A cover that declares a “War on Christians” is bound to get some attention.
Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali‘s argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk “about Muslims as victims of abuse,” because really it’s the other way around:
A wholly different kind of war is underway–an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.
To suggest that a genocide is underway is, of course, a serious charge. And Hirsi Ali alleges that it is widespread:
In recent years, the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.
To make matters worse the media have been cowed into silence, due to “the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation–a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia–and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.” She writes:
Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”–a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.
So there is a genocide underway, and there are specific groups obscuring this fact and steering media away from covering this horror–in effect making them complicit in the genocide.
This is a remarkably serious charge. It is rather shocking to see it printed in a national magazine with so little evidence.
Ali’s piece is accompanied by a large graphic (which doesn’t appear to be online) labeled “Terrorist Attacks on Christians in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.” According to the graph, there were 45 such attacks in 2010. Violence of this sort is tragic; the anecdotes Hirsi Ali cites from Nigeria sound horrific.
But is it a genocide? And is the violence directed against Christians on the basis of religion? It is hard to see how one could make such a leap. In Egypt, for instance, Hirsi Ali points to an incident where Christian protesters were killed by state security forces. Hundreds have been killed in similar circumstances in Egypt over the past year. They were not all Christians, and they were not killed in a drive to stamp out members of a particular faith.
Hirsi Ali finds similar evidence elsewhere: “Since 2003, more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone.” Of course, Baghdad has suffered terrible violence since the U.S. invasion and occupation. It is unclear why these particular deaths, a small percentage of total killings in Baghdad, should be considered part of a genocidal Muslim campaign against Christians. She adds that “thousands” of Iraqi Christians have fled their homes. But millions of Iraqis have done the same, across ethnic and religious lines. It’s hard to conclude that anti-Christian genocide is the story that is being kept out of the media by the likes of CAIR.
Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must “please get our priorities straight…. Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world.”
It’s hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.
… In 2007, a few months after Santorum was ousted from the Senate in a landslide defeat, he accepted an invitation from right-wing provocateur David Horowitz to speak at “Islamo-Fascism Campus Awareness Week.” As I documented in my video report on Horowitz’s appearance at Columbia University that year, “Islamo-Fascism” week was a naked ploy to generate publicity for the frenetically self-promoting Horowitz while demonizing Muslim-Americans as a dangerous fifth column who required constant government monitoring and possibly worse. The event was so extreme that even Jewish groups like Hillel known for promoting Zionism on campus rejected it.
There is no video documentation or transcript of Santorum’s speech at Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness” event. However, I was able to find a transcript of a speech Santorum delivered at Horowitz’s invitation in March 2007. During his address, the ex-Senator declared the need to “define the enemy,” but he made little effort to distinguish between the general population of Muslims and violent Islamic extremists. If anything, he seemed to conflate the two.
Here are a few of the remarkable statements Santorum made at Horowitz’s event:
“What must we do to win? We must educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate.”
“Look at Europe. Europe is on the way to losing. The most popular male name in Belgium — Mohammad. It’s the fifth most popular name in France among boys. They are losing because they are not having children, they have no faith, they have nothing to counteract it. They are balkanizing Islam, but that’s exactly what they want. And they’re creating an opportunity for the creation of Eurabia, or Euristan in the future…Europe will not be in this battle with us. Because there will be no Europe left to fight.”
We should “talk about how Islam treats homosexuals. Talk about how they treat anybody who is found to be a homosexual, and the answer to that is, they kill them.”
“… the Shia brand of Islamist extremists [is] even more dangerous than the Sunni [version]. Why? Because the ultimate goal of the Shia brand of Islamic Islam is to bring back the Mahdi. And do you know when the Mahdi returns? At the Apocalypse at the end of the world. You see, they are not interested in conquering the world; they are interested in destroying the world.”
“The other thing we need to do is eradicate, and that’s the final thing. As I said, this is going to be a long war.”
The Islamophobic rant Santorum delivered at an event organized by a known bigot. … Full article
A British Muslim pilot who was dismissed from his position in 2010 has complained to an employment tribunal, saying he was axed because of his religion.
The Metropolitan police officers arrested the Muslim pilot, who was not named by the British press, in 2007 over the allegations of being linked with terror suspects.
Following the arrest, the airline employer, which was not named by the British press either, suspended the Heathrow-based pilot over the allegations that he would be a threat to national security.
The allegations were made based on the British police’s claim that the two suspected extremists could have links with the Muslim pilot and he could be part of an alleged terror plot.
One of the suspects was the pilot’s landlord and the other was someone with whom the Muslim pilot’s brother conducted business transactions.
The pilot was dismissed in 2010 over the accusations that he could “cause considerable harm” to the “national security.”
During the hearing at the employment tribunal in Havant, Hampshire, the pilot said that if he had been a non-Muslim, he would have received a different treatment.
Moreover, the tribunal was told that the case was “unique and unprecedented” and never before had a pilot been axed over accusations of having links with terror suspects.
A union official who represented the pilot during the airline’s inquiry said the airline employer had no substantial evidence to prove any links between the pilot and the suspects.
Moreover, the official revealed that the airline had explicitly stated that the pilot’s religion and race were the main reasons for accusing him of plotting to hijack a plane and sabotage it.
“The airline’s line of questioning came across to us as, ‘You’re a Muslim man with a Pakistani-sounding name. You must therefore believe in all this stuff or at least be familiar with it,’” said the official.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 are often cited as the roots of “Islamophobia” in the United States. However, attributing Americans’ Islamophobia solely to the events of 9/11 ignores the anti-Muslim propaganda that predated the attacks, and that continues today.
The Roots
The roots of Islamophobia in America can be traced to a small, well-funded and well-connected network of “misinformation experts” who use Islamophobia as a tool to promote the Israeli agenda here within the United States.
According to a research study conducted by the Center for American Progress entitled Fear, Inc., there are five key purveyors who manipulate Islamophobia to further the US’s support of Israel: Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Robert Spencer of both Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. American billionaire Sheldon Gary Adelson, terrorism “expert” Evan Kohlmann, journalist Jennifer Rubin, and Emergency Committee for Israel’s founding member, Rachel Abrams additionally contribute to this network.
Steve Emerson
Arguably one of the most well known Islamophobes, Steven Emerson has proven to be highly influential as well. The goals of Steven Emerson’s organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, are to investigate, analyze and expose Muslim infiltration in the United States. The organization claims to be “one of the world’s largest storehouses of archival data and intelligence on Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” Prior to founding the Investigative Project on Terrorism in 1995, Emerson worked for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he left Capitol Hill in 1986 to further his career as a journalist. He worked for the US News and World Report, until taking a job as an investigative correspondent for CNN in 1990. The position was short-lived, and Emerson left CNN in 1994 and produced a documentary film entitled, “Jihad in America,” which he claims in his biography “exposed clandestine operations of militant Islamic terrorist groups on American soil.” The Nation, however, referred to this documentary as generating “mass hysteria against American Arabs,” and furthering sentiments of Islamophobia, which are bigoted, radical and dangerous.
This is not the first time, nor the last, that Emerson’s priorities and motives have been questioned. An article published by FAIR, an organization dedicated to promoting fairness and accuracy in reporting, raises the alarming question, “why is a journalist pushing questionable stories from behind the scenes?” The article questioned Emerson’s unusual involvement in a story claiming that “a senior Pakistani weapons scientist” was behind a “thermonuclear war” supposedly on the brink of occurring between Pakistan and India. The story claimed to have uncovered that Pakistan was “planning nuclear first strike on India.” Emerson worked behind the scenes to give his congressional and media contacts a heads-up on the story, and worked closely with the attorney on the case, who said that Emerson was helpful in “corroborating information and making scientific clarifications.” The nature of his “scientific clarifications” is not specified, and one might wonder what Emerson, who received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University in 1976 and a Master of Arts in sociology from Brown in 1977, would have to contribute in this regard. It was later uncovered that the alleged senior Pakistani weapons scientist, a man by the name of Iftikhar Chaudhry Khan, was in fact an accountant at a company that makes bathroom fixtures. At first, it seems unclear why a seasoned journalist such as Emerson would forward this unverified and largely speculative story to his contacts in Congress and the media, at the risk of pushing the world toward nuclear war, as FAIR’s article aptly points out. The article suggests that Emerson’s priorities may have gotten in the way of his professionalism and better judgment, in particular the fact that Pakistan is a Muslim-nation, and India’s nuclear program has allegedly been tied to Israel.
