Security Policy

It would be a good thing if American politicians were obliged, in addition to swearing to abide by and protect the Constitution, to take something akin to the physicians’ Hippocratic Oath. Dating from ancient Greece, this pledge begins with the laudable commitment “to do no harm.” Such a promise from Barack Obama with respect to the national security portfolio seems particularly in order.

On the face of it, the President-elect appeared to be doing the next best thing during his appearance on ABC’s Sunday morning program, “This Week.” He told interviewer George Stephanopoulos that he agreed with the commonsensical advice recently proffered to him by outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney on another television program:

“Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is [the Bush administration] did and how we did it. Because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead and it would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they’ve campaigned against them.”

In response, Mr. Obama gave a quite statesmanlike reply: “I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what’s going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So, I’ve got no quibble with that particular quote.”

Unfortunately, the President-elect then went on basically to reaffirm his troubling “campaign rhetoric” with respect to several of the things that the Bush administration has had “going on.” In particular, he reaffirmed his determination to fulfill his pledges to: preclude completely the further option of using “aggressive interrogation techniques”; close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; and begin negotiating with the Iranian mullahs.

With respect to interrogations, Mr. Obama essentially said that if the Army can do without the sort of aggressive techniques (including waterboarding) that the CIA has resorted to on a few but necessary occasions (notably, with great effect on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), then the country should forego their use altogether. Only by such self-restraint, he claimed, would we be “adhering to our core values and ideals.”

On Guantanamo Bay (a.k.a. “Gitmo”), the President-elect ruefully observed that “it is more difficult [to close] than I think a lot of people realize.” And yet, he made a point of reiterating the stance he took on the campaign trail: “We are going to close Guantanamo.”

As to the Iranian regime, Mr. Obama summarized the dangers it presents: “We have a situation in which not only is Iran exporting terrorism through Hamas, through Hezbollah, but they are pursuing a nuclear weapon that could potentially trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.” He might have added that the mullahocracy has signaled a willingness to use its Bomb to “wipe Israel off the map.”

The President-elect nonetheless went on to proclaim that “We are going to have to take a new approach. And I’ve outlined my belief that engagement is the place to start.” He undertook to “respect the aspirations of the Iranian people” while signaling what he (euphemistically) called our “certain expectations in terms of how a[n] international actor behaves.”

In these three examples, at least, it appears that Team Obama may pay lip service to the idea of doing no harm - that is, refraining from undoing policies and dispensing with capabilities the outgoing administration found essential to the national security, unless and until it has had an opportunity to disprove that that was the case - but the President-elect appears to be merely going through the motions. Were he truly prepared to put the country’s security ahead of his campaign promises, the following considerations should govern:

* Forswearing the use of vigorous interrogation techniques under all circumstances would be tantamount to unilaterally disarming ourselves of key weapons in the face of adversaries who are trained, if detained, to resist other forms of questioning - and will, in any event, claim to have been tortured by our forces.
* As a terrific new book by Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Cucullu, entitled Inside Gitmo: The Truth Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay (www.InsideGitmo.com), makes clear, shuttering Guantanamo Bay will hand our enemies a significant victory insofar as it would eliminate the state-of-the-art, highly secure detention/interrogation facility we need safely to house their captured colleagues, many of whom are among the most dangerous people on the planet.
* With respect to Iran, its government’s behavior has not been that of a responsible “international actor” since it was seized by Ayatolloah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution. The supreme aspiration of the vast majority of Iranians is actually to be free of the brutally repressive mullahs who have afflicted them for 30 years. Treating with their oppressors in the name of “respecting the will of the Iranian people” can only serve to perpetuate the latters’ suffering, while intensifying the danger the regime poses to us, as well as them.

In these and other areas, the Obama defense and foreign policies have the potential to do much good or considerable harm to the national interest. Truly heeding Dick Cheney’s wise admonition would increase the chances of the former outcome.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG’s corporate reputation and balance sheet.

Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm “too large to fail,” the company would surely have gone under by now. Instead, Paulson gave AIG well over $40 billion of the slush-fund Congress intended to bailout the financial sector (part of a total $150 billion the U.S. has sunk in AIG to date). As a result, you and I and our fellow taxpayers have now been saddled with ownership of nearly 80% of this once high-flying and now floundering global insurance enterprise.

Another result of AIG’s nationalization is, if anything, even more worrisome. All of us taxpayers are now owners of a company that promotes Shariah law - the brutally repressive, totalitarian theo-political-legal program of authoritative Islam.

It turns out that AIG has a subsidiary specializing in takaful¸ insurance products that are purportedly “Shariah-compliant.” I say purportedly because - while they have been cynically deemed “pure” (halal) by Shariah advisors that AIG employed for the purpose of making such certifications - the Islamic code expressly prohibits business transactions that involve risk. Consequently, insurance products designed to hedge against risk are inherently “impure” or haram.

Whatever the status of AIG’s takaful products under Islamic law, the U.S. government now has a vested interest in their financial success. Uncle Sam has become Uncle Shariah.

In so doing, Henry Paulson has acted in a manner that not only appears to smack of a conflict of interest and egregious disregard for the public’s fiduciary interests. He also seems to have violated the Constitution.

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights has long been interpreted as prohibiting the establishment of any national religion or conferring upon one religion a preference over others. By taking a massive stake in a company that explicitly promotes Islam’s Shariah law, the U.S. government is acting at odds with both of these revered principles.

