Jihad Watch Board Vice President High Fitzgerald shows that the State Department’s myopia and miscalculation is nothing new:
Reinhard Gehlen was a Nazi, Hitler’s Intelligence Chief for the Eastern Front, and a man up to his neck in murder. But he and his former Nazis managed to fool the CIA into thinking they were of value. After the war a number of Americans, some outright immoral, others merely guilty of the shallowest and stupidest kind of false machiavellianism, wanted to use Gehlen’s supposedly valuable “network” in the East. The CIA fell for Gehlen’s pitch, and contributed millions to him until, finally, in 1956, it stopped. And as anyone might have concluded, the network was useless and riddled with double agents who, as so many Nazis did, now worked for the KGB — that is, for its variously-named predecessors such as the NKVD. There were those who were useful to the Americans in Eastern Europe.
But it was not Gehlen and his Nazis who were useful, but rather the former anti-Nazis, many of them Jewish, such as those associated with the Red Orchestra. Some day it will all come out, and all sorts of people, from Buffalo Bill’s grandson to the suave mustachioed brother of a celebrated Harvard archeologist of White Russian descent, will get their due. And then there were others –what in god’s name did Gehlen and his murderous turncoats contribute to the defense of the West? Nothing. And what is worse, they muddied the waters, and often misled.
The kind of CIA men and State Department men who effectively killed denazification themselves deserve to be studied for their own prejudices and stupidities. The spirits of Breckenridge Long, and Loy Henderson live on in Michael Scheuer and others who, at this particular moment in history, as in the 1930s and 1940s, are in fact, given their obvious prejudices which causes them to misread the situation, security risks. At MI5, or its predecessor, Vernon Kell appointed Maxwell Knight, a fascist and antisemite. In May, 1940, Churchill cashiered Kell. Then, as now, antisemitism is not only distasteful — but now it is far more: it is a security risk. Anyone who displays its symptoms is unlikely to be sufficiently clear-headed to deal with the worldwide Jihad. Churchill did not tolerate such security risks when he became Prime Minister. And such security risks cannot be tolerated now.
As for Gehlen, he did less for Western security and the ultimate liberation of Eastern and Central Europe than did Leopold Labedz, sitting in his London flat, editing articles for Survey, or than Melvin Lasky, editing the CIA-funded magazine Encounter, the best magazine of the last century and possibly the best thing the CIA has ever done. Would that the kind of people who were behind that intelligent decision were in the CIA today. Or perhaps they are just joining up, at this very minute. But that appears doubtful.
The tutelary spirits of those in the State Department who deal with such matters, that is to say, matters connected to the Middle East and to Muslim terrorism, are two: one is that of Breckenridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State who was so instrumental in keeping Jewish refugees from being accepted into the United States before and during World War II; the second is the late and unlamented Loy Henderson, he of the doleful countenance, who was so instrumental in moving heaven and earth in keeping the United States from recognizing the nascent state of Israel, and did what he could to help smother it in its cradle. The palpable want of sympathy of Long and Henderson continues to this day — only now it is aided and abetted by the prospect of working as hirelings of Arab governments and the fear of recognizing the true nature of the Arab opposition to Israel — which is simply a case of a classic Jihad against an Infidel sovereignty in the midst of dar al-Islam, carefully redefined as a struggle for “nationalist operations” of the recently (post-1967) invented “Palestinian people.”
One regrets that the Secretary of State appears unaware of this problem. The refusal to understand the tenets of Islam in some quarters, precisely because a true understanding would make Israel’s case stronger, and the Arab case weaker, is not surprising. In the 1930s, those with an inherited or acquired animus against “the Jews” were the last to see or admit to the threat that Hitler posed — for precisely the same kind of reasons.
That is why even those who are not outraged at the hypocrisy of the treatment of Israel had better become outraged at the larger issue: the failure to come to grips with the Jihad as a natural and logical expression of central tenets of Islam, and not, as the State Department would still have us believe, simply the beliefs of a “handful of extremists,” something that expresses a “sense of humiliation.” No, it is not “humiliation” but a feeling of being thwarted, because Islam “is to dominate and not be dominated,” as the celebrated phrase puts it. Any evidence that this is not happening goes against the natural order of the universe and is intolerable to Arab and Muslim beliefs and amour-propre.
The State Department is not, as a whole, a nest of ninnies, but in the area that is now of most concern — that of the understanding of Islam, it certainly seems to be. Of course, there are those who have a glimmering of such understanding, who are horrified by the appeasement and apologetics that have characterized so much of what has gone on among those who deal with the Middle East. These include those now retired to posh positions elsewhere, and who like to assure one and all that “everyone agrees on the final disposition of things — a two-state solution.” This is said with a tone of complacent self-assurance by the likes of Edward Djerijian and his colleagues. But the evidence that this is an absurdity, that it ignores the uncompromising division of the world between dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb and the real nature of the relentless Jihad against Israel (it is Israel in any dimensions that is the problem for the Arabs and those Muslims over whom they hold sway) is not even addressed. When people start prating about what “everyone knows to be true” or start invoking the word “solution” for something that in fact will exacerbate the problem — that idiotic “two-state solution” — then one’s mental antennae should quiver.
In its coddling of the Palestinian Authority and relentless pursuit of moderate Muslims, those manning the relevant desks at the State Department show that they, at least, have learned little since the Nazi period. The same kind of impulse that allowed support for Reinhard Gehlen, because he or those under him could not possibly be anything other than stout anti-Communists, could they? is at work in the failure to analyze Islam, its theory and practice. This is partly inertia: the holdover-effect of decades of ignoring Islam, or still worse, believing it to be a Bulwark Against Communism and therefore A Good Thing (see all those Stinger missiles lavished on muhajirun in Afghanistan, see CENTO). It is partly the effect of decades of propaganda, either by the companies that constitued ARAMCO, or by those who could for their own benefit “recycle petrodollars” with various contracts for arms, hospital management, and so on — in the AWACS fight nearly a quarter-century ago, United Technologies (arms) and Whitney (hospital management) led all those disinterested American corporations that were fully prepared to insist that Saudi Arabia was the truest-bluest ally of the United States and “the American people” that it could possibly be. But Saudi Arabia in 1980 was just as malevolent toward Infidels as it is now; the doctrines of Islam, and of Wahhabi Islam, were not born yesterday, or developed as a response to any behavior by the American government in the past 25 years or indeed in the entire period of its existence.
And then there is just laziness. How much easier it is to parrot party-lines, rather than actually sitting down, reading and re-reading Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, reading the real scholars of yore. How much easier to go to receptions at various Arab and Muslim embassies, to take absurd figures like Edward Djerejian (now at James Baker’s — ’nuff said? — Institute for somethingorother at Rice University), whose every prediction, every take on things in the Muslim lands, is vitiated by reality, every day. A confederacy of dunces, a nest of ninnies, well — you are free to come up with your own brand-new terms of venery, just like Julian of Norwich.