Although Emerson’s reputation was hurt by this incident, he was back in the news following the bombings on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. As he returned to the political mainstream, he again injured his credibility as a journalist in multiple instances. His book Terrorist was criticized by the New York Times for being “marred” by factual errors and having an undeniable anti-Palestinian bias. Additionally, the Columbia Journalism Review discovered that entire passages of his book The Fall of Pan Am 103 bore “a striking resemblance in both structure and style” to articles published in a newspaper distributed out of Syracuse, N.Y. Emerson’s credibility was even further diminished by his confident assertion that the Oklahoma city bombing of 1995 was undoubtedly the work of an Arab, as it had “an Arab trait,” which he further defined as intending to kill as many people as possible. His willingness to jump to this conclusion and to promote this accusation proved ignorant and bigoted when his assessment turned out to be entirely wrong. Somehow, the American media continues to sanction Emerson. For one Associated Press reporter, the aforementioned errors were not enough to discredit Emerson as a journalist and a terrorism expert. He was asked to partake in a series on Muslim-Americans as a consultant and a resource. He provided the AP with what he claimed were FBI documents that have later been proven to be modified versions of his earlier writings, and one must wonder if the Associated Press’s faith in Emerson has finally been shaken.
Emerson hosts pro-torture Israelis in his home
Emerson’s anti-Arab sentiments are only one side of the coin; he also harbors close ties to Israel. The Jerusalem Post noted that Emerson has strong friendships with Israeli intelligence officials. Emerson has, on multiple occasions, personally hosted Israeli intelligence commander and supporter of torture, Yigal Carmon, in his Washington, D.C. apartment. Carmon has taken multiple trips to the US to lobby congress to continue to support pro-Israel policies. As if these connections are not enough to cause one to question Emerson’s bias and motivation, Emerson’s funding comes from organizations that Fear, Inc. have listed as top funders for the purveyors of Islamophobia, including the Donors Capital Fund, which has given Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism $400,000, and nearly $2.5 million to Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. He has also received $100,000 from the Russell Berrie Foundation, which has also donated almost $300,000 to Pipes’ Middle East Forum. Additionally, Emerson’s organization has received funding from the Anchorage Charitable Foundation and William Rosenwald Family Fund, which has also donated to Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, and over $2 million dollars in funds to Pipes’ Middle East Forum. Furthermore, Emerson’s Investigative Project on terrorism gave $3.3 million dollars to an organization called SAE Productions, to study the relationship between American-Muslims and terrorism. SAE Productions has one employee: Steven A. Emerson.
The financial connections between Emerson and other Islamophobia transmitters illuminate what the Center for American Progress aptly refers to as “a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing.” Sound dangerous? Since 9/11, Emerson has been called to testify before and to brief Congress “dozens” of times “on terrorist financing and operational networks of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the rest of the world-wide Islamic militant spectrum.” Let us allow Emerson’s track record to speak to his credibility and whether or not he is the best person to trust with framing our relationship with Muslims in America and in the Middle East.
Robert Spencer
Robert Spencer, Emerson’s contemporary and fellow Islamophobe, is another name associated with the deliberate spreading of Islamophobia in the United States. Spencer has a Masters in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the founder and director of Jihad Watch, an organization that claims to “track the attempts of radical Islam to subvert Western Culture.” Spencer is also the author of ten books, including two New York Times best sellers, entitled The Truth about Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. His next book, Did Muhammad Exist, is due for publication in spring, 2012. Spencer has been afforded the opportunity to lead seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, the United Stated Army Command and General Staff College, the US Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. According to a study by the American Center for Progress, Spencer’s book, The Truth about Muhammad, was recommended reading for new bureau recruits as a tool to help them train and prepare for “interviews [and] interrogations with individuals from the [Middle East].” Unsurprisingly, the ACP also found during the Fear, Inc. study that Spencer’s texts seem to be among the most widely promoted by proponents of Islamophobia.
Among those who support Spencer’s endeavors is Pamela Geller of Stop the Islamization of America, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, and David Horwitz of the David Horwitz Center. The web of connections between the aforementioned names and organizations is striking. Geller and Spencer are in fact co-founders of Stop the Islamization of America, as well as co-founders of a lesser-known organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative. According to Fear, Inc., donations made to Geller’s Stop the Islamization of America are received by Spencer’s own organization, Jihad Watch’s PayPal account, implying that the two organizations are more closely linked than one might expect. Spencer has also spoken at Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, and in turn Pipes has praised Spencer’s book, Stealth Jihad, calling it a “pioneering survey of the stealth jihad whose ambition and subtlety threaten the continuity of Western civilization,” a striking claim. Spencer has also served as a contributing writer to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism. In 2010, Spencer spoke on many panels with Gaffney, such as a panel entitled “Terror from Within,” and has openly supported Gaffney’s claim that Obama has an Islamist agenda.
These few members of what the American Center for Progress refers to as “misinformation experts” mutually reinforce and reiterate the Islamophobic concepts and accusations purported by one another. It should come as no surprise then that Spencer’s Jihad Watch received funding from the Fairbrook Foundation, which has also donated money to Pipes’ Middle East Forum, Gaffney’s Council for Security Policy, Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, and Brigitte Gabriel’s American Congress for Truth. The Fairbrook Foundation has also donated money to the David Horwitz Freedom Center, an organization that helps “spread bigoted ideas into American life,” according to the Southern Poverty Center, an organization that monitors hate groups in the United States. Horwitz himself has been quoted saying that “Middle Eastern Muslims are Islamic Nazis who want to kill Jews- that’s their agenda.” The David Horwitz Freedom Center produces two online magazines: FrontPage Magazine, and Spencer’s very own Jihad Watch.
Is Robert Spencer truly an “expert” on Islamic studies, and is he the man we trust with running workshops on terrorism, Islam and jihad at the United States State Department? According to Islamic scholar and professor Carl W. Earnst, recipient of the Bashrahil Prize for Outstanding Cultural Achievement, Spencer “has no academic training in Islamic studies whatsoever,” and notes that Spencer often carefully selects his textual evidence to create and convey the message that “Islam is not a religion of peace.” It is both dangerous to our national security and our relationship as a nation with American Muslims and foreign Muslims to afford Robert Spencer a prominent role as an informant regarding Islam.
Frank Gaffney
Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, is another influential purveyor of Islamophobia, and is most well known for his conspiratorial belief that Muslims are waging a “stealth jihad” against the United States, and Islam and Sharia Law are infiltrating American government and society with the intent of destroying the Constitution and the freedoms expressed therein. He is greatly concerned with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and has been described as “ideologically close to Israeli hardliners such as the Likud party Chief Yitzhak Shamir.” Gaffney has repeatedly spoken out against President Barack Obama’s supposed Muslim affinity, saying that Obama’s policy on Israel, which is for all intents and purposes very similar to that of his predecessors, will be the cause of “the next Middle East war,” and has even gone so far as to suggest Obama might even condone a military attack on Israel. Unfortunately for Mr. Gaffney, much of his ranting seems far too outlandish and paranoid to be taken seriously; Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Nathan Brown, described Gaffney as a “self-parody,” adding that he has “better things to do with my time than investigating the veracity of his raving.” Gaffney’s reliability has repeatedly been discredited, often by his own undoing. Gaffney claimed to quote Abraham Lincoln in an article for the Washington Times, when he said, “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” This quote, however, is “completely invented,” and the article has since been removed from the website. Despite his lack of credibility, Gaffney has still managed to become an influential voice in American politics.
Gaffney’s resume is frighteningly impressive. He worked in the 1980s as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy at the Department of Defense, where he worked under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle. He was nominated by President Reagan for the position of US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, and served as acting Assistant Secretary for the better part of a year before his nomination could be officially blocked by the Senate. Currently, Gaffney hosts Secure Freedom Radio; he is also the publisher and associate author of the book “Shariah: The Threat to America.” Additionally, he still heads the Center for Security Policy, a decidedly pro-Israeli organization. According to his biography on the CSP website, Gaffney “also contributes actively to the security policy debate in his capacity as a weekly columnist for the Washington Times.” Gaffney has repeatedly stated that Palestinians have embarked on a “perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel.” He discredits the Durban Conference peace negotiations as being nothing more than “international, and anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate-fests.” With Gaffney’s continuous Islamophobic rants circulating the Internet, radio and bookshelves, it is impossible to believe that the benefactors of the Gaffney’s CSP are unaware of exactly the type of rhetoric they are funding.
