In FrontPage this morning I explain why People for the American Way’s attack on Michele Bachmann is so ironic coming now:
The Leftist advocacy group People for the American Way (PFAW) has launched an all-out war
against Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). On Monday it plans to
present House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) with a petition bearing
178,000 signatures, demanding that Bachmann not be reappointed to the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.Michael Keegan, president of PFAW, explained Bachmann’s crime:
“Michele Bachmann has used her position on the Intelligence Committee to
spread baseless conspiracy theories and smear the reputations of
honorable public servants. Speaker Boehner himself called her actions
“˜dangerous.” It’s mysterious, then, why he has chosen to reward her
reckless extremism with continued access to sensitive national security
information and a powerful platform for her agenda.”Since Boehner has indeed previously thrown Bachmann under the bus, he
may be susceptible to this appeal; if he is at all fair-minded,
however, he will recognize not only that Bachmann deserves her place on
the Intelligence committee, but that she may be more deserving than any
of her colleagues of such a place.For while Bachmann was widely criticized and ridiculed for daring to
suggest that Muslim Brotherhood elements had infiltrated the U.S.
government, corroboration of her allegations has recently come from an
unlikely quarter: Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef
magazine, which asserted in a December article that six highly-placed
Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the Obama Administration had
transformed the United States “from a position hostile to Islamic groups
and organizations in the world to the largest and most important
supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (A translation of the article is
available from the Investigative Project here.)According to the Investigative Project, “the six named people include: Arif Alikhan,
assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development;
Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati,
co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed
Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and
Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on
Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.”These represent many of the individuals and groups about whom
Bachmann had raised concerns. For example, Bachmann’s letter last summer
to the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security stated
that Elibiary had “extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” and
“sympathy for Islamist causes,” and accused him of “gain(ing) access to
classified documents.”And indeed, in 2011 investigative journalist Patrick Poole reported
that “Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of
state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of
those materials to a media outlet.” According to Poole, Elibiary
approached “a left-leaning media outlet” with reports marked For
Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant “Islamophobia” in
the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The media outlet declined
to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping the Official Use
Only documents in the first place?Poole checked with Steve McCraw, director of the Texas DPS, who
“confirmed that Elibiary has access to the Homeland Security State and
Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database, which
contains hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports and products that
are intended for intelligence sharing between law enforcement
agencies.” Said McCraw of Elibiary: “We know that he has accessed DPS
documents and downloaded them.”There have been questions about Elibiary”s true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers
at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great
Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the
founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference,
Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was
going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared
there anyway once he found out. Among those who found this explanation
wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News,
whose skepticism angered Elibiary. The great moderate subsequently
threatened Dreher, telling him: “Expect someone to put a banana in your
exhaust pipe.”