Robert Spencer in PJ Media: 4 Muslims Who Deserve to Be Under Surveillance

Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

Leftists and Islamic supremacists are raising an uproar about this surveillance, and so it will soon end. But it shouldn’t. Here’s why, in my PJ Media piece for this week:

Leftists and Islamic supremacists are enraged this week over the revelation that the FBI and NSA, despite their officially politically correct See-No-Islam Hear-No-Islam Speak No-Islam stance, have had four prominent Muslim leaders in the U.S. under surveillance.

They have appealed to Barack Obama to stop this surveillance and all related monitoring of Muslims immediately, which he almost certainly will, and have mounted a Twitter campaign based around the bitterly ironic hashtag #IAmATarget, which applies more to infidels in the line of jihad attacks than it ever will to Muslim leaders in the United States.

The only problem with all the righteous indignation that Leftists and Islamic supremacist leaders have summoned about this surveillance is that it is entirely justified. The uproar began with an exposé titled “Under Surveillance: Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On,” written by none other than Glenn Greenwald, along with another far-Left journalist, Murtaza Hussain. Greenwald and Hussain purport to demonstrate that five Muslim leaders whom the NSA and FBI have been watching are undeserving of such scrutiny, as they’re honest, patriotic Americans whose only misdeed is to oppose administration policies.

This is, of course, absurd. Opposing U.S. government policies from the Left won’t get you placed under surveillance; it’ll get you media adulation, foundation grants, and awards from philanthropic groups. Obama’s IRS persecutes conservative groups, not Leftists, and several military presentations in recent years have claimed that “right-wing extremists” are a terror threat, with nary a word about genuinely violent Left-wing extremist groups such as the Occupy movement and others.

Bizarrely, and perhaps because they couldn’t find enough Muslims to fit their victim paradigm, Greenwald and Hussain include in their list of persecuted Muslims Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor at Rutgers, who is a professing atheist; for the actual Muslims on their list, they gloss over the genuine reasons why the FBI and NSA have placed these men under surveillance:

2. Agha Saeed

Agha Saeed is “a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights” – including, say Greenwald and Hussain, “the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against occupation if peaceful means fail—a right affirmed in a series of resolutions by the United Nations General Assembly.”

The fact that the corrupt and morally compromised UN endorsed the “Palestinian” jihad is hardly a ringing affirmation of its moral rectitude, and in any case, the groups that pursue “armed resistance against occupation” are jihad terror groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic Jihad. Saeed supports this “armed resistance,” so he may be in contact with some of the leaders or members of such groups, and surveillance could reveal something that could be used to stop their jihad terror attacks against civilians. So here again, surveillance is warranted.

Nihad Awad is “the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.” (Greenwald, the article fastidiously notes, “has given paid speeches before CAIR’s regional affiliates.”)

“Despite its political moderation and relationship to federal law enforcement agencies,” say Greenwald and Hussain, “CAIR became a primary target of hardline neoconservatives after 9/11.” This apparently resulted in the fact that “in 2007, the Justice Department named the group as one of more than 300 ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ in its controversial prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, then the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., which was eventually convicted of providing material support to Hamas.”

Greenwald and Hussain notes that “in 1994, Awad voiced public support for Hamas—before the group’s campaign of suicide attacks against civilians and subsequent placement on the State Department’s terrorist list in 1997.” But it adds:

“I do not support Hamas,” Awad says today, pointing out that the group was not involved in terrorist activities at the time he made the statement. “It was not on the list of organizations that sponsor or conduct terrorism by the State Department. And when the organization took those acts, CAIR has condemned it, repeatedly.”…

So we are to understand that Awad supported Hamas in 1994, but in 1997, when it was placed on the State Department’s terrorist list, he stopped supporting it. Here is part of the old Hamas website’s “Glory Record” of attacks against Israelis – the terrorist organization’s own record of its murderous actions. On a page that remained on its website well after 9/11, it celebrated the pre-1994 murders of Israeli civilian Ya’coub Berey; civilians on a bus to Tel Aviv attacked by Hamas jihadi Ahmed Hussein Shukry; civilians in a crowd in Jaffa who were murdered by another Hamas jihadi in 1992; and a civilian at Beit Lahya who was murdered by a member of Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades.

The site also celebrated the stabbings by Hamas members of an Israeli bus driver, a group of Israelis at a bus station in Keryat Youval, a group of Israeli citrus packers, and a group of Israelis who were run down by jihadist cab driver Jameel Ismail al-Baz.

All these acts were committed and publicly celebrated before 1994, when Awad professed his support for Hamas. That they give Awad a platform for his dissembling is typical of the dishonesty of the entire Greenwald/Hussain piece. But it will accomplish its purpose: the ending of surveillance of these and other Muslim leaders and the further weakening of counter-terror operations in general. And Americans will be in even greater danger than they were before.

Read the rest here.