Unsurprisingly, the Council for Security Policy receives funding from the same major benefactors as his Islamophobic contemporaries’ organizations, such as Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch (N.B.: Gaffney serves as legal counsel to Spencer’s Stop Islamization of America, which Spencer co-founded with Islamophobe Pamela Geller).In 2009 alone, CSP’s revenue topped $4 million. In the past decade, the Scaife Foundation contributed over $3 million dollars in funds to CSP, while the Fairbrook Foundation donated over $20 million dollars between 2002 and 2009. The Bradley Foundation contributed close to a million dollars, while the Becker Foundations and the William Rosenwald Funds each contributed around $400,000.
Gaffney seems to be most well known, in recent years, for his continued attacks against President Obama, claiming the President’s affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia Law time and time again. He firmly believes that “nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization.” Gaffney similarly purports that Obama is a practicing Muslim, supports the Muslim Brotherhood and is not a citizen of the United States. He claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood was intricately affiliated with both the President of the United States and the Department of Defense, citing a twenty year old “piece of hapless propaganda” written by a single member of the Muslim Brotherhood who the current MB leaders have since completely discredited. Gaffney, naturally, had much to say about Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt, in which the President offered hope to the Arab communities.
While many viewed the president’s speech as a much-needed move “to set a new tone in America’s often strained dealings with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims,” Gaffney found the historic and progressive speech troubling in two ways. First, Gaffney took the speech to be tangible proof that Obama plans to align “himself with adherents to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah- notably, the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood- to a degree that makes Mr. Clinton’s fabled affinity for blacks pale by comparison.” Secondly, Gaffney all but accused Obama as being anti-Semitic when he said that the President clearly “intends to compel the Israelis to make territorial and other strategic concessions to Palestinians to achieve the hallowed two-state solution. In doing so, he ignores the inconvenient fact that both the Brotherhood’s Hamas and Abu Mazen’s Fatah remain determined to achieve a one-state solution, whereby the Jews will be driven ‘into the sea.’” It seems highly unlikely that Obama is or was trying to drive the Jews into the ocean, (since his Presidency began in 2008, Obama has enjoyed an average of 14% higher approval rating among Jewish voters than the national average), but was instead supporting our national security interests by attempting to [or pretending to] rehabilitate America’s relationship with Arabs worldwide.
Unfortunately, it seems that Gaffney and his contemporaries have a powerful voice. Obama’s recent speech to the United Nations, decidedly pro-Israel, outraged Arabs worldwide, and significantly boosted his support in Israel. The Israeli Foreign Minister claimed it was the President’s best speech of his career, while Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas “listened with his head in his hands.” Unfortunately, because of the undue power and influence which this tightly knit network of Islamophobes have been awarded, the President, vying for a second term, is unlikely to return to his former objective of improving American – Arab relations, a move most crucial to our national security, any time soon. These are the results of the actions of Frank Gaffney, who has been likened to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and other like-minded thinkers and supporters of Islamophobia.
Rachel Abrams
Neoconservative activist and wife of former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, Rachel Abrams, is one such like-minded thinker. She is one of three founding members of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a PAC which is “committed to mounting an active defense of the US-Israel relationship by educating the public about the positions of political candidates on this important issue, and by keeping the public informed of the latest developments in both countries.” On Abrams blog, called “Bad Rachel,” she posted a stunning statement on the front page, which outlines what she sees as a fitting response to the return of Israeli captive Gilad Shalit, saying, “those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.” Unfortunately, due to Abrams connections in the media, she is able to disseminate her genocidal rants to the general public, and help to further the agenda of Islamophobes in America. ECIs advertising campaign that asserted that Occupy Wall Street is primarily an anti-Semitic movement, which as been denounced by prominent Jewish liberals in America, in a release entitled “A Statement Against Smears,” as “an old, discredited tactic.” ECI has also run negative advertisement campaigns against Senate hopeful Joe Sestak and House candidate Mary Jo Kilroy by portraying them as “openly hostile to Israel.” Curiously, ECI does not release its donor information, but it would not be surprising to see many of the aforementioned names and organizations on that list.
One of Abrams main allies in the media is Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, “who often uses her Post perch to attack both Republicans and Democrats whom she deems insufficiently supportive of Israel and weak on U.S. defense.” She has criticized Dennis Ross, a Middle East policy advisor in the Obama Administration and Editorial Board member of the Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, for being “delusional” in thinking that he could work under Obama and still benefit Israel. She has also “written in support of so-called Christian Zionists groups that espouse views closely in line with those of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party regarding Israeli claims to Palestinian territory.”
David Yerushalmi
David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and the founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), has rhetoric similar to Abrams and Rubin. Yerushalmi, according to the Anti-Defamation League, has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry,” having once described “blacks as the most murderous of peoples.” According to Yerushalmi, African Americans are a “murderous race, killing itself…The idea that racial differences included innate differences in character and intelligence would [,] it seem [,] more likely than not.” Statements such as this have triggered negative reactions among the media. Yerushalmi, who is himself Jewish, has even alienated himself from the Jewish people by blaming liberal Jews for destroying “their host nations like a fatal parasite.” Yerushalmi is also, alarmingly, one of the most influential members of the Islamophobic network; his work has, in recent years, sought to undermine religious freedom and promote an irrational fear of the infiltration and incorporation of radicalized Sharia law into the United States’ laws. Despite Yerushalmi’s widely known racism, he has still managed to become an important player in the way in which the United States views the Islam and Muslims. A New York Times article aptly summarized this frightening reality by correctly asserting that, “despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.”
Yerushalmi’s interest in Sharia law took roots in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. At the time of the attacks, Yerushalmi was living in Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, where he was working on “commercial litigation,” and promoting free market reform in Israel. In just five years, Yerushalmi entirely changed his career path and began to focus almost exclusively on the evils of Sharia, which he equated with radical Islam. By January of 2006, Yerushalmi had founded the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE) with the goal of promoting legislation that would punish individuals for observing Sharia, and began raising funds for Mapping Sharia, a project of SANE that sought to expose ties between jihadist, terrorist organizations, and American Mosques. This project was of great interest to Frank Gaffney, who told the New York Times that his partnership with Yerushalmi began when the two Islamophobes embarked on a mission to “engender a national debate about the nature of Shariah and the need to protect our Constitution and country from it.” The New York Times noted in another article on the subject that the “more tangible effect of the movement” has been to promote an “alarmist message” about Islam. The message was not quick to catch on, however, until 2009, with the introduction of the Tea Party into the American political sphere, providing Yerushalmi with a political base from which to promote his ideas. In 2009, Yerushalmi and Gaffney officially began the project Mapping Sharia. He began writing potential legislation entitled “American Laws for American Courts,” which was, in essence, “a model statute that would prevent state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States,” with the purpose of thwarting supposed efforts by American-Muslim jihadists to incorporate Sharia law into the United States’ laws.
The legislation proposed by Yerushalmi declared, “it shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” Additionally, Yerushalmi proposed that the Congress of the United States declare war with “the Muslim Nation, or Umma.” In a proposal that harkens back to the dark days of Japanese-American internment following Pearl Harbor, Yerushalmi asks that the President of the United States “immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies… and shall be subject to immediate deportation.” Yerushalmi does not want Muslims in America; he further stresses this point when he proposes that “no Muslim shall be granted an entry visa” in to the United States, at all. During an interview on National Public Radio, the NPR host began by addressing Yerushalmi, saying, “I’ll start with you because as we mentioned, your policy paper has been the intellectual basis for a number of the measures being considered around the country.” If a proposal by noted racist Yerushalmi is serving as an “intellectual basis” for policy, it seems as if Sharia law is not, in fact, the biggest threat to upholding the integrity of the law of the United States. Yerushalmi’s reach continues to extend, however, and his opinions are now echoed by influential politicians, such as former director of the C.I.A. James Woolsey, which has helped Yerushalmi disseminate information, (read: propaganda) regarding Sharia law. Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, for example, released a nearly two hundred page report entitled “Shariah: The Threat to America,” which was largely written by Yerushalmi, with contributions from Woolsey and other former intelligence officials, lending undeserved credentials to Yerushalmi’s work. New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliot said, in an interview on NPR, that “What was intriguing to me was how this man, who was really a fringe figure, came to cultivate allies and influence people at such high levels — former military and intelligence officials, leaders of national organizations, presidential candidates — how did he make that leap? . . . And I think part of the answer is, in person he comes across not as the erratic character as some might suspect but as a sophisticated man who is convinced by his idea and has an endless appetite for defending those ideas… Gaffney really became [Yerushalmi’s] bridge to a whole network of think-tanks and government officials, including Jim Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A.” Elliot concluded by adding, “I would say Gaffney catapulted Yerushalmi onto a new platform of influence and their aim seems to have been to get people in circles of influence to understand Shariah in this totally new frame, as a totalitarian threat akin to what the United States faced during the Cold War.”
