Unsafe Spaces: Islamist Mosques

Not content with snatching Crimea and preparing reprises elsewhere, Putin has a jet buzz one of our ships in the Black Sea for ninety minutes then launches a new multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile. By contrast, Team Obama is busily dismantling what’s left of our navy and strategic forces.

Then there’s the back of the hand treatment China showed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel when, during his recent visit to the People’s Republic, the Pentagon chief had the temerity to lecture his hosts about how to behave internationally. They took him to see their just-refurbished aircraft carrier and unveiled a new fighter aircraft to operate from it. The best Hagel could do was announce that the U.S. was going to respond to Beijing’s increasing belligerence in the region by sending there a grand total of two more anti-missile destroyers–by 2017.

A more subtle, but no less in-your-face kind of contempt has just been served up by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and other Islamists in this country.

To mark the occasion of the first anniversary of two of their fellow jihadists’ murderous attack at the Boston Marathon, the leaders of several Brotherhood fronts have launched something called the “Safe Spaces Initiative.” They evidently think we are so stupid, or at least now so submissive, that they can try to put mosques off-limits to law enforcement. This is all the more astounding since we know that the perpetrators of the terrorism of a year ago used the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge to become versed in the ways of the supremacist Islamist doctrine known as shariah and the jihad it commands.

A chief proponent of this Safe Spaces gambit is Salam al-Marayati, the president of an Islamist influence operation out of California with extensive access to the Obama administration, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). In an opinion piece posted by altmuslim blog on March 28, al-Marayati actually makes plain the true purpose of his Safe Spaces Initiative.

Notwithstanding the portrayal of this proposal as a means of preventing radicalization in mosques, in the words of al-Marayati: “Safe spaces are needed so that government informants and extremist recruiters are prevented from violating the sanctity of the mosque. In essence, we want to enhance both a spiritual safety and public safety.” (Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, the latest announcement by William Bratton–the former police commissioner recently re-appointed by New York’s new, Islamist-friendly mayor, Bill de Blasio–would sure seem to justify the Brothers’ low regard for us. As the New York Times reported today “The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods….Plainclothes detectives looked for ‘hot spots’ of radicalization that might give the police an early warning about terrorist plots.”

The Times quoted the NYPD’s chief spokesman, Stephen Davis, who made clear the completeness of the department’s submission to the Islamists who style themselves as the “leaders” and “representatives” of all Muslim Americans: “‘Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing the threat information that comes into New York City virtually on a daily basis,” Mr. Davis said. “In the future, we will gather that information, if necessary, through direct contact between the police precincts and the representatives of the communities they serve.”

I discussed the folly of making mosques surveillance-free zones in an interview on Secure Freedom Radio this evening with former federal prosecutor and best-selling author Andrew C. McCarthy. Here’s part of our conversation (for the entire podcast, click here):

FRANK GAFFNEY: The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who’s a Muslim Brother fellow-traveller jihadist type, has a rather poetic turn of phrase for it. He says, “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the faithful our army.” And, Andy, this gives rise to a concern that I’m sure you share about an initiative that some of these Muslim Brotherhood types, notably Mohamed Magid, the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States, the Islamic Society of North America–and, oh, by the way, a frequent visitor at the Obama White House and prominent source of counsel to him and others in his Administration–

ANDY MCCARTHY: And another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation.

FG: Indeed. These guys have cooked up something called the “Safe Spaces Initiative.” I wonder what you make of that idea, particularly as it seems their purpose is to, as one of them put it, “keep government informants…from violating the sanctity of the mosque.”

AM: Yeah, well, you know, it’s unfortunate that with this particular Justice Department and this Administration they’re probably pushing on an open door.

FG: It’s probably a wired game, let’s be honest. These guys have almost certainly got this rigged with the Justice Department.

AM: But the amazing thing is for all of Obama and Eric Holder’s caterwauling about, you know, how we’ve proved again and again that the civilian justice system is the best way to prosecute terrorism cases–well, why don’t they ever check into what was proved in those prosecutions that they like to tout around? Because if they open the transcripts…what they would find is that mosques were used as recruitment centers, they were used for conspiratorial conversations and agreements, they were used to house weapons, they were used to transfer weapons, and they really were used to light a fire under people who might have been fence-sitters but who were powerfully influenced by some of the imams, particularly the guy who I prosecuted in the 1990s, the Blind Sheikh.

It was in the mosques that [Omar Abdel-Rahman] did most of the damage that he did to the United States. So this is not something we speculate about, Frank. This is something that’s actually been proved in court, and proved again and again and again. So, if you’re going to say that a mosque needs to be a safe space, then what you’re really saying is we’ve taken willful blindness, which was a problem, and we’ve now codified it, so it’s not just willful blindness; it’s just mulish, absolute refusal to come to terms with what we’re up against.

FG: Yeah. And to speak to the other subject of your trilogy there, it is a formula for more of the grand jihad, not less. It is a certainty that you will find more Tsarnaev boys being recruited, or being trained, or being armed, or in other ways being enabled. It simply is mindboggling, Andy, and I think the American people couldn’t comprehend what’s going on here, or believe it if told it.

We can’t afford more of the sort of willful blindness that will give rise to more unsafe mosques and other places, and more jihad.