The Oslo Freedom Forum’s founder Thor Halvorssen speaks at the opening session Monday. To his left is Amnesty International Norway’s general secretary John Peder Egenaes. (Berit Roald / AFP/Getty Images)

Oslo Freedom Forum founder’s ties to Islamophobes who inspired mass killer Anders Breivik

by Max Blumenthal, The Electronic Intifada, New York City 14 May 2013

An Electronic Intifada investigation uncovers evidence that Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, receives significant funding from the same financiers who support the Islamophobes who inspired anti-Muslim Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik. Despite being presented with this evidence, the Norwegian government and Amnesty International are embracing Halvorssen, a long-time far-right activist and the scion of a politically-connected family tied to Venezuela’s US-backed opposition.

This week in Oslo, hundreds of people from around the world are gathering for the fifth annual Oslo Freedom Forum, a human rights conference billed as “a three-day summit exploring how best to challenge authoritarianism and promote free and open societies.”

Produced by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (humanrightsfoundation.org), the event is sponsored by, among others, Norway’s Labor Party government (in the form of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the City of Oslo, and Amnesty International Norway. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide is scheduled to deliver prepared remarks at the forum.

Oslo is still scarred by the murderous rampage carried out by the right-wing extremistAnders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian citizen who fashioned himself as a crusading knight on a mission to save Europe from the scourge of Muslim immigration.

His killing spree began on 22 July 2011 with a bombing that killed eight persons and injured 209 others outside Oslo’s main government building. The violence ended some 25 miles to the north at a summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor Party, where he massacred 69 persons, most of them children and youths.

Breivik insisted the bloodbath was necessary to stop those he saw enabling mass Muslim immigration — those he called “cultural Marxists” and especially the Labor Party — accusing them of “contributing to a process of indirect cultural and demographical genocide.”

Islamophobe inspirations

The killer outlined his views in a 1,500-page manifesto, listing the far-right Americans who helped radicalize him. They included the most notorious purveyors of anti-Muslim resentment, such as Jihad Watch founder Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, whose writings Breivik excerpted at length.

Among the suggestions for “Further Study” provided by the killer were links on YouTube to the 2008 propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, which has been promoted as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat” (Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center For American Progress, 26 August 2011, p. 16).

Breivik clearly thought it was powerful too and would help explain and justify his murderous rampage.

It is of public record that the Oslo Freedom Forum receives substantial financial support from the Norwegian government. But only a tiny handful of people know that one of the largest donors to the Human Rights Foundation — the producer of the Oslo Freedom Forum — are Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate Donors Trust, Inc.

Donors Capital Fund is the same right-wing American foundation that spent millions of dollars to fund the distribution of millions of copies of Obsession, and which has lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on the network of professionalIslamophobes that Breivik cited as his inspirations.

Donors Capital Fund is only one of several major funders to the Human Rights Foundation that have been among the principal donors or conduits for funding to the Islamophobic hate groups and ideologues who helped radicalize Breivik.

One person who certainly knew this is Thor Halvorssen.

Oslo Freedom Forum’s right-wing brainchild

Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.” The theme of this year’s conference is “Challenging Power.”

Halvorssen is also a right-wing activist, film producer and scion of Venezuela’s moneyed elite whose years of involvement in ultra-conservative politics enabled him to corral a small coterie of mostly far-right moneymen into bankrolling his Human Rights Foundation.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.

The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.

The Electronic Intifada’s analysis of IRS filings by Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust shows that the Human Rights Foundation received $764,950 from 2005 through 2011 from Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, all but about $5,000 coming through the Donors Capital Fund.

“Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the Center for American Progress noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”

In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.

Shadowy nonprofit funds Islamophobic film applauded by Breivik

In 2008, Donors Capital donated $17,778,600 to a shadowy nonprofit called the Clarion Fund — later renamed the Clarion Project (“Mystery of who funded right-wing ‘radical Islam’ campaign deepens,” Salon, 16 November 2010).

The donation paid for the Clarion Fund’s distribution of the film Obsession during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign — an apparent attempt to tar Democrats and then-Senator Barack Obama as weak on terror.

In the film, grainy clips of Nazi youth saluting Adolf Hitler blend into footage of Muslim crowds chanting in unison against Western imperialism. With commentary from a who’s who of anti-Muslim activists, including Daniel Pipes, the film implies that political Islam is today’s version of Nazism, and that between 10 and 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population poses an imminent, existential threat to the West.

Thanks to this support, some 28 million DVDs of the film were tucked into the Sunday edition of local newspapers and delivered to Americans in swing states across the country. Eventually, the film reached Breivik as well and is applauded in his manifesto.