Fortunately, an important legal initiative has just been launched aimed at blocking Secretary Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board from engaging in this sort of unconstitutional behavior via Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) and other commercial transactions. A lawsuit filed Monday 15 December in U.S. district court in Michigan by an Iraq war veteran named Kevin Murray contends that:

“The Shariah-based Islamic religious practices and activities that the government-owned AIG engages in - activities that are funded and financially supported by American taxpayers, including Plaintiff, who is forced to contribute to them - are antithetical to our Nation’s values, customs, and traditions with regard to religious liberty, religious tolerance, and the proscriptions of the First Amendment. These government-funded activities not only convey a message of disfavor of and hostility toward Christians, Jews, and those who do not follow or abide by Islamic law based on the Quran or the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, but they also embody actual commercial practices which are pervasively sectarian and which disfavor Christians, Jews, and other ‘infidels,’ including Americans.”

The litigation seeks relief in ways that would be far-reaching at a time when the U.S. government has bought not only most of AIG but owns some twenty other financial institutions - and seems intent on encouraging their embrace of Shariah-Compliant Finance. (Notably, in November, Paulson’s fellow Goldman Sachs alumnus and point-man for the financial sector bailout, Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, convened an “Islamic Finance 101″ seminar where officials in the “policy community” were propagandized by Harvard University professors and other champions of the SCF industry.)

The court is being asked to rule that, among other things, the defendants’ “policy and practice of approving, endorsing, promoting, funding, and supporting Shariah-compliant finance” and “the United States government’s ownership interest in and use of taxpayer money to financially support AIG and its Takaful Insurance business, which is pervasively sectarian, violate the Establishment Clause.” In addition, Murray v. Paulson seeks a permanent injunction against such practices both with respect to AIG and Shariah-Compliant Finance more generally.

Most Americans remain unaware of the menace posed by Shariah, let alone the extent to which it is being insinuated stealthily into our country. (Happily, the latter is the subject of an excellent new book by the acclaimed scholar of Islam, Robert Spencer, entitled, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs.)

Murray v. Paulson therefore provides not just an opportunity for an urgently needed constitutional ruling and injunctive relief with respect to the U.S. government’s submission to Shariah. This lawsuit brought on Mr. Murray’s behalf by one of the nation’s preeminent public interest law firms, the Thomas More Law Center, and by the formidable litigator/Shariah expert David Yerushalmi, who also serves as the Center for Security Policy’s general counsel, affords the American people a vital teaching moment: Official promotion of Shariah law is unconstitutional and, given Shariah’s inherently seditious nature (it explicitly requires the violent overthrow of all non-Islamic governments in favor of a global theocracy), acquiescence to its insinuation in this country constitutes a felony offense known as “misprision of treason.”

We cannot tolerate and must not permit Uncle Sam’s morphing into Uncle Shariah. Prompt action by the courts on Murray v. Paulson may spare us that monstrous transformation.

To paraphrase the Bard, there is a road-trip in the life of a nation when everybody decides to get on-board, whether or not they know or like the destination. With the successful humiliation of the formerly high-flying executives of the formerly Big Three U.S. car-makers (”the autos”) - who were forced to drive hybrids from Detroit to Washington to obtain a multi-billion dollar rescue package from Congress, it seems we have reached such a moment.

Faced with alarming new unemployment numbers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly dropped her objections to a deal that would free up $15 billion dollars approved earlier this year for the autos. Gone will be the condition that Detroit use the money to retool so as to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. Based upon the auto executives’ testimony last week, the money will be gone almost immediately, as well. My guess is that so too will be the Big Three’s top executives.

If we are going to allow a massive raid the treasury in the hope of providing a speed-bump on the certain road to reorganization and down-sizing of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, the very least we can do is get for the country something of lasting value in exchange. Here’s a modest proposal: Set America free from its enslaving addiction to oil.

As Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory has observed, what is really “addicted to oil” are our cars. The vast majority of them have to use gasoline or diesel fuel derived from petroleum, the preponderance of which has to be imported from places that are, at best unstable and at worst downright hostile to us.

Perpetuating this arrangement would only translate into more money in the hands of governments like Saudi Arabia’s, which exploits it to wage what Robert Spencer calls “stealth jihad” against the Free World; like Iran’s, which exploits it to build nuclear-armed ballistic missiles with which to threaten us, Israel and its neighbors; and like Venezuela’s, which exploits it to destabilize our hemisphere, notably by facilitating the strategic penetration of Latin America by Russia, China and Islamist terror organizations.

Fortunately, we have a ready alternative. By making new cars sold in America capable of running not only on gasoline but on ethanol or methanol, we can offer consumers fuel choice and wean ourselves from our present, dangerous dependency on foreign oil. Such cars are called Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFVs). Detroit knows how to make them cost-effectively (for less than an extra $100 per car): There are over 6 million of its FFVs on America’s highways now and many millions more that it has sold to Brazil where they are required.

As it happens, even before their present crisis, the Big Three had already agreed to ramp up production of Flexible Fuel Vehicles, pledging to make fifty-percent of their new cars FFVs by 2012. All it takes is a chip in the engine with the algorithm needed to adjust the burn rate in response to the mix of fuels in the tank, and some corrosion-resistant fittings in the fuel line.

