If you follow Twitter, you may be aware that Mohamed Elibiary, a Department of Homeland Security adviser to the president, has been sending out some fairly loaded messages lately. Not least among these was his claim on Wednesday that the United States is an Islamic nation — a statement that apparently even he found problematic because it was deleted by Thursday. Interestingly, Gateway Pundit links to a very similar tweet from October 2013 that wasn’t scrubbed:
@1776son America and yes I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution. Move On!
— Mohamed Elibiary (@MohamedElibiary) October 31, 2013
Here is Elibiary’s latest, posted three hours ago:
There r some who’ll view all of #Islam & all of #Islamism as threat 2 US,but that’s inaccurate & not academically or intelligence supported. — Mohamed Elibiary (@MohamedElibiary) June 27, 2014
I think most rational people would be inclined to share his view that not “all of #Islam” poses a threat to the U.S. But #Islamism? According to Wikipedia:
Islamist views emphasize the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law); of pan-Islamic political unity; and of the selective removal of non-Muslim, particularly Western military, economic, political, social, or cultural influences in the Muslim world that they believe to be incompatible with Islam.
If this is consistent with Elibiary’s sense of the term, then he needs to explain how this ideology is not a threat to the U.S.
This reanimates the dialog over where Barack Obama stands on the topics of Islam and Islamism. He has long maintained that he fully appreciates the scourge of the latter, but he’s never explained how people like Mohamed Elibiary continue to have a place in his administration.