The Insidious Network
This seems to be the key to how the Islamophobic network operates within the United States, however, with the main purveyors of Islamophobia helping to legitimize the work of their colleagues, and creating multiple organizations with essentially the same purpose and leadership. For example, the American Public Policy Alliance takes responsibility for Yerushalmi’s legislation “American Laws for American Courts.” The APPA is an alliance between Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT! for America, and the American Congress for Truth, and of course, David Yerushalmi. These people and organizations are pointedly pro-Israel, receive funding from many of the same organizations, and use one another’s organizations and connections to mutually reinforce their Islamophobic agenda. For example, ACT! for America spent approximately $60,000 promoting the Oklahoma legislation, which included over 600,000 automated calls featuring Woolsey. Gabriel’s organization claims to “fearlessly speak out in defense of America, Israel and Western Civilization.” Yerushalmi is also an attorney at the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is founded and run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. In a perfect example of how the Islamophobic network is mutually sustainable, Yerushalmi defended Geller in a 2010 court case. Additionally, Gaffney’s CSP and Steven Emerson’s Middle East Forum serve as outlets for Yerushalmi’s work, frequently publishing or offering links to his articles, or commending his anti-Sharia legislation.
These main purveyors often speak out in defense of one another as well, and seem to legitimize the work of the others. Following a New York Times article that suggested Yerushalmi’s fear of Sharia law was more than unfounded, FrontPage Magazine, an offshoot of Islamophobe David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, ran an article claiming that “The Timesfocuses in on Yerushalmi, as though his Judaic background and love for Israel delegitimize his opposition to Sharia… And to make that point, they’ll sacrifice wives and daughters, and then blame a Hasidic Jew.” In fact, it is not Yerushalmi’s “love for Israel,” but rather his blatant connections to Israel, that have many wondering at his true motivation for defaming Islam. For example, Robert J. Loewenberg serves as Chairman under Yerushalmi at SANE. Loewenberg is also the head of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a decidedly pro-Israel organization with links to Israel’s Likud Party. The Likud Party promises to “continue to strengthen and develop” communities in the occupied territories, “and will prevent their uprooting.” If Yerushalmi is receiving his funding and support from organizations that promote similar policies to IASPS, then it is more than probable that Yerushalmi and his contemporaries’ agenda is less motivated by fear of Sharia than by a pro-Israel agenda.
Yerushalmi has been careful to be very private about the donors who fund SANE. What is available, however, is that Gaffney’s CSP contributed an unspecified amount to a study conducted by SANE, which cost around $400,000 dollars, and involved secretly sending researchers into one hundred American mosques to determine the overall level of commitment to terrorist organizations. In that same year, Yerushalmi was paid over $153,000 dollars, consulting fees from CSP.SANE received $1.1 in million donations from 2007 to 2009, of which $950,000 went to “information dissemination through advertising and the website.” It is safe to assume, given Yerushalmi’s public Islamophobic agenda, that the vast majority of contributions come from organizations that share his ideology.
Sheldon Gary Adelson: Financier
One of the most famous contributors to help further the agenda of the Israeli lobby in the United States is American Billionaire Sheldon Gary Adelson. Adelson is the Chairman Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited. A “self-professed Zionist,” Adelson gave approximately $25 million dollars to Birthright Israel, and $1 million in 2010 to Islamophobe Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future. Adelson, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, is “fiercely opposed to a two-state solution” regarding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and declared that any such solution would be “a betrayal of principle.” It is not surprising then that Adelson also opposed the 2007 Annapolis Peace Conference aimed at achieving a mutually agreeable solution, and is suspected to have donated “hundreds of millions of dollars to Zionist” causes throughout his career. He has invested over $180 million dollars in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper often referred to as “Bibiton,” because of its unwavering support of Benjamin Netanyahu. He has also traveled to Israel to promote a DVD warning about “spreading of Islam in the West,” and warned “participants about the dangers that Israel has to deal with and the risks from radical Islam.”
In 2007, Adelson established the Adelson Family Foundation, which sends money to programs supporting “Israel advocacy and defense, Israel programs, Israel Studies on campus, and Jewish and Zionist Identity and Education.” He is also a Co-Founder of Freedom Watch, and a major contributor to the Zionist Organization of America, and AIPAC. He also largely funds Counterterrorism and Security Education and Research Foundation, (CTSERF), a foundation whose mission statement is to “develop education programs and materials for security professional and the general publics that will enhance our understanding of the causes of terrorism and the measures necessary to deter and combat it.” CTSERF has contributed over $1.6 million to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, but Adelson has never listed “the Investigative Project as the end recipient of [his] funding.”
Daniel Pipes
The aforementioned Daniel Pipes is an influential and highly educated promoter of Islamophobia, and the founder of the Middle East Forum. Although ideologically close to his anti-Islamic contemporaries, Pipes is one of the few members of the Islamophobia network that actually has an educational background in Islamic and Arabic studies. The Center for America Progress refers to Pipes as “the academic turned anti-Muslim propagandist,” and acknowledges his respectable educational foundation, having earned both his BA and PhD from Harvard University in the 1970s. Pipes studied abroad during his college and post-graduate years, spending three years in Egypt, and living in Cairo for two years in between college and graduate school. During this time, Pipes learned to read Arabic and studied the Quran, which he says helped him foster an appreciation for Islam. One journalist from the Washington Post book review noted in a 1983 review of Pipes book, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power, however, that although Pipes “professes respect for Muslims,” he is “frequently contemptuous of them.” Unfortunately, it seems Pipes respect for Islam is limited to Medieval Islamic History, the field in which he earned his doctorate. In the decades to come, Pipes would turn his attention towards what he saw as the emergence of radical Islam, believing that radical Islamists intend to infiltrate the United States government. As the aforementioned Washington Post journalist aptly noted, Pipes begins to display “a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims.” One of Pipes’ former college professors, and a former Director for Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies has said of Pipes, “to speak for myself, I have been appalled frequently by his polemical stance on almost everything having to do with Islam, Muslims or the Palestinian/Israeli issue.” The same professor went on to add that “the irony… is of course that Dr. Pipes and other radically and blindly pro-Zionist American Jews are much farther along the chauvinist and ultimately anti-American spectrum than are even radical American Muslims.”
Daniel Pipes founded the Middle East Forum in 1990, but it was not until after the attacks of September 11th that Pipes began to stand out as increasingly Islamophobic, becoming obsessed with “the supposed threat posed by Islam and Muslims in America.” The Center for American Progress describes Pipes as becoming “increasingly out of touch with the realities of the Muslim world at home and abroad, making more extreme and unfounded observations about Islam in the United States.” Following September 11th, Pipes formed three subgroups of his Middle East Forum: Campus Watch, Islamist Watch and the Legal Project. Formed in 2002, Campus Watch was the first of these subgroups. Campus Watch’s mission statement asserts that the group serves to review and critique “Middle East studies in North America, with an aim to improving them.” While this sounds harmless enough, a closer examination of the website reviews that the group seeks to address what they feel to be flaws in the professorate of Middle Eastern studies in North American colleges and universities. In the early stages of Campus Watch’s existence, Pipes encouraged that students report any “Middle East-related scholarship, lectures, classes, demonstrations and other activities” that undermine the goals of Pipes and the Middle East Forum. Campus Watch provides us with the following example and quote: a student at Georgetown University should report Professor John Esposito for saying that Islamist movements “are not necessarily anti-Western, anti-American, or anti-Democratic,” because he is “portraying militant Islam as a benign movement.” Interestingly, Campus Watch claims to fight against the “intolerance of alternate views;” apparently, there is only one correct answer regarding whether or not militant Islam poses a direct threat.
Pipes promotes the idea that the Islamist movement has two faces: one violent and one lawful, which help to mutually reinforce one another. Like Yerushalmi, Pipes is specifically concerned with the later. Pipes’ fear that Islamic law is infiltrating our government is the most curious of his phobias. The second of the groups which Pipes created seeks to expose the Islamist movement and then to fight back against what he calls Islamist “lawfare.” Islamist Watch, a subgroup of the Middle East Forum, asserts that “it exposes the far-reaching goals of Islamists” in the United States. The site includes links to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and FrontPage Magazine, of which David Horowitz is Editor in Chief, and where Gaffney is a frequent contributor. These links help to outline the small network of Islamophobes in the United States that mutually reinforce and affirm the assertions of one another. According to Islamist Watch, for example, Islamists within the West are “quietly, lawfully, [and] peacefully,” working to impose “aspects of Islamic law” into the legislature, and to “win special privileges for themselves” within America and other Western nations. Most, if not all, of these supposed “privileges,” including exemption from treatment programs for Muslim sex-offenders, and a law which would put the blame and responsibility of the crime on female rape victims in Norway, sound rather unlikely to occur.
