What Gaffney learned from Pajamas Media in 2008, I told him in 2002, but he didn’t hear me

Yesterday I posted an article about Frank Gaffney’s discovery, from an article by Youssef Ibrahim at Pajamas Media, that our fighting them “there” doesn’t necessarily protect us from their developing an “Islamist” regime “here,” an idea that Gaffney seemed to suggest had never occurred to him before. He wrote:

On May 4, an ominous alarm was sounded in a Pajamas Media column by Youssef Ibrahim, a former New York Times reporter. 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.”

In this connection, I just came upon an e-mail I sent to Gaffney on October 29, 2002. The argument in my e-mail is not exactly like Ibrahim’s, but they are similar on the key point. Namely, I said in 2002, just as Ibrahim says in 2008, that waging a war on Muslim extremists abroad is no protection from the Muslim extremists (or, more precisely, the sharia-supporting Muslims) who are already here. I then emphasized a point that neither Ibrahim nor Gaffney have yet made at all, that the only reason Muslim extremists are here is that we have let them come here, and therefore the only way to protect ourselves from them is to stop further Muslim immigration into the U.S. and to expel the Muslim extremists who are here.

Here is my e-mail to Gaffney:

Frank Gaffney
Center for Security Policy
October 29, 2002

Dear Mr. Gaffney

Regarding your article today at NR Online about Muslim extremists in this country, of course you are right that actual criminal perpetrators must be identified and that the Wahhabi network that supports them must be exposed. However, if we’re going to be SERIOUS about this horrendous problem, then we need to do much more:

(1) Immediately stop all mass and chain immigration from terror supporting Muslim countries. People from those countries should only be allowed into the U.S. on the most selective, individual basis, not on the basis of a blanket, equal right of all nations to immigrate to the United States. As long as universal non-discrimination remains the defining principle of the United States and of its immigration policy, it’s going to be prohibitively difficult to get any handle on specific immigration abuses because the driving force behind those abuses is still the ideological/sentimental compulsion to “let them all in.”

(2) Expel all non-citizens who have any connection with Muslim extremism.

(3) Consider doing the same to naturalized Muslim U.S. citizens who are involved with Muslim extremism. Shut down their mosques. Get them out of this country. You talk about expelling Wahhabi-supporting clerics from the United States armed forces. I say expel them from the United States.

(4) Stop describing America as a “universal” country where people of all cultures are equally welcome, but which has no culture of its own except for the fact that it welcomes all other cultures.

In short, the idea of waging war on Muslim militants abroad while continuing to allow them freely to enter and operate in this country (while only seeking to stop actual criminals and terrorists such as John Muhammad) is beyond insane. It is a principal reason why many conservatives do not trust President Bush regarding the proposed war on Iraq as well as the neoconservative strategy of a larger U.S. intrusion into the Muslim Mideast. If the “war on terror” is to be coherent and believable, then it must also involve fundamental changes in our immigration law—and in our immigration ideology.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster

Let us remember further that America’s top expert on Islamic jihad, Robert Spencer, has repeatedly stated that “there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadists from peaceful Muslims.” From which it follows that if we believe in preventing Muslim extremists from entering our country, we should prevent all Muslims from entering our country. And from which it also follows that if we believe in requiring Muslim extremists who are already present in our country to leave our country, our ultimate aim should be to get virtually all Muslims to leave our country.

I am not talking about forcibly deporting all Muslims. If Congress passed a law stating the simple truth about Islam, that it is not a religion in the ordinary sense, but a combination of a religion and an expansive political ideology aimed at overturning the Constitution and laws of the United States and replacing them by the tyrannical sharia law, Islam would thereby cease to fall under the First Amendment’s protection of religion. This would enable Congress to pass a statute restricting the practice of Islam. (If the two laws I’ve just described are overturned by the Supreme Court, we would then need to take the more radical approach of banning Islam outright by Constitutional amendment, as I have suggested here.) Once the practice of Islam was restricted under U.S. law, the Muslims would start to leave the U.S. on their own, just as their great master and model, Muhammad, departed from Mecca with his followers because they were not free to practice Islam there.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 07, 2008 10:51 PM | Send