by Robert Spencer
These Islamic supremacists got what they wanted in 2011: the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad. But that isn't enough: jihadists are still being investigated and prosecuted, and that has to stop.
There have been questions about Mohamed Elibiary’s true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out. Among those who found this explanation wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, whose skepticism angered Elibiary. The great moderate subsequently threatened Dreher, telling him: “Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.”
Yet despite all this, Elibiary still got his appointment to the DHS Advisory Council. Mohamed Elibiary has risen as far as he has without ever being properly vetted because government and law enforcement officials, and the media, are so avid to find a moderate Muslim who will stand against Islamic jihad terrorism that they will accept virtually anyone’s claim to be just that, no questions asked.
"Muslim advocates urge reduced FBI anti-jihad role," by Neil Munro for The Daily Caller, May 29 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):
Politically influential Muslim activists are pushing to reduce the FBI’s role in countering Islamic terrorism and are seeking greater federal reliance on hard-line orthodox Imams. The White House’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program “did not produce the results a lot of us were hopeful … [and] kind of collapsed towards the end of last year,” complained Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based advocate who was appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
“I don’t know where it is today … [but] it presents us with the opportunity to look at the question of [whether] it is right to house it within the FBI,” he said at an May 28 event in D.C. staged by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
The controversial CVE program was boosted in 2011, when President Barack Obama directed the FBI to work with Muslim political and community groups to suppress jihadi attacks, which are dubbed as non-Islamic “violent extremism.”
But, said Elibiary, “we spun our wheels for the last two years [and] we never got the national CVE policy across all 56 [FBI field] offices.”
Instead, said panelists, the FBI has continued its traditional policy of investigating jihadis for subsequent trial and convictions.
In contrast, the Department of Homeland Security, Elibiary said, has done much good by trying to work with Islamic groups.
The CVE program has been slammed by critics for giving too large an intermediary role to small Islamic political groups such as MPAC, which portray themselves as representatives of American Muslims. The groups try to foster the growth of distinct Islamic communities.
The CVE training has also been criticized for obscuring the many orthodox Islamic strictures that spur Muslims’ violence against non-Muslims.
Elibiary’s new call for reduced policing of Islamic communities, such as Boston’s immigrant Muslims, was echoed by other speakers at the panel, which was hosted by the progressive New American Foundation in Washington D.C.
“Imams and counselors need to be given some leeway” by police, said Suhaib Webb, Imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
Webb’s cultural center is affiliated with the mosque attended by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the ethnic Chechen Muslim who along with his brother Dzhokhar killed three Americans with two bombs at the Boston Marathon. Tsarnaev also killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer after Boston police broadcast his photo on TV. The police did not contact the main Boston mosque for help in identifying Tsarnaev’s image, which was captured by videos of the explosion and its aftermath.
Webb, who was disinvited from the state’s April 18 memorial service by Governor Deval Patrick, said he can persuade young men to stay away from violence. But “I need to be able to sit down with someone and not be subpoenaed or be called as a witness” in a later terrorism investigation, he said.
To succeed, government anti-terror agencies should keep their distance from such outreach to angry youth, he said. “We don’t need to be too close to each other, because that undermines our [Imams’] street credibility,” said Webb.
In fact, he added, his influence was recently reduced when he was labelled as a “moderate.” That “undermined my ability” to persuade youths, Webb said.
Muslim organizations are apprehensive about working with the FBI’s surveillance programs, which can deter cooperation, said Haris Tarin, director of the MPAC’s Washington office. “Is there a point of diminishing returns?” said Tarin, who organized the panel and invited the speakers.
Muslims in America have grievances, and “the way to address these grievances is not with violence, but with the way Islam prescribes… that way is best prescribed by Imams, not necessarily by the U.S. government,” said Rashad Hussain, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Muslims in America “are concerned that terrorists are killing innocent people,” Hussain said. Killing people who are innocent is “totally repulsive to their religion,” he said.
‘“Conservative and Salafi Imams are going to produce the most credible alternatives to al Qaeda” said panelist Peter Bergen, who is the director of the national security studies at the New America Foundation.
“It is going to be conservative Muslim voices and conservative Muslim scholars that will have the credibility” to persuade youth to stay away from violence, warned Rabia Chaudry, founder of the SafeNational Collaborative, a firm which offers to teach U.S. police about Islam’s blend of religion and politics.
By “conservative,” the speakers meant orthodox Imams, not free-market, small government conservatives.
One useful option, said Elibiary, would be for the government to allow young radicals an off-ramp from a pathway to jail.
Instead of running a sting operation that sends the would-be terrorist to jail, the government should warn them of their impeding collision with the law, he said.
“Sting operations… have been over-used” by the FBI, he said.
“By the time I finish here, the FBI frankly will be upset with me,” he added.
But even as they called for deference by the FBI, the Muslim panelists complained about the difficulty of persuading Muslim youths that jihad is not allowed in the United States....
Robert Spencer
Source: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/05/saudi-writer-women-who-work-should-be-molested.html
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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