Joe Kaufman

Kaufman-O-Meter #2:

In a now infamous article titled A Kahane Legacy Lost Kaufman wrote a eulogy admiring the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and expressing angst and deep sadness at his loss while affirming that the ideology that Meir Kahane developed was correct.

It is an embarrassing article for Kaufman especially since he attempts to now posit himself as a mainstream American patriot when in fact he has supported radical violent/racist ideologies and participated with banned organizations such as the JDL founded by Kahane and designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department.

Kaufman said in the article that he posted on the now defunct JDL forums in 2001,

I never did get that chance to see him [Kahane], though. He was murdered seventeen days before the event…I recall seeing one of my fellow JSU members crying, after hearing about this. I couldn’t believe that a person that I knew so little about…could elicit such feelings in someone… at least someone that wasn’t related or even a friend of the family! But I soon learned otherwise, as I watched the film that was shown in Kahane’s place. It was a film of a speech that he had given previously, and I cannot describe to you properly just how moving it was!

Who exactly is Kaufman so “moved” by? Well Meir Kahane was an advocate for the expulsion of all non-Jews from the Biblical Israel which includes the West Bank and Gaza, he was a proponent of a theocratic Jewish Kingdom governed by Torah Law, he founded the terrorist JDL which was banned in the USA and the Kach party which was eventually banned in Israel for being racist and violent. Adherents to the Kahanist ideology such as Kaufman have engaged in terrorism against Muslims and Arabs as was the case with Dr. Baruch Goldstein who massacred over 30 worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque.

So how long will ole’ corky Kaufman put up this facade that he is a die heart American patriot when it seems he is motivated not by democratic ideals but the spirit of his late mentor Rabbi Meir Kahane?

Also see:

Kaufman-O-Meter #1: “Nuke the Mooslims!”

Who is he?:

Joe Kaufman, has been on the Anti-Muslim scene for quite a while now and is dubbed by the far Right-Wing FrontPageMag as, you guessed it…another one of their ”Investigative Journalists.”  That he has been influenced by Meir Kahane and the Kahanist ideology is well documented, as is his love and angst for Kahane.

In the past he has been accused of contributing to the terrorist organization founded by Kahane known as JDL (Jewish Defense League) while others accuse Kaufman of at the very least holding views that parallel JDL positions.

Kaufman’s unsavory associations and views are quite real and they are only dangerous to America if you’re stupid enough to swallow his conspiracy theories but other than that he is simply a half-baked paranoid conspiracy theorist, some what along the lines of the “9/11 Truthers.”

In every nook and cranny there is a “Mooslim”…hiding and ready to get ya…so beware and be afraid. Be veryyyy afraid goes his story.

In this special LoonWatch series we will detail the exploits and punchlines that Krazy Kaufman throws out there and attempts to pass on as serious journalism, commentary and investigation.

Jim Pinkerton

It’s hard to take these people seriously anymore and part of me just wants to give up on them because it really seems like those people who believe Obama is a “Mooslim” will continue to believe in that fairy tale no matter what you tell them or how compelling the fact is that he isn’t a Muslim.  Do these claims ever get old?

We’ve written about this phenomenon before and as this video demonstrates there is no dearth of poor old white haired ladies trembling from the prospect that Obama is Muslim. It’s such an absurd prospect that it reminds one of those who think the world is 6,000 years old or assert that the earth is flat.

The most sinister aspect of the accusation is that it assumes being Muslim is a sin or an automatic “got-ya” card that disqualifies and delegitimizes an individual from public office or the public square. It is the height of prejudice, and the way it is nonchalantly bandied about, such as in the case of Jim Pinkerton underscores our point — no matter what you do or say people will continue to push this Islamophobic lie.

Eric Boehlert, in a great post titled Fox News and Obama as the Muslim Manchurian Candidate points out that Pinkerton, a regular contributor to Fox News is part of the mainstream of Conservatism and is still propagating this looniness,

That’s the premise Pinkerton is pushing on national television; that Obama kept his Muslim roots hidden during the campaign, but that signs of it are starting to show now, and when he’s safely elected he’ll finally feel comfortable practicing Islam out the open.

Behold the ‘mainstream’ conservative movement in America!

It is high time that people got over the idea that Obama is an evil “Mooslim” or that being a Muslim and holding public office is somehow helping our enemies take over our country or in the immortal words of Glenn Beck leading America to stand at some sort of “Boiling point.”

The truth is Obama isn’t a Muslim and it wouldn’t matter if he was one, these conspiracy theories hold less water than sightings of Big Foot and are closer in spirit to the discourse that Jews faced around the early 20th Century. Let the strange saga continue!

