The commentary below by Daniel Pipes illustrates the daunting challenge we in the West face in dealing with the threat of Islamist infiltration of our government and intelligence agencies.

If government officials are deemed as too aggressive in doing background checks of Muslims who seek such positions, they are met with the predictable cry of “discrimination” and “Islamophobia.”

If they are not aggressive or thorough enough in their background checks, radical Islamists slip through and gain access to classified intelligence information that could compromise critical anti-terrorism investigations – putting us at greater risk.

But the blame for this situation does not lie with Americans who are concerned about national security and demand exhaustive background checks of Muslims, and the “victims” are not Muslims who claim they are being discriminated against or treated unfairly.

The blame lies first with those millions of Muslims who are intent on waging jihad against us, whether through violent means or cultural subversion. The blame lies secondly with those Muslims who reflexively cry “discrimination” but do nothing to isolate or stop the Muslims intent on waging jihad.

And the victims are the American people, who, every time they have to take off their shoes to go through airport security…who every time they have to pay more for goods and services because of the increased costs due to the threat of terrorism…who every time they fear for the safety of loved ones who are traveling…are starkly reminded of the cost we are paying for this jihadist assault on our safety, security and values.

So let us never forget. We are in this war against Islamic terrorism, in all its manifestations, because Islamists have declared jihad against us. They are the aggressors, and we have every right to do what we must to protect and defend ourselves, and to do so without apology. And that includes keeping a keen and watchful eye on Muslims who seek positions in our government and intelligence agencies.

By Daniel Pipes http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

Aafia Siddiqui, 36, is a Pakistani mother of three, an alumna of MIT, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is also accused of working for Al-Qaeda and was charged last week in New York City with attempting to kill American soldiers.

Her arrest serves to remind how invisibly most Islamist infiltration proceeds. In particular, an estimated forty Al-Qaeda sympathizers or operatives have sought to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.

Such a well-placed infiltrator can wreck great damage explains a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, Michael Sulick: “In the war on terrorism, intelligence has replaced the Cold War’s tanks and fighter planes as the primary weapon against an unseen enemy.” Islamist moles, he argues, “could inflict far more damage to national security than Soviet spies,” for the U.S. and Soviet Union never actually fought each other, whereas now, “our nation is at war.”

Here are some American cases of attempted infiltration since 2001 that have been made public:

• The Air Force discharged Sadeq Naji Ahmed, a Yemeni immigrant, when his superiors learned of his pro-Al-Qaeda statements. Ahmed subsequently became a baggage screener at Detroit’s Metro Airport, which terminated him for hiding his earlier discharge from the Air Force. He was convicted of making false statements and sentenced to eighteen months in jail.
• The Chicago Police Department fired Patricia Eng-Hussain just three days into her training on learning that her husband, Mohammad Azam Hussain, was arrested for being an active member of Mohajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi (MQM-H), a Pakistani terrorist group.
• The Chicago Police Department also fired Arif Sulejmanovski, a supervising janitor at its 25^th District station after it learned his name was on a federal terrorist watch list of international terrorism suspects.
• Mohammad Alavi, an engineer at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, was arrested as he arrived on a flight from Iran, accused of taking computer access codes and software to Iran that provide details on the plant’s control rooms and plant layout. He subsequently pleaded guilty to transporting stolen property.
• Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who worked for both the FBI and CIA, pleadedguilty to charges of: fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizballah; and engaging in conspiracy to defraud the United States.
• Waheeda Tehseen, a Pakistani immigrant who filled a sensitive toxicologist position with theEnvironmental Protection Agency, pleaded guilty to fraud and was deported. World Net Daily explains that “investigators suspect espionage is probable, as she produced highly sensitive health-hazard documents for toxic compounds and chemical pesticides. Tehseen also was an expert in parasitology as it relates to public water systems.”
• Weiss Rasool, 31, a Fairfax County police sergeant and Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty for checking police databases without authorization, thereby jeopardizing at least one federal terrorism investigation.
• Nadire P. Zenelaj, 32, a 911 emergency operator of Albanian origins, was charged with 232 felony counts of computer trespass for illegally searching New York State databases, including at least one person on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.

Three other cases are less clear. The Transportation Security Administration fired Bassam Khalaf, 21, a Texan of Christian Palestinian origins, as an airport baggage screener because lyrics on his music CD, Terror Alert, applaud the 9/11 attacks. FBI Special Agent Gamal Abdel-Hafiz “showed a pattern of pro-Islamist behavior,” according to author Paul Sperry, that may have helped acquit Sami Al-Arian of terrorism charges. The Pentagon cleared Hesham Islam, an Egyptian immigrant, former U.S. Navy commander, and special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, but major questions remain about his biography and his outlook.

Other Western countries too – Australia, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom – have been subject to infiltration efforts. (For details, see my weblog entry, “Islamists Penetrate Western Security.”)

This record prompts one to wonder what catastrophe must occur before government agencies, some of which have banished the words “Islam” and “jihad,” seriously confront their internal threat?

Westerners are indebted to Muslim agents like Fred Ghussin and “Kamil Pasha” who have been critical to fighting terrorism. That said, I stand by my 2003 statement that “There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism.”

