On April 19 – Patriot’s Day – The New York Times ran a story about the new solicitude shown to Muslims in America by the Obama Administration. There were many things of importance left out of the story, and what was in the story was presented in such a way as to mislead the unwary.
Take, for example, how the saga of Rashad Hussain is presented.
In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.
Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.
At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”
Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.
“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.
“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.”
Rashad Hussain made comments in 2004 at a public meeting that suggested that he believed that the prosecution of domestic Muslim terrorists, in many high-profile cases, was not warranted but was, rather, “politically motivated” – a belief, or a charge, that takes as its corollary the notion that those accused of terrorism in the cases Rashad Hussain cited were innocent. But while the American judges and juries disposing of the cases he cited appeared not to have been quite so convinced of the defendants’ innocence as was Rashad Hussain, the most disturbing of all of his examples was the case of Sami al-Arian, the South Florida tenured professor who turned out to be in up to his neck in support of, and connections with others who were operatives of, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In the end, Sami al-Arian was convicted and given a long jail sentence, after which he is to be deported. But even though that verdict and sentence had not been reached, anyone at all familiar with that case would have found it not even close to being “politically motivated,” and would certainly not have dared to suggest that that particular case was “politically motivated.” One had to be a true-blue Believer in Loyalty to Fellow Members of the Umma and, not incidentally, a deep Unbeliever in the fairness of the American system of justice to conclude, as did Rashad Hussain – not a college freshman, but a student at Yale Law School, a year or two away from being a Member of the Bar – that such a case was “politically motivated.”
But that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was the deliberate attempt to conceal, to erase, to efface, all traces – unsuccessful, as it turned out – of what he, Rashad Hussain, had said, because he knew it would be dangerous for what he hoped would be his irresistible rise through the ranks. He had long been playing on that Yale law School background, and on the bright cheery smiling plausible promotion of himself as a Good American Muslim, one deeply devoted to this country – who dared to say him nay? His future employers would have the smug assumption that if he was good enough to be Assistant Deputy White House Counsel, Special Envoy to the O.I.C., you name it, then of course he had already been thoroughly vetted. Of course he was good enough for whatever he would next apply for. Only the mean-minded, only the viciously right-wing and the hysterically suspicious would not understand at once that this, clearly, was exactly the kind of Bright Young Muslim Reformer we needed and should encourage, by appointing him now to this office, and now to that. And so he expected, and for all I know still expects, to rise high, though he has never yet been questioned, or rather had his views, as a Muslim, examined. And that is amazing, because he cannot claim ignorance of Islam, insofar as he has claimed that he has read and memorized the entire Qur’an, which entitles him to the title of hafiz, a title that Obama himself took care to mention, apparently unaware of what that meant.
For what it meant, and what is also not communicated in the article by Andrea Elliott, is that he must have been raised in a Muslim household that, even in this country, was so devout that it felt that memorizing a very long text, in a language that was not his own – how much classical Arabic could he have known? – was a worthwhile use of his time. We must assume that along the way he studied, in Urdu or English or perhaps some other language, the appropriate commentaries to all the many verses he memorized, and we should grant that he probably knows the Qur’an, knows its contents, that is, even if he cannot translate at once every one of those suras he memorized, into English.
But that means he knows about Muhammad being the Model of Conduct, the Perfect Man (33.21). And he knows not only verse 5.32, which Bush and Obama both so enjoy quoting as examples of Muslim peacefulness (5.32 was appropriated practically verbatim from a pre-existing Jewish text) but he, Rashad Hussain, also knows the verse that immediately qualifies 5.32 – that is, 5.33. Rashad Hussain knows perfectly well how it qualifies, and indeed nearly reverses, the meaning that the naïve Infidel (Bush, Blair, Obama) would assume should be given to 5.32.
