Michael Hirsh reports: Last February Mike Flynn, the incoming national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, tweeted: “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” He urged his tweeps to “please forward” a Muslim-bashing video by one I.Q. al-Rassooli, a Britain-based, Iraqi-born polemicist who argues that Islam is less a religion than a cult in perpetual war with the West, that the Prophet Muhammad “committed crimes against humanity on a massive scale” and the Koran is “a rambling, incoherent, jumbled scripture of hatred and enmity that no true God would have ever revealed to anyone.”

Two years ago, in 2014, Steve Bannon, President-elect Trump’s incoming chief strategist, told an interviewer that “the Judeo-Christian West” is “in the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict … an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism”—an enemy that, unless harsher measures are taken, “will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

And this past May Mike Pompeo, President-elect Trump’s nominee to run the CIA, went to the Center for Security Policy, a hardline think tank that has accused Obama administration officials of being secret agents of the Muslim Brotherhood, for a sit-down with the head of the center, Frank Gaffney. Pompeo told Gaffney in a recorded interview that the fight “extends beyond those [Muslims] who are just engaged in violent extremism.” He added: “We don’t have to say that all Muslims are bad. But … we’re going to have to have a broader approach in order to keep Americans safe.” [Continue reading…]