UPDATE: More on Coughlan’s Master’s Thesis and what he thinks about Islam. I fear he is correct.
Several weeks ago, I posted on the firing of Major Coughlan, a Pentagon expert on Islamic law. He was accused of being a Christian ! A commenter here suggested that he did not know Arabic and therefore had no expertise. Now, there is more to the story, although unsurprisingly it has not made the MSM. There is an interesting debate going on in the Pentagon.
Former Army intelligence officer Jerome Gordon, who has discussed Coughlin’s thesis with former colleagues who have attended his briefings, told Newsmax that Hesham Islam is not Coughlin’s only enemy.
“If there is a cabal that is opposing him, it’s in the military intelligence community,” Gordon said. “Clearly, they have been cowed by the significant entrée provided by the U.S. government to leaders of Muslim Brotherhood fronts here in America.”
In a 153-slide PowerPoint presentation he uses to brief U.S. military officers headed for the Middle East, Coughlin criticizes analysts such as Harlan Ullman, a Washington Times columnist who boasts of his ties to Condoleezza Rice.
“And unlike the Nazis, these extremists lack a central, unifying ideology, come from many diverse movements and so far have not been inclined to develop a political theory for seizing political power,” Ullman wrote in a November 2007 column.
Coughlin called that statement a “non-sequitor,” and said that U.S. military officers had a “duty” to base their assessment on an objective analysis of the facts, not on assumptions or desires.
Another Ullman statement: “The world indeed has changed. But not as we think. American power and perceived omnipotence have been greatly neutralized or displaced…This means aligning our ego with reality. Mr. Bush once called for a more humble foreign policy. The times never demanded one more.”
So these are the people who want us to be blind to militant Islam’s literature.