Breivik cited Pipes at least 18 times in his manifesto; in one section, he quoted the far-right scholar commenting, “Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.”

Pipes’ Middle East Forum has benefited immensely from the generosity of Donors Capital Fund, reaping $2.3 million from the foundation between 2001 to 2009, according to the Center for American Progress.

Halvorssen responds

In 2010, the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen investigated what it referred to as Thor Halvorssen’s “secret funding,” which it suspected was “associated with the right side of the United States.” Halvorssen told reporter Sarah Sorheim: “I receive money from a variety of different people and environments. But that does not mean I necessarily support their political views.”

Sorheim asked him: “why not disclose who your sponsors are?” He deflected, explaining, “Since I got so much attention here in Norway, I’m still thinking about whether I can disclose our lists.”

Prior to this investigation by The Electronic Intifada, the full extent of Halvorssen’s right-wing funding was unknown. And contrary to the claims he made to Sorheim and to The Electronic Intifada, his political views appear to align neatly with many of his key backers and with those they support.

In an emailed response to The Electronic Intifada, Halvorssen stated that the $600,000 donated to the Human Rights Foundation through Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011 that is disclosed in the Human Rights Foundation’s 2011 IRS filing actually came from his own family.

“The Harry Halvorssen Fund is an account I set up with Donors Capital/Donors Trust and it is the main vehicle through which my mother and I make our contributions to [the Human Rights Foundation] and other charitable pursuits ranging from ecological concerns and scholarships to inner-city children in New York, to equine rescue,” he stated.

None of the money provided through the Donors Capital Fund, he said, went to support the Oslo Freedom Forum, but he and his mother donate separate funds through the Human Rights Foundation to support the Oslo Freedom Forum. “The Harry Halvorssen Fund has never made any contributions to any film called Obsession,” Halvorssen wrote.

To be sure, the kinds of donor-advised services for living donors and legacies that Donors Capital Fund provides to major philanthropists are also offered by many well-established foundations, such as the Chicago Community Trust or the New York Community Trust, as well as other financial institutions.

Tainted reputation

So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by its reputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to virulently Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?

“My choice of using Donors Capital Fund/Donors Trust is based on the fact that if I were to pass away unexpectedly I know they will very strictly abide to donor intent,” Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada. On its website, Donors Trust states that it was established “to ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise” is respected even after they die.

Halvorssen offered an analogy to explain his motives: “People I may disagree with may also open a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank, where I have a debit card; this doesn’t mean that Chase Manhattan Bank is responsible for their activities or that other customers are to carry some kind of collective responsibility for their banking choices.”

But this analogy might not be exact; on its website, Donors Capital Fund states that only organizations “approved by the Donors Capital Fund board of directors are eligible to receive grants from donor-advised funds administered by Donors Capital Fund.”

Anti-Muslim support

Even if Halvorssen were to be taken at his word about his relationship with Donors Capital Fund, he cannot explain why the Human Rights Foundation relies on other key members of the Islamophobia industry’s financial network.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the four foundations controlled by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife, donated $325,000 to Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation between 2007 and 2011, according to IRS filings.

According to the Center for American Progress, Scaife’s foundations contributed a staggering $7,875,000 to the Islamophobia industry between 2001 and 2009.

Among the major recipients of Scaife’s money was the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which received $3.4 million during the eight-year period documented in the “Fear Inc.” report.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center happens to be the main sponsor of Robert Spencer, the Islamophobic pseudo-scholar who claimed in a video interview with the conservative website Politichicks that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated deep into President Obama’s White House inner circle. Breivik referenced Spencer’s work no fewer than 162 times in his manifesto.

Then there is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which contributed $145,000 to the Human Rights Foundation from 2007 through 2011, according to IRS forms. As The Electronic Intifada recently reported, the Bradley Foundation has helped pay the salaries of some of America’s most virulent anti-Muslim agitators. These include David Horowitz, the creator of “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” Pipes and Frank Gaffney, publisher of conspiratorial pamphlets like his 2010 “Shariah: The Threat to America,” in which he warned that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of “sharia,” or Islamic law.

Breivik cited Gaffney and Horowitz a total of nine times in his manifesto.

False-flag conspiracy theories

Gaffney, for his part, hosted Halvorssen on the 22 April 2013 edition of Secure Freedom Radio show, introducing him as “a remarkable man I’ve had the privilege of knowing for a long time.”

Asked by Gaffney about the recent Boston Marathon bombing, allegedly perpetrated by the Chechen-American brothers Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Halvorssen suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to exploit the bombings. Putin, he said, sought to distract from “a legitimate government-in-exile” that “wants to look to the West” — a clear reference to the exiled Chechen politician Akhmed Zakayev, whom Halvorssen hosted at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2009.

