John Brennan wants us to believe that there is no connection whatsoever between Islam and the terrorism committed in its name.

He can express that opinion, of course. The trouble is he’s President Obama’s National Security Adviser. (Watch and listen to him on video here.)

Now a genuinely anti-terrorist organization, The Center for Security Policy, is rightly calling for Brennan’s resignation.

FoxNews reports:

An independent group of national security professionals deeply critical of the Obama administration is calling on National Security Adviser John Brennan to resign for what the group says is a coordinated effort to prevent “identifying, understanding and countering” threats posed by Islamic law, known as shariah.

Center for Security Policy chief Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official, held a news conference Wednesday to argue that Brennan failed in his “duty to know his enemy” when he allowed a sheik [Kifah Mustapha] with “known ties” to Hamas through his work at the Holy Land Foundation, the charitable group whose leaders were convicted of funding the Palestinian terror group, to participate in a six-week long FBI outreach program to the Muslim community.

(See our post, No terrorist left behind, September 27, 2010.)

The “outreach program” goes under the name of  “the Citizens Academy”. The FBI says on its website that the idea is to teach “how the agency tracks down spies and terrorists and how it collects and preserves evidence”.

So much for secrecy.

When first challenged to explain why a known terrorist supporter had been invited to look round the top-secret government department, the official response of the FBI was to lie. Spokesmen insisted that the story was totally fabricated, and declared that a photograph of Mustapha with the invited group had been “doctored” to include him.

Why did they feel the need to lie? Can there be any other reason than that they wanted to hide what they had done because they knew they shouldn’t have done it?

Their silly “We didn’t do it” was too plainly inadequate in the face of the evidence, so they changed their minds and argued okay, it had happened, but what’s wrong with it anyway?

The FBI defended its invitation to Mustapha in an interview with FoxNews.com, saying there was no reason to worry about his credentials or what he may learn during his participation.

Frank Gaffney took a different view:

Gaffney said at an afternoon news conference that Brennan is guilty of either “willful blindness at best” or a form of treason at worst.

“The FBI gave a guided tour of one of our most sensitive counter-terrorism facilities to a known Hamas operative …”

He spoke of “the cluelessness fostered by Mr. Brennan”, and went on to say that there was “a host of  others” in government “who are similarly either failing to know or rendered incapable of acting on what they do know is going on in this country in a form of civilization jihad and perhaps the precursor to violent forms of jihad.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Patrick Poole, who first exposed the scandal in Big Peace, has found out that rules had to be deliberately broken to allow Mustapha into the Counterterrorism Center:

Now a Homeland Security official (requesting anonymity for fear of retaliation by superiors) has contacted Big Peace saying that “the plugs had to be pulled on our system” in order to allow Kifah Mustapha to enter the NCTC and that “the NCTC has Kifah Mustapha on the highest watch list we have. There’s no way from a systems point-of-view that this could be an accidental oversight …”

What is Brennan trying to do? And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano? There appears to be a positive effort on the part of those entrusted with defending America to aid and abet the Muslim terrorist enemy.

But that’s unthinkable! Isn’t it?

Obama wants no Muslim to feel shunned and excluded, even if he’s a known terrorist, and even if the place he’s excluded from is a top-secret government center.

What about Muslim terrorists? Must they to be let in to such places, lest they feel cruelly discriminated against?

Oh, yes! For one thing, you see, no Muslims are terrorists, and no terrorists are Muslims. There is only a “tiny minority” of “extremists” who carry out terrorism in the name of Islam and in no way represent the Religion of Peace. Indeed, the word “Muslim” should never be uttered in the same sentence as the word “terrorist”.  Such is the official and only-permissible opinion of the Obama administration.

Furthermore, in those official eyes, even Muslims  who have been proved to be dedicated supporters of active terrorist organizations are really only the maligned victims of prejudice, and they more than any need to be reassured that they are trusted and respected. How may this be done? Why, invite them into the National Counterterrorism Center, show them around, let them ask questions and give them frank, full, and honest answers. They’re Muslims, not terrorists, for godssake!

