Zakariya, I likely share in this fractional Turkish heritage. Most of us from the old Ottoman empire do, but my matrilineal family was said to descend from a Turkish tailor, and bore the surname Kaftandzhiev. My great-aunt was a natural-born seamstress from childhood, and I outfitted a Russian orchestra and dance group, even though I can’t stand facings and buttonholes. I hate them almost as much as weak coffee, in fact.

Jai, poor Mr. Yerushalmi is right. You can’t be a racist without being called a racist, a sexist without being called a sexist, or a bigot without being called a bigot. It ain’t fair!

Moosern, what a lovely site! I bookmarked it, for when I’m able to zip up my skinny jeans again.

@Reynardine, try here:

http://kalustyans.com/catalog.asp?menucategory_id=240&category_id=118

“there are some conspiracies that are well founded, buoyed by facts and proven to be true later.”

Indeed. Case in point is Pamela Geller’s laywer and close ally, David Yerushalmi, who is of course also a senior member of Geller’s “SION” organisation. Yerushalmi was even one of the main speakers at Geller’s recent anti-Muslim conference in New York. Regular Loonwatch readers — or, in fact, anyone familiar with Geller’s recent articles on Atlas Shrugs, considering that she provided extensive details, photos and video footage of the event — will also be aware that a certain NY State Senator and a certain former US ambassador to the UN attended the conference and are vocal supporters of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and the rest of the “SION” leadership.

David Yerushalmi himself, of course, is also General Counsel for Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy organisation. Yes, the same Frank Gaffney who is discussed in the main Loonwatch article above.

Link: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2010/09/20/176281/neocon-team-b-author-yerushalmi-islam-was-born-in-violence-it-will-die-that-way/

Article:

Neocon ‘Team B’ Author Yerushalmi: ‘Islam Was Born In Violence; It Will Die That Way’

I wrote last week that the new “Team B” report from neoconservative activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy on the threat of Islamic sharia law is notable for, among other things, the fact that its authors consulted with no actual Muslims or Islamic scholars in writing it.

A key “expert” behind the report’s interpretation of Islamic law is a man named David Yerushalmi. In addition to running a DC law practice, Yerushalmi serves as General Counsel of the Center for Security Policy. Yerushalmi is also a contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace. On his law office website, Yerushalmi claims to be “considered an expert on Islamic law.”

The release of the sharia report was hailed last week by three leading Congressional conservatives — Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) — so it’s worth looking into what one the report’s key contributors actually believes about Muslims and Islam.

Here’s what Yerushalmi wrote in the American Thinker in 2006:

“Islam was born in violence; it will die that way. Any wish to the contrary is sheer Pollyannaism. The same way the post World War II German youth were taught by their German teachers and political leaders to despise the fascism of their fathers, with strict laws extant still today restricting even speech that casts doubt on the Holocaust, so too must the Muslim youth be taught from the cradle to reject the religion of their forebears.”

Yerushalmi also wrote in 2006 that the Muslim Brotherhood “has succeeded in penetrating our educational, legal, and political systems, as well as top levels of government, intelligence, the media, and U.S. military, virtually paralyzing our ability to respond effectively.” He criticized President Bush for his “fatal, but well-intentioned ideological whim to build democracies among a ruthless people who believe in a murderous creed falsely labeled a ‘religion of peace.‘”

Yerushalmi heads an organization called Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), whose charter — now hidden behind a paywall but shared here by Talk to Action’s Brian Wilson — states:

“America is a unique people bound together through a commitment to America’s Judeo-Christian moral foundation and to an enduring faith and trust in G-d and in His Providence… America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white, who ventured from Europe to create a nation in their image of a country existing as free men under G-d. The founding fathers understood that party-led parliaments and democracy were the worse form of government and sought to resist the movement that was soon to find fertile ground in France with the French Revolution…

…Any world view, ideology, or -ism that promotes directly or indirectly the elimination of national existence and the establishment of a world state is our foe. So you can know at the start that liberalism (and this includes libertarianism) and Islam are in our sights.”

Yerushalmi’s group suggests the following measures for dealing with America’s Muslim problem:

“- It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.
- The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.
- The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.
- No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.”