Last summer, bipartisan groups of legislators in both the Senate and the House introduced what is known as the “Open Fuel Standard Act of 2008″ (S. 3303 and H.R. 6559, respectively). It would simply codify the U.S. automakers’ existing commitment to manufacture FFVs, require that they be able to burn methanol as well as ethanol (and, of course, gasoline) and set a higher goal for 2015, namely that 80% of new cars be FFVs.

Importantly, the Open Fuel Standard (OFS) would apply to all car-makers - foreign as well as domestic. This would level the proverbial playing field, although it would effectively translate into at least a short-term competitive advantage for Detroit, as its rivals have not produced FFVs for the U.S. market.

A further, compelling argument for integrating the OFS into this week’s rescue package is that, were America to adopt such a requirement here at home, it would amount to a global standard. Since our market is so huge, production efficiencies will dictate that the FFV feature also be integrated into cars intended for sale elsewhere. As a result, approximately 100 countries around the world will be able to “grow” their own fuel (using sources such as biomass, sugar cane, algae, kudzu, coal, wood pulp, etc.)

By creating such an immense market, the demand for alternative fuels capable of cost-effectively competing with gasoline - even at its present, much-diminished price, to say nothing of what will almost certainly be higher ones in the future - will grow dramatically. The free market thus created in place of that dominated by the monopolistic OPEC oil cartel will respond by offering alcohol-based ethanol and methanol in large quantities.

The effect will be, as energy guru Anne Korin says, to transform oil from the strategic commodity it is today into just another product - in much the same way that salt has ceased to be so vital that nations went to war over it.

If Congress wants the American people along on its current road-trip with the autos, it had better have something to show for the ride other than throwing good money after bad. Adopting an Open Fuel Standard as part of the rescue package this week - and, thereby, helping to set America free from OPEC - would be a lasting achievement on the path we must take to energy security.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security and a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition (www.SetAmericaFree.org).

The sharp drop in world prices for oil and grain precipitated by the past few months’ economic turmoil has literally, if probably temporarily, taken the energy out of last summer’s vitriolic “food-versus-fuel” debate. Suddenly, we’re not hearing the denunciations about how ethanol is taking corn from the world’s hungry in order to put it in the gas tanks of the world’s rich.

Back when oil cost three- and four-dollars-per-barrel, the increased use of ethanol was blamed for high food prices, food riots and starvation of the poor. Senior UN official Jean Ziegler called the use of food crops for fuel a “crime against humanity.” Anti-American demagogues like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro seized the opportunity to pile on to the anti-ethanol jihad. Competing explanations for the rise in food prices - such as the role of speculators, the rise in oil prices and the increased demand for meat in China and India - were given short shrift by the “smart” people. Ironically, at the very moment that oil prices were at an historical high, the only alternative fuel available to keep gasoline prices from going even higher was facing an unstinting and ferocious attack. The past few weeks have clearly demonstrated that all this was a farce.

An immutable fact is now clear for all to see: Food prices track oil prices, regardless of how much corn is used for ethanol production.

When oil was selling at a premium, the costs went up for essential components of our food supply - especially those associated with operating agricultural machinery, fertilizers, packing, labor and transportation. When prices came down, the price of corn quickly followed.

In fact, oil has now fallen nearly 50% from its record $147 a barrel in July 2008. In the same period, corn prices have fallen by the same percentage, from $7.50 a bushel to under $4 today.

Did the price of corn drop because we used less ethanol? No. To the contrary, since the summer, ethanol production has actually risen by nearly 10%.

It is now clear that it was not ethanol that drove up the price of grain, and therefore the price of food. Rather, it was a result of the same speculative forces that jacked up oil prices. When the bubble created by hedge funds and other speculators popped in the current financial crisis, commodity prices declined.

This is not to say that ethanol had no impact at all on food prices. It did. But this impact was marginal in comparison to the other factors at play.

More importantly, on balance, the use of ethanol played a positive role in the U.S. economy and abroad. At the height of the oil crisis, ethanol was responsible for keeping the price of oil 15% lower than where it would otherwise have been. This means that as vexing as some find annual ethanol subsidies of roughly $5.6 billion, the use of ethanol saved the U.S. economy in 2008 roughly ten-times that amount which otherwise would have ended up in the coffers of foreign oil-exporting countries - many of them hostile to us.

The U.S. Agriculture Department has projected a 23% increase in farm-grown exports in the 2008 over 2007, and ethanol production capacity increased by 60% to 11 billion gallons, saving the global oil market almost one million barrels of oil per day. America is clearly doing its share in feeding the world as it works to diversify its energy sources.

It is high time we recognize the “food vs. fuel” debate for what it is: a myth. It is also past time for us to hold accountable those processed food companies who propagated this narrative to conceal their own contribution to the world’s food problems.

Notably, Kraft, Kellogg and Nestle were quick to pass their increased costs on to consumers when grain prices climbed. They sure are taking their time reducing prices, however, now that commodity prices are down dramatically. At a time when the economy is in dire straits and many working Americans are struggling to put food on their table, food producers who now pay less for their commodities are reporting profit increases and their shares, while down like everybody else’s, have outperformed most other sectors.

For example, Kraft’s revenue rose 19% from last year, Kellogg’s by 9.5%. And Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who wrote an anti-ethanol op.ed. in the Wall Street Journal when grain prices were high - declaring that “biofuels are economical nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible” - recently told the same newspaper that “retail food prices might come down a little, but I don’t think it will be anything spectacular.”