Circling the Wagons: Islamophobes on the Defensive
Even so, Pipes and his contemporaries are not taking any chances. The Legal Project, the third offshoot of the MEF, offers legal protection to those who are “victims” of the same Islamist “lawfare” which Islamist Watch seeks to expose. The Legal Project’s website offers a quote from Steven Emerson, which stipulates “legal action has become the mainstay of radical Islamist organizations seeking to intimidate and silence their critics.” The Legal Project, through donations and funding, arrange for “pro bono and reduced rate counsel for victims of Islamist lawfare,” according to its website. Often, the “victims” are people who have made defamatory and unfounded statements regarding Islam as a religion. The Legal Project has helped some high profile and notorious Islamophobes, such as Geert Wilders, who have been criticized for their anti-Islamic comments. Wilders, who has said, “I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam,” and fought for the banning of the Quran in the Netherlands, naturally applauds the efforts of the Legal Project. Wilders has commended and credited the Legal Project for the favorable outcome of his court case last June, saying, “I was acquitted of all charges by an Amsterdam court. The Middle East Forum’s Legal Project… was always there to help, advise and assist.”
The Main Purveyors of Islamophobia Are a Close Knit Group
Steven Emerson passed on control of the Investigative Project on Terrorism to his former intern and understudy, Evan Kohlmann. Kohlmann has written for the Journal of Counterterrorism, and is the author of the book, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: the Afghan-Bosnian Network, promoting the idea that Muslims are engaged in a conspiracy to promote radical Islam throughout the world. He has written for Daniel Pipe’s Middle East Forum, as well as Islamophobe contemporary Brigitte Gabriel’s Act! for America, along with David Yerushalmi, Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer, which speaks strongly to the Islamophobic network’s ability to mutually reinforce the information promulgated by one another.
Pipes has been interviewed for Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, and publicly endorsed Gaffney’s book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, a title which reminds one of the rhetoric of Pamela Geller, and the Stop the Islamization of America group founded by co-founded by Geller and Gaffney. Pipes also joined Geller and Gaffney in the fight against the “Ground Zero Mosque,” more aptly named the Park51 community center, and expressed his concern that the community center was an example of “Islamist triumphalism,” and would undoubtedly “spread Islamist ideology.” Daniel Pipes was also an influential advocate for the closing of a New York City public school that taught “Arabic and Arab Culture” classes. He referred to the school as a “madrasa,” hoping to promote his belief that “all Arabic instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist language.” Pipes later acknowledged that his use of the word “madrasa” was “a bit of a stretch,” but he defended his word choice, saying that he was simply trying to “get attention.”
Additionally, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum receives funding from some of the same large donors that contribute to other main promoters of Islamophobia. The Donors Capital Fund, for example, was previously mentioned in this report for having given the Middle East Forum over 2.3 million dollars between 2001 and 2009. As previously mentioned, the same fund also provided Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism with close to half a million dollars over the same time period. In 2008, the Donors Capital Fund also contributed over 17 million dollars to the Clarion Fund, a group formed in 2006 in which Frank Gaffney, Jr. and Daniel Pipes sit on the advisory board. The Clarion Fund produced and released a DVD entitled, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” which was distributed to over 28 million voters living in swing-states during the 2008 presidential election. Interestingly, the Clarion Fund shares an address with Aish Hatorah, a pro-Israel organization and the former employer of all three founders of the Clarion Fund. The Clarion Fund has been accused by International Relations Center as provoking “a climate of fear in the United States.” Upon closer examination of the organizations and funds that contribute financially and ideologically to Islamophobia, the interconnectedness of the main purveyors of Islamophobia is difficult to dispute, and Daniel Pipes, the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, Islamist Watch and the Legal Project certainly are no exception. We must ask ourselves if we want these “experts” to dictate and influence our understanding of Islam here in America and our vital, struggling relationship with Arab nations worldwide.
Jerusalem Post editor and US neocon group behind hate video
LatmaTV is popular in Israel and is run by Jerusalem Post deputy editor Caroline Glick. She is an American who grew up in Chicago, settled in Palestine in 1991, and served five and a half years in the Israeli army.
Glick told Robert Mackey who edits The Lede blog at the The New Times last year that LatmaTV is a project of the neoconservative US-based “Center for Security Policy” (CSP) to which Glick is an advisor.
Glick was also behind the notorious “We con the world” video which mocked victims of Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara also using crude racist stereotypes.
But the latest video, which seems to affirm the beliefs of mass killer Anders Breivik, may have reached a new low, even for such extremists. If the targets of this hate propaganda were Jews instead of Muslims, it is not difficult to imagine what the outcry would be.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says it has not broken any laws in helping the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to spy on American Muslims.
The CIA said on Friday that its inspector general had found that no laws had been broken and there had been “no evidence that any part of the agency’s support to the NYPD constituted domestic spying.”
An investigation carried out by the Associated Press has found that, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the NYPD dispatched undercover officers, known as ‘rakers,’ into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, using ‘unprecedented’ help from the CIA.
This is while the CIA is banned from spying on the US citizens.
The investigation showed that the ‘rakers’ have gathered information on the citizens’ ‘daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes, and nightclubs.’
The report added that the NYPD has employed intelligence agents, known as ‘mosque crawlers,’ to spy on Muslims and “monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.”
The revelations forced the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James R. Clapper to admit that it did not look good for the CIA to be involved with any city police department.
The Director of National Intelligence, is the responsible United States government official under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 who is subject to the authority, direction and control of the President.
Mohamed Arafi is suing his employer for barring him from servicing an Israeli delegation staying at a Washington, D.C. hotel
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in town to address the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, and Mohamed Arafi, a Moroccan-born U.S. citizen, was ready to work. An entire Israeli delegation, including Barak, was staying at Washington, D.C.’s high-end Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where Arafi has been a valet dry cleaner since late 2009. But when he showed up to work on December 10, 2010, he was told that he was barred from working the two floors where the Israelis were staying. The reason given, according to Arafi, was because he is Muslim, and the Israeli delegation did not want to be served by Muslims.
Now, Arafi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are fighting back in the form of legal action alleging employment discrimination by the hotel against Arafi. The recently filed case is currently in district court in Washington, D.C, and comes on the heels of an inconclusive Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling on the case.
The hotel is not backing down, and responded in a Nov. 28 filing (pdf) that they were following a national security directive from the State Department that barred Arafi and 11 other employees from serving the Israeli delegation.
Arafi says that the hotel has also punished him for speaking out by cutting his workweek from five days to two days, and that his work colleagues said demeaning things about Muslims to him after the incident became known to them.
“What they want me to do is just quit,” Arafi said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to run away…I want to stay there until I have my rights.” The company has denied Arafi’s charges.
The case could also be seen as a stark illustration of the consequences of Israeli-style “war on terror” attitudes towards Muslims.
Ms. Escander, [Arafi’s supervisor], stated to Boris [another employee], “Boris, Israel is here. You go up and get the dry cleaning for Mohamed.” Mr. Arafi was confused and asked for an explanation. Ms. Escander stated to Plaintiff, “You know the Israeli delegation is here. You cannot go on the 8th and 9th floor (to pick up or deliver laundry).” Plaintiff asked for further explanation. Ms. Escander stated, “You know how the Israelis are with Arabs and Muslims. It’s better if you just let Boris go.”
The lawsuit alleges that the hotel first claimed to be complying with an Israeli government request not to have Muslims serve them. Arafi said that after he went to the Washington Post with his story, the hotel’s reasoning changed to saying they had no choice in the matter because of the State Department directive. The hotel says the directive came as a result of the department finding “irregularities” in Arafi’s and the other employees’ background checks.
A Mandarin Hotel spokesman repeated that reasoning in a phone interview, and said the lawsuit was “all sizzle and no steak.” The State Department press office did not respond to two phone calls requesting comment.
But Nadhira Al-Khalili, the CAIR attorney working on Arafi’s case, says that neither of the reasons the hotel has given excuse their actions.
“Even if [the State Department] did [issue a national security directive], we say that it was unlawful and the hotel cannot use this national security exemption to discriminate against Mr. Arafi,” said Al-Khalili. She noted that “this is an untested area of the law” and that a ruling could set a precedent.
The specific law the Mandarin Oriental Hotel says the State Department used is a provision in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The law prohibits employment discrimination but also states that a national security interest provides an exemption to the law’s requirements. But Arafi and Al-Khalili say that it makes little sense that Arafi would have “irregularities” in his background check or be considered a security threat. Arafi has routine access to government officials and he says that he personally serviced former President George W. Bush just days before the Israeli delegation came through.
