Gaffney’s stunning revelation

Frank Gaffney, the neoconservative movement’s leading spokesman on “Islamism,” has just discovered to his great shock and consternation that the people he variously calls “Islamists,” “Islamo-fascists,” and “jihadists”—but never, you know, “Muslims”—are ensconced in America and gaining a foothold in the corridors of power. Paraphrasing the title of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, he calls this new regime “Amerabia.”

May I ask where Gaffney has been? It is now May 2008. Steven Emerson’s extremely alarming, mind-altering documentary Jihad in America, showing the profound inroads that jihadist and terror-supporting communities had made in heartland cities across this country, was broadcast on PBS in 1994. Just in case Mr. Gaffney misses the significance of that last sentence, I’ll help him out:

It’s been a known fact for at least 14 years that Mideast-based jihadist communities and organizations are widely established in America.

Not only that, but Emerson writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1995 revealed the close relationship between President Clinton and jihadists, especially Abdurahman Alamoudi, whom the Clintons invited on several occasions to the White House, who wrote up Mrs. Clinton’s talking points for addressing Muslim groups, and who in 2000 persuaded presidential candidate George W. Bush to make it harder to investigate Muslim terror suspects. That’s the same Alamoudi who in 2004 was convicted for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Khaddafi regime and participating in a plot to murder the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. In short, the 9/11 attack happened in part because of the influence of jihadists on the U.S. government. Yet it just occurs to Gaffney now that jihadists have too much influence in America. (See my November 2000 article at NewsMax, “The Clintons, Abdurahman Alamoudi, and the Myth of ‘Moderate’ Islam.”)

Gaffney tells us how this revelation came to him:

On May 4, an ominous alarm was sounded in a Pajamas Media column by Youssef Ibrahim, a former New York Times reporter. Mr. Ibrahim is an astute critic of the Islamists’ steady, tireless and increasingly effective efforts to impose—on Muslims and non-Muslims alike—the repressive theo-political-legal agenda they call Shariah law. He warned that “In the very real war on terror, a noisy squabble over ‘fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here’ clouds a simple truth: namely, that ‘they’ are here already. Indeed, Islamists are busy constructing a wing of jihad in America’s backyard.”

A sense of unreality arises. Right-wing critics of the George W. Bush / Frank Gaffney ideology have been saying for several years that “fighting them there in order not to fight them here” makes absolutely no sense, since, first, fighting some of them there would not prevent others of them from coming here, and, second, some of them are already here. But this obvious logic never occurred to Gaffney before, nor apparently did he hear anyone else make such an argument, because it was not made by someone in the closed ideological circle to which he belongs and beyond which he never looks. (For an example of how Gaffney deals with arguments from outside the neocon envelope, read how he reacted when I pointed out to him in person an obvious contradiction in his own statements about Islamic extremism.) No, he could only hear this “new” truth when it was published at the website Pajamas Media edited by the liberal Roger Simon, a website so politically correct that it recently ended its years-long relationship with the Gates of Vienna website because of a single hard-hitting article GoV had published about future European-Muslim conflict in Europe.

In any case, by Gaffney’s own testimony, the well known, frequently written-about fact that jihadists are already here and gaining power had never occurred to him until he heard Pajamas Media “sound the alarm.” It’s a good thing Frank was not assigned to Paul Revere’s job in Boston in April 1775, or we’d still be British subjects: “Little Green Footballs if by land. Pajamas Media if by sea.”

Gaffney writes:

Every day, new evidence appears of similar acts of submission—the Islamists call it “dhimmitude”—on the part of the U.S. government, judges, the press and leading corporations. Eurabia, meet the United States of Amerabia.

Gaffney, the head of a prominent think tank on security policy and a well funded “expert” on “Islamism” who has even made a documentary movie on the subject, doesn’t know that the term dhimmitude was coined by Bat Ye’or, the world’s leading scholar on the subject.

Then get this:

Groups like CAIR, ISNA and MPAC made great strides in what [Yusuf] Ibrahim calls “the common task [of] instill[ing] the notion among Arab-Americans or European immigrant communities of Muslim countries that they are not part of secular multicultural societies.”

First, how can one be “a part of secular multicultural societies? A multicultural society by definition has no culture of its own, it’s a collection of equal cultures with no dominant or majority culture. How does one belong to a country that has no identity other than diversity?

Neocons like Gaffney define society out of existence, then they’re shocked, shocked, that people don’t feel a part of such a society.

Second, what are “European immigrant communities of Muslim countries” in the context of this article? Evidently Youssef Ibrahim, who has written good articles on the Islam problem, made a mistake and garbled that sentence. But Gaffney, not noticing that it was garbled, went ahead and approvingly quoted it.

Finally, and needless to say, Gaffney in his hyper alarmed article about “Islamist” inroads in America makes no mention of the fact that the “Islamists” got into America via immigration. He neither criticizes the immigration policy that let these enemies into our country, nor suggests any change in those policies.

Gaffney criticizes others for following a policy of “dhimmitude,” meaning surrender to “Islamism.” But by systematically and as a matter of principle refusing to say anything critical about Islam, and by refusing to oppose the immigration of more Muslims into America, Gaffney shows himself to be a major league dhimmi.

- end of initial entry -

Ray G. writes from Dearbornistan, Michigan:

When your home town public school district takes any pork food products off the lunch menu, when they have days off every few weeks (seemingly) for Islamic holidays, when you see teen-aged school girls walking around town dressed in essentially a black bag covering their whole bodies, you know you’re well on your way to becoming a dhimmi.

Thanks for noticing, Frank!!

LA writes:

Ironically, the comments following Gaffney’s article uniformly mock him, very insultingly, as a hysterical alarmist on the subject of Islam, with statements like “Frankie has gone completely around the bend this time,” and “This ‘Muslims are going to take over Western civilization’ crap has been going around since 9/11 in the neoconservative crowd.”

Why would Gaffney want to maintain, at his own website, a comments board where he is promiscuously insulted by liberals? Maybe it’s because he’s a liberal.

Remember George W. Bush, who gives his liberal enemies backrubs, then lets them pour mud on him, then gives them another backrub.

But, of course, from Gaffney’s point of view, the insults poured on him by liberals reinforce his own position, strengthening him in his conviction that he bravely stands at the farthest possible right edge of the political world, and that someone like me, who criticizes him from his right, is off the planet and is automatically to be dismissed.

And so it will always remain, with true political discussion precluded, so long as left-liberalism is defined as the center.

David B. writes:

Years ago, I wrote to you about the neocons railing about crime and social breakdown, while favoring open borders which increases the very problems they claimed were destroying the social fabric. Gaffney is a prime example of this. He warns against jihad and is surprised that jihad has come into the United States. This is while ignoring the vast increase in Muslim immigration sanctioned by his President and his fellow neocons.

When Bush was elected in 2000, the neocons stopped talking about social ills. They began to declare, “The culture is fine. The Culture War is over.” They may soon be saying, “The Muslims have assimilated to America. There is nothing to worry about.”

LA replies:

Yes. They set up a standard, “assimilation,” which appears to mean something. Then it turns out that it means, whatever is, is assimilation.

Michelle Obama complains about America continually raising the bar. In fact America keeps lowering the bar.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 06, 2008 05:07 PM | Send