If there is anybody who can alleviate the cost-of-food crisis at this time, it would be not the ethanol industry but the processed food producers themselves. Those who blamed Big Oil for price-gouging at the pump should now look at what Big Food is responsible for doing on the supermarket shelf.

Sooner or later, the economy will pick up steam and oil prices will most likely rebound, perhaps even to higher levels than we saw earlier this year. At that point the anti-ethanol coalition will no doubt regroup to resume its misleading and strategically misguided campaign against ethanol as an alternative energy source. When that happens, American consumers and policy-makers alike will need to bear in mind the truth that outed in the Fall of 2008: oil prices are the driving force behind food costs and ethanol helps keep oil prices down.

Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy. They are founding members of the Set America Free Coalition (www.SetAmericaFree.org).

Meltdown in the financial sector. Recent spikes in oil prices. Democratic electoral gains throughout Washington, made possible in part by the political muscle of organized labor. Add it all up, what have you got? A perfect storm that will surely translate into an infusion of billions more in taxpayer life-support for the seriously - possibly terminally - ill U.S. car-makers.

Such an outcome may not happen during this week’s lame duck session of the expiring 110th Congress. In fact, the smart money says that sufficient numbers of Republican legislators will find offensive the idea of throwing good money after bad that they will preclude passage in the Senate this year of any bail-out for Detroit that the Democrats manage to cobble together.

Even so, the increased numbers of Democratic legislators who will make up the 111th Congress and the evident support of the incoming Obama administration essentially assures that there will be a rescue package for Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, known collectively as “the autos.” The only question is what are its terms - how much money, how few strings and how long it will stave off the inevitable: the restructuring, downsizing and retooling of what used to be known as the “Big Three”?

At this writing, it seems likely that, come next year, economic conditions in general and those of the U.S. auto-makers (not to be confused with American-based manufacturing operations of their foreign competitors) will translate into relief for Detroit. “Too big to fail,” too many jobs at stake, too much of the nation’s manufacturing capability at risk are among the considerations that will justify government intervention on a massive scale.

The effect will probably be to perpetuate, rather than alleviate - let alone eliminate, the myriad problems that afflict Ford, GM and Chrysler. Until the effects of this bail-out peter out, management changes may or may not be made. Inefficient facilities may or may not be shuttered. Turning the Big Three into the not-so-Big Two will or won’t happen.

Unless the costs associated with producing American vehicles in union shops are dramatically reduced and there is a turn-around in the appeal of such cars and trucks to consumers buying fewer of them from anybody, the writing is on the wall: No amount of largesse at the taxpayer’s expense is going to stave off the autos’ inevitable downsizing, job loss and economic dislocation.

There is, however, one thing that might make a difference in alleviating these bleak prospects and, if integrated into the coming rescue package for Detroit, even justify such an intervention: Tie the bail-out to the adoption of a new “Open Fuel Standard” (OFS) that would have the effect of giving U.S. auto-makers a distinct, near-term competitive advantage, while making a giant leap on one of our most important national security challenges - energy security.

The idea is straightforward. The Big Three have produced approximately six million vehicles now on America’s highways that are equipped with what is known as a Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV) capability. FFVs can be configured to run on ethanol or methanol - fuels that can be manufactured from a variety of sources that we have here in abundance - or on gasoline, or some combination of the three.

The American auto manufacturers have also produced many more such vehicles for the Brazilian market where an OFS is effectively the law of the land, ensuring that all new cars offer consumers “fuel choice.” Brazil’s experience is instructive. Where fuel competition is afforded and the monopoly gasoline currently enjoys in the United States is broken, the costs of powering the transportation sector are dramatically reduced. More importantly, billions of dollars that might otherwise go to purchase oil from sources that are unstable at best and unfriendly at worst can be kept at home.

During the recent presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain endorsed the concept of an Open Fuel Standard. Legislation that would institute it has been introduced on a bipartisan basis in both the House and Senate (H.R.6559 and S.3303, respectively). By incorporating the bills’ requirement that, by 2012, 50% of all new cars sold in this country be Flexible Fuel Vehicles - which Detroit’s auto companies have already committed and are planning to do - we can begin to wean America off of our cars’ current, absolute addiction to oil. The legislation would require that by 2015, a further 30% of these fleets be equipped with FFV technology, something that today costs less than $100 per car.

Imagine a President Obama as one of his first initiatives formally embracing the Open Fuel Standard, rewarding Detroit for taking a step that is highly desirable from both an environmental and national security perspective with a bailout tied to the imposition of such a standard on both domestic and foreign cars. The new chief executive could inspire his people and advance his stated agenda of achieving energy independence by calling on the American people to purchase a vehicle with FFV capability. Until foreign manufacturers retool and conform to the Open Fuel Standard, most of those FFVs will be sold by the Big Three - a shot in the arm for them, our economy and the national interest more generally.

An additional benefit for an Obama administration concerned with alleviating world poverty is that the adoption by this country of an Open Fuel Standard will have the effect of establishing it as a global standard. Car manufacturers will sell their FFVs all over the world, enabling about 100 countries to grow the fuels they need to power them, ending their dependence on foreign oil and reducing dramatically the petro-wealth transfers being used by freedom’s enemies to our collective detriment.

Call it the silver lining of the autos’ perfect storm.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition (SetAmericaFree.org).

