. As the Brotherhood put it in its 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General
Strategic Goal for the Group in North America:
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brothers] 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 the hands of the believers so that it is
eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
On account of the Brotherhood’s nature and activities, it
has been designated as a terrorist organization from
Egypt to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A bill first introduced by
Sen. Ted Cruz in 2015, calling for the U.S. secretary of state to submit a
report to Congress on designating the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist
organization in America, lays out several other reasons the group merits
this, including:
The [group’s] explicit calls for
violent jihad, with the end goal of imposing Islamic law over all the world of
the group’s founder and spiritual leader Hassan al-Banna, and the consistently
violent Islamic supremacist content of the Brotherhood’s core membership texts
The terrorist efforts of numerous
jihadist groups explicitly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the efforts of
individual Muslim Brotherhood members designated as terrorists by the U.S.
government themselves
The litany of terrorist financing
cases involving the Muslim Brotherhood, including the…Holy Land Foundation case
[the largest terror financing case in U.S. history] …
Do What We Like or Get Smeared as a Bigot
On the campaign trail and in its early days the
Trump administration indicated an interest in designating the Muslim
Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. But within months it shelved these plans. What
happened? The Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber deployed.
The Brotherhood undertook an extensive lobbying and
information operation designed to dissuade the
administration’s plans, reportedly backed by millions of dollars.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment quickly proliferated articles and
comments in prominent mainstream publications defending the
Muslim Brotherhood against charges of being a jihadist group, adding that
designated it as such would be impractical and impracticable. Notably, The New York Times went
so far as to print an op-ed in the Brotherhood’s defense written by Clinton Foundation-linked Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Gehad
el-Haddad.
In the midst of this flurry of articles, it leaked to the
media that the CIA and State Department both
produced memos against Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation.
Concurrently, counterjihadists throughout the Trump
administration were subjected to a barrage of attacks. Many would ultimately be
sidelined, though some like Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo survived. He,
like Bolton, is being attacked as
an Islamophobic bigot as
well.
Bolton recognized at the time that these events were not
random. During a July 2017 interview he
noted:
There’s been an amazing campaign.
It’s always amazing to me how these stories and op-eds and lines of chatter
appear simultaneously, all very well-coordinated…The argument being the Muslim
Brotherhood is a complicated organization, not every part of it is devoted to
the support of terrorism. Some of them do humanitarian work and so on; a
declaration that the entire Brotherhood is a foreign terrorist organization
would actually buttress the cause of the jihadis; so, therefore, don’t do
anything.
Bolton’s riposte?
Let’s take the notion inherent in
that argument as having some validity, that there are pieces of the Muslim
Brotherhood that don’t qualify under the statutory definition we have of a
foreign terrorist organization…My response to that is, ‘Okay, we need some
careful drafting based on the evidence we have now that excludes some
affiliates, some components of the Muslim Brotherhood from the designation.’
I’m prepared to live with that, of course, until we get more complete
information.
This position is what really draws the ire of the
Brotherhood echo chamber. CAIR, the unindicted
co-conspirator in the previously mentioned largest terror financing case in
U.S. history, published a press release condemning the appointment of
“Islamophobe John Bolton” as NSA, citing corroborating articles from such
non-biased sources as Think Progress, The Nation, Islamophobia.com, Vox, and
Huffington Post.
As I have written previously, CAIR’s Muslim Brotherhood and
jihadi ties are numerous and longstanding, involving not
only its founders and present leaders to Hamas, but
its harboring of apologists for Islamic
terrorism, and alleged impeding of counterterrorism efforts.
Bolton’s endorsement of designating the Muslim Brotherhood a
terrorist organization illustrates a keen understanding of the size, scope, and
nature of the Islamic supremacist threat that the national security and foreign
policy establishment lacks. It is a proxy for a worldview that if followed to
its logical conclusion would turn our largely futile efforts to beat back
jihadists over the last 17 years on their head. This view takes Islamic
supremacists at their word in their desire to impose upon us the Sharia-based,
totalitarian theopolitical ideology to which they adhere. Hence the pushback.
Applying this worldview would
lead to decisions antithetical to the progressive Wilsonian internationalists
and political Islamists on myriad issues in the Middle East, including:
·
Treatment of Israel versus
the Arabs
·
The Iran deal
·
Iran policy more broadly,
including appropriate measures against its proxies in Syria and Lebanon
·
Qatar’s bellicosity
·
Turkey’s behavior under
Islamic supremacist Erdogan
The Trump administration ought not to concede one inch to
those who self-evidently wish to sideline the personnel and stifle the policies
that would make its counterjihadist agenda a reality. This specious and
slanderous smear campaign reflects all the better on the appointment of Bolton
as NSA.
Photo Gage Skidmore / Flickr
________________________
Ben Weingarten is a senior
contributor at The Federalist and senior fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research. He is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media, a media consulting and
production company dedicated to advancing conservative principles. You can find
his work at benweingarten.com, and follow him on Twitter @bhweingarten.
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