First ‘Fake News,’ Now ‘Fake Narrative’: New York Times Misrepresents Center’s Views on Islam, Muslims

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

2 February 2017

(Washington, DC): A front-page, above-the-fold article in The New York Times today used an attack on President Trump and his Senior Counsel Stephen Bannon to ignore a distinction long made by the Center for Security Policy between Sharia-supremacists – notably, the Muslim Brotherhood – and Muslims who do not adhere to that totalitarian political-military-legal doctrine.

In two different places, the Times describes Center President Frank Gaffney as characterizing “Muslims” and “Islam” when, in fact, he was clearly characterizing and warning against the Muslim Brotherhood. Obscuring this distinction plays to the papers efforts to depict the Trump administration and other, like-minded individuals and groups as anti-Muslim “Islamophobes” and “haters.”

Mr. Gaffney observed:

The New York Times did a public disservice with its latest bid to discredit and undermine President Trump as he seeks to protect the American people by halting the further importing of jihadists. Mr. Trump and his senior subordinates are clearly sensitive to the distinction between Muslims who, in the President’s words “share our values” and seek to help live and build the American dream on the one hand and, on the other, those who believe it is Allah’s will to destroy countries like ours. So am I.

It is reprehensible and contrary to the national interest – and potentially to our national security – that those like the Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center persist in encouraging the former to believe otherwise.

The context of the portion of Mr. Gaffney’s interview with New York Times mischaracterized by reporter Matthew Rosenberg is below.

Partial Interview:

Full Unedited Audio, December 1st Interview:

Full Unedited Audio, December 8th Interview, Part I:

Full Unedited Audio, December 8th Interview, Part II:

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF FRANK GAFFNEY INTERVIEW WITH MATT ROSENBERG OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

December 8, 2016

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So we took a fresh look at Sharia. [Gaffney presented Rosenberg with an abridged version of Sharia: The Threat to America; An Exercise in Competitive Analysis, Report of Team B II] And if you’re interested, I’ll give you the larger version of it. But it was a distinguished group of, as I recall, nineteen folks.

And the conclusion that we came to was that contrary to the orthodoxy of the time – which was that of the Bush years, which has become more true under Obama – that the doctrine or the ideology or the program that we’re confronting has nothing to do with Islam.

It actually has everything to do with what the authorities of Islam say is the faith, namely, Sharia. Having said that, we very directly acknowledge in the book, and I do in every opportunity that we have, that there are lots of Muslims who don’t practice their faith in accordance with Sharia. But they’re not the problem, by and large. At least not yet.

The ones who do are unmistakably [the problem]. And that manifests itself in what Sharia compels them to do. Again, I may be repeating some of the stuff we talked about the other day, but just in the interest of completeness, it’s their God-directed duty to impose it on everybody else, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Sharia, that is. And the way to do that is through jihad, which is not about personal struggle or about being a better Muslim or any of the other things we’re often told. Again, some Muslims may feel that way, but that’s not what Sharia is really requiring of them.

By the way, when I talk about Sharia, and I don’t know if you have seen it, my colleague may have it next door, what we’ve used as kind of our reference text is Reliance of the Traveller. Which is a book that I think was first written about thirteen hundred years ago. It has been translated into English –

MATT ROSENBERG:

What was the title again?

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Reliance of the Traveller. It has been described as authoritative in terms of its rendering of Sharia by al-Azhar and House of Saud and Jordanian royals and so on. And when you look at the jihad as it is described there, it is clearly about holy war.

And the holy war is, as a practical matter, pursued by those who believe this is God’s will in different ways. The preferred way, the most efficient way, is terrifying violence. And where you’re strong enough to do that and where you can succeed at it, you go for it. Some say you should do it whether you can succeed at it or not, just because that’s the right way and, you know, you’ve got your Islamic States and your Talibans and your – the folks you’ve been hanging with [on foreign assigments] – Al-Qaeda and so on, lovely people.

But as important, I think, are the other kinds of jihad that are also perfectly legitimate and in fact the responsibility of Muslims to engage in, especially where they’re not strong enough to use violence. And that runs the gamut from the hijra – migration, colonization, whatever you want to call it. [To] zakat, at least a portion of which is supposed to go to jihad [and] the people who engage in it, their families. [To] what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad.”

And this [Gaffney pointing to a print of the Explanatory Memorandum: The General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America] is the single most important book as far as I’m concerned on the subject because it is a secret plan that the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership here in America wrote in 1991 as a report back to the mother-ship in Egypt. Never meant for our eyes, but it lays out both what their mission is, which is described as “destroying Western Civilization from within by their hands – meaning ours – and the hands of the believers so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

And then it proceeds to say in the way of a report as to how they’re coming, some twenty-five years after they began, with this stealthy, subversive kind of jihad. By which they essentially, like termites, hollow out, you know, the structure of civil society and other institutions, government institutions included, for the purpose of creating conditions under which the jihad will succeed, perhaps through a violent phase or perhaps otherwise.