In the aftermath of last week’s attack on American personnel in Gaza, the United States announced that the FBI will conduct a thorough investigation.
Given that the perpetrators seem to be members of a hitherto unknown terrorist group, one can only hope the bureau will avail itself of expert Israeli help in pursuing the case. But a recent report about the FBI raises doubts that it will.
Last week, WorldNetDaily reported that the FBI has rejected, apparently systematically, applications from Jewish Arabic speakers seeking to serve as translators.
The story is that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when the FBI made a public call for Arabic-speaking translators, more than 90 Sephardic Jews from New York applied.
According to Sephardic community leaders questioned by WorldNetDaily, many of those applicants — all of whom are American — had prior professional experience working for Israeli Radio in Arabic and serving as linguists in the Israel Defense Forces. Indeed, for most of them, Arabic was their mother tongue.
The FBI has offered no official comment on its rejection of the applicants. Sources familiar with the FBI’s vetting process have claimed that the sense was that the Jews “were too close to Israel” and might fail to translate documents in an objective manner. A former FBI official I spoke with said that he could not dismiss the idea that perceived loyalty to Israel would in fact cause a Jew to be rejected by the FBI.
It is too soon to tell how much of this story is true. If American Jews are indeed being barred from contributing to the U.S. war on terrorism for fear of conflicting loyalties with Israel, there is reason to be distressed.
Meanwhile, Muslim military and civilian personnel working at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay have been arrested during the past month on suspicion of committing espionage for al -Qaida and Syria.
Several weeks ago, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, an American who is responsible for vetting and accrediting candidates for Islamic chaplaincy positions in the U.S. military, was arrested on terrorism-related charges.
Last year, in the face of public protests, FBI Director Robert Mueller spoke at the dinner of the American Muslim Council, an organization that Alamoudi founded. FBI spokesmen have referred to the AMC as “the most mainstream Muslim group in the U.S.”
Yet Alamoudi has publicly expressed support for Hezbollah and Hamas. The director of the AMC, Eric Vickers, refused on a television interview to acknowledge that al-Qaida is a terrorist organization. Alamoudi has said repeatedly to Muslim audiences that the goal of Muslims in America is to turn the United States into an Islamic state.
Aside from the AMC, many of the other organizations Alamoudi led, founded or has been active in have been raided in federal counterterrorism probes. These groups include Mercy International, the Fiqh Council of North America, the Success Foundation, the United Association for Studies and Research, and the Talibah International Aid Foundation. But apparently concerned about the potential dual loyalties of Jews, the FBI has preferred to seek out Alamoudi’s Muslim American associates as translators.
Something similar seems to be going on with the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
This week, Sabah al-Iman, a member of the Iraqi council, participated in the meeting the Arab League’s Damascus-based Israel boycott committee on behalf of U.S.-occupied Iraq. While in Damascus, al-Imam stated that post-Saddam Hussein Iraq would not be party to any commerce with Israel.
Why did the Iraqi Governing Council feel it necessary to send an emissary? Egypt didn’t. Neither did Jordan. Iraq expert Amatzia Baram of the U.S. Institute of Peace referred to the participation of a member of the Iraqi Governing Council at the meeting as “a travesty.”
In Baram’s view, “It is a complete outrage that he went to Damascus, which is a center for anti-American and anti-Israel extremism and violence. What it means is that Iraq under US occupation is reverting to its foreign policy under Saddam Hussein.”
At the end of World War II, the United States set out to de-Nazify Germany. This involved not only arresting and trying Nazis and barring Nazi sympathizers from positions of power. It also involved telling the German people that the entire Nazi worldview, its Jew-hatred above all, was morally reprehensible.
Today, the United States is on a path of de-Ba’athifying Iraq. And while high ranking Ba’athists are being rounded up and arrested and party supporters are being kept from positions of power, the United States is doing nothing to tell the Iraqis to stop believing in one of the party’s central organizing principles —Jew-hating. Thus, an editorial in Al-Safeer, one of the new independent Iraqi newspapers, makes a plea to Iraqis not to allow the breakup of the country along ethnic lines. Such a breakup, the editorial explains, “is what the Zionists want.”
The United States is attempting to bring openness and freedom and democracy to a country that has known none of these things and is surrounded by other countries that fear all of these things. But if the new Iraqi national identity is based on the old Iraqi anti-Semitism then the attempt is destined to fail.
If the Iraqis after Saddam can find no better reason to keep the country together than the need to stay unified to fight Israel, then maybe there is no reason to lift a finger to prevent its breakup. If hating Israel is the core of the Iraqi national identity, then that identity is undesirable.
By the same token, trying to bring radical Muslim groups into the American mainstream without demanding that they shed their anti-Semitism just feeds the beast of hatred and engenders situations like that at Guantanamo Bay.
Last week’s Palestinian terror attack on the Americans in Gaza yet again made clear that the same forces that are at war with Israel are also at war with the United States. Because of this, there is no reason to worry about the so-called dual loyalties of American Sephardim.
These loyalties are not in conflict. They are identical.
What is clear is that America’s attempt to enlist what it believes is the “moderate Muslim leadership” in the war on terror is fraught with risk. It is also clear that the United States has a valuable store of human capital for its war on terror — the Sephardic speakers of Arabic whose applications were apparently rejected by the FBI. Better this resource be used than squandered for the sake of pandering to radical Arab groups.
In Iraq the stakes are just as high. By tolerating anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes in Iraq, the United States is courting disaster. What else would you call a U.S.-appointed Iraqi regime that declares war on Israel?
Caroline Glick is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where this column previously ran.