Walid Phares a Strange Choice as Romney’s Foreign Policy Advisor

by Sheila Musaji

Walid Phares is a former fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  He was one of the “experts” featured in the Clarion Fund film The Third Jihad, and is a member of the advisory board of the Clarion Fund.  Rightweb reports that “Phares states on the CV on his personal website that he “has been an advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives Caucus on Counter Terrorism since 2007 and is the Co-Secretary General of the Trans Atlantic Legislative Group on Counter Terrorism since 2008. He is Fox News Terrorism and Middle East Expert since 2007 and has been MSNBC-NBC Terrorism Analyst from 2003 to the end of 2006 [sic]. He teaches Global Strategies at the National Defense University in Washington DC since 2006.”  He is a columnist for David Horowitz’ Front Page magazine.  He endorsed two books by Robert Spencer.  Phares and his books are promoted by Pamela Geller. Phares serves on the board of Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America.

There has been a great deal of controversy (especially since Mitt Romney appointed him as an advisor) over Phares past participation in extremist Lebanese militia groups.  Although many of our elected representatives have made openly Islamophobic statements, and it seems as if the GOP particularly has declared war on American Muslims,  Romney has in the past not been openly Islamophobic.  He did say “Based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”  Absolutely amazing that a Mormon has such a short memory about where such bigotry leads.  Romney also expressed opposition to the Cordoba House/Park51 project in NYC. 

As As`ad AbuKhalil reports  “After General Michel Auon assumed the presidency of Lebanon in 1988, Phares joined the right-wing coalition known as the Lebanese Front, which consisted of various sectarian groupings and militia. The Front backed Gen. Auon in his struggles against the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad and the Muslims of Lebanon. Phares’s role was not small, according to Beirut newspaper accounts.. He served as vice chair of another front’s political leadership committee, headed by a man named Etienne Saqr, whose Guardians of Cedar militia voiced the slogan “Kill a Palestinian and you shall enter Heaven.” (Saqr later moved to Israel, and then Cyprus.) The Front was also backed by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a bitter foe of the Syrians. It seems unlikely that Romney knew much about this chapter in Phares’ career when he tapped him as an advisor.”

Rightweb notes about this chapter in Phares career: “The Congressional Research Service described the Guardians of the Cedar as an “extremist Maronite militia and terrorist organization. ... Named after Lebanon’s national symbol, it consisted of about 500 men and cooperated with the Phalangists in the Civil War.”

Jarad Vary reports on The New Republic ...

Since Romney announced his advisors on October 6, he has won praise for a foreign policy group that is unusually large and uncommonly strong. But one name sticks out: Walid Phares, a Lebanese Christian academic who has come under fire from Muslim advocacy groups and academics alike since his inclusion on Romney’s team. Muslim groups are decrying Phares’s close involvement with right-wing Christian militia groups during the Lebanese civil war. Academics note his relatively sparse credentials. But both complaints beg an obvious question: Just who is Walid Phares, and why would the risk-averse Romney add an obscure and controversial pundit to his star-studded foreign policy team?

A fog of conflicting rumors surrounds Phares’s role in the brutally violent Lebanese civil war that took place nearly three decades ago. Phares denies any involvement. Indeed, his spokesman recently told Politico that his client was a victim of confusion with “another man of the same name.” But Elias Muhanna—a visiting fellow at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and author of a highly esteemed blog about Lebanese politics, Qifa Nabki—assured me it is an established fact that “during the civil war [Romney advisor] Phares was involved with the Lebanese Forces. He held a high ranking position in their executive council.”

Today the Lebanese Forces is a mainstream political party that holds eight seats in the country’s parliament; three decades ago, however, it was a radical right-wing Maronite Christian militia and a major participant in the Lebanese civil war. The militia, like some other parties to the vicious war, fought for ethnic domination and occasionally targeted civilians for massacre. Phares himself is not accused of war crimes, but as part of the group’s senior leadership, he did help set the Lebanese Forces’s aims and strategy.

