Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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What you really should be reading about Anthony Weiner

other than his pervy, salacious compulsions, has to do with his wife Huma’s Unmentionables:

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at theJournal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Read the whole thing, written by Andrew McCarthy, who was chief prosecutor of the first World Trade Center terrorist attack. He concludes with

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

You must read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Mr. Bingley

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Catch Spring Fever

Andrew McCarthy‘s new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy is out today,

Every human heart does not yearn for freedom. In the Islam of the Middle East, “freedom” means something very nearly the opposite of what the concept connotes to Westerners – it is the freedom that lies in total submission to Allah and His law. That law, sharia, is diametrically opposed to core components of freedom as understood in the West – beginning with the very idea that man is free to make law for himself, irrespective of what Allah has ordained. It is thus delusional to believe, as the West’s Arab Spring fable insists, that the region teems with Jamal al-Madisons holding aloft the lamp of liberty. Do such revolutionary reformers exist? Of course they do . . . but in numbers barely enough to weave a fictional cover story. When push came to shove – and worse – the reformers were overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of Islamic supremacism, the dynamic, consequential mass movement that beckons endless winter.

In it,

…foremost, I did not try to write a history of the “Arab Spring.” Spring Fever is, instead, an attempt to give the reader an alternative way to understand what is happening in the Middle East, an antidote to the delirious “Arab Spring” narrative. Mine is based on understanding that Islam, a culture and civilization distinct from and hostile to the West, is the most significant fact about the region; that far from being a fringe ideology, Islamic supremacism is the dominant interpretation of Islam of the Middle East; and that the most salient precedent for the current revolt, Turkey, is a model for Islamization not democratization.

You can buy the book at Andrew McCarthy‘s website, or through Amazon.

Post re-edited to include omitted paragraph.
Cross-posted in The Green Room.

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Andrew McCarthy talks about the World Trade Center mosque

Do you have any concerns about the mosque being built at Ground Zero, New York?

Yes, I have great concerns about it. I’m actually really astounded that the debate over the mosque takes place within the context of a discussion about tolerance. We have in the United States over 2,300 mosques. In the New York area alone there are probably a couple hundred. There are certainly several scores of mosques in any event. If you were to go to Mecca or Medina, you wouldn’t see any Christian churches. You wouldn’t see any Jewish synagogues. In fact, you wouldn’t actually be able to go to Mecca or Medina at all if you’re not Muslim. Non-Muslims are deemed not fit to set their feet on the ground in those Islamic holy sites. So I think if we’re going to argue this thing on the tolerance meter, we’re pretty far ahead on that score and we don’t have anything to apologize for.

Secondly, the mosque plan has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. They want to call it the Cordoba Islamic Center. Cordoba is the name of the Islamic caliphate that conquered Spain and ruled it often brutally for over half a millennium. So, you know it’s pretty clear just in the choice of name what’s going on here. It’s the Islamist strategy that’s centuries old, which is to build their icons on top of the icons of the people that they’ve either conquered on intend to conquer.

So it seems to me that it’s fairly obvious that this is going on. It also seems to me that many, if not most, well meaning Muslims don’t want to see this happen either. They don’t want this fight. The reason they don’t want it is because there’s really common sense involved in this as much as anything else. No one is saying that they shouldn’t be able to have mosques or that Muslims shouldn’t be able to worship in the United States. What we’re saying is a mosque in that particular site would be grossly inappropriate. I don’t know what’s happened to America, but if this were, say 1943 or 1944, or I daresay even today, you wouldn’t have a Shinto temple built at Pearl Harbor. People would say there are plenty of places in America for a Shinto temple but that isn’t one of them. That’s not bigotry. That’s not intolerance. That’s plain common sense and respect for people who lost their lives on those sites.

Go read the full interview.

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Andrew McCarthy says “no”

An extraordinary article by Andrew McCarthy, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year.

McCarthy was in charge of the prosecution of the first World Trade Center attack, an experience he described in his book Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad. He was invited to attend a Department of Justice meeting of the Detention Policy Task Force this week, and he declined. Here’s why:

Saying No to Justice
Why I declined to meet with the President’s Detention Policy Task Force.

From my perspective, though, I’m a lawyer who’s been asked to give advice to the government by an administration that says such advice could lead to criminal investigation and professional discipline. And although the advice I would give is firmly rooted in the laws of war, and was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 2004 Hamdi decision, this administration regards such detention as running afoul of the rule of law. Thus, as I wrote to the attorney general:

Given your policy of conducting ruinous criminal and ethics investigations of lawyers over the advice they offer the government, and your specific position that the wartime detention I would endorse is tantamount to a violation of law, it makes little sense for me to attend the Task Force meeting. After all, my choice would be to remain silent or risk jeopardizing myself.

The second reason for declining the Justice Department’s request is that the exercise known as the “President’s Detention Policy Task Force” is a farce. The administration has already settled on a detainee policy: It is simply going to release trained jihadists. Holder said as much in his Germany speech. In the irrational world he inhabits, the existence of Guantanamo Bay, where dangerous terrorists cannot harm anyone, is more of a security threat than jihadists roaming free, plotting to menace and murder us. That’s why the administration just released Binyam Mohammed, who conspired with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla to execute post-9/11 bombings in American cities. That’s why Holder will soon announce (perhaps as early as today) that the Chinese Uighur detainees — who’ve been affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and who’ve received paramilitary training at al-Qaeda camps — will not only be set free in the United States but will, according to National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, subsist on the support of the American taxpayer.

For all their talk about “the rule of law,” President Obama and Attorney General Holder have to know this policy is illegal. In 2005, Congress provided in the REAL ID Act that aliens who’ve been affiliated with a terrorist organization or who’ve received paramilitary training (which has been a staple of virtually every jihadist plot against the United States) are excludable from the United States. Moreover, even if the administration were not riding roughshod over federal immigration law, it is endangering the American people. The sophistry required to believe that having people who want to kill us locked up is more perilous than loosing them on civilian populations is so absurd it nearly defies description.

To satisfy his antiwar base and to put paid to commitments offered by his top campaign advisers (like Eric Holder), President Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay within a year, despite having no plan for what to do about the terrorists there, many of whom cannot be tried under the standards of the civilian justice system. Military proceedings are anathema to the administration — many of whose lawyers either represented the Gitmo detainees or come from firms that did. (Holder’s former firm, for example, brags on its website that it represents detainees in their wartime lawsuits against the American people.) And the administration is evidently not very interested in exploring novel systems of preventive detention, such as my proposal for a “national security court,” which would require extensive legislative work. Instead, the Obama policy is simply to release our enemies — knowing many are certain to return to the jihad — if that’s what it takes to comply with the president’s promise to close Gitmo by January.

Consequently, the President’s Detention Policy Task Force is not an effort to arrive at the best counterterrorism policy. It is an effort to justify a bad policy that has already been made — to be able to tell the American people that this suicidal approach was arrived at in consultation with experienced terrorism prosecutors and national-security officials.

You must read the entire article. While you’re at it, also read his excellent book.

UPDATE
The full text of the letter.

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