The case “really does have the appearance of racial discrimination of the rawest kind,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a national security expert, told CNN. “But the hotel is able to use the State Department to say, any complaint you have, you should take up with the State Department.”
Regardless of whether it was a State Department directive or an Israeli request that the hotel complied with, important questions need to be asked about the case. Is the State Department ordering private businesses to discriminate because of Israeli attitudes? Or is a private employer being cowed by an Israeli government demand?
If nothing else, the case illustrates how pervasive anti-Muslim sentiment is in some workplaces in the U.S.
“Since I’ve worked at CAIR, employment discrimination has been the number 2, and sometimes number 1, complaint,” said Al-Khalili. “It’s disturbing that one additional aspect of the law is being used to discriminate against Muslims. We’re going to try and challenge it and try to say it does not apply in this particular case.”
Al-Khalili has a lawsuit filing due in the coming weeks, and vowed to appeal even if Arafi’s case is ruled against. The entire process, she acknowledged, could take years.
NEW YORK – The FBI has been illegally using its community outreach programs to secretly collect and store information about activities protected by the First Amendment for intelligence purposes, according to FBI documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The trust that community outreach efforts aim to create is undermined when the FBI exploits these programs to gather intelligence on the very members of the religious and community organizations agents are meeting with,” said Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent. “The FBI should be honest with community organizations about what information is being collected during meetings and purge any improperly collected information.”
FOIA documents showing instances of inappropriate intelligence gathering include:
• San Francisco FBI memos, written in 2007 and 2008 by agents who attended Ramadan Iftar dinners under the guise of the FBI’s mosque outreach program, documenting participants’ names, conversations and presentations. The 2008 memo also recorded participants’ contact information and descriptions of their opinions and associations.
• A 2009 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing FBI participation in a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization. Agents detailed conversations with three community leaders and members about their opinions, backgrounds and charitable activities.
• A 2007 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing a mosque outreach meeting attended by 50 people representing 27 Muslim community and religious organizations, identifying each person by name and organization and analyzing their “demographics.”
“Except under certain special circumstances, the Privacy Act bars the FBI from maintaining records like these describing how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Congress passed this law to prevent records obtained by the government for one purpose from being used for another reason without a person’s consent, but that is precisely what the FBI has done.”
There is no indication in the FOIA documents that community members were informed that the FBI’s outreach activities were used for intelligence gathering purposes or could be potentially used to target these people and their organizations for investigations.
One of the organizations whose members were noted attending the mosque outreach meeting was the Muslim Community Association (MCA). “Like all Americans, we want to help the FBI. Now we feel betrayed,” said MCA Board Secretary Isa Shaw. “We support the idea of building trust through FBI community outreach programs, but the government should not be taking advantage of it to violate our First Amendment rights like this.”
The ACLU is calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate Privacy Act violations in the FBI’s San Francisco and Sacramento Divisions and to initiate a broader audit of FBI practices nationwide. It is also urging the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes, to be honest with community organizations regarding what information is collected and retained during community outreach meetings and to purge all improperly collected information.
The request for these documents was made by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Islamophobic blogs like Gates of Vienna, popular with white supremacists have Israeli American fans who have adopted a hard line pro Israel agenda. It also appears that ‘Fjordman‘ is back at Gates of Vienna. He was cited recently as a tipster alongside Caroline Glick, the senior editor at The Jerusalem Post.
A closer scrutiny of Gates of Vienna the white supremacist blog which published ‘Fjordman‘ until he went into hiding after the Norway massacre shows it is run by a couple living in Virginia, USA, one Baron Bodissey whose real name is Edward May popularly known as ‘Ned May‘ and his wife who edits the blog under the pseudonym ‘Dymphna.’ It claims to focus on the ‘Great Jihad’ in Europe, regularly publishing essays promoting white supremacism, calls for a Muslim Holocaust and is filled with vile anti Islam bigotry, lies and polemics dressed up as ‘counter jihadism’. Anders Brievik has posted comments there. In the past too, discussions of exterminating the ‘Muslim’ problem caused waves as in ‘Thinking the Unthinkable‘ in which options to rid the world of Muslims were discussed.
Gates of Vienna has a pro Israel focus which Ned and Dymphna go to great pains to emphasise. A cynic may suspect there are ulterior motives at play here. The connection between Zionism and organized Islamophobia is clear and comes as no surprise now. Fear Inc. a six month study by the Centre for American Progress, details how an Islamophobia industry is being funded and peddled by a small minority of conservatives. What is popularly known as ‘Islamism’ has its Zionist counterpart, as explored in a recent LoonWatch series ‘Why Religious Zionism, Not Judaism, Is The Problem‘.
Indeed Dymphna regularly does the rounds at right wing Zionist websites posting comments moaning about their poverty. One such blog is the rabidly anti Palestinian and Islam hating blog ‘Sultan Knish‘ run by Daniel Greenfield an Israeli sabra living in New York, who is a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Centre the same organisation that sponsors Jihad Watch. Daniel is obsessed with a pathological hatred for Muslims and a delusion that the US military exists to carry out his fantasy of a war on Islam. Daniel’s postings regularly dehumanise Muslims, and are filled with anti Islam screeds which he fabricates on whim, not unlike Ned May. He also has a Torah Parsha blog and this video shows him in a debate about New Media. In a common theme amongst neo cons, Daniel complains there is a plot to destroy the US military by Obama. In one blog post ‘Winning the War on Terror‘ he suggests genocide:
‘We would have to be willing to kill millions, directly or indirectly, while maintaining an alliance that would defy Russia, China and the First World nations that would accuse us of genocide. The real name for this war might well turn out to be World War III. It would take a Churchill or a Roosevelt to launch something like that, and while the world would be radically different afterward, it might well turn out to be radioactively different too.’
Whilst Daniel’s crowd propagate that Muslims are out to destroy the USA, the truth is these very neo conservatives bankrupted the US economy by leading it into trillion dollar wars on fake premises and fabricated evidence. As Julian Borger reported in The Guardian, the evidence for the Iraq war was fabricated by the now defunct ‘The Office of Special Plans‘ affiliated with hard line Likudniks. […]
Far right Islamophobic activists have forged alliances of convenience with radical Zionists and regard Israel as an ally, not least because they see Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as a role model for how Muslims should be treated. Hard line Zionists see it as an opportunity to lessen the growing Muslim presence and influence in the USA and Europe which they see as detrimental to a greater Israel. Stooges like Geert Wilders are funded in the hope they can halt Muslim immigration and influence. Marginalised as they are, some European nationalist groups are willing to shed their traditional Jew hatred in an attempt to find allies, but as often happens in marriages of convenience, it doesn’t take much for cracks to appear. Pamela Geller’s association with the EDL caused waves when Roberta Moore claimed they had Jew hating members and were not sufficiently pro Israel. In Europe, German newspaper Der Spiegel probed this alliance in ‘The Likud Connection‘ showing how some marginalized right wing populists are going the Geert Wilders way. This bizarre coupling has split the far right movement in Europe which has traditionally been anti-semitic.
Meanwhile, Ned May, an EDL activist, serves as director of International Free Press Society an American and Denmark based group whose members claim to fight threats to free speech from ‘forces within Islam’. IFPS’s board members include the familiar names Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and affiliates like Aish Ha Torah. Incidentally, one of the listed advisers for IFPS is Rachel Ehrenfeld an “expert on terrorism” and author of ‘Funding Evil’ in which she made allegations of terror funding against the now deceased Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz for which he sued.
Ned often mixes in a pro Israel and pro Jewish stance liberally peppering his polemics with quotes from the Talmud and expresses a desire (like Dymphna) to be in the pay of Mossad. In this he has help from fellow bloggers like his friend, a Jerusalem based Israeli American lawyer, one Carl Mordechai Sherer, who runs Israel Matzav as ‘Carl in Jerusalem‘. Charles Johnson banned Carl from Little Green Footballs where he was a heavy commenter for posting a link to Gates of Vienna with a curt ‘I will have nothing to do with people who promote fascist creeps‘. Stung by LGF’s criticism, a blog war followed, in which Ned May tries to salvage some dignity for his cesspool.
A particularly revealing blog post is where Carl can be seen giving Ned advice on the legality of declaring Jewish rights to Israel as an indigenous people, stating he fully supported a ‘greater Israel’ though the world won’t allow it. Ned in turn laments a common Nazi theme which he modifies to this convoluted logic:
‘Regardless of the merits of the case, I agree with Carl that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will never be applied to Jews — or to white Europeans, for that matter.