Here is the entry on Walid Phares from the Political Research Associates Report Manufacturing the Muslim Menace

Walid Phares – CI Centre Faculty.  Walid Phares is a Lebanese-American “terrorism expert” with a PhD in International Relations and Strategic Studies from the University of Miami.114 In addition to his position at the CI Centre, Phares is a Senior Fellow and the director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, a neoconservative think tank.115 Since 2007, Phares has taught Jihadist Global Strategies at National Defense University, a school funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.116 His academic pedigree and prominence in government circles would suggest that he brings a scholarly approach to the field of counterterrorism. A contributor to the ultraconservative Christian Broadcast News, and Fox News, Phares has published three books since September 11, 2001 describing a longterm, global conspiracy by various Islamic movements to subvert the U.S. government and establish an Islamic state. Phares’ seven pre-2001 publications consisted of studies of Middle Eastern conflicts and area studies.

Following 2001, Phares wrote Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005); The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy (2007); and The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad (2008); in these works, Phares identifies a new global ideological menace based on claims of a longterm jihadist strategy spawned by conservative Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, Khomeinists in Iran, and the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The sinister plan involves a steady decades-long infiltration of key institutions in the United States, including academia, the defense sector, and community organizations, in preparation for a future overthrow to impose Sharia law. While Phares is often very cautious in his characterization of Muslims, on the whole, his narrative distorts the nature of Islam, misstates the role of the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans, and reinforces cultural stereotyping of Arabs and Islam.

Phares regularly briefs and testifies before Congressional committees and the European Parliament. He leads seminars for government employees, and addresses law enforcement and homeland security conferences. On April 24, 2010, Phares joined Robert Spencer and Brigitte Gabriel, the president of ACT! for America to discuss “Radical Islam: How and Why It Threatens America.”117 An ACT! for America advertisement for this conference warned, “City Council and County Commission members need to understand how Islamists are suing local jurisdictions to demand excessive rights (such as the Muslim policewoman in Philadelphia who sued for the right to wear her hijab as part of her uniform).”118

Drawing extensively on the thesis of Future Jihad, Phares’ courses at the CI Centre examine the common ideological roots of what he calls the “Salafist
world movement.” Phares explains, “It is very important for people in the national security field, law enforcement, intelligence, defense, and others to
understand the ideological roots of movements that are as diverse as one can find,” yet “share a common ideological root, which we examine.”119 Like Future Jihad, CI Centre’s Course 361, “The Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine,” looks at “the strategies by the jihadists’ movements on intellectual, cultural, ideological levels. How they indoctrinate? How do they create a vast pool of individuals who can be recruited by various militant or terrorist organizations?”120

Future Jihad was included on summer reading lists for Republican members of the U.S. Congress, and the UK’s House of Commons in 2007.121 Phares’
popularity extends well beyond the Beltway. In 2001, Phares gave a seminar to statewide law enforcement in Florida on the threat of Radical Islam.122 In 2009, Paula Gordon, speaking at a FEMA Higher Education Conference about integrating “all hazards” homeland security perspectives into training for emergency management personnel, recommended including Phares’ materials in training curricula.123

In September 2008, Phares joined local sheriffs, state homeland security officials, and U.S. Congresswoman Sue Myrick at a joint North and South Carolina conference to “educate first responders on the threat of Domestic Terrorism and Radical Islamic Jihadists and the danger they pose to both the
Carolinas and the entire southeast.”124 Author Paul Sperry, who warns against “those trying to mainstreamIslam,” also spoke at this conference.125

Sperry wrote Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington, an Amazon bestseller and Conservative Book Club feature selection, which spins a conspiracy theory about covert Muslim infiltration that dovetails neatly with Phares’ claims. Phares uses jihad to connote a long-range strategy of conquest. In doing so, he follows closely the path of intellectuals like Robert Spencer who promote the Islamophobic idea that Islam is innately extremist and violent.126 In its most generic meaning, “jihad” signifies the battle against evil and the devil, the self-discipline to follow God’s will, to be better Muslims. It is a lifelong struggle to be virtuous, to be true to the straight path of God.127 Professor Jonathan Zartman of the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College writes that Phares “briefly acknowledges” how jihad represents an inner spiritual cleansing to many followers, but he “moves on to discuss jihad as a policy used by elites for political ends.” In Phares’ view, writes Zartman, “‘Jihad was to become the legitimate call for mobilization and action and ultimately war.’ [Phares] defines jihad as a military principle that makes all battles holy and transforms all encounters with the enemy into religious duty.”

