Ted Cruz’s
Team of Islamophobes
By Derek Davison
March 19, 2016
"Information
Clearing House"
- "LobeLog"-
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), one of the three remaining
candidates for the Republican presidential
nomination, is unveiling his national security team
today, and Bloomberg View columnist Eli
Lake was able to
preview some of its members for his readers this
morning. Calling the group “an unlikely team of
foreign-policy rivals,” Lake argued that Cruz has
chosen a wide array of advisors who hold divergent
views with respect to at least one key foreign
policy issue:
In
a year when the Republican Party is breaking
apart because of Donald Trump, the only man left
with a chance to beat him is trying to build a
big tent—by GOP standards—when it comes to
foreign affairs.
On
Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce
his campaign’s national security advisory team,
and it includes many foreign-policy insurgents
and a few more establishment types. The list
includes conservatives who disagree on one of
the most pressing issues facing the next
president: defining and confronting radical
Islam.
This is one
way to describe Cruz’s team. Another way would be to
say that Cruz has assembled a collection of some of
the most prominent Islamophobes in American
right-wing circles and balanced them with a group of
neoconservatives who only want to go to war against
part of the Islamic world, not all
of it.
The
Most Notorious Islamophobe
Perhaps the
most shocking name on Cruz’s team, and the one Lake
spends the most time discussing, is
Frank Gaffney. After working in the Reagan
administration, Gaffney went on to found the Center
for Security Policy (CSP), where he has
become known as “one of America’s most notorious
Islamophobes.” Gaffney exhibits a standard variety
of neocon militarism when it comes to opposing
diplomacy with Iran, though he has diverged from
many of his fellow travelers in opposing American
intervention in Syria. But it’s on the subject of
Islam here in the U.S. where Gaffney’s unique
paranoia takes wing. Gaffney has been
the leading voice pushing a fringe right-wing
theory that the Muslim Brotherhood has somehow
infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S.
government, a
purely McCarthyite claim that fortunately hadn’t
been taken seriously by any prominent Republican
before Cruz.
Gaffney has
in the past called for a “war on Shariah,”
comparing Islamic law to “Nazism, Fascism,
Japanese imperialism, and communism.” He has praised
the work of
admitted white supremacists. He has found
“proof” of President Barack Obama’s “submission to
Shariah” in, of all places, the
logo for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. It was
a poll—an unscientific poll, at that—conducted by
CSP that
served as the basis for Republican front-runner
Donald Trump’s post-San Bernardino proposal to bar
all Muslims from entering the United States.
Gaffney’s
unhinged theories have been complemented by his
nasty personal invective. He once called for
Secretary of State John Kerry’s impeachment over the
Iran nuclear deal and for the crime of…having
an Iranian-American son in-law. He has accused
Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s long-time aide, of working on behalf of
the Brotherhood, a charge that
drew criticism from, among others, Senator John
McCain (R-AZ) and the Republican and Democratic
leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. He has
also
accused prominent conservative anti-tax activist
Grover Norquist of Brotherhood ties, absent what
appears to be any evidence whatsoever.
Gaffney is
not the lone Islamophobic voice in support of Cruz.
Frederick Fleitz and
Clare Lopez, both high-ranking employees of
Gaffney’s CSP, are also on Cruz’s team, and both
have similarly venomous views on Islam. Fleitz, a
close associate of former U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton,
once alleged that a “left-wing conspiracy”
within the U.S. intelligence community was covering
up proof of Iran’s active nuclear weapons program.