And Rashad Hussain also knows perfectly well – knows them by heart in fact, even if in Arabic (or did he memorize the Qur’an in Urdu, or English?) – those verses which are described, accurately, in the Calcutta Qur’an Petition as the “Jihad verses” of the Qur’an: more than one hundred of them. He knows 9.5. He knows 9.29. He knows the verses about Killing the Unbeliever (2.191, 4.89, 9.5), and about Striking Terror Into the Hearts of Unbelievers (8.60). He knows what the phrase “jihad fi sabil Allah” means. He knows what the word “dhimmi” means, and the word “Jizyah” too. But he hasn’t sat down, I suspect, and told many – or any – of his non-Muslim fellows at the White House Counsel’s Office or anywhere else all about the “troublesome” verses in the Qur’an. Why, I doubt that he chose to explain to President Obama the “problems” in the Qur’an. I don’t think he’s read with interest and sympathy the books of Ibn Warraq, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Wafa Sultan, or Magdi Allam. I doubt if he intends to bring up to the O.I.C. the problem of religious freedom in Muslim-ruled lands, including the two issues that are so deeply disturbing: first, the physical attacks, of every kind, on non-Muslims (Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and many others, including Ahmadiya Muslims who, being regarded as non-Muslims, are now the object of Muslim hatred and, in Pakistan, murder), and second, the attacks on those who leave Islam, and who must live in permanent fear save in some parts of the free West. And even there they must be careful, must live always with a sense of deep unease or, as in the case of Wafa Sultan, go into hiding or, as in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, be permanently surrounded by bodyguards.
Now not all of this needed to go into the paragraphs written by Andrea Elliott the other day for The New York Times. But Elliott said nothing about how Rashad Hussein remained completely silent on the subject of how his quotes had been quietly removed from the archival files of the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, while its editors, clearly in cahoots, attempted to blame the reporter for shoddy reporting. Thus the editors had had to clear things up, apparently, by deleting quotes without any explanation. Hussain continued to be silent until so much evidence was gathered, including evidence that someone from outside the magazine had asked that that material be removed, that he could no longer maintain his silence. At that point – and only then, after making every attempt to deflect attention or to get a false story accepted – did Rashad Hussain admit that yes, it was he himself who had called, who had asked that the quotes correctly attributed to him be deleted, and have it done quietly. I would guess that he also asked his friends at the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, if anyone inquired, to put blame on the reporter for falsely attributing things to him – in other words, he was happy to besmirch her, make her look like an idiot, if it would protect him. She – herself now working in the Obama administration – wasn’t having it, and stuck to her guns.
Now if we told the tale of the Hussain Coverup fully, it could go on for quite a while, and make quite an impression. And we won’t do that, because visitors to this site know this story, and can read about it again, in Robert Spencer’ s articles here and here.
But let’s go back and read how quickly it is handled – with a rapidity that itself misleads even if there is nothing inaccurate about the story – by Andrea Elliott:
At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”
Does Mr. Hussain still maintain that he was quoted inaccurately? Hasn’t he abandoned even that and is now standing, rather awkwardly, with his hand where that now-dropped fig leaf should be? Even if Keith Ellison, as he has so carefully become for electoral purposes (whatever happened to “Keith Hakim” of the Nation of Islam?), tells us that “Rashad Hussain is squeaky clean” – the language of a television crime series about the mob (“Listen, Frank ‘The Banana’ Bonanno knew what he was doing when he hired him for the job – he’s got no record, he came up from Miami, around here he’s squeaky clean”), not about politics.
If Rashad Hussain was ever “squeaky clean,” he is not any longer. For what he did in trying to efface his own comments is enough to sully him. He might, after all, have left them, and then at least tried to brazen things out, by saying that he “said those things when I was younger, and my knowledge was imperfect, and I not only regret those remarks but I think they were idiotic and unacceptable.” Well, he did in fact utter a version of those remarks once his cover-up had been uncovered, but it was a little late. And he was quite tepid in distancing himself from those statements, with no words such as “idiotic and “unacceptable” to be found anywhere in sight.
That he was not then dismissed, that he was not only not dismissed but the Obama Administration stood by him, simply amazes.
