It was bad enough that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson spoke at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a group with demonstrable ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
But what he said made it even worse.
What is ISNA? According to Discover the Networks:
[ISNA] was established in July 1981 by U.S-based members of the Muslim Brotherhood with a background as leaders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). As author and terrorism expert Steven Emerson puts it, ISNA ‘grew out of the Muslim Students Association, which also was founded by Brotherhood members.’ Indeed, Muslim Brothers would dominate ISNA’s leadership throughout the Society’s early years.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism adds that, in a 2008 court filing, ISNA and its affiliate, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), did not deny evidence of their ties to Hamas and the Brotherhood, but simply argued that the evidence was old.
Nonetheless, Jeh Johnson chose to speak at ISNA’s convention last Saturday. First, he assured the crowd:
Tonight I will not talk to you about counterterrorism.
Then, the theme of Johnson’s address was that Muslims in the U.S. were unfairly targeted for discrimination and harassment, and that he was on their side. His principal argument that this (unsubstantiated) targeting is unfair? Nothing but his denial of the painfully obvious link between Islam and terrorism:
You have heard us, before multiple audiences of different political stripes, refuse to bend to the political pressure to call terrorism “Islamic” extremism. We know that ISIL, though it claims the banner of Islam, occupies no part of your religion, which is founded on peace.
He knows that? How does he know that?
Having declared that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, Johnson was able to dismiss concern about Islam in the U.S. as just another manifestation of the ugly prejudice that, he said, had made life difficult for other immigrant groups in the past:
Your story is an American story, told over and over again, generation after generation, of waves of people who struggle for, seek, and will eventually win your share of the American dream. Know the history of this country and you will know that — whether it’s Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, Mormon Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americas, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Muslim Americans — this will be true.
Yes, you remember when Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, Mormon Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americas, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans flew those planes into the towers, and bombed the Boston Marathon, and murdered 13 Americans in cold blood at Fort Hood, and four in Chattanooga, 15 in San Bernardino, and 49 in Orlando, and tried to commit mass murder at Garland, and in so many other places.
You remember those global terror organizations made up of Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Irish, etc. committing acts of violence around the globe, and threatening the imminent conquest of the U.S. and the rest of the free world.
The Obama administration’s solicitude flows entirely one way, towards Muslims as victims of discrimination – which, according to the administration’s own hate crime statistics, is a false and inaccurate claim anyway. Meanwhile the jihad advances, as do Islamic supremacist attempts to assert Sharia norms over American norms.
Johnson had nothing to say about such things, or about the unaccountable phenomenon of so many Muslims in the U.S. adhering to the version of Islam that Johnson assures us is un-Islamic.
And then there were Johnson’s fellow speakers.
Among them was Yasir Qadhi, who has taught that Muslims can freely take the lives and property of non-Muslims in jihad:
The life and property of a mushrik [one who worships others besides Allah] holds no value in the state of jihad … which means if they don’t say la illaha illa Allah, their lives and property are halal [can be taken by Muslims].
Dalia Mogahed spoke as well. Obama’s former adviser on Muslim affairs once appeared on a British television show aired by pro-Sharia group Hizb ut-Tahrir, where she said: “Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood.” How have we misunderstood Islamic law? We have associated it with “maximum criminal punishments” and “laws that … to many people seem unequal to women.” The Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified,” she claimed: most Muslim women worldwide, she said, associate it with “gender justice.”
Another speaker was Tariq Ramadan.
French journalist Caroline Fourest, in her book Brother Tariq, notes that Ramadan is “remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy mapped out by his grandfather [Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna], a strategy of advance stage by stage” toward the imposition of Islamic law in the West. She explains that he invests words like “law” and “democracy” with subtle and carefully crafted new definitions, permitting him to engage in “an apparently inoffensive discourse while remaining faithful to an eminently Islamist message and without having to lie overtly — at least not in his eyes.”
And then there was the celebrated Khizr Khan.
Intelius recorded that Khizr Khan has worked at Hogan Lovells LLP. According to the Washington Free Beacon:
Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show. Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton’s campaign … [The Saudi government] supplied the Clinton Foundation with millions. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has given between $10 and $25 million to the foundation while Friends of Saudi Arabia has contributed between $1 and $5 million.
Why is the DHS Secretary Johnson appearing among this rogue’s gallery?
The answer is obvious: because he shares their agenda.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member