CAIR Strikes Out

[Valin]

P J Media:

 

Michael Ledeen

July 25, 2012

 

It’s always a happy day when would-be censors fail to silence voices they don’t agree with, and it’s particularly satisfying when the losers are a well-known crowd of politically correct anti-1st Amendment vigilantes. The losers in this case are the hyperactive folks over at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and their intended victim is “Reza Kahlili,” the former member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps who for some years worked inside that murderous organization on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s well known to PJ Media readers, having posted here on many occasions, and his book, A Time to Betray, is a must-read for anyone who wants to get an accurate picture of life inside the Islamic Republic’s praetorian guards.

 

Reza is inevitably controversial, as you would expect. Some even doubt that he was really a CIA agent inside the IRGC (I was able to get confirmation of his bona fides, as was David Ignatius of the Washington Post), and CAIR got very annoyed with him, above all when he wrote that American mosques are being used to recruit and organize terrorists, in preparation for potential attacks inside the United States. And they were openly furious when he described his conversion from Islam to Christianity, saying that the “unimaginable” Islamic practices he witnessed in Iran “misrepresented Islam,” leading him to search for a faith that better presented his vision of the Almighty.

 

Worse yet, from CAIR’s standpoint, was that Reza was employed by the American government to lecture its intelligence specialists on Iran at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy in Maryland. CAIR demanded he be fired. The head of CAIR wrote directly to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to make the request, as reported in a press release from the organization.

 

It didn’t work.

(Snip)

[Valin]

You never know what you're gonna find

 

Fighting the Ideological War: Lessons from the United Kingdom and the United States

5/25/12

 

The Obama Administration has had a longstanding policy of trying to remove all reference to Islam and Islamic ideology from discussions about terrorism. Widespread changes have been instituted in counterterrorism training with the result that many U.S. experts on radical Islam have now been sidelined and are restricted in what they may or may not teach about Islamic ideology.

 

For some time the British government pursued a similar policy. However, seeing its shortcomings, they recently changed course. Recognizing the centrality of Islamist ideology to domestic radicalization, the United Kingdom re-launched the “Prevent” strategy. This strategy not only examines Islamist ideology but also directly confronts it. As the UK government’s June 2011 framework document states, “The Prevent program we inherited from the last Government was flawed… It failed to confront the extremist ideology at the heart of the threat we face.” So as the British government is moving deeper into the study and confrontation of Islamist ideology, the United States is moving in the very opposite direction.

 

Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo has worked closely with the United Kingdom’s police force as well as with U.S. law enforcement and military authorities. Join us as he discusses this critical component of U.S. counter-terrorism strategy and shares his insights into these two different strategies.

 

Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies from Communism to Islamism