Thread: Sharia a Danger to US, Security Pros Say

Shariah a Danger to US, Security Pros Say
Wednesday, 15 Sep 2010 09:04 AM
By: Bill Gertz

A panel of national security experts who worked under Republican and Democratic presidents is urging the Obama administration to abandon its stance that Islam is not linked to terrorism, arguing that radical Muslims are using Islamic law to subvert the United States.

In a report set for release today, the panel states that "it is vital to the national security of the United States, and to Western civilization at large, that we do what we can to empower Islam's authentic moderates and reformers."

The study group, sponsored by the conservative-oriented Center for Security Policy, says in its report that proponents of advancing Islamic law mark the "crucial fault line" in Islam's internal divisions separating truly moderate Muslims, like the late Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, from the large portion of the world's 1 billion Muslims who advocate imposing what they call Shariah law throughout the world.

Mr. Wahid, who died in December, is a widely respected Muslim visionary who promoted pluralism in Indonesia, which has the world's largest population of Muslims.

According to the report, proponents of Shariah are "Muslim supremacists" waging "civilization jihad" along with the Islamist terrorists engaged in violent jihad, like al-Qaida.

The 19-member study group was led by retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the George W. Bush administration, and retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, Defense Intelligence Agency director from 1988 to 1991.

Included in the team of former defense, law enforcement and intelligence officials were Clinton administration CIA Director R. James Woolsey and Andrew C. McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, a career counterterrorism prosecutor during the Clinton administration.

Frank Gaffney, director of the Center for Security Policy, said the Obama administration's policy is based on an incorrect assumption. The Team B report seeks to expose flaws in anti-terror programs, including the policy of not referring to al-Qaida and similar groups as "Islamist" to avoid offending Muslims, he said.

"What if it turns out that some of the people the Obama administration has been embracing are actually promoting the same totalitarian ideology and seditious agenda as al-Qaida, only they're doing it from White House Iftar dinners?" said Mr. Gaffney, referring to the daily meal eaten by Muslims to break their fast during Ramadan.

The group of experts was modeled after the official CIA Team B, whose 1976 contrary analysis said U.S. intelligence assessments had underestimated Soviet nuclear forces. That Team B report led to the military buildup under the Reagan administration.

John Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for counterterrorism, told The Washington Times in June that he disagrees that "there is an Islamic dimension to terrorism."

The administration's policy of not using the word Islam and its derivatives to describe today's fundamentalist terrorists is aimed at "not according these individuals any religious legitimacy," he said.

A White House spokesman could not be reached for comment on the report or the administration's policy on political Islam.

Mr. Gaffney said the report concludes that U.S. government programs aimed at reaching out to Muslim groups that promote Sharia law "is not political correctness, it's submission".

The administration's failure to understand the Islamist nature of the terrorist threat is "inviting more violent jihad against this country," Mr. Gaffney said.

The report calls for a campaign against radical Islamists following the model used against communist ideology and activities during the Cold War, including infiltrating foreign-supported jihad groups by the FBI and other aggressive security measures.

"Today, the United States faces what is, if anything, an even more insidious threat: the totalitarian socio-political doctrine that Islam calls Shariah," the report says.

"Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of Sharia as a 'religious' code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere--economic, social, military, legal, and political."

The Team B report calls for developing a counterstrategy to Islamist ideology, but notes that understanding the nature of the enemy is a critical first step.

"That cannot be done by following the failed strategy of fictionalizing the state of Islam in the vain hope that reality will, at some point, catch up to the benign fable," the report says. "Empowering the condign elements of Islam requires a candid assessment, which acknowledges the strength of Sharia-- just as defeat of 20th century totalitarian ideologies required an acknowledgment of, and respect for, their malevolent capabilities."

The Sharia system is "totalitarian" and incompatible with the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of democratic lawmaking, freedom of conscience, individual liberty and freedom of expression, including the right to analyze and criticize Sharia law, the report states.

The report cites the 1991 document from the Muslim Brotherhood in North America describing a covert process of Islamic "settlement" in the United States. The plan is to carry out a "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," the document stated.

The Egyptian-origin Muslim Brotherhood is the most important entity promoting Islamic supremacism, the report says.