Glenn Beck

Recently, as many who follow the news are aware we were given a glimpse of hatred and racism with the shootings at the Holocaust Museum.  It was a tragic hate incident in which a security guard lost his life reminding us that there is a lot of prejudice out there directed at many different communities. It also revealed the strange and obscurantist pathologies that exist amongst the extreme right-wing and those who attempt to pass themselves off as mainstream media.

So it is not hard to believe that even with this shooting, which was carried out by 89 year old James Von Brunn, a right-wing White Nationalist, there are those who want to blame it on Islam and Muslims! This highlights something well known, though not much talked about, in which loonie Islamophobes and Muslim haters will attempt to tie every event that they can to Muslims regardless how unrelated it may be. Such was the case with  Steven Emerson who claimed that the Oklahoma City Bombings revealed a “Middle Eastern trait,” or Debbie Schlussel claiming that the Virginia Tech Massacre was committed by a Muslim even when it was clear that it was a Korean male with no link to Islam.

These are the times we live in, with heightened suspicion of Muslims translating itself into absurd ideas that Muslims are behind every plot, they are the boogey men in your closet and the monsters underneath your bed.

This time we have Glenn Beck and none other then — you guessed it — Debbie Schlussel outlandishly linking the Holocaust Museum shooting to Islam and Muslims. As Gawker noted,”Beck, with a straight face mind you, looked into the camera and said that America as it stands today is a “boiling pot” fueled by extremists groups like Al Qaeda and 9/11 truthers who are sowing the seeds of extremism and hatred in this country.”

Beck implies somehow in his warped world that America is brimming with extremist (Muslim) terrorists from groups such as Al-Qaeda. To prove his point he shows footage of a man speaking about a crazy plot in Arabic. We aren’t told who the guy is, where he said what he was saying or how that indicates that America stands today at a “boiling pot.” It is a strange point to make especially when the shooter James Von Brunn had nothing to do with Islam or Muslims, in fact it highlights what seems to be Beck’s attempts to cover up for his incendiary rhetoric which really does fuel extremism,

Beck…doesn’t make mention, much less offer an apology for, the lunacy he’s been promoting over the radio and television airwaves over the years, lunacy that directly feeds the derangement of people like James von Brunn, inflammatory rhetoric he’s been spewing about America turning into a totalitarian communist regime under Obama, the New World Order, Mexicans pouring over our borders to take our jobs and rape our children, FEMA concentration camps, ACORN rigging an American Presidential election for Obama, that dark, powerful, unseen forces are controlling the American economy, how liberals might to assassinate him—We could go on and on and on.

Debbie Schlussel

Debbie Sclussel, described by Gawker as an “Anne Coulter wanna-be” goes further than Glenn Beck stating explicitly that “It is because of Muslims…that neo-Nazis feel comfortable manifesting their views about Jews.” Can it get anymore loony than that? This is coming from a woman who recently joked about the genocide of Palestinians, while writing about clashes between rival Palestinian forces which left six dead Schlussel stated, “As we say in lawyer jokes, that’s a start. Six down, a few million to go.” Does the irony of these peoples statements go right over their heads?

Here is the totality of the absurdity spewed by Schlussel,

It is because of Muslims—who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels—that neo-Nazis feel comfortable—far more comfortable!—manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn’t been, in general, 89-year-old White guys.

Mr. Von Brunn has been on this planet for 89 years, and he didn’t feel comfortable shooting up a Holocaust museum until now—this new era of “tolerance,” in which we must tolerate the most extremist Muslim behaviors and sentiments. It’s, in general, not 89-year-old White guys telling people at churches worldwide and in religious schools that the Jews are the devil incarnate, a filthy tribe, the sons of pigs and monkeys, subhuman, etc.

No, it’s guys with names like Mohammed and Ahmed on our own American streets who make Mr. Von Brunn far more at ease in 2009 than he was even in 1999 to attack places associated with the Jews. They created the comfort zone for James W. Brunn to engage in today’s shooting.

Moreover, not only do White supremacists and neo-Nazis work with Muslims in many, many documented cases and investigations. But they are basically one and the same. The only difference is that one guy is named James and the other guy is named Ahmed. And the former only has a few thousand discredited, marginalized compatriots.

Whereas the latter has over a billion followers and a U.S. President kissing their collective ass.