Our view is obstinately different. We say those who finance, support, applaud, and defend terrorism, are co-perpetrators of terrorism. We know that without their fans and funders, the terrorists could not operate. We have also observed that almost all acts of terrorism carried out anywhere in the world in the 21st. century have been perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam (today’s tally, 16115 since 9/11). But there you – our terrorist is an Obama administration’s peace-lover.

One such known co-perpetrator, who was invited to look around the country’s counter-terrorism facilities and acquire sensitive information, is an agent of Hamas named Kifah Mustapha.

What a gift to the sworn enemies of the United States! He and they must be laughing fit to burst!

Patrick Poole reports at Big Peace:

A known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – Kifah Mustapha – was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI’s training center at Quantico, during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim Community. The group was accompanied by reporter Ben Bradley of WLS-Chicago (ABC), who filed a report on the trip …

“Sheik Kifah Mustapha, who runs the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, asked some of the most pointed questions during the six week FBI Citizens’ Academy and trip to Washington. He pushed agents to fully explain everything from the bureau’s use of deadly force policy to racial and ethnic profiling. ‘I saw a very interesting side of what the FBI does and I wanted to know more,’ Sheik Mustapha explained after returning from D.C. …”

Yes, I bet he wanted to know everything about the FBI’s policies.

Curiously, Bradley’s report on the Citizen’s Academy fails to make note of Mustapha’s extensive terrorist ties and support for Hamas, including his former employment with the Holy Land Foundation, which was listed as a specially designated terrorist group by the U.S. government in December 2001, and whose executives were convicted of terrorism support in 2008 and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Mustapha was personally named unindicted co-conspirator (#31) in the case and employment records submitted by federal prosecutors during the trial showed that he received more than $154,000 for his work for the Holy Land Foundation between 1996 and 2000. … In a deposition he gave in a civil trial concerned with the murder of a Chicago teenager killed by Hamas while waiting for a bus in Israel, Mustapha admitted that he was the registered agent for the Holy Land Foundation in Illinois, and also to his involvement with other Hamas front groups, including the Islamic Association for Palestine. He was later hired as an imam by the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, which the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004 has long been a hotbed of Hamas support. …

Why should terrorist operatives have to covertly case potential targets when the FBI will happily escort them and take them into areas they would never be able to reach on their own? Who’s next on the FBI’s “outreach” calendar, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow GITMO detainees?

Sure, why not? After they’ve had a civil trial and been acquitted, they might be given jobs in the intelligence services. Their expertise would be of inestimable value to the state.

No terrorist left behind.

Obama is acting the role of POTUS, not  filling it. He reads from a script. He does not understand the responsibilities of his position.

That’s the opinion of several commentators.

Carol Peracchio writes at the American Thinker:

So far, Obama’s approach to being president has appeared to be: 1. Make a speech outlining a policy (health care, stimulus). 2. Hand everything to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. 3. When the negative public reaction reaches critical mass, threatening passage of the legislation, spend the last two days before the vote twisting arms and making offers to Democrats. 4. Pass the legislation on a strictly party-line vote. 5. Make another speech taking full credit for whatever ended up passing.

Unless reading a teleprompter can be considered work, it’s obvious that anything that can be considered an achievement of this presidency is due to Pelosi and Reid, with honorable mention in the arm-twisting category to Rahm Emmanuel. And in the rare instance where a goal of the president does not involve Congress (think the Chicago Olympics), Obama’s “read a speech” approach to hard work is shown to be an utter failure. If there is even a tiny glimmer of light in the Gulf oil spill disaster, it’s that the Obama con that he actually is working and involved has been exposed …

A fascinating illustration of Obama’s work ethic can be seen in this article by Jack Cashill, who has done exhaustive research on the dubious authorship of Barack Obama’s autobiography. Apparently a “hopelessly blocked” Obama gave all his notes to his friend Bill Ayers, who “helped” produce a manuscript. Exchange Nancy Pelosi for Bill Ayers, and we see that Obama’s modus operandi toward actual work has not changed. …

President Obama played the Big Con and became president by perfecting the art of appearing cool, calm, intellectual, and competent. Unfortunately, this seems to be the extent of his repertoire of emotions… No matter the crisis, the president reads his lines the exact same way: cool, calm, detached. He is truly one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen. It’s too bad there isn’t a director around who can tell our (Not So) Great Pretender, “I’m afraid you’re just not what we’re looking for.”