Senator Barack Obama became President-elect on the uplifting, if inexact, slogan, “Yes, we can.” This week, there is growing evidence that people who have in mind doing away with the presidency of the United States – and all other aspects of our secular, democratic and constitutional form of government – are similarly convinced of their inevitable success. Judging by the sheer audacity of their agenda, “Yes, they can” would appear an apt description of the prospects for the Saudis and other champions of the totalitarian program they call Shariah.

In the run-up to an emergency summit outgoing President George Bush has called to address the now-global financial crisis, the oil-rich Islamists of the Persian Gulf led by Saudi Arabia have not only established that their petrodollars are indispensable to any solution. They also seem to have secured the Bush Administration’s acquiescence to the sinister strings attached to any bail-out of the West in which they might participate.

Specifically, the Saudis and their friends want the United States to join those, particularly in Europe, who have accommodated themselves to Shariah. No, we are assured, they aren’t taking about the brutal theo-political-legal code that features such barbaric practices as beheadings, floggings, stonings, amputations, female genital mutilation and misogyny more generally.

All they want, those in the know insist, is for Washington to encourage Wall Street – more and more of which is owned by the U.S. government – to embrace Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). A Treasury Department seminar convened last week depicted SCF as nothing more than a kind of socially responsible investing vehicle that respects Muslim religious beliefs by eschewing interest-bearing transactions and those involving pork and “sin” stocks. So, what’s the big deal? The Catholics, Methodists and Jews have their funds, why not the Muslims?

What makes the Shariah-Compliant Finance gambit both a big and troublesome “deal” is that, unlike these other religious traditions, Shariah’s adherents are pursuing a global theocracy. They believe they must impose their agenda on everybody else, religious and secular alike, using violence if necessary. And SCF is explicitly described by leading practitioners as a complement to violent holy war: “financial jihad” and “jihad with money.”

In other words, there is no such thing as free-standing Shariah-Compliant Finance. According to all of the recognized authorities and institutions of Islam, Shariah is a unified, indivisible program to which all faithful Muslims must adhere comprehensively.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Saudis & Co. are not simply seeking to insinuate Shariah-Compliant Finance into our capital markets. They are also advancing the creation of a parallel Shariah-governed society through various other means.

One of these techniques will be in evidence when the Saudi monarch himself convenes a meeting in New York City in the hope of imposing Shariah blasphemy laws worldwide. In light of the stated, and seemingly benign, purpose of the so-called “Culture of Peace” event hosted by King Abdullah at the United Nations – namely, promoting interfaith understanding and tolerance, numerous world leaders, including President Bush, will be present. Never mind that Saudi Arabia is arguably the most intolerant nation on earth, a fact even some in the Bush administration have acknowledged.

The real reason attendance at the King’s séance is going to be impressive, of course, has more to do with the hope that petro-largesse will flow to those who ingratiate themselves to the House of Saud. Abdullah appears confidently to have signaled that, if the West plays ball on the “Culture of Peace” agenda, the Saudis and their fellow Islamists will be constructive at what might be called the subsequent “Culture of Money” meeting in Washington.

What will the answer be when the Islamists insist that free speech must not allow the slander, libel or defamation of Shariah, or other aspects of their faith? If the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council have already accommodated themselves to this demand, why should we object? So what if, by so doing, we would effectively thereby be precluded from talking about – or even understanding – the Islamist threat we face, to say nothing of eviscerating the First Amendment? As the Treasury Department can attest, we need the money.

Unfortunately, this is no time for us to be diminishing awareness throughout the Free World of the various, grave dangers we face from adherents to Shariah’s seditious program. London’s Sunday Telegraph reported this weekend that a classified British government assessment has concluded that there are “some thousands of extremists in the U.K. committed to supporting Jihadi activities, either in the U.K. or abroad.”

Such extremists are said to be engaged in attack planning in the United Kingdom “either under the direction of al-Qaeda, or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology of global Jihad” (read, Shariah). They may inflict “mass casualties” and constitute a “severe” threat to the Government Security Zone (including the Houses of Parliament and key executive offices) in the heart of London.

At such a moment, a federal judge in Oregon has held the law criminalizing material support for terror is unconstitutionally “vague.” Taken together with the other manifestations of our capitulation, is it any wonder the champions of Shariah are convinced that “yes, they can” have their way with us? Who will disabuse them of this terrifying notion? We can, but will President-elect Obama lead the way?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a founding member of the Coalition to Stop Shariah (USAStopShariah.org).

This week will be all about the new order in Washington. Whether Tuesday’s balloting results in an administration populated by a President Obama or a President McCain, one thing is already clear: The U.S. Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah – the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.

As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Kimmitt announced: “The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis.”

“Islamic banking” is a euphemism for a practice better known as “Shariah-Compliant Finance (SFC).” And it turns out that this week the Treasury will be taking officials from various federal agencies literally to school on SFC.

The department is hosting a half-day course entitled “Islamic Finance 101” on Thursday at its headquarters building. Treasury’s self-described “seminar for the policy community” is co-sponsored with the leading academic promoters of Shariah and SCF in the United States: Harvard University Law School’s Project on Islamic Finance. At the very least, the U.S. government evidently hopes to emulate Harvard’s success in securing immense amounts of Wahhabi money in exchange for conforming to the Islamists’ agenda. Like Harvard, Treasury seems utterly disinterested in what Shariah actually is, and portends.