“Indigenous Peoples” are “brown” peoples, especially Muslims, American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and black Africans. Anything using the term that is passed by the UN will only be allowed to apply to those peoples, and never to Jews or Caucasians.’
Ned May must be unaware of the millions of Caucasian Muslims including Russians, American Muslims, British and other European converts. Carl, who did not see fit to tell his friend that most Israeli’s are non Caucasian Sefardi Jews was however, quick to hypocritically cry ‘Nazi’ at white supremacist Occupy Wall St protesters.
‘For those who have never been to Gates of Vienna, go check it out. It’s some of the highest level intellectual material you will ever read on the Internet.’
How high is that ‘intellectual level’ ? Let us quote Ned verbatim where he explains the purpose of Gates of Vienna is to spread lies at a grassroots level, in short; telling a lie often enough makes one believe it. Not just to lie but to oversell it. In a blog titled ‘Overselling the Meme‘ he states:
‘This must be accomplished at a level well below that of the celebrities and famous pundits, because action on that battlefield invites a massive and well-funded counterattack by CAIR, ISNA, the OIC, etc.’
Using hyperbole and flowery nonsense, he spells out his mission in life:
‘As a propagandist, my task is to spread the meme and not to sweat the nuances. Nuances can be argued about and nailed down by scholars in the centuries after Islam — as a culture, a political ideology, and a religion — is totally destroyed. We don’t have the luxury for such finicky scholasticism right now.’
Perhaps the best known Israeli tipster for Gates of Vienna is The Jerusalem Post’sCaroline Glick an Israeli American known for her right wing views, and who serves as editor for the Israeli political satire website Latma TV. Caroline was cited approvingly in Breivik’s manifesto. It appears that Fjordman is once more back at Gates of Vienna, for on 13th October 2011, the credits included :
‘Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, heroyalwhyness, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.’
‘But this is lower than I’ve ever seen someone go who carries a management title at a journalism organization. I’m ashamed to say that Glick and I are both Columbia alums. Even if she hates people of another race or religion and is allowed by her editors to poke fun at them in a tasteless and blatantly racist way, she should be fired for making fun of the dead.’
This incident was not the first time Caroline Glick had received flak for her radical opinions. In the aftermath of the Norway massacre, the Jerusalem Post published editorials that had tried to link the tragedy to Europe’s immigration policies. Norwegians took offence at sentiments expressed by Glick amongst others and voiced their objections to Israeli diplomats as to how the tragedy was being exploited. Some weeks later, the Jerusalem Post’s Editor in Chief published ‘Apology to Norway‘ an editorial in which he expressed remorse:
‘As Senior Contributing Editor Caroline B. Glick suggested in her column last Friday, the fact that Breivik’s warped mind cited a group of conservative thinkers including herself as having influenced his thinking in no way reflects on them.
“As a rule, liberal democracies reject the resort to violence as a means of winning an argument. This is why, for liberal democracies, terrorism in all forms is absolutely unacceptable,” she wrote. “Whether or not one agrees with the ideological self-justifications of a terrorist, as a member of a liberal democratic society, one is expected to abhor his act of terrorism. Because by resorting to violence to achieve his aims, the terrorist is acting in a manner that fundamentally undermines the liberal democratic order.”
It later emerged that Breivik, a Christian radical, had posted on the Internet an extremely anti-Muslim manifesto that supported far-right nationalism and Zionism.’
He then moves on to vocalise the Jerusalem Post’s stance:
‘This is certainly not the kind of support Israel needs. It is the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews. Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and around the world should be standing together against such hate crimes.’
Caroline has also given explicit permission for Gates of Vienna to publish a Norwegian version of Norway’s Problem which Ned did after writing:
‘Under normal circumstances, Gates of Vienna does not publish in any languages other than English (in its American, British, Canadian, and Australian variants). However, we are making an exception for the following opinion piece by Caroline Glick.’
Setting the tone for this unique honour, Ned continues:
‘The result was the column below. Several Scandinavians requested that we publish a Norwegian translation, and with Ms. Glick’s permission it was kindly translated by Cecilie.’
Indeed! We have here one of Israel’s ‘most important’ women and the Senior Contributing Editor of the Jerusalem Post giving permission to publish a translated version of her article at a hate site (that credits and links back to her) espousing views deemed repugnant by her editor-in-chief. One can recall the hue and cry when Octavia Nasr tweeted about a Hezbollah sheikh’s death that led to CNN firing her!
Gates of Vienna may be bottom feeders in the world of Islamophobia, but clearly their unsettling involvement with prominent hatemongers is more than just a cause for concern.
Van Buren Board of Education near Findlay, Ohio is holding ‘A Night to Honor Israel’ at its High School on October 27th. The sponsor of the event is nothing other than Christians United for Israel (CUFI). This is an odd thing. A Night of Honoring Israel for what? Honoring someone, or a group, should be reserved for those whose work and contributions help positively impact the quality of life for others and enhance the image of their country. Not Israel!
That said, there are however several noted and noble Israelis that are worthy of honor for their efforts end the occupation and help bring peace to the region. Here is my short list: Jeff Halper, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Rami Elhanan and Uri Avnery.
The first thing I did after reading about this so-called “Honor Night,” was draft a letter and send it to the School Superintendent and to all Board of Education members urging them to pull the plug on this unpatriotic and anti-Muslim hate group.
This event is in direct violation of the board policy 9700 on special interest groups which states that:
“All materials or activities proposed by outside political sources for student or staff use or participation shall be reviewed by the Superintendent on the basis of their educational contribution to part or all of the school program, benefit to students, and no such approval shall have the primary purpose of advancing the special interest of the proposing group.”
If the primary purpose isn’t for fundraising (they are charging $15 per adult/$10 per student), then what educational benefit does this event provide?
Secondly, honoring a foreign nation that engages in spying, stealing America’s top [secrets], and murder its citizen is a betrayal in itself, and a shameless act to say the least. Van Buren School district should honor instead the victims of the USS Liberty, a US Navy intelligence ship that was suddenly and brutally attacked in international waters on June 8, 1967 by the air and naval forces of Israel. Thirty-four Americans were killed in the attack and another 174 were wounded.
Why would CUFI honor the foreign country that killed Rachel Corrie? This group does not know her. Rachel was a 23-year old American peace activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003, while undertaking nonviolent direct action to protect a Palestinian family from demolition.
CUFI is also honoring the same foreign nation that murdered the 19 year-old American peace activist, Furkan Dogan. Eight other Turkish citizens were also killed on Gaza bound aid Flotilla. Hey, John Hagee, founder of CUFI, a foreign navy boarded an unarmed ship flying the flag of a NATO member in international waters! Where were you hiding on Memorial Day of 2010?
Speaking of pastor John Heage, this man has repeatedly argued that the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West. According to this “man of God,” CUFI is a lobby intended, he says, to be a Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC.) In other words, CUFI is acting as an unregistered foreign agent group, better yet, a mouthpiece for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
A quick check into the CUFI website, I ran into a link from a 2006 NPR interview should suffice… it’s tempting to write this guy off as a nut job, but he has hundreds of thousands of followers and this is the kind of indoctrination that will be coming to a public school if it’s not canceled (see here). It’s about 25 minutes long, but it’s really necessary to listen to all of it for someone that’s rather new to this theology to understand how deadly this venomous hate speech is. He also says in this interview that “Israel gave up Jordan” …and they’re considering letting him pass out “educational” material??!?
Beginning at the 14:00 minute mark, Hagee (founder of CUFI) says that Muslims have a mandate in the Qur’an that they must kill Christians and Jews. He also compares Islamic nations to Hitler and Imperial Japan.
I also fail to understand the logic in renting the school to an extremist organization that is notorious for its anti-Muslim and anti-Arab views. I mean, if a public school is nothing more than a facility and a meeting place, regardless to what it is, then would they rent out schools to show adult movies on the weekend?
I don’t believe Van Buren School District would be thrilled, or even allow any other speaker, to spew similar anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish rhetoric, at any of its schools. Muslims and Islam should not be fair game.
Truth is, Israel is wolf in a sheep’s clothing yet CUFI will depict it as an innocent lamb during their scheduled event. CUFI is among several groups that are behind most of the anti-Muslim hysteria that swept across our country. They create fear and hate mongering against ALL Muslims and other minority groups.
Let’s set the record straight: Muslims respect and revere Jesus [peace be upon him]. They consider him one of the greatest of God’s messengers to mankind. The Quran confirms his virgin birth and a chapter of the Quran is entitled “Mariam” (Mary). Muslims also believe he was born miraculously, by the command of God, the same command that had brought Adam, [pbuh] into being with neither a father nor a mother.
