Author: Stephen Schwartz
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: July 8, 2002
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1731
Numerous parallels are visible between
the totalitarianism of Soviet Communism and that of Wahhabism, the Saudi-funded
movement to seize control of world Islam. Aside from their ideological
similarities and the common elements in the struggle of each for power,
there is the striking matter of their identical tactics in penetration
of the United States.
The Communist Party, USA, claimed
to lead and, in effect, represent the entire labor and left movement, when
its constituency was restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents
of a foreign regime.
The Wahhabi lobby - the Council
on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslim Council (AMC) and
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) - claim to lead, and, in effect,
represent the entire community of American Muslims, when its constituency
is restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents of a foreign regime,
the Saudi kingdom.
The Communist Party, USA, claimed
it was engaged in protected speech, and, even more, argued that investigation
of its conspirative activities in the interest of treason, terrorism, and
espionage involved "denial of free thought." Right; it involved investigation
of people who spent a lot of time thinking about their loyalty to the Soviet
Union rather than the U.S., their support for actions like the assassination
of Trotsky, entirely organized from U.S. soil by American Communists, and
the need to assist spies like the Rosenbergs, Morton Sobell, and Rudolf
Abel. But since their thoughts could not be investigated, rendering a discussion
of the morality of such ridiculous, they were investigated for their pursuit
of these thoughts, in real, direct actions.
The Wahhabi lobby claims it is engaged
in the protected exercise of religion, and, even more, argues that investigation
of its conspirative activities in the interest of treason and terrorism
involve "denial of religious freedom." But religion per se does not enter
into this investigation, which is based entirely on voluntary criminal
acts, like September 11.
The Communist Party, USA, used labor
unions as cover; the Wahhabi lobby uses charities. The means and the ends
are the same: each represents the place where the ideological network encounters
and seeks to control the masses. Each is used as a recruitment center and
cover for terrorists.
Finally, when national and international
developments act irresistibly to strip the benign mask away from each -
the seizure of Czechoslovakia and break with Tito in 1948, in the Communist
case, September 11 in the Wahhabi example - the alien operatives in charge
of the terror network have taken refuge behind popular American sympathy
for the underdog. Like the Communists before them, the Wahhabis have presented
arrestees, detainees, and indicted suspects as people persecuted because
they are "foreign born," or victims of "ethnic profiling."
The classic example of Communist
manipulation of this issue was embodied in an organization known as the
American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB). This
was a legal front set up to protect aliens caught in the U.S. while employed
as representatives of the Communist International and in other top positions
in the clandestine networks. Their ethnicity was varied. Overall, the Kremlin
did not feel it could depend, for the real guidance of the American Communists,
on lily-livered American ex-Socialists, who might be timid about the really
rough stuff, or on former members of the anarchosyndicalist Industrial
Workers of the World, who suffered attacks of conscience. While these types
dominated the Communist leadership, the clandestine networks were more
often run by Slavs, especially Croats, Hungarians, Finns and, in California,
Japanese.
The Slavs were tough men, steelworkers
and miners, brought up in a tradition of rural social protest that typically
led to the Habsburg gallows. The Hungarians and Finns usually had lost
brothers or other close relatives in the failed Communist revolutions in
those countries. The Japanese were the loneliest: in the 1930s, they were
routinely beheaded in Japan, and had no base in China; the Japanese Communist
Party was therefore run out of California and Hawaii.
Once in a while a member of one
of these bands would fall into the hands of U.S. immigration and naturalization
inspectors, military intelligence, or local law enforcement. Nobody in
the FBI paid serious attention to the Communists until 1939. Since all
these individuals were aliens traveling with multiple false U.S. passports
and other forms of fraudulent identity, they were deportable if nothing
else. The INS of that time played a heroic role in tracking Communists
when nobody else cared; indeed, it was the main engine of pursuit in the
long-running attempt to deport Harry Bridges to Australia. Bridges, who
had captured control of the West Coast longshoremen's union, did not disguise
his Communist sympathies, and would generally not deny being a Communist.
Rather, he challenged the government to prove he was a Communist, knowing
as he did that the party apparatus was virtually airtight in California.
Proving his membership would be an impossible task, and the government
failed in its attempt. At the end of his life, Bridges commented, "of course
I was in the party; they just couldn't prove it." With the opening of the
Russian archives of the American Communist organization, all doubt was
dispelled forever; internal party documents showed that Bridges was a member
of the Central Committee.
The high standard of proof required
in such cases, and other legal barriers, provided enough pretexts for ACPFB
to conduct decades of work assisting Communist alien operatives. Of course,
the organization placed itself under a liberal mantle: its honorary cochairman
in 1950 was Thomas Mann, the German novelist who fled to the U.S. and skated
back and forth between the Stalinists and anti-Stalinists (this was particularly
common among German leftist émigrés). Other signatories of
its propaganda that year included Dr. Philip Morrison, nuclear physicist,
Hon. Robert W. Kenny, a California attorney general and rank fellow- traveller,
the long-serving Soviet tool Dr. Linus Pauling, and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.
In the mid-50s, with support for
the Stalinist network way down among dupes, the New York Committee's troika
of cochairs included Hugo Gellert, a Hungarian social-realist painter and
leader of the open Hungarian Communists in America, and Hugh Mulzac, a
Caribbean-born shipmaster and functionary in the Communist maritime network
- the all-important conspiracy of seagoing couriers. Other faces familiar
at Stalinist gatherings rallied to the NYCPFB, including Dr. Edward K.
Barsky, head medic for Stalin's American mercenaries in the Spanish civil
war, banjoist Pete Seeger, social realist painter Rockwell Kent, and "folk
composer" Earl Robinson.
