At PJM, terrorism researcher Patrick Poole reports that Mohamed Elibiary, an appointee on President Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, is in hot water with the Texas Department of Public Safety (TDPS). The issue is whether Elibiary used his privileged access to a state law-enforcement database to acquire intelligence reports and then tried to shop them to the media, urging that they showed rampant “Islamophobia” at TDPS under Governor Rick Perry.
Poole says no story was published because, according to one press source, there was “nothing remotely resembling Islamophobia” in the leaked reports. The source told Poole, “I think [Elibiary] was hoping we would bite and not give it too much of a look in light of other media outfits jumping on the Islamophobia bandwagon.”
The Islamophobia bandwagon was the subject of my column last weekend. Seems there are plenty of Islamists and Leftists climbing aboard.
Elibiary, you’ll no doubt be stunned to learn, was also on the Obama DHS’s working group on “countering violent extremism.” That’s the brain-trust that helped devise the new Obama counterterrorism strategy I outlined (here and here) a few weeks back — the one that envisions having law-enforcement pare back their intelligence-gathering activities and take their marching orders from “community partners.” I call the new strategy “factophobia.”
As noted by Poole and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Elibiary’s history includes an appearance at a conference honoring Ayatollah Khomeini; condemning the Justice Department’s successful prosecution of a Hamas-financing conspiracy designed by the Muslim Brotherhood (the Holy Land Foundation case); praise for Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb; and an aggressive email exchange with Rod Dreher in 2006 (when Dreher, at the Dallas Morning News, countered Elibiary’s praise for Qutb), in which Elibiary reportedly called Dreher “a Klansman without a hood” [ACM: I think that means “Islamophobe”] and warned him: “Treat people as inferiors and you can expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe or something.”
Who better could President Obama possibly choose to help formulate counterterrorism strategy? Actually, once you read the strategy, I think you’ll agree that he made a perfect choice.