The Progressive 'Analysis' of National Security

Anyone interested in a microcosmic view of how the Alinsky-ite progressives earnestly carry water for the Shariah-driven jihad against America–whether the violent variety or the “Civilization Jihad” version laid out by the Muslim Brotherhood–need only visit any number of progressive blogs and examine their reporting of the most recent report by the Center for Security Policy entitled, The Shariah Threat To America. The book-length analysis of shariah as the enemy threat doctrine, which I wrote about here last week, is subtitled, An Exercise in Competitive Analysis: Report of Team ‘B’ II.

Quite simply, the 2010 version of Team B’s competitive analysis challenges the politically correct dogma dominating our defense, law enforcement, and intelligence establishment elites. To wit, that the terrorism conducted throughout the world against the U.S. and its allies has nothing to do with Islam and, to the extent it does, it is an absolute perversion of extant and authoritative Islamic law and doctrine. As with many dogmatic positions, very little substantive analysis of the empirical evidence supports this politically correct narrative myth, which nine years after 9/11 continues to dominate and blind those in charge of our national defense from knowing who are enemies are and, even more importantly, why they have aligned against us in a global war of terror.

The report was announced at a press conference on Capitol Hill on September 15 before members of Congress and the media. In attendance, of course, was at least one of the progressive “starlets”–typically young, college-age progressives who write for progressive blogs, which feed the broader left-wing blogosphere like Salon and the Huffington Post, which in turn spoon-feed the slow moving, elder statesmen of leftist progressivism–the main stream media, viewed by their younger cohorts as senile seniors in need of journalistic aid ranging from assisted living care to full convalescence.

To understand how the progressive “analysis” of national security issues work–and here we mean national security issues where real innocent men, women, and children are murdered every day by jihad combatants, both here in the U.S. and abroad–we turn to the still nascent analysis of Team B, as it rolled off the presses.

In attendance at the press conference on Capitol Hill was one Matt Duss, essentially a young college kid with no experience in anything of substance–certainly not national security or shariah. He had just received an Executive Summary, certainly had no time to have read the full embargoed report, yet he asked the following question: “You’ve made some bold statements about what shariah is in this report; can you tell us which Muslim scholars and shariah experts participated in the preparation of the report?”

The answer at the press conference, which was coming to a close, was too brief to have been much help to Duss, but in essence it was that the report’s collaborators and team members were overwhelmingly experts themselves in national security issues dealing with this issue and many of whom had individually and collectively worked with and consulted many such Muslim scholars and experts over the years.

Duss decided to run with that answer without actually having read the report itself in order to be the first attack dog to take a bite of flesh. That very same day, just two hours after the press conference concluded, Duss published an entry at the hard-left Think Progress blog called The Wonk Room (as in a place for policy “wonks” or “experts” to bone-up on their chosen policy professions).

The entire Duss analysis, however, is void of any, and here I mean literally any analysis. It begins with some descriptive introductory paragraphs and then informs the reader, in an effort to gain credibility as a real journalist, that the writer, Duss, was actually at the press conference. When he finally gets to a place in his blog entry where he might engage substance, Duss writes:

Questioned about the report’s assertions about Islamic law, the Center for Security Policy’s general counsel David Yerushalmi — someone so extreme even Daniel Pipes [link embedded here] has distanced himself — insisted that all that was needed to understand sharia was “to look at the doctrine” and “look at the text.”

In other words, Duss hints at some substantive discussion and then simply reverts to an ad hominem attack against me, as one of the Team B II members. In fact, Duss doesn’t even honestly set up the attack.

The question, a reasonable one by the Voice of America journalist in attendance, was whether there was a difference between shariah and its counterpart in the Jewish world, halacha. Frank Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy which sponsored the report and the moderator at the press conference, asked me, as the resident expert on such comparative law issues, to address the question. Here at BigPeace.com you can view my answer in full (and actually read a more detailed essay, long-published in the blogosphere, which of course was available to Duss). Indeed, here you can witness how Fox News reported the event.

