Jihadist pro-terror group meeting in Chicago hotel
From Gary Bauer’s July 17 e-mail:
Islamic Supremacist Groups in the U.S.
A group called Hizb Ut-Tahrir with ties to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one-time leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will be holding a conference this weekend at a Hilton hotel right outside of Barack Obama’s old stomping grounds, Chicago. The conference theme is “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam.”
Walid Phares, director of The Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described the group as “one of the oldest, largest indoctrinating organizations for the ideology known as jihadism.” He stressed that unlike Al-Qaeda, which trains individuals to carry out attacks, this group indoctrinates children between the ages of 9-18 in hateful jihad rhetoric.
The group’s mission is to form a new Islamic caliphate or empire that will rule according to Islamic law, and the group condones any means to achieve it, including violence. That this meeting is being allowed to take place on American soil is a scandal. But Obama is too busy apologizing for America to notice, and the Democrats who dominate Capitol Hill are too busy investigating the alleged crimes of Dick Cheney and the CIA to care.
[end of Bauer e-mail]
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Ed L. writes:
“That this meeting is being allowed to take place on American soil is a scandal.” Everything that Bauer says up to this point is solid and strong, but then he needlessly botches his focus:
“But Obama is too busy apologizing for America to notice, and the Democrats who dominate Capitol Hill are too busy investigating the alleged crimes of Dick Cheney and the CIA to care.”
One does not have to be a partisan sympathizer of Cheney to be alarmed or outraged about a jihadist conference on American soil. More to the point, even if Democrats and Republicans (individually) were paying full attention to this event in Chicago, it is not a given by any means that any of them would unequivocally oppose it in serious pragmatic terms (i.e., insist that it should be strictly outlawed). Such is the strength of the engrained conviction in freedom of speech in our country. Even such grotesque cases as this are unable to dislodge the prevailing conventional attitude: “It’s the price we have to pay for our civil liberties. What can you do about it?”
LA replies:
You’re right. If the meeting were taking place during Bush’s presidency, would Bush have done anything to stop it? Bauer implies he would have. But of course he wouldn’t have. Bauer has the Repubulican partisan blindness which we’ve discussed before. I can’t find the link at the moment, but a few months ago I posted an e-mail exchange I had with Bauer in which he automatically and rudely rejected any thought coming from outside the Bushorama perspective.
Terry Morris writes:
Gary Bauer writes:
“But Obama is too busy apologizing for America to notice…”
Ha! His busying himself with apologizing for America has very little, if anything, to do with whether he notices things like this or not. Bauer doesn’t like that Obama goes about apologizing for America, and so he works it into his email. I don’t like it either, but it’s beside the point.
The implication is simply wrong. As if to say that “if he would cease spending his time apologizing for America, then he would notice that this event is taking place and would do something about it.” That’s not the case at all. First, he likely knows about it. Second, he isn’t going to do anything about it in any event.
I’m pretty sure at this point that the vetting system the framers established in the Constitution did not prevent what they were trying to prevent by its institution above all—the “raising of a creature of their [foreign governments’] own to the chief magistracy of the union.”
Paul Nachman writes:
A bunch of readers made useful comments about that Bauer article. The thing I noticed right off was his silly tying of the meeting to Wonderboy’s “old stomping grounds,” as if that had the slightest relevance. That’s junk-writing, really sophomoric:
A group called Hizb Ut-Tahrir with ties to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one-time leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will be holding a conference this weekend at a Hilton hotel right outside of Barack Obama’s old stomping grounds, Chicago.
LA replies:
You’re right, and it’s worse than that, since the hotel was not even in Obama’s “old stomping grounds,” not in Chicago, but outside Chicago.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2009 01:13 AM | Send