Gaffney asked Halvorssen, “Did he [Putin] have something to do with this attack in Boston — that he was running Tamerlan Tsarnaev?”

“I have questions about it, Frank,” Halvorssen stated in an emphatic tone. “I have serious questions.” With his answer, Halvorssen demonstrated a readiness to indulge wild conspiracy theories that fit his political agenda.

Halvorssen’s hard-right libertarian supporter

Rounding out the small stable of major donors to Human Rights Foundation is Peter Thiel, who contributed $535,000 to Halvorssen’s group through his personal foundation from 2007 to 2011.

Thiel earned his fortune as a venture capitalist, helping to found Paypal and investing inFacebook. He is also a right-wing libertarian ideologue who declared, as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel went on to blame the extension of voting rights to women for “hav[ing] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Besides Halvorssen’s pet human rights project, Thiel has financed the notorious and now-discredited ACORN video sting by right-wing filmmaker James O’Keefe.

A February 2012 profile of Thiel published by Mark Ames in The Nation noted that the libertarian billionaire “co-authored an anti-affirmative action book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus — a book that belittles ‘imaginary oppressors’ of minorities, blames homophobia on homosexuals and attacks domestic partnerships.”

Halvorssen presented Thiel with an award at the 2010 libertarian film festival, Libertopia, hailing him for “revolutioniz[ing] the monetary system.” The following year, he invited Thiel to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

“I support the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum because their focus on dissidents engages the intellectual debate as well as the moral cause,” he remarked to the website The Street (“Peter Thiel Urges Investing in Human Rights,” 20 June 2011).

Double standards

In response to questions about the Human Rights Foundation’s acceptance of support from Scaife, Thiel and other major donors of Islamophobic and ultra-conservative causes such as the Bradley Foundation, Halvorssen gave this statement to The Electronic Intifada:

Any donation or grant accepted by HRF is done with a categorical understanding that the foundation is free to research and investigate regardless of where such investigations may lead or what conclusions HRF may reach. We encourage funding from anyone who cares about human freedom. This does not mean HRF endorses the views or opinions of its donors. In plain language: We are grateful, privileged and proud that we receive support, as this ultimately means that our mission is being endorsed. This does not, however, mean we agree [with] the views of those who support us. Likewise, some donors on this list may ultimately disagree with the decisions and public statements of HRF. Their inclusion on this list in no way implies that they agree with all of HRF’s positions or activities.

While Halvorssen takes a relaxed view about the activities of his principal funders, he has different standards for where others should get their money.

When actors Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme accepted payments to be celebrity guests at the birthday party of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Russian puppet regime in Chechnya, Halvorssen denounced them. “Hilary Swank obviously has the right to earn a living entertaining the highest bidder, but this sort of venality should be exposed,” he said. “We must remember the disgrace of Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Beyoncé and 50 Cent [who] were exposed … singing for Gaddafi’s family and earning millions of dollars for it” (“Hilary Swank, Van Damme slammed for attending Chechen president party,” Digital Spy UK, 11 October 2011).

As for libertarian ideologue Thiel, Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada: “Peter Thiel is not just a donor, I consider him a personal friend. … Peter’s devotion to human rights, education and nonviolence are extraordinary. We are thrilled to have him as a donor and as a former speaker at [Oslo Freedom Forum].”

This year, the Thiel Foundation is listed as a main supporter of Halvorssen’s forum.

Norwegian government, Amnesty respond

The Electronic Intifada shared some of the information about the Human Rights Foundation’s donors with Ragnhild Imerslund, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs communications chief and spokesperson for Foreign Minister Eide.

Imerslund acknowledged that the Norwegian government has provided 800,000 Norwegian kroner ($138,000) to pay for “participation by Human Rights Defenders from the Global South to the Oslo Freedom Forum 2013,” which she called “an important arena for discussing human rights issues.”

Regarding the donors to the Forum’s producer and creator, Imerslund said only, “Questions regarding sources of funding for the Human Rights Foundation should be directed to them.”

Similarly, Gerald Kador Folkvord, Political Advisor to Amnesty International Norway, wrote that “To the best of our knowledge, none of the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum (mind you, it’s the Forum we are concerned with; who might or might not support the organization Human Rights Foundation outside the Forum does not really concern us as we have no other dealings with them) has been involved in activities undermining human rights so seriously that we couldn’t be part of an event they are sponsoring.”

“The Sarah Scaife Foundation is not listed among the sponsors of the Oslo Freedom Forum,” Amnesty’s Folkvord added. “When it comes to their support, if any, to The Human Rights Foundation, the latter would have to answer for that.”