Republican and Democratic administrations failed to understand the ideological nature of the terrorist enemy, the report says, including its ultimate goal of reinstating a totalitarian Islamic caliphate with Sharia imposed globally.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Sharia ... /id/370342

Source: The Washington Times

WOOLSEY & MCCARTHY & SOYSTER: Second opinion needed on Shariah

Our political establishment wears blinders and ignores the threat

By R. James Woolsey, Andrew C. McCarthy and Harry E. Soyster

6:00 p.m. Tuesday

September 14, 2010

-

The Washington Times

It is time for a "Team B" approach to Islamist ideology. The strategy has worked before, against a similarly determined threat to freedom. In 1976, George H.W. Bush, then director of central intelligence, invited a group of known skeptics about the strategy of detente to review the classified intelligence regarding Soviet intentions and capabilities. The point was to provide an informed second opinion on U.S. policy toward the Kremlin.

The conclusions of this experimental Team B study differed sharply from the government's regnant theory. The skeptics found that, pursuant to its communist ideology, the Soviet Union was determined to secure the defeat of the United States and the West and to tyrannize the globe. Thus, not only was detente unlikely to succeed, but national-security policies undertaken in its pursuit exposed the nation to grave danger. The study was particularly persuasive to former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who would use it not only to challenge the detentist policies of the Ford and Carter administrations but to build the strategy that ultimately brought down the "Evil Empire."

Today, the United States faces a similarly insidious ideological threat: Shariah, the authoritarian doctrine that animates the Islamists and their jihadism. Translated as "the path," Shariah is a comprehensive framework designed to govern all aspects of life. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of it as a "religious" code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere - economic, social, military, legal and political. That regulation is oppressive, discriminatory, utterly inimical to our core constitutional liberties and destructive of equal protection under the law, especially for women.

We consequently have joined a group of security-policy practitioners and analysts in subjecting this ideology and its adherents to a new Team B study. Our assessment challenges bedrock assumptions of current American policy on combating (and minimizing) what the government calls "extremism" and on engaging (and appeasing) Shariah proponents who claim to reject terrorism. These proponents are described, wrongly, as "moderates" because they appear content to achieve their patently immoderate designs through political-influence operations, "lawfare" and subversion. Participants in the study constitute a rich reservoir of national security experience drawn from military, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement and academic backgrounds.

Our study does not perfectly replicate the Team B work of a generation ago. We have not been encouraged by our government, which, under administrations of both parties, has been immovably content to wear its blinders. Nor have we been invited to review classified information. These, however, have hardly been insuperable obstacles. What Americans need to know is ready to hand in the public record. The problem isn't access to information, it is coming to grips with what available information portends for our security.

Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam's internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates - figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world's largest liberal Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama - who embrace the Enlightenment's veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On that side of the divide, Shariah is defined as but a reference point for a Muslim's personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.

The other side of the divide is dominated by "Islamists," who are Muslim supremacists. Like erstwhile proponents of communism and Nazism, these supremacists - some terrorists, others employing stealthier means - seek to impose a global theocratic and authoritarian regime, called a caliphate. On this side of the divide, Shariah is a compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to wage jihad to install and to which the rest of the world is required to submit.

For these ideologues, Shariah is not a private matter. They see the West as an infidel enemy to be conquered, not a culture and civilization to be embraced or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of government like ours to coexist peacefully with the end-state they seek.

It is not the burden of our study to broker competing claims about which side of the Shariah divide represents the "true Islam." There are approximately 1.4 billion Muslims in the world, and their understandings about their belief system, as well as their practices with respect to it, vary widely. There may not be a single "true Islam." If there is one, we do not presume to pronounce what it holds.

What cannot be denied credibly, however, is that Shariah is firmly rooted in Islam's doctrinal texts, and it is favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, traditions and academic centers. For more than a half-century, moreover, Shariah Islam has been financed lavishly and propagated by Islamic governmental entities (particularly Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference) through the offices of disciplined international organizations, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. We know from an internal 1991 memorandum authored by one of the Brotherhood's U.S. leaders that its mission is a "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house."