Let’s try to come up with a verisimilar analogy. Suppose, for example, a new appointee is named, but not yet been vetted and approved by Congress. Let’s say it was someone who would be sent as an American “special envoy” to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. And let’s say that it was discovered that as a graduate student, the would-be envoy turned out to have written for a journal devoted solely to the celebration of the Confederacy, and had described in print the way that textbooks in American history maligned the “peculiar institution” of slavery as “politically-motivated.” Let’s say he stoutly defended, in this article, as unfairly maligned, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and later, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. And let’s assume further that the year before he was appointed he had tried to get his article excised from the online archives of the magazine, and had even contacted the magazine’s editors to see if they would “understand” his position and destroy any remaining paper copies of the magazine. And then suppose that all of his attempts to hide the evidence of that article became known. What would have happened? Would his appointment still have gone through? Would that Republican Administration still have stoutly stood by him? Would his statement that he “no longer agreed with what I wrote as a young man” be enough? You know his name would be withdrawn. You know that he would probably be out of politics forever.
But there is one last point to make about Andrea Elliott’s artfully swift and laconic coverage of Rashad Hussain, so swift that the whole Cover-Up seemed merely a little contretemps that was now put safely behind him, behind Obama, behind everyone under the sun, and only those who inhabited the crepuscular world of the arachnid-like right, to be found spinning their fetid fantasies out of the light, in a few cobwebby corners — corners that cry out, as they say in England, to be puzzled with a charwoman’s broom.
And that point is this: the discussion of Rashad Hussain leaves the reader with the idea that he’s a Good Guy, one of those Young Reformers of Islam Who Are The Hope of the Future, though exactly what he has done to reform Islam, or whether he thinks even a single syllable of the Qur’an, hadith, or Sira need to be “reformed” – that is, changed either in what they say or in the interpretation that has been given to them over the past 1350 years, is not known, is never even discussed. We are told that he’s doing what he can to help in the Fight Against Terrorism: “In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.”
Well, what about it? Don’t you want to know more? What are those “peaceful teachings of Islam” that will be so useful in fighting terrorism? Shouldn’t we be told what they are? Couldn’t we be even be told about perhaps just one or two of those “peaceful teachings” – with appropriate commentary by leading Islamic scholars? Are they, by any chance, such well-known “peaceful teachings” as 5.32 without 5.33 (see above for more, or see here). Could those “peaceful teachings” include such phrases as “you to your religion and I to mine” (sura 109), without any commentary as to what that means over the past 1350 years of Muslims putting the texts of Islam into practice, especially when it comes to the status of non-Muslims under Islam? Could those “peaceful teachings” include such a Qur’anic passage as 2.256 (“There is no compulsion in religion”)? And if Rashad Hussain believes that that phrase is to be taken literally, in the way that he knows naïve non-Muslims will take it, could he please explain the last 1350 years of Muslim murders of Muslim apostates, who were certainly being subjected to what most of us would call “compulsion in religion”? Could he explain all the onerous disabilities which non-Muslims endured as dhimmis? And the dhimmis were the best-off of the non-Muslims. For those who were not treated as Ahl al-Kitab, People of the Book, that is, Christians and Jews, were even lower on the Muslim ranking. Hindus could only survive by ultimately being allowed a kind of honorary status, not out of Muslim kindness, but out of Muslim calculation that the Muslim state relied on the Jizyah and if all the non-Muslims were killed or converted, there would be no one left to pay that Jizyah.
We don’t know.
But here’s what I intend to do. I intend to take a look at Rashad Hussain’s article, the one he “co-authored,” and that, so Andrea Elliott tells us, argues that the American government should “use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.”
It’s a great idea. Why didn’t we all think of that? So I’ll find out what those peaceful teachings are – assuming I was wrong in the paragraph above, uncharacteristically skeptical, even cynical. Then I’ll report back to you.
But if Andrea Elliott happens to read this, and if she wants to look into that article that so endeared Rashad Hussain to others in Washington and beat me to the punch, I’ll not be abashed or angry. I’ll be delighted. And so, I suspect, will you.