Zartman summarizes Phares’ argument as follows:  we should not become fixated on Osama bin Laden, but rather direct our defenses against the vast network of enemies engaged in at least six strategies to destroy the United States… (1) use oil as a weapon (economic jihad), (2) penetrate our centers
of culture and ideas (ideological jihad), (3) mollify the public to prevent self-defense (political jihad), (4) infiltrate our intelligence service (intelligence jihad), (5) use our laws to destroy our freedoms and protect the collection of money and soldiers for jihad (subversive jihad), and (6) seek to control our foreign policy (diplomatic jihad).128

Phares’ view of jihad as encompassing a variety of non-violent and legal tactics makes his call to outlaw the “ideology of jihadism” particularly problematic
from a civil liberties perspective.129 Muslims in nearly every community, academic, cultural, and governmental institution could conceivably be subjected
to McCarthyistic interrogations about their belief systems, associations, and loyalties.

Adam Serwer reports on Phares activities since 9/11

Appearing on Fox News two months after the attacks, Phares warned of the danger posed by Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera, telling Bill O’Reilly that "linguistically, the Arabic language is a very powerful one. It has a lot of codes. It could be used in a lethal way."

...  Phares’  message, though more polished, isn’t all that different from the paranoid worldview of anti-Muslim figures in the United States. In Future Jihad,  Phares writes that "jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates" working to ensure that "[a]lmost all mosques, educational centers, and socioeconomic institutions fall into their hands." Phares contends these stealth jihadists are merely waiting for a "holy moment"  to strike.

"[Phares] is telling people to suspect all Muslims Americans as something other than how they portray to themselves," says Thomas Cincotta, one of the authors of a report titled "Manufacturing the Muslim Menace," published by the liberal group Political Research Associates. But it’s not just anyone Phares is preaching his ideas to.  "He’s addressing the intelligence community, he’s addressing policymakers, military personnel," Cincotta notes.

Phares eventually came into Mitt Romney’s orbit. Shortly after President Barack Obama won the election in 2008, Toni Nissi says Phares told Nissi over dinner at Washington’s Madison Hotel that Romney had promised Phares a high-ranking White House job helping craft US policy in the Middle East should the ex-governor win in 2012.

"To have someone who has these old ideas about the dangers of Islam and especially the dangers of political Islam—I don’t think it’s going to be very helpful to Romney’s understanding of the Middle East," says the Council on Foreign Relations’ Mohamad Bazzi.

Mother Jones  contacted Phares several times seeking comment. Eventually Jed Ipsen, a spokesman for Phares, offered to answer written questions on Phares’  behalf. Mother Jones provided him with a detailed list of queries, but Phares never responded. Romney’s camp also declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.

One former US counterterrorism official says he was shocked to learn that Phares was advising Romney. "He’s part of the same movement as Pamela Geller," the official says, referring to the anti-Muslim conservative activist behind the Ground Zero mosque controversy. "He’s viewed as a mainstream scholar of jihadism, but he doesn’t know a lot about the actual movement."

Phares may be viewed as mainstream, but he doesn’t avoid the more vocally anti-Muslim segments of the right. He has been a columnist for David Horowitz’s arch-conservative Frontpage magazine, and he endorsed two books by Robert Spencer, whose writings frequently posit that American Muslims are part of a conspiracy to establish Taliban-style Islamic law in the United States. Phares also serves on the advisory board of the Clarion Fund, which has released a series of films warning of an Islamist fifth column in the United States. In a YouTube video released by anti-Islam activist Brigitte Gabriel, herself a Maronite Christian whose views of Islam were shaped by harrowing experiences in Lebanon’s civil war, Phares tells Gabriel that "there is a cold war infiltration acquiring influence and the lands of what they call the infidels." When Gabriel’s cohost asks Phares for examples of this vast conspiracy, Phares quietly assures him, "We can’t give names, because it’s operational, it’s happening now."

