In his 2002 letter to the American people explaining why he perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden asked, âWhat are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?,â and then immediately answered his own question: âThe first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.â Wednesday his coreligionist Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, declared victory: âI do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.â

It could be a canny new Homeland Security strategy: end the jihad against the U.S. by surrendering to it. If Elibiary can convince the Islamic jihadists who are waging jihad warfare against the United States that America is already âan Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution,â they will have nothing left to fight for, at least against us, since the goal of jihad is to impose Islamic law wherever possible, and ultimately over the world entire.

In retrospect, then, Janet Napolitanoâs tabbing of Elibiary for the DHS Advisory Council, much as I criticized it at the time, looks like a genius move. The amount of money that the U.S. will save on security costs will be enough in itself to save the economy, and Obama will at least be able to make good on his 2008 campaign promises to mend relations with the Islamic world. Itâs peace in our time!

There are still a few things to iron out. Will America as an Islamic country be Sunni or Shiâite? Whichever one Elibiary and his colleagues choose, they will need to be careful to maintain friendly relations, insofar as it is possible, with the spurned party. After all, if America becomes a Sunni state, Iran might be angered by failing to gain as a Shiâite partner the powerful nation that Barack Obama already described several years ago as âone of the largest Muslim countries in the worldâ â and an angry Iran could be dangerous. The same, of course, can be said of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan if the U.S. goes Shiâite.

Also: will the payment of the jizya, the poll tax that the Qurâan (9:29) demands be paid by the subjugated non-Muslims, be written into the existing tax code, or will it become a new layer of the Washington bureaucracy, bringing with it a new raft of forms for beleaguered American taxpayers, and a new raft of thorny problems for H & R Block? And what of the same verseâs command that the subjugated people display âwilling submissionâ to the Muslims, and âfeel themselves subduedâ? A huge new bureaucratic apparatus will be needed to ensure that non-Muslims are denied equality of rights with Muslims in every way possible, and the civil rights community will have to turn on a dime to trying to secure equal rights for all citizens to working to deny them for non-Muslims and women.

This will take some doing. Will a cabinet-level Department of the Dhimma be established, perhaps with Elibiary himself as its first Secretary?

Elibiary would certainly protest that all this wasnât what he meant. The point he was making was substantially that of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who has claimed that the U.S. Constitution and government are already Sharia-compliant, because â he claims â the Constitution and Islamic law reflect the same values and principles. âThe only truly clashing area,â Rauf has claimed, âis the penal code, and no Muslim has the intention of introducing that to America. The penal code is the area that people in the Western world are worried about â but these are things that arenât even observed today in most of the Muslim world. Apart from the Taliban and a few places like that, where do you see this happening?â

Well, Brunei, which has just introduced Sharia punishments such as stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and flogging for homosexuality; Yemen and Nigeria, where thieves were recently sentenced to amputation; and everywhere else where Sharia is fully implemented. But in any case, the claim of Elibiary and Rauf that aside from these punishments the U.S. is essentially Sharia-compliant already depends on its hearers being ignorant of Shariaâs institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims, its denial of the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience, and more.

Elibiary is not ignorant of those things. On the contrary, his record is illuminating of his real agenda. Investigative journalist Charles C. Johnson noted several weeks ago in the Daily Caller that Elibiary was âan old friend of an activist who was convicted in 2008 of financing the terrorist organization Hamas. In an interview with The Daily Caller, Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, reiterated claims he made this summer that former Holy Land Foundation president and CEO Shukri Abu Baker is innocent and a victim of political persecution. Elibiary, who in his position on the council has regular access to classified information, also said the United States insults Muslim dignity and compared the Muslim Brotherhood to American evangelicals.â

Counter-terror researcher Patrick Poole reported at PJ Media in 2011 that âElibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet.â According to Poole, Elibiary approached âa left-leaning media outletâ with reports marked For Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant âIslamophobiaâ in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).  The media outlet declined to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping them Official Use Only documents in the first place?

Poole checked with Steve McCraw, Director of the Texas DPS, who âconfirmed that Elibiary has access to the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports and products that are intended for intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies.â  Said McCraw of Elibiary:  âWe know that he has accessed DPS documents and downloaded them.â

There have been questions about Elibiaryâs true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled âA Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.â  The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadnât known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didnât explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out.  Among those who found this explanation wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, whose skepticism angered Elibiary.  The great moderate subsequently threatened Dreher, telling him:  âExpect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.â

Yet despite all this, Elibiary still got his appointment to the DHS Advisory Council, and was even recently promoted. Mohamed Elibiary has risen as far as he has without ever being properly vetted because government and law enforcement officials, and the media, are so avid to find a moderate Muslim who will stand against Islamic jihad terrorism that they will accept virtually anyoneâs claim to be just that, no questions asked.

And now he has declared victory for the jihad, and proclaimed that the U.S. is an âIslamic country.â Osama bin Laden would have been so proud.

By Robert Spencer