Josh Rogin, The Washington Post and the Clinton Campaign: One Network

by Rebecca Bynum (August 2016)

 

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is pulling out all the stops to smear Donald Trump and anyone associated with his campaign. Their shameless shilling for Hillary Clinton seemingly knows no bounds and may be in retaliation for Trump’s suggestion that Amazon.com should collect sales taxes as all storefront retailers in the US are required to do.

In a Washington Post column entitled, “Pro-Trump Muslim groups bash Khan family,” Josh Rogin launched an attack on an association I am proud to work with, the American Mid-East Coalition for Trump. AMCT is a federation of many Mideast American NGOs and federations, including Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and others. In the US a majority of people who emigrated from the Greater Middle East are of Christian background, though in the region, the Christians are a minority. Rogin’s ignorance is evident. He assumed that since AMCT is Middle Eastern, it is Muslim. His rushed to prove that AMCT doesn’t represent the majority of Muslim Americans, while it actually represents much larger communities. He wrote:

Several other Muslim American leaders I spoke with said that groups such as AMC Trump and Muslims for Trump represent only a tiny fraction of Muslim Americans and are misrepresenting Trump’s level of support in the Muslim American community.

As founding member of AMC Trump, John Hajjar, said

We live in an upside down world, where the word of Muslims with clear Islamist ties, even with ties to Hamas, such as CAIR, are taken over the word of Americans trying to do their best to help their families and friends in the Middle East.

Rogin’s main attack on AMC Trump hinges on a couple of tweets which seem to suggest the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) might be involved with promotion of the Khan family. I don’t know where anyone would get that idea; their press release perhaps? CAIR is always johnny-on-the-spot to spin the press regarding any Muslim family whose wayward relatives happen to slaughter innocent Americans, or when an incident of perceived bias as clock-boy occurs, so why would this time be any different? Nevertheless, CAIR completely denies any involvement with the Khans, according to the Rogin article.

CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “These Islamophobes blame us for everything, including the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. It really gets to be a bit ridiculous at times.”

What, then, are Khizr Khan’s connections to the Clinton campaign? The intrepid reporter for the Washington Post doesn’t bother to ask. Fortunately for us, however, Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle decided to find out. He revealed those ties to be deeper and more complicated than anyone had thought.

It turns out, however, in addition to being Gold Star parents, the Khans are financially and legally tied deeply to the industry of Muslim migration–and to the government of Saudi Arabia and to the Clintons themselves.

Khan worked for the Hogan Lovells law firm. They were also employed by the Clintons as tax attorneys and it is unclear whether this firm or another was involved in the scrubbing of Hillary’s computer and the mobile devises and computers of her staff after they handed over emails belonging to the State Department. It is the same law firm Loretta Lynch once worked for, in its earlier incarnation as Hogan & Hartson, however.

And there’s more. Khan is involved in securing EB5 visas for foreign nationals coming into our country. (His website advertising this, linked above, has since been removed from the internet.) This program is notorious for fraud and as Representative Chuck Grassley pointed out, these visas are “pushed through despite security warnings.”

The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security wrote an internal memo that raises significant concerns about the program. One section of the memo outlines concerns that it could be used by Iranian operatives to infiltrate the United States. The memo identifies seven main areas of program vulnerability, including the export of sensitive technology, economic espionage, use by foreign government agents and terrorists, investment fraud, illicit finance and money laundering.  

Luckily for Mr. Khan, Mrs. Khan speaks Farsi! Let us hope those visas he has procured and continues to procure receive close scrutiny in the future, but with an immigration system as broken as ours, that isn’t likely.

Whatever we may think of Mr. Khan and his law practice, the most recent ISIS issue of Dabiq declared their son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, an apostate for fighting for America against his fellow Muslims. This conflict for Muslims in the military is what Major Nidal Hassan tried to draw attention to before he decided to make his position more clear by shooting up a crowded room full of unarmed soldiers, killing 13 of them.

National Security Analyst for the Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro stated:

One CAIR official has, for three years in a row, suggested that Muslims should not honor U.S. troops who have died in wars in Muslim countries they disagree with and paired that statement with nasty depictions of the military. When someone who served in the U.S. military asked this CAIR official about honoring the Muslim soldiers he fought alongside, she replied that they also don’t deserve to be honored.

When I asked a senior CAIR official about this, he said CAIR would not condemn her statement about honoring fallen U.S. soldiers, including Muslim ones. He said it was “discussed internally.” CAIR did not fire or officially distance itself from her. Quite the opposite, CAIR regularly features her as one of their top stars. The audio is here.

So we have Trump and his team members responding negatively to parents of a fallen Muslim soldier who criticized him on a major platform but CAIR–which has an official that actually opposes honoring fallen soldiers (including Muslim ones) on Memorial Day–is treated as a credible source on the issue?

Which prompts the question: which side of this ideological divide is Josh Rogin actually on? Tom Harb, founding member of AMC Trump, expressed it this way:

Rogin trying to attack the American Middle Eastern majority voice for the benefit of CAIR/ Muslim Brotherhood, who represent the minority jihadists.

Jihadist might build fears in people but will not silence the truth …

Mauro was more forceful:

CAIR has been making the back-and-forth between Khan and Trump a major feature of its newsletter. Phares and the AMCT never once said Khan is an employee of CAIR’s or that his speech originated with them. They are responding to how CAIR is using the controversy and CAIR’s long history of defaming Phares in deplorable ways.

The article includes quotes from CAIR and Wajahat Ali and Muaz Mustafa, making it sound like it is fanciful to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood exists in America and wants to influence public opinion. Practically everyone accepts the notion that special interests and foreign organizations and governments try to influence U.S. politics and opinion. The claim that the Brotherhood and its affiliates aren’t doing this is wilder than the claim that they are.

The FBI had confidential sources reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood network in the 1980s. In 1993, two of CAIR’s co-founders were wiretapped by the FBI at a secret Brotherhood/Hamas meeting in Philadelphia to discuss how to use deception to influence the U.S. media and policy in a direction favorable to the Islamists. The participants explicitly discussed forming new organizations for this purpose and CAIR was born the following year.

The Justice Department has identified CAIR and other groups as U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities and the Brotherhood’s own documents refer to its efforts to “develop the work” of CAIR. 

The article doesn’t include any of this. All it has are quotes attacking those that talk about this as Islamophobes. The author should have either not discussed the validity of these concerns at all or have provided balance.

Futhermore, if you are concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry, you should want Walid Phares to be advising Trump. Phares has worked for a long time advocating support for secular-democratic Muslims around the world. He has not wavered on that, even though there are many who believe that betting on moderate Muslims is a failing proposition or counterproductive. There are few who have done as much as Dr. Phares to advocate for Muslims who desire human rights and freedom from Islamism, while rejecting negative stereotypes of Muslims as incapable or unworthy of the freedoms we cherish.

 

_____________________________________________

 

Rebecca Bynum serves as Assistant to the Foreign Policy Advisor to Donald J. Trump, Dr. Walid Phares. She is also New English Review’s managing editor. Her latest book is The Real Nature of Religion, published by New English Review Press.

To comment on this article, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish timely and thought provoking articles like this one, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this article, and would like to read more by Rebecca Bynum, click here.

Rebecca Bynum contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.