Consequently, we need to come to grips with Shariah. Whether pursued through violent jihad or the stealthier techniques the Brotherhood calls "civilization jihad" or dawa (the call to Islam), Shariah rejects fundamental premises of constitutional governance and American society: the bedrock proposition that the governed have a right to make law for themselves irrespective of any theocratic code; the republican democracy guaranteed by the Constitution; freedom of conscience; individual liberty (including in matters of personal privacy and sexual preference); freedom of expression (including the liberty to analyze and criticize theocratic codes and practices); economic liberty (including private property); equality (including equality of men and women and of Muslims and non-Muslims); freedom from cruel and unusual punishments; an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism (one that does not rationalize barbarity as legitimate "resistance"); and an abiding commitment to deflate and resolve political controversies by the ordinary mechanisms of federalism and democracy, not wanton violence.

Trial evidence has shown, most recently in the terrorism-financing prosecution against an ostensible Islamic "charity" known as the Holy Land Foundation, that Shariah adherents - including a network of Muslim Brotherhood-connected organizations operating in the United States - are seriously pursuing civilization jihad in this country. Their agenda is about power, not faith, and therefore must not be confused with a constitutionally protected form of religious practice. Shariah's ambitions transcend what American law recognizes as the sacrosanct realm of private conscience and belief. It seeks to supplant our Constitution with its own authoritarian framework.

Sometimes the Brotherhood and its friends are supportive of Islamist terrorism, particularly against Israel and against American operations in Islamic countries. Sometimes they strategically condemn terrorist methods (although they are careful to refrain from condemning specific terrorist groups and to blame America for their behavior). In either event, however, the endgame of Islamist ideology is the same whether pursued by terrorists or nonviolent activists: to extort American society into Shariah compliance.

It is vital to the national security of the United States that we do what we can to empower Islam's authentic moderates and reformers. That cannot be done by following the failed strategy of fictionalizing the state of Islam in the vain hope that reality will, at some point, catch up to the benign fable of a thriving moderate Islam beset by a mere handful of aberrant "extremists." Empowering the real moderates requires a candid recognition of the faux moderates and the strength of their Shariah agenda, just as defeat of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies required a gimlet-eyed appreciation of their malevolent capabilities.

The definition of "moderation" needs to be reset, to bore in on the Shariah fault line. Only by identifying those Muslims who wish to impose Shariah can we succeed in marginalizing them. As our study manifests, the Shariah system is utterly anti-American. Those obliged to defend the proposition that it should be adopted here will find few takers and, quite properly, be seen for what they are in the West: marginal and extremist figures. That, and only that, will strengthen true proponents of a moderate or reformist Islam that embraces freedom and equality.

Most important, we must protect our way of life regardless of the ultimate resolution of Islam's internal strife. We can do a far better job of empowering non-Shariah-adherent Muslims who are our natural allies, but we cannot win for them - they have to do that for themselves. Irrespective of whether they succeed in the herculean task of delegitimizing Shariah globally, we must face it down in the United States, throughout the West and wherever on Earth it launches violent or ideological offensives against us.

If we are to face down Shariah, however, we must understand what we are up against, not simply hope that dialogue and "engagement" will make the challenge go away. The brute fact is that Shariah adherents perforce support objectives that are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights it guarantees and the representative government it authorizes. Our security depends on confronting them, not sitting silent as they gradually efface our liberties.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... iah/print/

R. James Woolsey was director of central intelligence under President Clinton. Andrew C. McCarthy was the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the perpetrators of the first attack on the World Trade Center. Lt. Gen. Harry E. "Ed" Soyster was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1988 to 1991. Their full report will be available online at ShariahtheThreat.com at noon today.

Shariah: The Threat to America

Center for Security Policy | Sep 13, 2010

This study is the result of months of analysis, discussion and drafting by a group of top security policy experts concerned with the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time: the legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as "shariah." It is designed to provide a comprehensive and articulate "second opinion" on the official characterizations and assessments of this threat as put forth by the United States government.

The authors, under the sponsorship of the Center for Security Policy, have modeled this work on an earlier "exercise in competitive analysis" which came to be known as the "Team B" Report. That 1976 document challenged the then-prevailing official U.S. government intelligence estimates of the intentions and offensive capabilities of the Soviet Union and the policy known as "deÌ