The Other Influence Operation

The revelation that eleven individuals allegedly were insinuated under deep and illegal cover into various communities around America by Russian intelligence for the purpose of influencing U.S. policy has been met here as much by puzzlement as outrage.  For most of our countrymen, the fact that these folks were apparently tasked, not so much with collecting secret information, but with exercising influence deemed helpful to the Kremlin is confounding.  According to some press accounts, in one targeted community, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the operation was even seen by some as flattering.

Unfortunately, however much our widespread ignorance of the tradecraft of determined and long-running influence operations (IO) – with their covert agents, femmes fatales, invisible ink, dead letter drops and other traditional espionage techniques – causes us to discount such activities as irrelevant or perhaps charmingly passé, the just-exposed Russian program should serve as an object lesson.  Specifically, it should arouse us to an appreciation of a similar but far more comprehensive, insidious and deadly IO to which America is being subjected at the moment.

In fact, this particular influence operation is hiding in plain sight: The campaign by adherents to what authoritative Islam calls “Shariah” are hard at work penetrating our society and subverting our Constitution, government and society with a view to compelling our submission to their global, theocratic designs.  This stealthy form of jihad is at least as deadly to free peoples as is the violent kind that supports and reinforces the influencers’ efforts to achieve the triumph of Shariah’s Islam.

Thanks to the successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation in 2008, we know that many Muslim organizations in America are a front or an associate of the Muslim Brotherhood – a mafia-like enterprise with chapters all over the world.  We also know that the Brotherhood’s mission is “to destroy Western civilization from within… by its own miserable hand.”

This infrastructure for stealthy sedition is aided and abetted by many mosques in this country.  By some estimates, roughly 80% of them are controlled– including “control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching… and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation.” The Wahhabi Saudis are the prime funders of jihad of both the violent and “civilizational” kinds around the world.

Evidence of the Shariah adherents’ influence operations in America abounds.  They have secured the right to select, train and credential chaplains for U.S. prisons and the military; emplaced operatives throughout the transportation sector, including in the TSA; co-opted and/or installed their own agents in law enforcement, intelligence, military and government circles; and deeply penetrated the capitalist system with a Muslim Brotherhood invention called “Shariah-Compliant Finance.”

These achievements have translated into a plethora of actions that are seen by our enemies as evidence of our submission – the literal meaning of “Islam,” and the goal of jihad.  To cite but a few illustrative examples, the U.S. government and media conform to Shariah blasphemy requirements by refusing to name the enemy, or even to describe accurately the ideological wellspring of its efforts to destroy us: Shariah.  The American taxpayer owns the largest purveyor of Shariah-compliant financial products in the world: AIG.  And senior civilian, military and intelligence officials increasingly insist that the United States must “engage” with (read, legitimate and make concessions to) “moderate” jihadists of such terrorist organizations Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Interestingly, an individual who has arguably done as much as any other non-Muslim to enable Shariah influence operations in America is Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  As Dean of the Harvard Law School – did I mention that it was located in that favorite target of IO agents, Cambridge, Massachusetts? – Kagan presided over its Islamic Finance Project. (As the website states: “In 1995 the Islamic Finance Project (IFP) was founded by the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). In late 2003, IFP became part of the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP) at Harvard Law School. As the only Ivy League project of its kind, IFP aims to study the field of Islamic finance from legal perspectives by analyzing contemporary scholarship, encouraging collaboration among scholars within and outside of the Muslim world, and increasing the interaction between theory and practice in the Islamic finance industry.”)

The purpose of this project is to recruit some of the nation’s most promising young lawyers to work for and otherwise help promote the financial Trojan Horse some of its practitioners have correctly described as a vehicle for “jihad with money.”  On Kagan’s watch, it played a critical role in getting the U.S. government to embrace Shariah-Compliant Finance (including, but not limited to, the AIG take-over).

As an open and free society, the United States is inherently susceptible to toxic influence operations.  The blown Russian IO should serve as a reminder of the danger such activities pose.  But it pales by comparison with one that masquerades as a religion in a nation constitutionally hard-wired to tolerance of religious practice and the freedom of speech.

It is past time that we focus on a IO threat that is both serious and indisputably present.  There are conservatively tens of thousands of people in America – many of whom are not foreign citizens but our own – who are determinedly seeking to insinuate, then impose, Shariah here.  As the Kagan example suggests, they are making real progress in doing so.  The 4^th of July is an appropriate time to declare our determination to halt and reverse the threat to our independence and lives posed by the “other” influence operation.  And Big Peace is a powerful new platform for helping do just that.