Unfortunately, such submission – the literal meaning of “Islam” – is not likely to remain confined long to the Treasury or its sister agencies. Thanks to the extraordinary authority conferred on Treasury since September backed by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the department is now in a position to impose its embrace of Shariah on the U.S. financial sector. The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury’s purchase of – at last count – 17 banks and the ability to provide, or withhold, funds from its new slush-fund can translate into unprecedented coercive power.

Concerns in this regard are only heightened by the prominent role Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari will be playing in “Islamic Finance 101.” Kashkari, the official charged with administering the TARP fund, will provide welcoming remarks to participants. Presumably, in the process, he will convey the enthusiasm about Shariah-Compliant Finance that appears to be the current party line at Treasury.

As this enthusiasm for SCF ramps up in Washington officialdom, it is worth recalling a lesson from “across the pond.” Earlier this year, the head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams provoked a brief but intense firestorm of controversy with his declaration that it was “unavoidable” that Shariah would be practiced in Britain. Largely unremarked was the reason he gave for such an ominous forecast: The U.K. had already accommodated itself to Shariah-Compliant Finance.

This statement provides an important insight for the incumbent U.S. administration and whomever succeeds it: Shariah-Compliant Finance serves as a leading edge of the spear for those seeking to insinuate Shariah into Western societies.

Regrettably, SCF is not the only instrument of the stealth jihad by which Shariah-promoting Islamists are seeking to achieve “parallel societies” here and elsewhere in the West. The British experience is instructive on this score, too. Her Majesty’s Government has allowed the establishment of at least five Shariah courts to hear (initially) family law cases. Polygamists in the U.K. can get welfare for each of their wives (as long as all the marriages beyond the first were performed overseas). And in the latest British act of obeisance to the demands of Shariah-sensitized multiculturalism, Oxford will dispense with Christmastime in favor of a “Winter Lights” celebration.

Thus far, we in this country may not have reached the point where evidence of this sort of creeping Shariah is so manifest. But Treasury’s accommodation to SCF demonstrates that we are on the same trajectory – the one ordained and demanded by the promoters of Shariah, one to which we serially accommodate ourselves at our extreme peril.

After all, the object of Shariah is the supplanting of our government and Constitution, through violent means if possible and, until then, through stealthy ones. Islamists, having secured footholds via their parallel societies, inevitably use those to extend their influence over Muslims who have no more interest in living under authoritative Islam’s Shariah than the rest of us do. Inexorably, it becomes the turn of non-Muslims to accommodate themselves to ever more intrusive demands from the Islamists. It is known as submission, or dhimmitude.

Soon – possibly as early as this Wednesday – the Treasury Department and the other federal agencies will be taking orders from representatives of Barack Obama or John McCain. It may be that the outgoing administration’s determination to advance the Islamist agenda via “Islamic Finance 101,” and what flows from it, may be the first, far-reaching policy decision inherited by the new President-elect. If he does not want to have his transition saddled with an implicit endorsement of submission to Shariah, the winner of the White House sweepstakes would be well-advised to pull the plug on Thursday’s indoctrination program and the insidious industry it is meant to foist on the “policy community,” our capital markets and our country.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

News item: On Sunday, Arab News reported, “The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis, Robert M. Kimmitt, US deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a press conference held at the US Embassy here yesterday.” The newspaper went on to note that “[Kimmitt] said that experts in the US Treasury Department are currently learning the important features of Islamic banking.”

As it happens, for the better part of a year, we at the Center for Security Policy have spent a fair amount of time trying to teach U.S. Treasury Department and other government “experts” about what is euphemistically called “Islamic banking,” but better known as Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). In meetings with Secretary Kimmitt and other top Treasury officials, my colleagues and I have presented them with all they really need to know about the “important features” of this growth industry.

Specifically, we shared with them a detailed legal memorandum written by one of our experts – David Yerushalmi, an attorney specializing in securities law who is deeply knowledgeable about the comprehensive theo-political-legal code that authoritative Islam calls Shariah. Mr. Yerushalmi’s memo makes a compelling case that there is both civil liability and criminal exposure associated with SCF.

This is so because, at its core, Shariah is sedition: It explicitly espouses the violent overthrow of all secular governments and constitutions – including those of the United States – in favor of a global Islamic theocracy. The Yerushalmi memo makes clear that Shariah advisors – who play a central role in this industry as it falls to them to determine whether transactions are Shariah-compliant or not – and/or the companies that employ them appear to be involved in one or more of the following: racketeering, anti-trust violations, consumer and securities fraud or material support for terror.

Senator Jon Kyl, the Senate’s number two Republican and a senior member of that chamber’s Finance Committee found the conclusions of the Yerushalmi memo to be sufficiently alarming that in August he sought official reactions to its findings from Bob Kimmitt’s boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, SEC Chairman Chris Cox, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Attorney General Michael Mukasey. To date, only Messrs. Cox and Bernanke have deigned to respond. Both did so in an appallingly superficial manner.

In the case of Chairman Cox, he assured Sen. Kyl that the SEC was ensuring that “U.S.-registered issuers offering SCF products must comply fully with the applicable disclosure requirements of the federal securities law.” Never mind that no offerer of Shariah-Compliant Finance products discloses that Shariah is seditious, let alone that SCF is an instrument of its stealth jihad.

For his part, Fed Chairman Bernanke blithely stated that, since “Shariah-Compliant Finance is still in its infancy,” it was too early to tell whether regulators would have problems monitoring it. [Moreover, he wrote, the Fed has at present “no reason to believe” that “SCF products and services offered by banks in the United States are non-compliant with U.S. financial services law.”]