Unsurprisingly, Yerushalmi’s antipathies extend beyond Muslims. In a 2006 article, “On Race: A Tentative Discussion” [Jai's note: PDF can be accessed directly here: http://www.mcadamreport.org/The McAdam Report%28585%29-05-12-06.pdf ] — tentative because, as Yerushalmi laments in the article, one cannot engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist — Yerushalmi writes that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men:

“There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically.”

So Yerushalmi isn’t crazy about Muslims, African-Americans, immigrants, or women. But wait, he also strongly dislikes liberal Jews:

“Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all “progressives:” a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a “historical” march to the World State…

…one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.”

I contacted Mr. Yerushalmi to give him an opportunity to explain these writings. He declined.

[Jai’s note: Extensive further information on Yerushalmi’s views & agenda here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/david-yerushalmi-sharia-ban-tennessee, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/center_for_security_policy_sharia_report_a_threat_to_american_ideals/0018233, http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/12/27/20819/823, http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/36930_The_Leaders_of_the_Anti-Mosque_Movement.

Dragon, if Romney becomes President, it will negatively affect the planet no matter. He doesn’t have to believe a thing is true to act on it.

We, Muslims, should be glad that we have become so powerful (albeit only in people’s imagination) that we could be thought of controlling America. Until recently, only Jews had that status quo. We are finally powerful, yay!

@ Reynardine:

It never ceases to amaze me how these morons view Islam as some monolithic entity, but how they also seize upon the most popular name at the time. After 9-11, one would think that al-Qaeda and the Taleban were interchangeable the way that some conservatives talked about them. And then, after the revolution in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood suddenly became the new bogeyman… even though none of them had ever mentioned them before. Now they revive the specter of the Ottoman Empire from centuries ago… never mind that, despite claiming the title of Caliphate, the Ottomans never had hegemony over the entire Muslim world. Afghanistan, India, Uzbekistan, Sokoto, Kanem-Bornu, Zanzibar, Malaya, Sumatra, Java and many other Muslim states all were outside their power. Not to mention Persia, which declared itself Shi’a in the 16th century and rejected the notion of Caliphate entirely. Plus the Ottomans had to deal with intermittent rebellions, including from Arab Nationalists and Wahhabi fundamentalists.

Despite the death of Ertuğrul Osman, ‘the last Ottoman,’ there are indeed legitimate descendants of the Ottoman Sultans. Of course, none of them have displayed any interests in claiming the throne nor have the Turks shown any interest in reestablishing the monarchy. Osman himself said that democracy was working fine when he was finally allowed to return to the country in the ’90s. The only real move to restore the Caliphate that I can think of was the Caliphate Movement in early 20th century Punjab, which at the time was under British rule and had no real connection to the Ottoman Empire (beyond being Muslim) so the likelihood of the Panjabis somehow restoring the Caliphate was pretty much slim to nil from the start. Plus, like I said most of us Shi’ites are pretty hostile towards the idea of monarchy, something that the Islamophobes tend to ignore or gloss over.

Speaking of Turkish ethnicity, you wouldn’t have to go very far to find people of Turkish descent in the Middle East. Ethnicity has always been fairly fluid, so there are plenty of Arabs, Kurds and the like who may or may not have Turkish heritage somewhere. The Turks ruled much of the region. Indeed, Egypt had been under Mameluke rule for centuries before the Ottomans even arrived. The Safavids, Afsharids, Qajars and Pahlavis were all of Turkic ancestry. The Mughals were also of Turco-Mongolian heritage, though they too quickly adopted Persian language and culture. Of course, the SUBJECTS of these dynasties were indigenous Arabs, Assyrians, Greeks, Kurds, Copts, Persians and Indians, but it does go to show how far the Turkic peoples spread across Asia.

All of this, of course, is lost on the Islamophobes. To them, our rich heritage is simply a brownish mass of scimitar wielding madmen and oppressed harem ladies. The fact that they cannot (or will not) differentiate between Shi’a and Sunni, Arab and Turk, even Muslim and non-Muslim shows where their true priorities lie. They do not care about the Assyrians, Copts or Israelis any more than they do us. They simply want to cater to a specific breed of racists, xenophobes and cultural imperialists, and promoting anti-Muslim makes them big money.

Aah, the Muslim brotherhood is trying to take over the world again. I’m getting tired of this silly conspiracy theory, as the Americans saying goes ‘Only in America’.