When the military goes PC

From FrontPage Magazine.

On September 1, 2006, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England was featured as a speaker at the 43rd annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America or ISNA. He began his speech by stating the following:


Friends, fellow Americans, people of faith - Good afternoon! Thank you to Dr. Louay Safi for the kind introduction, and a special thank you to Sheikh Muhammad Nur Abdulla, and Dr. Ingrid Mattson, for your leadership and for the invitation to join you at this Islamic Society of North America conference.


Thank you also for the pleasant lunch, and the opportunity to dialog with the Society’s leadership. It was most beneficial to share ideas and values.


It is a profound honor for me to be here with you today, representing all the men and women in the United States military, and all the civilians who serve America in the Department of Defense and throughout the US Government.

ISNA was established by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-associated Muslim Students Association (MSA) in 1981, helped into existence by a group of MSA alumni and a teaching assistant at North Carolina State University (NCSU) named Sami Al-Arian, who only two years prior co-founded Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Egypt. ISNA was incorporated using the same physical address as the MSA, which was also the address used to incorporate the American Hamas financing wing, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF).

In December of 2003, ISNA was the subject of a terrorism investigation launched by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee “into possible links between nongovernmental organizations and terrorist financing networks.”


In June of 2007, ISNA was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a legal case brought by the Justice Department against HLF officials that dealt with the funding of millions of dollars to Hamas. During the trial, a May 1991 MB document bearing ISNA’s name was presented as evidence, stating: “The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] 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 G-d’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”


Even today, right on ISNA’s official website, one can read the following quotes: “May Allah fight the jews and the christians. They took the graves of their Prophets as places of prostration . Two deens [religions] shall not co-exist in the land of the Arabs.” And “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” The statements have been on ISNA’s site since March of 2006, months before England gave his speech.


Furthermore, ISNA Executive Council member Muhammad Nur Abdullah (see above) and board members Jamal Badawi, Yusuf Ziya Kavakci, and Muzammil Siddiqi all currently serve as Sharia Scholars for the ‘Fatwa Bank’ on Islam Online. Contained in it is a fatwa (religious ruling) mandating violence against American troops, entitled ‘Seeking Martyrdom by Attacking US Military Bases in the Gulf.’ It states, “[A]ttacking American soldiers who came to launch war against Muslims is an obligation and Jihad, as they are true invaders. Hence, killing any transgressing American soldier is an obligation and a kind of Jihad since those occupying troops came to invade Muslim lands.”


For such a high-ranking government official, as Deputy Secretary England is, to participate in an event sponsored by ISNA is alarming to say the least, but the series of events that followed the speech were far worse and will have much greater implications for the future.

UPDATE

At Pajamas Media, Claudia Rosett notes that a Muslim aide for dep sec England has had his bio taken off the DoD's Web site.

Hey, Presto! Where did it go?

Last Friday NRO ran my article, “Questions for the Pentagon: Who Is Hesham Islam?” The article raised questions about some of the stories recounted in a glowing profile, dated Oct. 15, on the Defense Department web site, featuring a top Pentagon aide, Hesham Islam.

Instead of answering the questions, the Pentagon appears to have disappeared the profile.Today, the entire web page, complete with photo of Islam in his office and lavish praise from his boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, appears to have simply vanished from the DoD site. What was previously a link to the article (click on the second link listed here) is now a link to current news articles (no Hesham Islam), and the profile seems to have disappeared even from the October 15 archives.

As of this writing a cached version can still be found on Google. Lest it disappear from the face of the earth, here’s a copy of the original in pdf format, and here it is saved as a web page. This is an Armed Forces Press Service article which the Pentagon until recently appeared only too happy to publicize as DoD gospel.

What’s going on? I phoned the Pentagon to ask, following more than a week of trying to get answers prior to publishing the story last Friday about the mysteries surrounding this top aide, whom Gordon England, number two man at the Pentagon, described last year (that link has not yet disappeared) as his “personal close confidante.” No answers yet. Once again: Who’s running this show?