"His experience in the region is colored by his experience in Lebanon during the civil war,"  says Mohamad Bazzi*, an Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who emigrated to the United States from Lebanon in 1985. "He has this alarmist tendency, especially about Islam, to demonize all forms of political Islam, even ones that are not violent." He adds, "To have someone who has these old ideas about the dangers of Islam and especially the dangers of political Islam—I don’t think it’s going to be very helpful to Romney’s understanding of the Middle East."

Should Phares’ militant past keep him from advising a presidential candidate, or perhaps a president?  "I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for everything I did when I was 22. I don’t think that’s fair to him," says Graeme Bannerman, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute and a former Republican staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The question is what are his views now, and those fall well within the mainstream of the Republican Party."

Phares is in many ways the ideal Republican foreign policy adviser, synthesizing all of the GOP’s foreign policy impulses in one place. He is supportive of American military intervention and combines anti-Muslim sentiments with a veneer of counterterrorism expertise drawn from his experience in Lebanon’s civil war.

But James Zogby asks: "Is he serving Mitt Romney, or is he serving the politics of a group in Lebanon that was fighting for their sectarian hegemony in a civil war that took over 100,000 lives?"

 

 

SEE ALSO:

A Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/a_whos_who_of_the_anti-muslimanti-arabislamophobia_industry

Backgrounder on Phares http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/phares_walid/

Clarion Fund to Inject Millions in November Elections Throgh Iran Mushroom-Cloud Propaganda, Richard Silverstein http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/clarion_fund_to_inject_millions_in_november_elections_throgh_iran_mush

From Clarion: A Protocols of the Elders of Islam?, Eli Clifton http://irancoverage.com/2008/10/06/from-clarion-a-protocols-of-the-elders-of-islam/

Brigitte Gabriel, Guy Rodgers and ACT for America, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/brigitte_gabriel_and_act_for_america1/ 

Meet Mitt Romney’s Radical, Right-wing, Sharia-phobe Foreign Policy Advisor, Jarad Vary http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/96519/romney-walid-phares-sharia-caucus-iowa-pawlenty

National Review Online Fumbles Its Defense Of Walid Phares, Adam Serwer http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/nro-fumbles-defense-walid

“Obsession” - Happy Ramadan:  “The Third Jihad” - Happy Eid, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/the_third_jihad_happy_eid

Walid Phares: Romney’s Advisor, Ben Smith http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1011/Romneys_adviser.html

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Robert Spencer, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/the_politically_incorrect_guide_to_robert_spencer/

The right-wing Lebanese Christian advising Romney on the Middle East, Brooke Anderson   http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Jan-06/159051-the-right-wing-lebanese-christian-advising-romney-on-the-middle-east.ashx#ixzz1imMUaCLT

Romney and Perry get chummy with the anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian crowd, Alex Kane http://mondoweiss.net/tag/walid-phares

Romney Has Called For Firing Of Public Officials For Far Less Than Ties To War Criminals http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/10/27/354712/romney-phares-firing-far-less/

Romney’s adviser on Middle East has had a career boosted by Israel lobby, Philip Weiss http://mondoweiss.net/2011/10/romneys-adviser-on-middle-east-has-had-a-career-boosted-by-israel-lobby.html

Romney’s indiscreet adviser, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011102673018375864.html

Romney’s scary Middle East advisor, As’ad Abukhalil http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/07/romneys_scary_middle_east_advisor/

Top Romney Adviser Tied to Militia That Massacred, Adam Serwer http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/walid-phares-mitt-romney-lebanese-forces?page=2

Who is behind Relentless, Obsession and The Third Jihad?, Sheila Musaji   http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/who_is_behind_relentless_obsession_and_the_third_jihad1

 

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