Folkvord said that Amnesty had paid for one “human rights defender” to travel to Oslo and, “with the other organizations involved, Amnesty participated in discussions around the program of the Oslo Freedom Forum and suggested issues and speakers.”

The Electronic Intifada asked both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Amnesty how they thought members of the Norwegian public would respond to the fact that the Human Rights Foundation — the producer and originator of the Oslo Freedom Forum — counted among its most generous supporters the same donors that sustain the Islamophobic activists cited by Breivik as inspirations. Neither offered a reply.

The right connections

So how did Halvorssen manage to secure funding from Norwegian government sources? And why are government officials so dismissive when presented with evidence that he is simultaneously supported by rightist forces propagating religious bigotry?

A 26 November 2010 report in Norway’s daily Klassekampen offers some possible answers (“Gir millioner til sine egne”).

According to the paper, the Oslo city council increased funding for Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum in 2010 while slashing social spending amid a worsening financial situation. Leading the effort to ramp up public funding of the human rights forum was a politician from the Liberal Party named Ola Elvestuen — the brother of Per Elvestuen.

And who is Per Elvestuen? As Klassekampen revealed, he has been listed as a “coordinator” and “director” of the Oslo Freedom Forum. He is also is a board member ofNy Tid, the magazine owned by Halvorssen and a spokesman for the Halvorssen-owned Hunter Media Inc.

Thanks to a tangled web of high-level connections and an apparent case of nepotism, the Oslo Freedom Forum has thrived.

Fortunate son of Venezuela’s elite

Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez. His mother, Hilda Mendoza Denham, a direct descendant of Venezuela’s first two presidents, is a member of one of her country’s most influential clans.

Halvorssen’s father, also named Thor Halvorssen, was a wealthy heir who gained control over Venezuela’s telecommunications monopoly. In 1989, then-President Carlos Andres Perez appointed Halvorssen Sr. as Venezuela’s “anti-drug ambassador.” That same year, President Perez’s government was responsible for committing one of the worst massacres in modern times: up to 3,000 persons were killed protesting President Perez’s harsh International Money Fund-imposed austerity program (“Victims of Venezuela’s Caracazo clashes reburied,” BBC News, 21 February 2011).

Halvorssen Sr. is reported to have helped expose the secret bank accounts his longtime friend Perez used to embezzle public money, allegedly earning the wrath of the president and his inner circle.

As Perez sought to fend off scrutiny and an electoral challenge, a series of bombs exploded around Caracas. Halvorssen Sr. was immediately arrested and accused of orchestrating a terrorist plot to manipulate the Venezuelan stock market. He was imprisoned under harsh conditions and only freed after 74 days thanks in part to intervention from Amnesty International.

With his father cleared of all charges, Halvorssen Jr. refers to him today as a former “political prisoner,” describing him as the force that helped inspire his interest in human rights. But there was another side to the elder Halvorssen that was wrapped in intrigue and which remains shrouded in mystery.

Besides his role as a businessman and government official, Halvorssen Sr. was a part-time spook who, according to a 19 November 1993 report by the Associated Press, “cooperated with the CIA” and “was used to funnel money to Nicaraguan Contra leader Eden Pastora” (“Trafficker, Alleged Terrorist Penetrated CIA, DEA in Venezuela”).

In her book Hostile Acts, journalist Martha Honey notes that Halvorssen Sr. served during the early 1980s as president of the Committee in Defense of Democracy in Nicaragua, a CIA front group “used to rally regional public opinion against the Sandinistas …” (p. 237).

A 29 November 1993 article by US News and World Report describes Halvorssen Sr. as a “CIA source” and notes that he was also a US Drug Enforcement Agency informant at the time, but that the agency eventually cut him loose, citing his tendency towards “duplicity and manipulation.” According to the report, Halvorssen Sr. “had unusual ties to and knowledge of drug traffickers” (“At play in the fields of the spies”).

Just as the father retreated from the international scene, the son began to make his name.

Anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, anti-Arab

In a 2010 interview with Klassekampen, Halvorssen said, “Personally, I am no right-wing ideologue, as some have described me. I’m liberal. Period” “Jeg er liberalist”). He described himself in the same terms to The Electronic Intifada.

But a look at the early stages of Halvorssen’s career, which he spent as a conservative operative combating gay rights initiatives, feminism and multiculturalism on US college campuses, suggests otherwise.

Like his father, Halvorssen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. He first gained notice in 1994, when he authored a guest commentary for The Daily Pennsylvanian demanding that prospective students be warned before applying to the school that “it may be deadly to live in West Philadelphia,” the mostly African-American area surrounding Penn’s campus.

