Wednesday, November 12, 2008
As President-elect Barack Obama and his administration begin the transition process from the Bush administration, anti-Islamists cannot help but be concerned. Those of us dedicated to stimulating and facilitating long overdue reform within the Muslim consciousness against the growing threat of political Islam cannot help but feel more adrift now than ever before with little legitimate “hope for change” in our policy against Islamists then we have ever had.
The long and arduous two year campaign negligently spent little to no time laying out what the policy of the Obama administration would be toward Islamists, both foreign and domestic. While the Bush administration understood the basic need to promote liberty as an alternative to oppression in Muslim lands, they were unable to translate that into an effective policy with a critical engagement of Islamists. They did not seize the opportunities they had to counter political Islam by fostering grassroots movements for freedom against Islamists. If the Obama campaign is any sign of what is in store, we seem to be headed even further back into a retreat from any perceptible contest of ideas against the ideology of Islamism.
The Obama Campaign and Islamists
While the dominance of economic issues during the final months of the campaign can certainly be understood, one major attack by radical Islamists is all that would be necessary to precipitate what could ultimately be a most devastating and crippling blow to our economy. We cannot afford to overlook this possibility. To do so leaves little room for comfort in the hearts of concerned anti-Islamists today.
In fact, looking at the Obama campaign’s inclination to appoint individuals like Mazen Asbahi to “Muslim outreach” may portend a naïve facilitative role with regards to Islamists and the ideology of Islamism. Looking at the converse, in what appears to be significant domestic and foreign support for President-elect Obama by Islamists, also portends an upcoming weaker stance – if not outright appeasement – from Washington against the ideology of Islamists. In fact, the messages from the Obama campaign (or lack thereof) concerning political Islam, were interpreted favorably by American Islamist organizations. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and their umbrella lobbying organization the American Muslim Task Force (AMT) all quickly rushed to congratulate President-elect Obama. Interestingly, the AMT pushed out an election eve endorsement on November 3, 2008, deceptively trying to “have its cake and eat it too.” They stated to the Massachusetts Telegram and Gazette , “by making an ‘indirect endorsement’ but keeping it low profile, Mr. Ali said, the organization avoided two pitfalls: ‘creating problems for the Obama campaign (and) accepting exclusion from the American mainstream.” In other words, the Islamists carefully avoided any possibility of having the Obama campaign account for their stance by having to accept or reject the endorsement of every American Islamist organization. Thus the twelve Islamist organizations which are represented by AMT were able to claim public and open support of Obama on November 5, 2008 while avoiding any real contest of ideas and reckoning about their own facilitation and promulgation of political Islam.
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This weekend on “Afterwards,” Frank Gaffney interviews Bill Gertz, author of Failure Factory: How Unelected Bureaucrats, Liberal Democrats, and Big-Government Republicans Are Undermining America’s Security and Leading Us to War on C-SPAN2 Book TV. Sat, Nov 15th – 10pm ET |