Not only is she attempting to blame the Holocaust Museum tragedy on Muslims but she attempts to blur the obvious-as-day-and-night difference between Muslims and Nazis by saying, ‘Neo-Nazis/White Supremacists and Muslims are one and the same thing.’ Really Debbie? This fairy-tale from Debbie world would probably not sit well with the many Muslims who have faced violence from White supremacists and Nazis or Black Muslims who are part of Islam or Arab Muslims who are a Semitic people despised by the Nazi Aryan ideology.

In  “Debbie in Wonderland” all rationality goes out the window when you swallow the Islamophobic pill — anything goes. Up is down and down is up, black is white and white is black, and Nazis are Muslims and Muslims are Nazis.

Frank Gaffney

True, June is not even over yet but we couldn’t help but post on the loony antics of Frank Gaffney, he’s earned nothing less than the Loon Quote of the Month. Frank Gaffney is a neo-conservative war hawk and was one of the leading supporters pushing for war against Iraq during the Bush era. He has also called for military action against Iran.

From a Christian Science Monitor article,

In 1987, President Reagan nominated Gaffney to be assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. he earlier served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under then-Assistant Secretary Richard Perle. In the late 1970s, Gaffney served as a defense and foreign policy adviser to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

He is columnist for the Washington Times and a contributor to Defense News and Investor’s Business Daily. He is a contributing editor to National Review Online, WolrdNetDaily.com and JewishWorldReview.com. Gaffney is also one of 25 mostly neoconservative co-signers of the Project for a New American Century’s Statement of Principles.

So what did Gaffney say? Well he pretty much made the claim that Barack Obama is America’s first Muslim president while comparing Obama to Hitler. Think progress breaks his quote down,

“There is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” The evidence? “Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to ‘the Holy Koran,’” he “established his firsthand knowledge of Islam,” and he uttered the phrase “peace be upon them” when referring to Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. And according to Gaffney, “no believing Christian” would ever make such a statement because “for Christians, Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God.”

The quote speaks for itself. If someone mentions the Quran in a speech and utters the terrible and suppossedly “unchristian” saying of “Peace be upon them” they not only identify with Muslim but actually are Muslims according to Frank Gaffney! The lunacy continues.

Words of Ginny Brown-Waite Wisdom: “Except for Timothy McVeigh every terrorist has been a Moslem.” Way to go Ginny, you sure paid attention in school.

Michael Goldfarb

President Barack Obama is an iconic figure that inspires heated discussion on many topics as he is not easy to pigeonhole into one category or label. One topic that has and will continue to strangely garner absurd and heated discussion is the topic of Obama and his relation to Islam and Muslims.

In a recent manifestation of such absurdity, a blog post by Michael Goldfarb on The Weekly Standard surmised that Obama’s use of the Arabic word Shukrun, which means ‘thank you,’ somehow denoted that Obama knows more about Islam than he is letting on,

Obama has said before that he speaks “barely passable Spanish” and “a smattering of Swahili,” as well as some Bahasa from his youth in Indonesia. But Obama has at other times denied speaking a foreign language, saying in July of last year, “I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing!“…One wonders if the president hasn’t been concealing some greater fluency with the language of the Koran.

The bigotry is on live display in the above quote and Eric Boehlert at Media Matters rightfully pointed out that “Goldfarb does his best to to raise doubts about whether or not Obama secretly speaks Arabic.” Goldfarb doesn’t pause to consider that not only is Arabic the “language of the Koran” but it is also the language of millions of Christians from various denominations, many of whom sing their prayers and recite their liturgy in Arabic — i.e. no one has a monopoly over a particular language.

Goldfarb also might have missed, probably because he doesn’t speak Arabic, that Obama mispronounced the Arabic word Hijab (veil) incorrectly as Hajib during his speech in Cairo.

So continues the theater of looniness in which Obama is considered a closet Muslim and because he used an Arabic word we should now be even more suspicious of him.

The truth is that this is just another manifestation of the unconscious hatred felt by many in the right-wing for all things Islam. The hope is to secure some cheap political points by somehow tainting all percieved enemies of the right-wing with associations to Islam and Muslims — the new boogey men of America. How long will the right-wing believe they can pull this on Americans? Only fellow Americans can answer that one.

Debbie Schlussel

The continuing internet blog wars amongst the anti-Muslims and Islamophobes have been quite funny and interesting for all that they reveal about the agendas driving them.  It was only a matter of time before the fault lines began to appear amongst a group for whom it will be noted (a piece in the future) were really only united by a hate for Islam and Muslims, and in which their real motivations were self-aggrandizement coupled with hatred of the other.