In these regards, it might be helpful if, while Secretary Kimmitt is in Qatar, he pays a visit to one of the most prominent of the SCF advisors, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, who serves on, among numerous others, the Shariah advisory board of two Qatari Islamic banks. As my colleague Christopher Holton has pointed out in a recent posting on the Family Security Matters website , Qaradawi has called for the Islamic world to use the present financial crisis to destroy Western capitalism and replace it with “an Islamic economic system.”

Inquiring minds among Treasury’s experts trying to “learn about Islamic banking” might also be interested to know that, in a 2006 interview with the BBC, Qaradawi also declared that he calls SCF “jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money.”

[Kimmet might also ask his hosts in the Persian Gulf what they think of Mufti Taqi Usmani, probably the single most authoritative “scholar” on Shariah and SCF in the world. His book, Islam and Modernism, translated into English in 1999, obligates Muslims living in the West to either engage in violent Jihad to overthrow the infidel democracies or at the very least support Jihad with their money and other resources.]

What are we to make of the fact that so many senior U.S. government officials seem so clueless about the true and threatening nature of Shariah-Compliant Finance and the seditious Shariah agenda it explicitly serves? For sure, they find David Yerushalmi’s conclusions inconvenient at a time when Kimmitt and others are desperately trying to recycle our petrodollars now in the hands of Shariah-adhering Saudis and Qataris.

In a terrific new book, The Failure Factory, the Washington Times’ ace national security correspondent documents myriad cases of federal bureaucrats actively subverting the President’s efforts to wage and win the war against our terrorist foes. Perhaps, this is yet another example of such insidious disloyalty.

Whatever the motivation for federal officials giving Shariah-Compliant Finance the “see-no-evil” treatment, sedition is sedition. And under the U.S. code, those who are aware of seditious activities and who fail to take actions to stop it are themselves guilty of a felony offense. It is called “misprision of treason.”

Those government officials who have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States have a special responsibility not only to learn all they can about seditious Shariah and the various means – including “Islamic banking” by which it is being advanced in our capital markets and others. They also have a professional obligation to make clear that Shariah and its financial form of jihad are not legal in the United States and will be prosecuted. If they fail to do so, they themselves risk, and deserve, prosecution.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

Suddenly, the presidential campaigns are addressing an issue that should have been at the forefront of this year’s election long ago. Call it “characters count.” We know people – especially public figures – by the company they keep. And we need to know much more about, to put it charitably, the characters that have figured prominently for years in Barack Obama’s life.

Over the weekend, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin brought the issue to the fore by observing caustically that the Democrats’ would-be commander-in-chief has “palled around with terrorists.” The Obama campaign immediately deployed talking points and a television ad conjuring up Charles Keating, a one-time friend and supporter of John McCain who was a driving force behind the 1980s-era savings and loan debacle.

The problem for Barack Obama is that convicted – and unrepentant – terrorist William Ayers is not the only person with a profound animosity towards this country with whom he has “palled around” since his youth. It is not, as the Democratic candidate maintains, a distraction or a sign of desperation on the part of his opponents that serious questions are finally being asked about the nature and the implications of the judgment he has exhibited in the past – and may exhibit in the future – as evidenced by his myriad and profoundly troubling personal ties. That is especially the case since so little is known about the junior Senator from Illinois and what he really means by “change.”

Take for example, the formative influence in Barack Obama’s youth that he calls in his memoirs simply “Frank.” As it happens, the Frank in question was Frank Marshall Davis, a well-known Stalinist Communist in Hawaii whose attachment to the Soviet Union and hatred for an America he loathed as racist and imperialistic caused the FBI to keep him under surveillance for at least 19 years. Evidently, young Obama and his father spent hours in the company of this mentor, presumably soaking in not only his alcohol but his virulent hostility towards America.

We now know that a similar view was espoused routinely from the pulpit of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Sen. Obama maintains that somehow he had not heard any of Wright’s loathing of this country – epitomized by the latter’s notorious plea, “God damn America.” When confronted with evidence of it, he could not bring himself to disassociate from his pastor of twenty years until that tie properly threatened to scupper his candidacy during the Democratic primaries.

Thanks to the intrepid Stanley Kurtz, we also have learned of Sen. Obama’s longstanding ties to another fixture of the radical left, one emblematic of its enmity towards an America seen as oppressive and racist: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (better known as ACORN). Obama trained ACORN personnel, worked with its activists on the group’s (often problematic) voter-registration efforts and consulted with its most aggressive operatives. Preeminent among the latter has been one Madeline Talbott.

Obama also secured, through his position on the Woods Fund and Chicago Annenberg Challenge boards (he served on the former with Bill Ayers), funding for ACORN’s intimidation campaigns against banks that failed to make sub-prime style loans to otherwise ineligible would-be homeowners. As Kurtz put it in the New York Post (http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0), “It would be tough to find an ‘on the ground’ community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.”

To the extent that the economic effects of the sub-prime meltdown makes Charles Keating’s S&L raid on the Treasury look like a church social, Obama should be careful about casting stones in that direction.

