Maybe you heard that the Obama administration has been engaged in a large, unaccountable, covert shadow war against terrorist groups using special forces and armed drones. Perhaps you've heard about its vastly expanded targeted killing program and the civilian casualties associated with it, or the administration's embrace of broad surveillance powers the president once promised to reform as a candidate. You might have heard about some guy who used to run a terrorist group getting killed by special forces a few months ago.
All this might lead you to believe that the administration has been pursuing a rather aggressive counterterrorism strategy, one that's largely come together in secret. But you'd be wrong. As Jennifer Rubin explains, these efforts are all "feeble" because Obama doesn't say "jihadism" enough. Dutifully reprinting the views of a recently created right-wing Muslim group, the The American Islamic Leadership Coalition, which for right now consists of a Tumblr warning about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, none of this counts because Obama hasn't indicted CAIR yet:
First, it harshly criticizes the administration (a fault equally applicable to the Bush administration) for conducting “outreach” to precisely the wrong groups. CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), for example, refuses to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups, and a number of its officials have been criminally indicted. Yet this group is given legitimacy and access to the administration.
The FBI excluded CAIR from its outreach efforts a long time ago, and the administration hasn't restored them, but whatever. The point of the group is to help give Republicans cover for their culture war counterterrorism, and to wit most of the "lambasting" Rubin describes involves demands that the Obama administration use certain words more often. Serious! Anyway, here's looking forward to conservatives reprinting more AILC press releases in order to provide some superficial "Muslim approval" of broad generalizations made by Republican politicians about American Muslims and their Muslim Brotherhood sympathies. And just in time for Peter King's new hearings!