Some bloggers such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Football’s have calmed their rhetoric and focused on other subjects such as science and local politics, while Robert Spencer and his allies have continued their hatred unabated, though stung by the increasing irrelevance of their movement in the Obama age. Who knows how long this will last or the eventual outcome of the Great Blog Soap Opera?

Yet, the fault lines were appearing earlier when in September of 2008 Debbie Schlussel, a well known Islamophobe came out strongly against both Walid Shoebat calling him a “fake terrorist” and Steven Emerson who she described as a “phony.”  All these are welcome contributions to the exposition of the loons and may have softened the image of Schlussel as an Islamophobe in the minds of some if it weren’t for the fact that her motivation in exposing these two wasn’t pure ego.

She was compelled to reluctantly spill the truth about these two for the simple reason that in the case of Shoebat he “cursed her out” and failed to cite the use of Schlussel’s work. So no one should fall under the illusion that her turn of face in exposing these two was motivated by a cathartic realization that they are haters, it was all personal and business — not principles.

In other news the Los Angeles Times has taken Schlussel to task for saying that the recent Ron Howard directed movie Angels and Demons was soft on Muslim Terrorists. Patrick Goldstein aptly describes Schlussel as, “a trigger happy anti-Muslim zealot.”

Just when Ron Howard thought he was in the clear, having avoided being attacks by the Vatican for any anti-Catholic story lines in his upcoming “Angels and Demons,” he now finds himself under fire from the one and only Debbie Schlussel. Revered as a truth-teller in conservative circles, the blogger-critic is actually a trigger-happy anti-Muslim zealot — she went nuclear last year when ”Defiance” Ed Zwick director refused to condemn Hamas — who’s now taking aim at “Angels and Demons,” which she (big surprise) thinks is soft on Muslim terrorists.

How did the Howard-directed thriller go from being anti-Catholic to pro-Muslim? According to early press reports, Howard apparently changed the identity of an assassin, who is Muslim in the Dan Brown bestseller, to someone who is now Danish. For the rest of us, this is — how should I put it — not such a big deal. But for Schlussel? She writes:

“Over the years, I’ve written about the many movies in which Hollywood changes the villain or the terrorist in the original script or novel from a Muslim to something else out of politically correct deference to Islam, the religion of whiners (and ultimately, murderers). Now, Hollywood continues in this tradition. … I’m already learning that ['Angels and Demons'] has been ‘disinfected’ by Islamopanderers (director Ron Howard) not wanting to upset our dear friends in the ‘Religion of Peace,’ who might do something ‘peaceful’ if the movie had stayed true to the book.”

This is just part of a prolonged Schlussel shame campaign, often based on the flimsiest of evidence, to belittle Hollywood for not treating Muslims as wild-eyed villains. In one of her classic posts, she attacked Marvel Comics for giving academic internships to Arab students from the United Arab Emirates, using that as evidence to support her outrageous claim that “Spider-Man and the Hulk are embracing the new Nazis.” She also recently ridiculed the Wall Street Journal for allowing one of its reporters (“with a Muslim-sounding first name”) to write admiringly about a Muslim author doing a DC comic book.

I don’t exactly have a direct line to Ron Howard to talk to him about his casting process. But here’s my suggestion: The next time Howard does a Dan Brown thriller, if there’s a good part for a terrorist, I think he oughta make sure Debbie Schlussel gets first crack at the job.

As Goldstein points out this isn’t the first time that Schlussel has supposedly “uncovered” a so called nefarious Muslim plot against the West — it is a trademark of her paranoid writing. When the Virginia Tech Massacre occurred, the police told the press that the shooter was an “Asian male” Schlussel was quick to tie it to Muslims, saying in a racist screed that “Pakis are considered ‘Asian,’” and that it could be “part of a co-ordinated terrorist plot by Pakistanis.”

Later when it was revealed that the shooter was a student of Korean background and that he authored a play titled Ismail Ax, she continued to attempt to tie the massacre to Muslims, insisting that the Muslim sounding name of Ismail in the play penned by the murderer was enough to conclude that he was a “secret” Muslim and that Islam was to blame.

Needless to say this was rejected by the police as it was obvious that the murderer had no ties to Islam or Muslims. Even more egregious, the ironic fact lost on Schlussel that Muslims died in the massacre.

The case of Debbie Schlussel, a certified trigger happy anti-Muslim highlights the absurdity of the loon blogsphere. All of them have bigger egos than the other and they are willing to throw one another under the bus if it suits them.  It kind of reminds one of the statement “There is no honor amongst thieves” reworked as “There is no honor amongst Islamophobes.”