A 1953 advertisement in the Daily
Worker listed, as speakers at an ACPFB rally, an illustrious "foreign born"
Communist: the Caribbean Ewart Guinier, father of none other than Lani,
"quota queen" supreme and advocate of crank voting schemes. Papa Ewart
was a leader of the American Communist organization in Hawaii, and he was
accompanied at the 1953 event by Carl Marzani, alias Tony Wales, a Soviet
spy inside the U.S. State Department. The 1955 letterhead of the national
organization sported the name of Dashiell Hammett, former union-busting
Pinkerton goon turned Stalinist, and number one "squeezed lemon" among
Communist literati.
In the long term, the Communist
juridical operation aimed at protecting their terrorist, treasonous, and
spying activities was successful. It should therefore surprise nobody that
when the Wahhabi lobby came under American investigative scrutiny in the
1990s, their response and that of their defenders (including a considerable
number of ultrasecularist and leftist Jews) almost exactly reproduced the
effort mounted earlier in American history by Stalinist Communists and
their protectors. Aside from the claim that they were victims because they
were "foreign born," or were "ethnically profiled," the Wahhabis have recycled
a full range of Stalinist techniques for evading the law.
Like the Communists of the 1940s,
the Wahhabis claim to be victims of slander while practicing it against
their critics. Detailed, factual charges against them are denounced by
them as mere allegations, when they are, without exception, based on publicly
recorded, voluntary statements made before thousands of witnesses. When
the Wahhabis are shown, by their own declarations, to be terror advocates,
they insist that their activities are benign and innocuous, involving only
fundraising for the relief of children and refugees.
The Communists had used the same
methods with extraordinary success. They claimed to be "progressives,"
not Stalinists; they denounced their critics, including anti-Stalinist
socialists and liberals, as "fascists" and "witch-hunters," and when it
was demonstrated that they did belong to Communist organizations, argued
that they had only been engaged in programs of social uplift, defense of
labor rights, and fighting against racism. In reality, their main tasks
had not been in the field of trade unionism or civil rights, but rather
involved the propagandistic defense of Stalin's purges, pact with Hitler,
and other atrocities.
Furthermore, years of wrongheaded
decisions were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which seemed to want
to overlook Communist espionage and terrorism in America (the assassination
of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 - the most famous terrorist act of the
20th century - was almost entirely organized in the United States by members
of the domestic Communist Party). The Court held to the philosophy that
suppression of Stalinism was only appropriate if it could be shown that
the republic was in danger of immediate overthrow. That the American Communist
party was an arm of the Soviet secret police, controlled in its entirety
by Moscow, had not been "proven," even though it was self-evident, because
the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
were unwilling to produce testimony that would reveal to the Russians the
extent of American success in decrypting secret KGB and related communications.
So the courts, the lawyerly establishment, civil liberties lobbies, and
assorted other sectors of the public adopted a hardline attitude: if treason,
espionage, and terrorism could not be proven in open court, with full right
of cross examination by attorneys hired with Soviet money and intent on
assisting the Soviet government, it did not exist. It was for this reason
that so many potential codefendants in the infamous case of the Rosenberg
couple were never even indicted, and some made their escape from the U.S.
altogether.
Until September 11, the Wahhabis
in America enjoyed similar success in convincing American investigative
agencies, judges, lawyers, civil liberties advocates, journalists, academics,
and others that they were, in effect, prosecution-proof. Ludicrous mistakes
were made because Americans were concerned to protect the freedom of the
enemies of freedom. Sayyid Nosair, assassin in 1990 of Jewish extremist
Meir Kahane, was only found guilty on a firearms charge. The FBI impeded
the investigation of Zacharias Moussaoui, who was arrested before September
11 and later charged as a member of the conspiracy, because it lacked "sufficient"
probable cause. The list of such errors could be greatly lengthened. But
the traps of moral equivalence were deeper and more dangerous. America's
capacity to defend itself spiritually and intellectually had been deeply
harmed by "anti-anti-Communism."
The legacy of this deviation in
American political life is audible whenever the claim is made that firm
measures against terrorists - the use before September 11 of "secret evidence,"
or, after that date, denying terror troopers status as prisoners of war,
investigating extremist activities that sheltered under the cover of religion,
more efficient standards for wiretapping, detention of aliens, higher levels
of transportation and communications security, or the failure to provide
"American Taliban" John Walker Lindh with a "dream team" of lawyers in
the Afghan hinterland - threatened to put America on the terrorists' level.
America was told repeatedly it must fight for protection of the rights
of its enemies if it was not to become indistinguishable from them. Similarly,
apologists for Bin Laden and his accomplices insisted that evidence of
his terrorist activities, satisfying absurdly high standards, must be produced
before action could be taken against him.
The time has come to end the period
in American history when protection of the enemies of freedom was considered
more important than protecting freedom. Arab and Muslim residents of the
United States whose assistance to terrorists is suspected, based on the
doctrine of probable cause, must be thoroughly investigated and, when necessary,
punished. The Wahhabi lobby must be barred from continuing its charade
as the "representatives" of "the Muslims," as if all Muslims in America
were their enthusiastic supporters, which they are not. Groups outside
the Wahhabi lobby that have issued aggravated and exaggerated claims about
repression of Arabs and Muslims - particularly the Arab American Institute
(AAI) and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - should
cease emulating entities from the dustbin of history, like the American
Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Arab and Muslim advocacy
groups must cease equivocating; cease providing excuses for terrorists;
examine their own pasts, and admit their previous involvement in extremist
incitement. To survive, they must take sides, and be seen to be effectively
taking sides, against the terrorists. There is no other path.