Duss’ reference to Daniel Pipes, long-considered a “radical” Islamophobe by the Muslim Brotherhood, even though he is one of the tamer critics of Islam–contending that Islam has enormous inherent powers of self-correction and reform–is to make the point that I am simply an off-the-charts extremist. Duss of course ignores my credentials as an attorney of 27 years, whose record is devoid of any claims of wrong doing by clients or the courts before whom I have practiced, and as one who has worked in the area of national security and written extensively on the subject of shariah and its intersection with national security and terrorism. Yet, Duss is comfortable identifying me as an “extremist.”

More, the only evidence Duss offers of my “extremism” is a link to a hard-core leftist blog written by a man, Richard Silverstein, who the California trial and appellate courts have ruled as a matter of law is a liar who defamed a pro-Zionist journalist by calling her a Kahanist terrorist. In a deposition, for which I was specially retained by the plaintiff to conduct, I was able to get this Israel-bashing Jewish leftist to admit that his accusations against the plaintiff and me (and other conservatives and Israel supporters) labeling us as “fascists” and “Jewish terrorists” were factually baseless, and which he knew at the time were factually baseless.

In other words, without yet a word of substance or analysis of the report’s substantive claims, Duss authoritatively links to a man, in an effort to discredit me and those associated with me, who has, under oath, admitted to being a serial defamer and one who does so with malice.

Duss now moves on to his next ad hominem attack, wherein he writes:

Noting some of the report’s broad and controversial claims about Islamic law, such as that all Muslims are duty-bound to wage jihad against unbelievers, I asked Gaffney how many actual Muslims or Islamic scholars he and his group had consulted with in writing the report. He could not name any, though he noted that he had consulted with various Muslims “over the years.”

The problem with this statement is that Duss tries to create an aire of credibility to his query when none in fact exists. Thus, Duss did not in fact note any “broad and controversial claims about Islamic law.” What he did was to simply assert that the report included “bold statements” about what Islamic law–shariah–is. But again, what Duss said at the press conference and what he wrote in his blog are simply examples of sophomoric childishness, or, if not that, a conscious water-carrying for the Muslim Brotherhood, which states clearly in its internal documents that it seeks to follow shariah in its efforts to destroy us from within.

In fact, had Duss actually taken even a moment to glance through the report prior to writing his blog, he would have seen that the entire report is little more than the aggregation of descriptions of shariah and jihad by contemporary and classical ulema–Shariah scholars in the Muslim world who are undisputedly the world’s most authoritative voices on Shariah; Muslim and non-Muslim academic scholars who have written publicly on shariah and jihad, oftentimes in apologetic tones; and of course the leaders of the world’s mujahideen–the jihad warriors–themselves.

The balance of the Duss blog entry then attacks the original 1976 Team B report claiming it got the Soviet Union threat assessment all wrong–as if that puts the final touches on Duss’ analytical tour de force.

And, several blogs have essentially copied Duss’ approach sometimes adding additional ad hominem attacks against me or other of the Team B members. The use of the word “racist” is ubiquitous as a kind of exclamation mark that one need not actually investigate. Mere accusation suffices on the Left.

But nary a word about substance. Not one word. This of course follows the Muslim Brotherhood playbook as exemplified by the most notorious of such groups in the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been named by the U.S. government as a front-group for Hamas–itself an offshoot of the Brotherhood.

This is the level of political discourse available to the progressive Left. It is incoherence writ large. The blogosphere is for them the perfect synthesis of Rush Limbaugh’s famously correct description of the main stream media as “drive-bys,” who have barely the time to think much less analyze, and the mindless incantations developed by progressives to avoid thinking outside the box, which includes the most popular rhythmic chant of the elite Left–all conservatives are mindless bigots, fascists, and, now of course, Islamophobes. And, the proof they offer? Why, anyone who is not progressive and seeking to unravel national sovereignty and to apologize for America’s very founding could be nothing but a mindless patriot.