by Steven Emerson
This morning Senator Dick Durbin, senior Democrat of Illinois, is holding a Senate Judiciary hearing on ”Protecting the Civil Rights of American Muslims.” Sounds all well and good. Who could be against the civil rights of Muslims or for that matter any group?
Except when you start to scrutinize the Senator’s close and long time relationship with radical Islamic groups and even Hamas terrorists, one has to wonder whose civil rights the Senator is trying to protect?
The Senator seemed to recognize who the bad guys were years ago. In a 2003 Senate hearing chaired by NY State Senator Chuck Schumer, witnesses brought a plethora of evidence showing that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) was a radical Islamic group that supported Hamas. At the hearing, Durbin appeared to concur with the conclusions of Schumer that CAIR was tied to terrorist when he said that CAIR was a group, “which apparently from what I have read is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its association with groups that are suspect.”
CAIR has sponsored Holocaust deniers, radical Imams calling for Jihad, has justified suicide bombings, and is so homophobic that it would not let its it number one television supporter and apologist, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow–who portrays CAIR as a de facto Muslim NAACP–speak to its members because she is an avowed lesbian, a fact that is being revealed for the first time in this column.
Since that Senate hearing however, the Senator has a change of heart and sent various letters of support and congratulations to CAIR. The Senator’s romance of CAIR is all the more perplexing given the vast amount of evidence that has been released showing CAIR to be a front group for Hamas. In the Holy Land Foundation trial of Hamas leaders accuses of laundering money for Hamas–in which all defendants were convicted–CAIR was listed as an un-indicted co-conspirator and described by an FBI agent on the stand as a front group for Hamas. That evidence prompted the FBI to cut off its relations with the group. Last year, the DOJ said it had seen no “new evidence that exonerates CAIR from the allegations that it provides financial support to designated terrorist organizations.”
Earlier this month, the Senator paid an extraordinary visit to the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview Illinois (https://www.investigativeproject.org/2719/durbin-flawed-hearing) considered to be the epicenter of Hamas in the US today.
He was pictured smiling broadly alongside senior Hamas activists and officials including Jamal Said (also an un-indicted co-conspirator in the HLF case) and who participated in leading fundraising sessions in the 1990’s for Hamas at Hamas conventions recorded on tape asking for money to be given for “martyrs.” In the group picture alongside Durbin was Kifah Mustapha, a paid HLF employee from 1996-2000 serving as a fundraiser and as its Illinois representative. Also standing alongside Durbin in the photo were other known Islamic militants who were tied to or supported Hamas terrorists.
The Senator refuses to even utter the term “radical Islamic extremism” although his non-stop venom for the FBI’s efforts to stop Islamic terrorism has resulted in the Senator making the demonstrably false and incendiary claims that the FBI can arrest any Muslim simply because of their race without any other evidence. He denigrates the dedicated law enforcement agencies of this country in ways that only our worst Islamic enemies describes us–as de facto Nazis bent on destroying Islam.
The Department of Justice in 2008 issued newly revised guidelines for FBI agents in investigating terrorism to stop them from being self-shackled by incorrect interpretations of existing laws but none of the new guidelines went beyond existing laws or permitted racial profiling whatsoever or investigations simply because of ethnicity as alleged by Durbin. But that did not stop Durbin from making demonstrably false allegations. In a 2008 letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Durbin wrote, “These guidelines would permit FBI surveillance of innocent Americans with no suspicion and on the basis of their race, religion or national origin” adding that the new guidelines “threaten the constitutional rights of American citizens.” There was not a shred of truth to Durbin’s claims but you can be sure it was certainly added to the list of so-called grievances by Islamic terrorists invoked to justify more murderous attacks against Americans and Jews.
Durbin compared the treatment of FBI agents of of Afghanistan detainees to that of the Nazis and Pol Pot on the Senate floor on June 14th, 2005:
“If I read this to you, and didn’t tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis, Soviets in their Gulag or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others, that had no concern for human beings. Sadly that’s not the case. This was the action of Americans in treatment of their own prisoners.”[1]
It is exactly that type of rhetoric–a variation of the radical Islamic conspiratorial mantra that the US, the West, Christians and Jews are engaged in a mythical war against Islam that is the single most important factor in radicalizing Muslims into becoming extremists and then into becoming terrorists.
And then look at the record and statements of the one and only Muslim witness, Farhana Khera, who heads up a group called “Muslim Advocates” which claims to be a Muslim civil rights organization. Ms. Khera has never ever used the word “radical Islamic extremism” because she believes the term is racist. And she has blamed the FBI for being agent provocateurs in a secret conspiracy, she alleges, to instigate most of the Islamic terrorist plots in recent years. This charge was even too much for Attorney General Holder, who also cannot bring himself to utter the term “radical Islam” when the AG defended the use of FBI informants in a speech this year to Khera’s organization.
All I can say is thank God the FBI was able to recruit informants in preventing more than 3 dozen terrorist attacks, which, had they been successful, would have killed thousands of Americans.
Moreover, Ms. Khera exhorts her Muslim constituents NOT to talk to or trust the FBI in dealing with knowledge of terrorist attacks or other information pertinent to our nation’s national security. She has even accused the FBI of wanton murder in the killing of a radical Imam in Detroit who shot at police, threatened to kill all the police outside his home, killed the police dog, and refused to surrender his weapon after hours of efforts by the FBI to peacefully get him to disarm.
Ms. Khera has even portrayed Denver Imam Imam Afsali , who was friendly with the would-be NYTimes Square terrorist Naji..Zazi, as a victim of his civil rights being violated by the FBI. The FBI contacted the Denver Imam and asked the Imam to tell them to call the FBI if he had information about the whereabouts of Zazi, a ticking time bomb. What did the Imam do? He promptly picked up the phone and warned Zazi that the FBI was looking for him, enabling Zazi to evade FBI detection and gave him more time to prepare his massive car bomb, that thankfully did not go off. Had it done so, who knows how many civilians would have been killed? Afsali was later convicted of lying to federal law enforcement and deported. But in the twisted logic of Ms. Khera, Afsali was a poor victim of FBI repression of human rights and was falsely accused and wrongly convicted of lying to federal agents in tipping of Zazi that the FBI was looking for him.
Senator Durbin has apparently decided to become a shill and apologist for radical Islamic militants. But in legitimizing and conferring respectability upon the most notorious Islamic militants in the United States today, please don’t be so condescending and arrogant that you claim you are protecting Muslim civil rights. That would be equivalent to a claim that in inviting David Duke to a hearing, you would be protecting the rights of American citizens.
So Senator Durbin, its nice that claim you are concerned with the civil rights of an American ethnic group, but the reality shows you are more concerned with the civil rights of terrorists. That you freely associate with Hamas leaders who have given speeches calling for killing Jews tells us something about your values. And the people of Illinois deserve to know of your full and uncritical embrace of Islamic militants whose values are an anathema to this country.
If you truly wanted to protect the rights of innocent people, can you tell us when are you going to hold a hearing defending the civil and human rights of American citizens not to be blown up in their own country?