If you want to find out about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on American college campuses, let alone in the Middle East, you are looking at one of the few sites which attempt to provide it.
Few media outlets covered the panel on Shariah Law at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Even fewer got it right.
Sarah Posner barely mentioned it in her story on C-PAC that appeared in The Nation and got picked up by CBS and other news outlets. The Center for Security Policy’s Frank “Gaffney did make an appearance in the audience at a Saturday afternoon panel called ‘The Sharia [sic] Challenge in the West,’where moderator Cliff May of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies promoted a book published by Gaffney’s CSP,” Posner wrote. She went on to describe the panel as “the only ‘official’ CPAC event with an explicitly anti-Islam agenda” in the sum total of her references to it.
Contra Posner, even Campus Progress, which hardly gave the panel the sympathetic treatment, noted that the speakers on the topic made a distinction between the radical Islamic elite and moderate Muslims.
“A popular panel this afternoon at CPAC was ‘The Sharia Challenge in the West,’ featuring Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, Ayaan Hirshi Ali, who authored controversial books Infidel and Nomad, and former CIA director Jim Woolsey,” Kay Steiger and Katie Andruilli wrote in their live blog of the conference on February 12, 2011 for Campus Progress. “While the panelists tried to present a nuanced position, saying there’s a difference between radicals and ‘rank and file’ ordinary Muslims, they also argued that many of the prominent Muslim organizations in America today are actually radical organizations that present themselves as moderate.”
“Among those that panelists said were deceiving Americans were the Muslim Student Association, which has over 600 chapters on campuses in America and Canada, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). McCarthy said CAIR posed itself as a human rights and civil rights organization because, ‘You know what these nutty Americans love? Human rights and civil rights.’”
“Ali responded to an audience question about campus activism by saying that students should target Muslim students by showing them an alternative to Muslim groups on campus. ‘They can establish a defense system on campus to identify organizations that do student activism of the [Muslim] Brotherhood. They can target Muslim students before the Brotherhood can get to them,’ as well as creating awareness among American students on campus about the dangers of Sharia. ‘It takes a network to defeat a network,’ she said. Ideas of Islamophobia and ostracization, she said, are often planted by Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Muslim American communities.”
“An audience member in a West Point uniform asked, seriously, ‘How many years before Sharia law is implemented in America?’ McCarthy said that cultural conflicts in Europe between traditional Westerns and new Muslim immigrants is a warning sign. ‘They’re about 10 years ahead of us,’ he said.” Actually, the uniform was from The Citadel, as was the student, as I learned by reading his name tag.
Surely the ladies could have done this much shoe leather reporting. That’s not all they missed. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, pointed out that the MSA and CAIR were named as co-conspirators in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation terrorism front. Moreover, CAIR, he has noted, was founded by Hamas in Philadelphia in 1994.
Moreover, Steiger and Andruili did not mention, and the above is their entire blog, what Woolsey and Ali had to say about the prevalence of wife beating and literal gay bashing under Shariah law. This particular omission is rather odd, given the professed desire of Campus Progress and its parent group, the Center for American Progress, not to mention their benefactor, George Soros, to achieve, “the common good.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