From Newsmax, by Theodore Kettle:

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, whose tireless leadership in the days and weeks after 9/11 made him a national hero, has accused President Obama of doing everything wrong in his handling of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It couldn’t be worse,” Guiliani said Wednesday when asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity to rate Obama’s performance. “I mean, this would be an example, if you’re taught ‘Leadership 101,’ of exactly what not to do: minimize it at first; two days after or three days after it happened, go on vacation. … He’s been on vacation more often than he has, by far, been to Louisiana or Mississippi, or any of the places affected,” Giuliani added. …

According to Giuliani, the president’s nonchalance delivers a “signal right into the entire bureaucracy, that they’re also very lackadaisical about it. But one of the things you understand as a leader is: your actions are going to energize your bureaucracy to do the best it can.”

The ex-NYC mayor charged that Obama exhibited a similar lack of leadership in the case of the Christmas Day botched airliner bombing last year, with a negative ripple effect as the result.

“He did the same thing on the Christmas Day bombing,” Giuliani told Hannity. “He stays on vacation for 11 days. So the other guys go on vacation.” That’s a clear reference to National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter not cutting short a ski trip after the December 25 near-destruction of a Detroit-bound passenger jet. … The reality is that the administration has made every mistake it could possibly make, right down to this criminal investigation of BP. … Are you gonna distract them from the job of what they’re supposed to be doing? … If we’ve got a bunch of criminals doing it, why are we allowing them to do it?” Giuliani wondered.

From the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell:

Pretending that our economy can survive without a commitment to safe oil operations is naïve at best. It is binary: If we don’t drill, we import. And if we don’t open drilling to easier sources such as onshore deposits and shale, we limit ourselves to riskier exploration a mile below the ocean floor. Despite the president’s assertions at his press conference earlier this week, billions of barrels of “easily accessible” oil have been turned into “impossible to access” oil by federal regulations and moratoria – including the President’s own actions – that block any access.

What the President should do is examine the red tape that may have contributed to the failure to contain the environmental disaster. Were there missed opportunities to burn off more of the leaking oil because of overblown air pollution standards? What were the holdups in the use of dispersants? Did federal permitting delays stop Louisiana from creating the artificial barriers it needed? The answers to these questions appear to be yes, and that responsibility lies with the President. He and his team should make it top priority to waive any regulatory barriers that continue to slow cleanup and recovery efforts. …

The Deepwater Horizon platform sat on federal waters and was under federal jurisdiction. It is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that the leased space is not a threat to public health or safety. And it is the responsibility of the government to ensure the clean up efforts in the Gulf are appropriately managed. …

Coordinating the cleanup is equally imperative … The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 authorizes the president to oversee the cleanup efforts of the responsible parties, and offshore this duty falls to the U.S. Coast Guard. Yet, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had to lobby the White House for weeks to get engaged on this front. …

The Obama administration’s resort to criminal investigation and possible prosecution of BP is not only premature, it is predictable. In the wake of accusations that Obama has failed to take decisive action, his administration is taking the path of “nothing shows that you are ‘doing something’ like prosecuting someone.”

It is possible that criminal wrongdoing occurred, but the current approach—one that all but announces that criminal charges will be brought and then seeks to identify the crime and who will be designated as criminal—undermines the criminal justice system and Americans’ respect for the law. …

President Obama instinctively leans toward an activist government except when every so often he hesitates. Ironically, it is these moments that tend to be the precise times when the federal government’s role is most justified, whether that be border security, the war on terror, ceding sovereignty to multilateral organizations, or now in the Gulf. The federal government has a role in the Gulf, and it’s time for the president to articulate it to the American people.

We don’t disagree that Obama’s an incompetent windbag and a bad actor, but he has real power and is using it to impose his collectivist ideals on America, immensely harming the country he was so disastrously elected to lead.