Neither this group, nor their invited guests, will tell you that the name of Jesus Christ, [pbuh], is mentioned 33 times in the Holy Quran, whereas the Prophet Mohammad’s name is mentioned only 5 times. That is called respect! What this group and their guest are promoting is hate, fear, and deception.
Every red-blooded American should take a stand against bigotry and fear mongering against Muslims by helping to pull the plug on this event or any other event in the future that defames, degrades, or insults any ethnic or religious group in America.
Every one in America is entitled to free speech, even if it is bigoted. However, doing it on school grounds will give the impression, that the School District endorses and promotes hate speech. School facilities, that are supported by taxpayers, should not be used as a platform, to defame and bash Islam, or any other faith. Such was the recent decision of the School Board when a Columbus-area high school canceled the appearance of an anti-Muslim Tea Party speaker.
Make no mistake about it, CUFI does not speak for Muslims, Jews or God-fearing Christians that I know.
Today marks the release of yet another book by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ prolific foreign affairs columnist whose articles over the years have exposed such trends as the “collective madness” of Palestinians and the progress in Mexican baby namesto more NAFTA-friendly alternatives than Juan, such as Alexander and Kevin.
Friedman’s latest book, endearingly titled That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, is coauthored by Friedman’s “intellectual soulmate”, the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum—a longtime staple of Friedman columns and a purveyor of such predictable notions as that “The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power”.
Despite having admitted to an audience in Istanbul that his two previous bestsellers—The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, marketed as wakeup calls concerning globalization and clean energy, respectively—really “have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart” and are instead “basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself”, Friedman managed to advertise That Used to Be Us as “the first book I’ve really written about America” during an interview with Fox’s Don Imus earlier this year.
Slightly more surprising than Friedman’s continuing habit of self-contradiction is a recent less-than-favorable review of the new book on the website of the Financial Times, the institution that in 2005 partnered with Goldman Sachs to bestow upon Friedman the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat. Friedman responded to the honor by referring to the pair as “two such classy organizations”, before finally conceding two years after the 2008 financial crisis that Goldman Sachs is perhaps in fact “utterly selfish”.
The FT.com review notes that the phrase “that used to be us” was appropriated from a statement by Barack Obama, in which the president lamented that “it makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us”. FT.com refrains from pointing out that Obama’s complaints in this case are themselves presumably appropriated from Friedman’s own experiences with Chinese trains and Singaporean airports, given the columnist’s de facto position as presidential adviser.
Friedman’s incestuous relationship with centers of capitalist power does not, however, prevent him from being portrayed in the FT.com review as essentially defying reality with his new book by “reinforc[ing] the illusions of [American] exceptionalism” and immunity from historical patterns, and by promoting the “idea that a third-party movement could somehow enable America to avoid the decline that eventually overtakes every great power”.
Friedman will likely remain undeterred in his eternal quest to restore US glory and global domination. However, he may desire a more creative title for his next book than, for example, That Really Used to Be Us:How America Has Fallen Even Further Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.
He might thus consider issuing an anthology of previously published excerpts entitled Thomas Friedman Recycled—which would additionally underscore his unwavering commitment to environmentalism and the notion that reform in the Arab world can be achieved by combining a “geo-green” strategy with the neoconservative strategy of contaminating the earth with depleted uranium munitions.
It’s a never ending struggle, this uphill battle with Israel’s mighty propaganda machine. But as they say, no rest for the weary.
Over the past few months, Israel has been sullying the reputation of yet another aspect of Palestinian governance. In late May, the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog organization that tracks Palestinian media for incitement against Israel released a report claiming that the Palestinian Authority is paying salaries to Palestinian prisoners in accordance with a newly published law.
The PMW spread the news as quickly and with as much venom as possible. “In other words, all Palestinians in Israeli prisons for terror crimes officially join the PA payroll. According to the definition in the PA law, Palestinian car thieves in Israeli prisons will not receive a salary, but Hamas and Fatah terrorist murderers will,” the report read.
“The PA also gives a salary to Israeli Arabs convicted of terror crimes against Israel – the country of which they are citizens. PA benefits to Israeli Arab terrorists, in fact, are greater than the ones extended to Palestinian terrorists.”
Since then, the slandering has taken hold, especially since the PMW called on donor countries to cut aid to the PA altogether since, according to their logic, the money will go to “terrorists” and their families.
This is not the first time the Palestinians have been accused of supporting terrorism and incitement towards Israel. After the PA came to power in 2004 and devised its own school curriculum, Israel immediately began tearing the books apart, page at a time and claiming they were full of anti-Israeli sentiments. An excellent article published earlier this month by The Guardian notes that Israeli textbooks, which are rarely in the spotlight, are far more inciting and racist than that of the Palestinians. The article points out that the word “Palestinians” is only used when in reference to “terrorists.” Otherwise, Palestinians are referred to as Arabs – uneducated, deviant, camel riders.
Claims of incitement are not limited to schoolbooks, unfortunately. When Palestinians named a square after Dalal Al Mughrabi, a Palestinian fighter who was killed during a military operation against Israel in 1978, Israel was up in arms, claiming the Palestinians should not be allowed to name streets or squares after “terrorists.” Israeli watchdog groups and the Israeli government play on the fact that Palestinians have named streets after Abu Jihad (Khalil Al Wazir) and Yehya Ayash. The prisoner stipends are just the latest episode in the drama.
What Israelis should know is that any country in the world with a welfare system is responsible for its citizens, including the families of prisoners. There is nothing out of the ordinary in this. Actually, the PA has been doing it for years. The United States does not punish the family of a murderer nor would Israel cut government benefits from the family of Yigal Amir. Neither should the Palestinians abandon their own people.
Additionally, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are a whole other ballgame. These men and women are not imprisoned for stealing cars, or for selling drugs. They are there because they are resisting a belligerent military occupation of their land, which has oppressed them and their people for decades. The PA’s allocations to prisoners and their families is in no way an endorsement of “terrorism and violence” but rather a means of helping mostly young men and women and their families to resume a life that has been interrupted by an occupying authority. Any other country would have done the same.
Besides, countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of others. If the Palestinians want to name a street after one of their national heroes, regardless of how this person is perceived by Israel, that is their business. The Palestinians have never objected to the fact that Israel named its international airport after David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father and a man who advocated the transfer of Palestinians after the 1948 war. “We should prevent Arab return at any cost,” he said in June, a month after Israel’s declaration of independence and 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes virtually overnight.
For the Palestinians, Ben Gurion is no hero. The thousands of political prisoners in Israeli jails, on the other hand, certainly are.
~
Joharah Baker is Director of the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.
As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozen are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.
The Israeli government praised the ‘restraint and morality’ of the IDF, as did the fifty-two Major Jewish American Organizations (MJAO) who largely control the US Congress. These grotesque massacres began during the Christian Holy Week on Good Friday and Easter, coinciding with the Jewish Passover. The self-righteous officials of the MJAO and their relatives and friends broke matzos at joyful Seders as the blood of Palestinians soaked into ground at the fence containing the largest open-air prison camp in history, Gaza.
While tribal loyalties bonded the Israeli and Jewish American leaders, the politicians of the Western oligarchic electoral regimes refrained from criticizing the shocking display of brute force and even defended Israel’s cold blood mass killings of Palestinian civilians in their Gaza prison.
This paper will discuss and analyze the reasons for Israel’s willing Western accomplices and the centrality of its fifth column in the United States.… continue
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Indeed Dymphna regularly does the rounds at right wing Zionist websites posting comments moaning about their poverty. One such blog is the rabidly anti Palestinian and Islam hating blog ‘Sultan Knish‘ run by Daniel Greenfield an Israeli sabra living in New York, who is a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Centre the same organisation that sponsors Jihad Watch. Daniel is obsessed with a pathological hatred for Muslims and a delusion that the US military exists to carry out his fantasy of a war on Islam. Daniel’s postings regularly dehumanise Muslims, and are filled with anti Islam screeds which he fabricates on whim, not unlike Ned May. He also has a Torah Parsha blog and this video shows him in a debate about New Media. In a common theme amongst neo cons, Daniel complains there is a plot to destroy the US military by Obama. In one blog post ‘Winning the War on Terror‘ he suggests genocide:
Over the past few months, Israel has been sullying the reputation of yet another aspect of Palestinian governance. In late May, the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog organization that tracks Palestinian media for incitement against Israel released a report claiming that the Palestinian Authority is paying salaries to Palestinian prisoners in accordance with a newly published law.
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