Lopez has echoed Gaffney’s belief that Muslim
Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated the U.S.
government. Through the Iran Policy Committee, where
she
formerly served as executive director, Lopez has
close ties to the Iranian exile (and formerly
designated terrorist) group Mujahideen-e-Khalq
(MEK). On the subject of Islam, Lopez actually
wrote this in 2013:
Deeply rooted in pre-Islamic
tribal social structures, some of the most
primitive of all human drives—to conquer and
dominate by force—were brilliantly sacralized in
Islamic doctrine. With assassination, banditry,
genocide, hatred-of-other, polygamy, rape,
pillage, and slavery all divinely sanctioned in
scriptures believed to be revealed by Allah
himself, the world is not likely to see an end
to Islam’s “bloody
borders” or “bloody
innards” any
time soon. In the traditional Arab and Muslim
system, there is just too much at stake for
those who win, as well as those who lose. There
is no such thing as a “win-win” concept in
Islam.
This person
could be advising President Ted Cruz on national
security.
Cruz’s team
also includes former federal prosecutor
Andrew C. McCarthy, who along with
Gaffney
has flirted with “birtherism” (the conspiracy
theory that Barack Obama was not eligible to serve
as president due to questions about his
citizenship). McCarthy has also
suggested that former Weather Underground leader
Bill Ayers, and not Obama, wrote Obama’s
autobiographical Dreams from My Father, and
has
repeatedly alleged that Obama’s administration
represents some sort of “leftist-Islamist” union to
take America down from the inside. Apparently, per
McCarthy, health care reform is Islamist. Who knew?
Balanced by Neocons?
To be fair
to Cruz, his team also includes less
conspiratorially minded neocons like
Elliott Abrams, who has
opposed diplomacy with Iran (he’d
prefer a war, thank you very much) and
supports stronger intervention in Syria. But
Abrams does not believe that America is at war with
Islam or that nefarious Muslim agents have
infiltrated the federal government at all levels. It
also includes former Reagan administration official
Michael Ledeen, who told Lake that “We’re at war
with a coalition of radical Islamists and radical
secularists. It’s not all one thing, nor is Islam
all one thing.” Ledeen is perhaps best known for
devising the “Ledeen Doctrine,” which, as
related by National Review’s Jonah
Goldberg in 2002, goes like this:
Every ten
years or so, the United States needs to pick up some
small crappy little country and throw it against the
wall, just to show the world we mean business.
I doubt
Ledeen would say that the 2011 Libyan intervention
qualifies, so that means the United States is long
overdue for throwing “some small crappy little
country” against the wall. One can only imagine
which country a President Cruz, with Ledeen at his
side, would pick.
Ledeen, who
served for many years as the “Freedom Scholar” at
the right-wing American Enterprise Institute before
taking the same position at the neocon Foundation
for Defense of Democracies, is
at least as toxic as Gaffney. He was
involved in the Iran-Contra affair during the
Reagan administration and was a key advisor to Karl
Rove during the George W. Bush years, advocating for
the invasion of Iraq and for
war with Iran. Ledeen even brings his own
conspiratorial baggage. In the 1980s, he was known
for pushing the “Bulgarian Connection,” the theory
that the KGB was behind Mehmet Ali Agca’s attempted
assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. In 2003,
Ledeen
speculated that French and German opposition to
the Iraq War was all part of a deal they’d struck
with “radical Islam” to weaken the United States.
Summarizing this “argument” can’t really do it
justice, so read for yourselves:
How
could it be done? No military operation could
possibly defeat the United States, and no direct
economic challenge could hope to succeed. That
left politics and culture. And here there was a
chance to turn America’s vaunted openness at
home and toleration abroad against the United
States. So the French and the Germans struck a
deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs:
You go after the United States, and we’ll do
everything we can to protect you, and we will do
everything we can to weaken the Americans.
“It sounds
fanciful, to be sure,” Ledeen wrote of his theory.
No kidding. At least he won’t feel out of place in a
Cruz administration.
Derek
Davison is a Washington-based researcher and writer
on international affairs and American politics. He
has Master's degrees in Middle East Studies from the
University of Chicago, where he specialized in
Iranian history and policy, and in Public Policy and
Management from Carnegie Mellon University, where he
studied American foreign policy and Russian/Cold War
history. He previously worked in the Persian Gulf
for The RAND Corporation. |