Brigitte Gabriel’s second book They Must Be Stopped devotes an entire chapter to the Muslim Brotherhood’s project for North America. Many focus attention on beheadings, mutilations, atrocities against women and etc. While these should not be ignored, an even greater threat of radical Islam goes well beyond physical terrorism to include cultural jihad, the infiltration and subversion of our society to destroy us from within. Read M. Zuhdi Jasser’s piece to understand the reality of this threat!

M. Zuhdi Jasser (Part I of II)

While we in the West sleep, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB),       Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, is whispering in Arabic to hundreds of millions of Muslims         how to establish Islamic states. In July he wrote two extensive columns (on July         13th and July 22nd) on the subject of the Islamic state in Arabic. Some Islamist         apologists who remain ignorant of the threat of the Islamic state argue that the         ascendancy of political Islam in the Muslim world is the better of “other evils” that     could arise. Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike across the world, however,           believe that it is self-evident that the ascendancy of political Islam will remain a       significant security threat to the United States and to the West for decades to           come as it has been so obviously so for anti-Islamist Muslims and non-Muslims       alike in the Middle East.

This security threat is manifold. The attempt to create “Islamic” states which derive their laws from the theological interpretations of Islam and Sharia by clerics will always give rise to variant forms of internal and transnational movements which are supremacist in their worldview and thus justify various forms of terrorism against non-Muslims. Many in the state department believe that somehow Muslims are sentenced to live under the Islamist rule and rather governments which are pluralistic and are blind to a single religion are not possible under Muslims majority governments. Many of us would beg to differ. While this may be the line which the Muslim Brotherhood would like us to accept without debate, the reality is that a plurality if not a majority of Muslims refuse to subscribe to the religio-political collectivism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the now archaic concept of the Islamic state.

Up to this point, we have done very little in the public space to expose and engage the real ideological motives of the Muslim Brotherhood. The discourse over political Islam continues to grow but without reviewing source material and their discourse in Arabic we will make little headway. Some have been doing this but real time debate among Muslims is sparse to nonexistent over the subject of political Islam.

The English discourse over issues related to political Islam by the MB is hypocritically filtered for the Western audience. One need just review the MB’s English website and compare it to their Arabic website. They are not simple translations of one another. Same organization, same ultimate mission, very different messaging for very different fronts in the same conflict. A real debate over political Islam will only occur when we engage the ideas they present to their Arabic audience, as well. The English version of their message plays a mere peripheral cosmetic  role based out of London. The Arabic version stems from deep within their soul and reflects their home base of operations. The major difference between them reflects their dissimulation and hypocrisy.  Thus, true anti-Islamist activity must center on their deeply engrained ideologies which are expressed in Arabic.

This requires a “Counter-Project” to refute and confront “the ongoing Project of the Muslim Brotherhood” and it will certainly take some time in its development. MB and current day political Islam took over a century to develop. I pray our response can be developed much more quickly. Just as the MB early on devised a plan as outlined in their project and effectuated at numerous meetings such as the 1993 Philadelphia meeting, so too should anti-Islamist Muslims begin to meet in the West and in Arabic countries and devise mechanisms of exposing and countering the ideologies of Islamist movements most notable of which is the MB. This is our mission at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

While the origins of the MB derive from the writings of Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, today’s spiritual leader of the MB remains Yusef Al-Qaradawi. He is the master of Islamist doublespeak. Yet, anyone with an iota of energy to search a few of his political commentaries will find a plethora of radical commentaries and outright militancy when speaking to Muslim and Arabic audiences. He has endorsed terrorist acts, suicide bombings against Israelis in Israel and against Americans in Iraq to name a few. He has stated in April 2001 on suicide operations that “these are not suicide operations but are heroic martyrdom operations.” He has endorsed spousal abuse, death for apostates, a forward Jihad, and the reestablishment of the Islamic Caliphate as summarized by the Investigative Project.

In English he contributes to the Qatar-based IslamOnline providing fatwas (religious opinions) read by millions of Muslims like this one permitting women to perform suicide operations in Israel. He appears regularly on AlJazeera, also out of Qatar which is viewed by over 80 million daily spewing the same vacillation between militancy and his hypocritical “Middle Way” (Wasatiya) making himself appear moderate when he is in fact a radical.

Al-Qaradawi’s site in Arabic lately seems to be trying to lay the groundwork for the latest iteration and foundations of political Islam. On July 22, 2008 he published a lead Arabic article explaining at length how the “Islamic State is in line with the essence of democracy.” And before that he also published a major piece at his website on July 13, 2008 stating that, “the Islamic state is a civil state which derives its authority from Islam.” (translation provided by AIFD)

Let’s look at these columns and begin to dissect some possible Muslim responses to his Islamist worldview. Both of his columns seem to be laying out the strategy of how to counter the secularist argument being made for freedom by some Muslims. He feigns advancement in his writing claiming to be building upon his own MB ideological forefathers in Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat Al-Islamayia in Pakistan, and his own mentor Sayyid Qutb from Egypt. Make no mistake: while some MB leadership try to marginalize Qaradawi’s influence, he is the present day “Godfather” of MB philosophy. To quote from an MB site posting of an IslamOnline article from just a few weeks ago on July 18, 2008:

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is a pure product of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement. His only activist and ideological affiliation is to the Muslim Brotherhood and he has never frankly opposed it. Al Qaradawi has been defined by the Muslim Brotherhood Movement perhaps as much it is defined by him. They have been related in all stages of his life.

And earlier in 2006 he stated, “the MB asked me to be a chairman, but I preferred to be a spiritual guide for the entire nation”

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