The London and Boston attacks are a gruesome reminder we’re still at war with jihadists, at home and abroad. However, we’re also at war with their apologists and propagandists.
Alarmingly, Islamists are infiltrating the national media, where they’re undermining every aspect of the global war on terror — from surveillance of homegrown jihadists like the Boston bombers to foreign drone strikes on high-value al-Qaida targets to the imprisonment of enemy combatants at Gitmo.
These agents of influence include:
• Amina Ismail, a former Egyptian reporter who somehow got credentialed by the Secret Service to cover the White House as a “special correspondent” for the liberal McClatchy Newspapers.
Just days after the Boston bombings, Ismail showed up at a critical White House press conference, her head covered in an Islamic scarf, and was recognized by President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney.
As Boston surgeons were still performing amputations on shrapnel-riddled victims, this Muslim activist posing as a reporter drew a moral equivalency between the Boston bombings and U.S. drone strikes against terrorist targets overseas — playing right into the argument of the Boston jihadists.
“President Obama said what happened in Boston was an act of terrorism,” Ismail sniffed. “I would like to ask: Do you consider the U.S. bombing on civilians in Afghanistan a form of terrorism?”
Ismail formerly worked in Cairo for a pro-Muslim Brotherhood rag called Al-Masry Al-Youm, where she wrote anti-American propaganda.
After the Brotherhood toppled the pro-U.S. Mubarak government, Ismail authored an interview with Ahmed Agiza, a Brotherhood leader jailed by Mubarak for his role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat but recently freed by the new Brotherhood regime.
In the article, Ismail described his arrest, along with that of other Brotherhood leaders — which included Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaida’s kingpin — as part of “the Mubarak regime’s dirty war” on terrorists.
Ismail also claimed Agiza was tortured as a suspected 9/11 terrorist in “Washington’s illegal extraordinary rendition program,” an outgrowth of “the United States’ so-called war on terror.”
• Hina Shamsi, head of the ACLU’s National Security Project and a regular on MSNBC and other media.
In a recent appearance on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to discuss the Boston terror attacks, she denied any threat from homegrown jihadists and argued the military should have no role in fighting them.
“There is no global jihadist movement” against the West, she asserts. Yet she insists the West is waging war on Muslims and Islam.
Shamsi and her stable of Muslim lawyers have even defended 9/11 co-conspirator Anwar Awlaki in a campaign to save the al-Qaida leader from drone targeting.
“Our government is killing people in (Muslim) countries,” Shamsi complained in a USA Today column arguing the drone program must be “stopped.”
• Hadeel Al-Shalchi, formerly Canadian spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the Justice Department lists as a Brotherhood and Hamas front and an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator. She has written anti-Israel, pro-Brotherhood pieces for the Associated Press.
• Sharaf Mowjood, a former CAIR government-relations coordinator who has written or produced pro-Islamist pieces for the New York Times, ABC News and NBC News, where he works as an associate producer.
CAIR seeks to Islamize the newsroom.
“Muslims must become active in the nation’s offices where news reports and headlines are written,” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad once told the faithful.
And the terror-tied group is making inroads at AP. Under CAIR pressure, AP last month announced it would stop calling radical Muslims “Islamists.”
Ponder that: An Islamist group planting Islamists in the media is now controlling how the media reports on Islamists. Much more than the camel’s nose is under the press tent now.