I was concerned about the story of Hesham Islam. I have had several posts on this story.
It got stranger and stranger, especially his life story.
He is (was) the Muslim assistant to an Undersecretary of Defense who was conducting controversial “outreach” to some odd Muslim groups. Now he is out. Apparently his life story was just too odd to remain believable once the spotlight went on.
Strange things are going on at the Pentagon. Earlier this month, I posted a question about the firing of a military expert on Islamic radicals. Claudia Rosette seems to have been just as interested in this story. She made inquiries about Hesham Islam, the “expert” whose opinions were enough to end Coughlan’s stint at the Pentagon. Last Friday, she wrote an article at NRO about who Islam really is. Now his profile has disappeared from the Pentagon website. That is a cached version.His exciting life story, questioned by Rosette, has some oddities. He describes being bombed as a child in his apartment in Cairo during the 1967 War. Israel did not bomb any Cairo residential areas. The Pentagon has no evidence, or is willing to share no evidence, to support many of his biographical details. He says he was a survivor of a ship sinking in the Arabian Sea at the age of 16.The profile goes on to describe young Hesham Islam as a “merchant mariner adrift for three days in the Arabian Sea after an Iranian torpedo sunk his 16,000-ton cargo ship, drowning all but Islam and four of his crewmates.”That profile is now gone from the Pentagon website. Rosette, an experienced investigative reporter (who wrote the definitive account of the oil-for-food scandal) can find no evidence of such a sinking.Later, his career took another turn:In 1985 he joined the Navy as an electronics technician in the submarine service. According to his Pentagon biography, he went on to serve on a number of ships, in largely technical and operational posts, before hooking up with Gordon England and finally arriving at his current job in the Pentagon.My earlier guess that a 20 year career that ended as a LT Commander (A major in other branches) would not be distinguished unless begun as an EM, was correct.He does have one qualification for his high position in the Pentagon; he hates Israel.He argued that U.S. support for Israel “has negatively affected the attainment of U.S. objectives in the Middle East.” He blamed the influence of American Jews on U.S. policy for a host of ills, ranging from Arab “retaliation” against Americans, to jobs lost overseas, to hampering sales of “defensive arms to friendly Arab states.”Is that why Gordon England, his boss and #2 man at the Pentagon, chose him as a senior aide ?Well, he did have a distinguished career before enlisting in the Navy as an EM.In 1980, according to the profile, Islam immigrated to the U.S. to get married, being suddenly love-smitten after receiving a photo of an American pen pal with whom he had been corresponding sight-unseen for more than three years. For the next five years he worked in what the spokesman describes as the “food services” industry. In 1985 he joined the Navy as an electronics technician in the submarine service.Well, at least he wasn’t driving a taxi ! What in the hell is going on ?Is this guy a mole ? An Islamic mole ? Does anybody else read Tom Clancy novels ? In one of them, I think Executive Orders, an Islamic mole becomes a Secret Service agent, ready to assassinate the President when given the order by his Ayatollah.This is going to be a big story , I hope. We need to find out why this guy was spiking careers of people who were worried about Islamic radicals infiltrating our society.
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.