Even more worrisome from a national security perspective are some of Obama’s ties to prominent figures in the world of radical Islam. These include another racist black nationalist, Don Warden, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Khalid al-Mansour. According to Kenneth Timmerman in Newsmax, al-Mansour has worked closely to advance the influence operations in America of one of Saudi Arabia’s most insidious royal billionaires, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The latter has appreciated for some time the help America’s higher education institutions could give his Islamist “soft jihad” – the effort to legitimate and insinuate Islamic law (Shariah) into this country. Toward that end, he has bought leading Middle East studies programs, notably at Georgetown and Harvard University, and reportedly helped advance Obama’s candidacy to the latter’s law school.

Then, there is the case of Rashid Khalidi, a former colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago and now a professor at Columbia. Khalidi is an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinians, fervent critic of Israel (which he calls a destructive “racist” state), an admirer of suicide bombers and a driving force behind the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). This so-called pro-Palestinian “community organization” in Chicago is another beneficiary of the largesse of the Obama-Ayers team at the Woods Fund and promotes an agenda that would horrify many of Obama’s Jewish supporters.

Tuesday’s town-hall style debate between Barack Obama and John McCain offers the public an opportunity to explore a basic question: Have these and similar influences on Sen. Obama’s life in fact been influential – and, if so, will they translate into personnel, policies and practices that are inimical to our country, its people and security if he is elected?

We have a need to know. Characters count.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

Q. What do Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Barack Obama have in common?

A. The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic candidate for president of the United States of America have both chosen to spend much of their lives in the company of people who are virulently hostile to this country. At least some of them seek to bring about, as Ahmadinejad puts it, a “world without America.”

As it happens, Ahmadinejad will be given Tuesday a platform for his anti-American invective by the United Nations. That organization increasingly not only shares a generalized transnational ambition to transform a sovereign, powerful United States in favor of one-world government. Worse yet, thanks to the growing petro-wealth and aggressiveness of the leaders of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the UN is actually starting to accommodate itself to that bloc’s ambition to have the new world order be arranged according to the totalitarian program the Iranian and other Islamists’ call Shariah.

In the early days of the Iranian revolution, Ahmadinejad was a street thug (and, according to some Americans taken hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, one of their tormentors) in the service of the radical Shiite Islamist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Ever since, he has been rewarded for his loyalty to the most intolerant strains of Islam and for his hostility to the “Great Satan.”

Today, that service continues as the front-man for the current ruling theocracy, led by another radical cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian regime is not content with having Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touting repeatedly its determination to bring about a world without America – and, by the way, without Israel, either. It is acting to acquire the capability to fulfill these genocidal threats with the development and deployment of the means of launching unimaginably destructive nuclear attacks against these nations.

Is that possible? Unfortunately, given Israel’s small size and concentrated population, a single weapon could effectively achieve Ahmadinejad’s stated goal of “wiping Israel off the map.” Less well understood is the fact that, according to a congressional commission, a single nuclear weapon used to unleash a devastating electro-magnetic pulse via a nuclear detonation in space, could cause “catastrophic” damage to this country, too. By some estimates, were the electrical grid to be taken down for a very long time, nine out of ten Americans would be unable to survive. A world without America, indeed.

Thankfully, the friends of Barack Obama who have exhibited their own, rabid hostility toward this country have had more modest ambitions towards “changing” this country – or at least not been in a position to act on Iranian-style apocalyptic visions. It is now common knowledge, however, that his pastor for twenty-years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, called on God to “damn America” and that one of Obama’s early political allies, convicted terrorist William Ayers, expressed regret that he was unable to “do enough” when it came to “setting bombs.”

Before Messrs. Wright and Ayers, though, there was “Frank,” the name Obama gives in his memoirs to a man he describes as a formative influence during his early years in Hawaii. It turns out this Frank was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Stalinist black Communist whom the inestimably valuable Cliff Kincaid (www.usasurvival.org), has identified as a “high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii,” which “the communists had targeted…largely because of its strategic location and importance to the U.S. defense effort.” Kincaid describes Davis as a “propagandist, racial agitator and recruiter for the Communist Party of the USA.” He reports that, during the 19 years Davis was under FBI surveillance, Obama’s mentor “spent much of his time” photographing Hawaii’s shorelines and beachfronts – presumably not for their scenic value.

Last, but not least, there is increasing evidence of Obama’s long-standing ties to two others with records of hostility towards this country. According to investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman (www.newsmax.com/newsfront/obama_sutton_saudi/2008/09/03/127490.html), the first is Khalid al-Mansour (a.k.a. Don Warden), once a prominent advocate for racist black nationalism. Since his conversion to Islam, al-Mansour has worked closely with a Saudi billionaire anxious to “exert influence in the United States,” Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. It will be recalled that the latter was the Wahhabi whose largesse then-New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani famously spurned after 9/11 upon learning the Saudi royal had blamed American policies for that day’s horrific attack. Obama reportedly benefited from these Islamists’ help in securing a position at Harvard Law School – a university that now has a $20 million center named for the prince that helps legitimate the seditious practice of Shariah in America.

We know that Barack Obama has, in the past, declared his willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran without precondition. While he has subsequently qualified that commitment, it seems fair to conclude that, given what they have in common, the Democratic candidate would feel unencumbered by a reluctance to dignify – to say nothing of encourage – so vociferous a proponent of anti-Americanism as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It is clear what kind of “change” the Iranian president believes in and that which has animated several of Barack Obama’s long-time friends. This week’s presidential debate may afford an opportunity to determine to what extent change inimical to America is also what the Democratic candidate believes in.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

(To unsubscribe, please reply to info@centerforsecuritypolicy.org)