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CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program director: “Political Islam is not a threat”

Sep 22, 2006 7:18 am By Robert Spencer

This story contends that the U.S. still lacks understanding of Al-Qaeda, but it reveals a much larger problem. Not only does the intelligence community have “only a single office devoted to understanding political Islam,” but the director of that one, Emile Nakhleh, says: “Political Islam is not a threat. The threat is if the people become disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence.”

Political Islam is not a threat, but Al-Qaeda is? All right. So evidently the attempt to accomplish by peaceful means what Osama bin Laden wants to do by violent means is perfectly fine. Only the means matter, not the end. It’s perfectly all right if we all end up living under Sharia, with its institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims, as long as nobody gets hurt on our road to Islamization.

The implications of this wrongheadedness are massive. This explains why there is no official notice taken of the Islamization of Europe, or of the necessity to revise immigration procedures to screen applicants for attachment to Sharia. This explains why a group like CAIR, whose spokesman Ibrahim Hooper has expressed a desire to see the U.S. become an Islamic state, is considered moderate: after all, they’re not setting off any bombs, and this struggle is all about “terrorism” and only “terrorism.”

Imagine if there had been a group in the U.S. in 1940 that declared that it wanted to see a National Socialist America, but intended to accomplish our Nazification through education, not violence. What would authorities of the day have thought of such a group? What might they have done about it? Ah, you will say, but Sharia isn’t Nazism. Of course it isn’t. But it is nevertheless inimical to Western values and Western civilization, and harmful to all non-Muslims, in a host of ways. And it is Sharia that is the goal of those we fight. The manner in which they are advancing it is simply a question of their tactics, not of whether or not they are enemies of our way of life.

“US still lacks understanding of al Qaeda – report,” from Reuters, :

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) – Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration still does not fully understand the threat from al Qaeda, a congressional report released on Wednesday said.

“(Al Qaeda) still remains the single greatest threat … Unfortunately, there are still gaps in our understanding of Islamist extremist groups, which leaves America vulnerable,” the report said.

The document, “Al-Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat,” was part of a series of reports released by the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on threats facing the United States.

Democrat members distanced themselves from them and accused the Republican majority of trying to frighten voters about such threats in advance of elections in November.

The latest report found “significant shortfalls” in the government’s knowledge of both Islamist militancy abroad and the potential extremist threat at home and said it had failed to counter the rhetoric of anti-American Islamist extremists.

The intelligence community has only a single office devoted to understanding political Islam — the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, created in 2004 to study the issue, advise policymakers and engage academics worldwide, it said.

It said the effort should be expanded, and called on U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte to create similar operations at other agencies.

The CIA had no immediate comment on the report.

But the CIA program’s former director, Emile Nakhleh, played down the problem and estimated only two to three percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were politically active.

“Political Islam is not a threat,” Nakhleh, who retired from the CIA in June, said in an interview posted on the web site of Harper’s magazine. “The threat is if the people become disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence.”

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