Elibiary: America Is an Islamic Country

Last fall, a top Obama Homeland Security adviser generated controversy when he wrote that the U.S. Constitution was “Islamically compliant.”

Mohamed Elibiary returned to the topic in a Saturday morning Twitter post: “… I said America was an Islamic country not a Muslim country. Pls study up on the difference b4 attacking me.” The post appears to have been deleted from Elibiary’s Twitter feed.

Elibiary declined to explain what he meant when the Investigative Project wrote to him asking for clarification. The tweets are puzzling considering that there were 2.6 million Muslims in the United States as of the 2010 census – roughly less than .2 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

A source close to Elibiary told the IPT, however, that the Homeland Security adviser meant to say that he feels there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution and the American system that runs contrary to Islam.

Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, rejected the theory.

“His entire attempt to repeatedly say that ‘American is Islamic’ is pure deception in the context of an Islamist ideologue like him who has not only never critiqued Islamism but rather continuously advocates for it,” Jasser said. “In fact it is not. American Islamists like Elibiary have consistently rejected debate with other anti-Islamist Muslims about the threat of Islamism and the way to separate Islam from Islamism.

“Why? If they lose that debate, his entire raison d’être inside the U.S. government ceases to exist.”

Elibiary also compared criticism of Islamism, or political Islam, with “segregation era standards,” and invoked the memory of the “separate & unequal doctrine” that marked that era.

Elibiary’s defense of Islamism ignores how Islamist luminaries such as Sayyid Qutb – whom he previously praised – advocated forcing non-Muslims to enjoy an inferior legal status under the “protection” of the Islamic state.

Wherever Islamists have exercised power through violent or non-violent means, religious minorities such as Christians and Jews have found themselves facing violence or discrimination. This has certainly been the case in Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

A week earlier, Elibiary tweeted that the restoration of the long-defunct Muslim Caliphate was “inevitable.”

Elibiary also predicted that conservatives would evolve on the foreign policy front to accept a “Muslim majority world.”

“Islamism is incompatible with liberty and is a supremacist doctrine for which he deceptively argues is Islam the faith,” Jasser said. “In all of his work, you will not find any critique of Islamism, the Islamic state, or government imposed shariah in his opinions or any admission of the deep reforms necessary for American ideals to be compatible with Islam.”

This article originally appeared at The Investigative Project on Terrorism.