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Glenn Greenwald, who reported on NSA surveillance leaks, to address banquet of Hamas-linked CAIR

Oct 5, 2013 10:48 am By Robert Spencer

When the surveillance scandal broke, I wrote this here at Jihad Watch:

This surveillance scandal arises out of our national bipartisan unwillingness to face the reality of Islamic jihad. Because we all agree that Islam is a religion of peace, we can’t possibly address where the threat is really coming from, and monitor mosques or subject Muslims with Islamic supremacist ties to greater surveillance. Instead, we have to pretend that anyone and everyone is a potential terrorist, and surveil everyone. Our freedoms and privacy are now at risk because of our refusal to admit the truth about Islam.

People who leak classified information need to be punished, but Snowden is more of a whistleblower, akin to a Soviet dissident working against an all-encompassing government. It is good that it came out that they’re watching our every move, reading all our emails, etc. It needed to come out because it needs to stop if we are going to have any chance of surviving as a free people and not becoming a totalitarian state in which every slave of the authoritarian rulers is under constant surveillance.

And I still believe that the massive surveillance is unnecessary, unconstitutional, and detrimental to our future as a free republic of free people. At the same time, the pivotal role of people like Greenwald and other manifestly pro-jihad hard Leftist “journalists” brings out another aspect of this whole affair: Hamas-linked CAIR, for which Greenwald is an eager stooge, wants the NSA surveillance ended so that any residual surveillance of jihad terrorists will also end (cf. its campaign against NYPD surveillance of mosques) and the jihad can proceed unopposed and unimpeded. That doesn’t make me in favor of the NSA surveillance — but if free people manage to end it, it will have to be succeeded by realistic and legal law enforcement procedures to protect us from Islamic jihadists and supremacists. Nothing is much less likely, but it needs to be stated anyway in case sanity ever returns to the public discourse.

“Glenn Greenwald, Journalist Who Reported on NSA Surveillance Leaks, to Address Islamic Event,” by Patrick Goodenough for CNS News, October 3 (thanks to Lookmann):

(CNSNews.com) — The American journalist and commentator who first reported on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents on National Security Agency surveillance programs will be the keynote speaker at an annual Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet next month.

Glenn Greenwald, described as “political commentator, lawyer, columnist,” tops the bill at CAIR California’s “Faith in Freedom” banquet in Anaheim on November 16.

“Join us as we reflect on our past year’s endeavors, honor inspirational figures, and embrace a more tolerant, inclusive and just future for all,” the organization says….

CAIR has not publicized a topic for Greenwald’s speech in California next month, but the organization holds strong views on NSA surveillance.

Greenwald has also addressed other issues high on CAIR”s agenda. In a 2010 Salon column, he wrote that the word “terrorist” has come to mean “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.”

Greenwald’s appearance via Skype in June was the third year in a row he had addressed the annual Socialism Conference, which is sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, publisher of the Socialist Worker and the Center for Economic Research and Social Change, which publishes International Socialist Review.

At the 2011 conference he spoke on “Civil liberties under Obama” and in 2012 on “Challenging the U.S. surveillance state.”

The earlier speeches included some controversial statements regarding Islamist terrorism. At the 2011 conference he referred to Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric and al-Qaeda propagandist who was reported in 2010 to have been approved by the Obama administration for targeted killing.

Greenwald described Awlaki as “an American-born citizen in Yemen who the U.S. government hates because he speaks effectively to the Muslim world about the violence that the U.S. commits in that part of the world and the responsibility of Muslims and the need of Muslims to stand up to this violence.”

“The U.S. hates him because this message is resonating and so the solution is not to charge him with crimes — because he’s not committing any crimes, because you have the First Amendment right to say the things he’s saying  — it’s not even to detain him without due process, they”re not bothering with that,” Greenwald continued. “They”re trying to kill him.”

A year before Greenwald gave that speech, Awlaki in online messages praised Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to bomb a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas Day 2009, calling them his “students.”

In the same message, the cleric justified the killing U.S. civilians. “Non-combatants are people who do not take part in the war,” he said. “The American people in its entirety takes part in the war, because they elected this administration, and they finance this war.”

Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen about three months after Greenwald made the speech in Chicago.

Greenwald also used the Socialism Conference platform to criticize the U.S. government’s designation of Hamas and Hezbollah as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs).

“We have organizations on the [FTO] list that are not even remotely a threat to the United States, such as Hezbollah and Hamas which, whatever you think of them are not in any way devoted to harming Americans,” he said.

“They are devoted to protecting their citizens against the State of Israel and yet it is criminal in the United States to do anything that is deemed to be material support for Hezbollah and Hamas. There are people in prison who have been convicted of material support for terrorism, for doing nothing other than for example offering a cable service that includes a Hezbollah television station.”

“Material support of terrorism is really a way to criminalize opposition to U.S. policy in the Middle East and especially U.S. support for Israel,” he added.

Notwithstanding Greenwald’s comment about the two groups not being “remotely a threat” to the U.S., Americans have been among the victims of Hamas” violent campaign against Israel. U.S. citizens were killed in Hamas bombings in Jerusalem in 1997, 2001, 2002 and 2003.

The U.S. government holds Hezbollah responsible for suicide bombings targeting the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. More than 300 people, most of them Americans, were killed. Before 9/11, the U.S. held Hezbollah responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other terrorist organization in history….

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Filed Under: CAIR, Leftist/Islamic Alliance, Useful idiots


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