Shocking information on how US homeland security and anti-terrorism policy has been designed by the Islamic jihadist enemies themselves, is provided by Clare M. Lopez, a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, who writes this plain-speaking article for Human Events:

Counterterrorism policy is being formulated under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the lead international jihadist organization charged with “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” It’s important to note that the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood coincide exactly with those of al Qaeda and every other Islamic jihadist organization in the world today: re-establishment of the caliphate/imamate and imposition of Shari’a (Islamic law) over the entire world. …

Former North Carolina State Senator Larry Shaw, elected CAIR Board Chairman in March 2009 stated that he “looks forward to partnering with the Obama administration…” In case anyone failed to notice, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror funding case and an acknowledged affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, just how close is that partnership?

The policy implications of Brotherhood influence are both startling and evident. For example, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano sets the tone for the Obama administration view of Islamic jihad, but in April 2009, she rejected any notion that the enemy is either Islamic or a jihadi. Absurdly, she even refused to even use the word “terror,” instead preferring the inane “man-made disaster.” She was joined in planting the collective U.S. national security leadership head firmly in the sand by senior counterterrorism advisor to the president, John Brennan, who, apparently oblivious of Islamic doctrine and law, claimed in August 2009 that the meaning of jihad is to “. . . purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”

Following the foiled Christmas Day airliner bombing, Brennan made a frenzied round of the Sunday talk shows, shocking most of us with the off-hand announcement that a plea deal was “on the table” for Abdulmutallab (who lawyered up and shut up the moment he’d been Mirandized). Treating Islamic jihad as a legal problem or as though it doesn’t exist cripples U.S. national security policy making. 

Where did such ideas come from? How could our most senior officials entrusted with the defense of national security be so far off the tracks? It matters critically, because policy executed in ignorance of the essential linkage between Islamic doctrine and terrorism is bound to miss warning signals that involve Muslim clerics, mosques, teaching, and texts. A key indicator about our counterterrorism officials’ failures may be found in their advisors: their jihadi and Muslim Brotherhood advisors.

The inability of the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”) to connect the dots is no accident. It is not meant to connect the dots. In the summer of 2008, the NCTC organized a conference on U.S. Counter-Radicalization Strategy. According to a 4 January 2010 posting by Patrick Poole at Pajamas Media, one of the leading speakers at that conference was Yasir Qadhi, a featured instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. But by his own public admission, Yasir Qadhi was on the U.S. terror watch list! 

Yes, a key speaker for an NCTC discussion about Counter-Radicalization Strategy is on the terror watch list. He’s obviously there for good reasons. For one thing, Qadhi’s Ilmquest media company featured audio CD sets of sermons by al Qaeda cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, on its website and for sale at Ilmquest seminars. Yes, that al-Awlaki — the one linked to both Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Muslim Ft. Hood shooter, and Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim would-be Christmas airline bomber. 

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As noted above, the influence of the enemy extends to the very words we use to describe that enemy and his campaign of conquest. … Back in 2008, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued lexicon guidance to their employees, counseling avoidance of words like “jihad” or “ummah” or “Caliphate” when describing the enemy. They refused to identify the Muslim American sources who’d advised them on their decisions.

But it is enlightening to note the list of Muslim Brotherhood front groups that endorsed the vocabulary list once it had been issued: the Muslim American Society (MAS — founded by the Muslim Brotherhood); Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC — which lobbies to remove Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and Hizballah from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list); ISNA; and CAIR. When Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee, led by Congressman Peter Hoekstra, proposed an amendment to the 2009 Intelligence funding bill that would have prohibited the Intelligence Community “from adopting speech codes that encumber accurately describing the radical jihadist terrorists that attacked America and continue to threaten the homeland”, the Democratic majority rejected it outright.

Congressional Democrats would appear to be thoroughly influenced by the MB …

These are the Jihad wars, and they are nearly 1400 years old. The U.S. has only been confronting Islamic jihadis since our 18th century naval campaigns against the so-called Barbary pirates but liberal democracy will not see the 22nd century if we do not acknowledge and confront this enemy here and now in the 21st. Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack.