Islamism Rising: Defense Department in Crisis

National Security specialist Frank Gaffney has blown the lid off of a scandalous sequence of events today which has caused one of the foremost experts on the Islamist threat we face--Major Stephen Coughlin--to be fired from the Defense Department by Deputy Secretary Gordon Englund--apparently at the recommendation of one Hashem Islam, Englund's man in charge of "Islamic outreach".

This "point man"--who is in a remarkably important Defense Department position, considering we are at WAR with the "political wing" of Islam (i.e. the Islamofascists)--has, simply by virtue of firing Coughlin, had a decidedly negative impact on neutralizing the funding of radical groups right here in the United States. I would argue that this could just be the tip of the iceberg.

Gaffney has termed this scandal "Front-gate" because the issue is Islamic Front groups and a Defense Department that seems to have made a choice to let them operate with impunity. It's horrifying, and it reads like something right out of (the original) Manchurian Candidate (emphasis is mine):

It is now well-established in Washington that any scandal, no matter how seemingly innocuous, soon is given the suffix "-gate," establishing a lineal connection to the mother of all scandals, Watergate.

Well, let me be the first to suggest that a recent scandal in the Pentagon be known hereafter as "Front-gate" in recognition of the central role played in the drama by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization designated by the Justice Department as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). With the House and Senate both back in business this week, Front-gate should be subjected to close congressional scrutiny since it may involve the most strategically ominous case of official misconduct since the Clinton administration's China-gate.

The Front-gate saga began with the firing last month of Stephen Coughlin, a major in the Army Reserves working as a civilian contractor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he ran afoul of one Hashem Islam, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England's point-man on Muslim community outreach.

Hashem Islam is also evidently an admirer of ISNA. He arranged for Mr. England to address one of the group's meetings last year — a huge help to an organization reeling from its designation by the Bush Justice Department not only as a Brotherhood front but as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism-financing conspiracy.

According to reporting by The Washington Times' national security correspondent, Bill Gertz, the sacking of Maj. Coughlin was precipitated by a sharp disagreement with Mr. Islam over ISNA. The former had made a serious study of this and other Islamist organizations as part of a 333-page thesis titled "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad," prepared for and recently accepted by the National Defense Intelligence College.

Based on his analysis of the Islamofascist roots and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, Stephen Coughlin was given to warning his military audiences that it was no "moderate" organization. For example, he notes that one of the Ikhwan's most prominent leaders, Sheik Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, has declared: "The abduction and killing of Americans in Iraq is an obligation so as to cause them to leave Iraq immediately."

Maj. Coughlin has also studied the evidence submitted by the government in the Holy Land Foundation trial, including this chilling passage from a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum about its mission: "The Ikwan['s]... work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

Mr. Islam reportedly told the Joint Staff's Maj. Coughlin to soften his criticism of the Brotherhood's ISNA and, when the latter refused, defamed him as "a Christian zealot with a pen." Some accounts add that it was a "poison" pen. Since Maj. Coughlin is not giving his side of the story to the press, it may require a congressional subpoena to get it properly told.

What is known, however, is that shortly after this exchange, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not renew Maj. Coughlin's contract, which will expire at the end of March. Mr. Gertz reports the Chiefs deemed it "too hot" to retain the services of a man widely believed to be the military's most knowledgeable expert on the Islamist ideology of our enemies.

Read the rest. It is scandalous. And it is also a fine example of what can happen when even a well-intentioned organization allows the sickness of Political Correctness to infect his rational thinking. (see President Bush's "courtship" from day one of the decidedly pro-Sharia organization CAIR). It also suggests a critical need for a more thorough vetting by the FBI of people working in positions of influence. In a time of War, Political Correctness has no place anywhere near individuals making policy for that War. War is what it is. Lives are on the line. In this case, not just military lives, but also innocent American lives. It was people who think like the ISNA who brought down those towers in New York. It seems to me we life in far too consequential time to allow our prosecution of an enemy bound to either kill or assimilate us all to become a sacrifice at the altar of the cancer that is PC.

Robert Spencer, who has received threats on his life from these so-called "benign" groups representing the "Religion of Peace", has a post up on Jihad Watch on the serious implications of the firing of Major Coughlin.