As editor of the conservative student magazine Red and Blue, Halvorssen courted controversy when the magazine ran a November 1994 column called “One Man’s Vision of Haiti” that was illustrated with a sketch of a voodoo doll. “To the best of my knowledge,” the article’s author wrote, “the only imports from Haiti we have in this country are exiled dictators and cab drivers.”

The article’s publication stirred the outrage of African Americans and Haitians on campus, eventually prompting Penn administrators to temporarily withdraw school funding from Red and Blue. For Halvorssen, the incident crystallized his sense that conservatives on campus were an oppressed minority.

He emerged after college as the executive director of a newfangled right-wing group called FIRE, or the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, defending evangelical students against charges of anti-gay discrimination and combating hate crimes legislation.

FIRE has been funded by two right-wing foundations that also support Halvorssen’s human rights mini-empire: the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, an evangelical outfit directed by John Templeton Jr., a veteran right-wing activist who hasdonated more than $1 million to ban same-sex marriage in California. In 2009, HRF notedthat the Oslo Freedom Forum “was made possible in large part thanks to a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.”

Right-wing campus operations

Halvorssen also found work at the time as a program director for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another prominent right-wing campus operation. Under his direction, the group condemned the establishment of a women’s studies program at Yale University, complaining in an 1 April 1998 press release that the program “delves into the most radical issues of militant feminism and homosexuality while completely ignoring traditional female roles.”

Halvorssen’s political empire expanded with his founding of the Moving Picture Institute, a libertarian film company that produced “Mine Your Own Business.” Financed by a Canadian mining company, the film was promoted as “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary” (“A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect,” The New York Times, 19 August 2007). The Moving Picture Institute received more than $300,000 through Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust from 2005 through 2011, according to those organizations’ IRS filings.

Next, Halvorssen oversaw the making of a 2007 documentary called Indoctrinate U (the entire film is on YouTube). The film features an amateur conservative filmmaker named Evan Coyne Maloney wandering around campuses attempting to interrogate befuddled school administrators and poking fun at feminist students who had established women’s centers on their campuses.

Towards the end of Indoctrinate U, Daniel Pipes and ultra-Zionist scholar Martin Kramersurface as talking heads, warning that Arab donors have been stealthily guiding the anti-American agenda of university departments.

Kramer also appears on the pages of Breivik’s manifesto making remarkably similar statements: the killer quotes him attacking the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Saidand complaining that “academics were so preoccupied with ‘Muslim Martin Luthers’ that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis of bin Laden and his indictment of America.”

Campaign for Venezuela regime change

In 2004, Venezuela’s US-backed political opposition lost a hard-fought 2004 referendum aimed at recalling Chavez, whom it considered illegitimate from the start. The voting resultswere certified by former US President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center as “reflect[ing] the will of the Venezuelan electorate.” According to the Carter Center, “balloting day was conducted in an environment virtually absent of any violence or intimidation.”

However, at an earlier opposition protest rally demanding Chavez’s ouster, Halvorssen’s mother was shot and wounded, allegedly by a Chavez loyalist.

It was then that Halvorssen claimed to realize that “defending [college] students’ rights while there were people in Venezuela being shot for disagreeing with the government” was “a little absurd” (“My dinner with Thor,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, March-April 2008).

He embarked on an international campaign for regime change in Venezuela, with his Human Rights Foundation leading the way.

In 2005, Halvorssen took to the neoconservative Weekly Standard to paint Chavez as an anti-Semitic dictator seeking to establish a “resistance bloc” that placed the US, Europe and Israel in grave danger. Halvorssen called for “democratic alternatives to Chavez,” describing him as a key supporter of “terrorist groups in South America and terror sponsors in the Middle East.”

That same year, Halvorssen appeared as a guest on the radical right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s television program The 700 Club. A week before hosting Halvorssen, Robertson had urged the US to “take him [Chavez] out,” declaring, “if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

When Robertson denied calling for Chavez’s assassination — an obvious falsehood — Halvorssen leaped in to defend his host. “The person who began this, who started the concept of assassination for political reasons, was in fact Hugo Chavez, and his foreign minister is a former guerrilla terrorist,” Halvorssen told Robertson. “They basically have no standing to criticize anyone who made remarks that like — you know, that were misinterpreted, like the ones you made.”

Halvorssen’s obsession with overthrowing Chavez deepened after the president was re-elected. In 2008, Halvorssen railed against the actor and film producer Danny Glover in an editorial for Fox News, accusing him of “coddling Chavez” for accepting financing from the Venezuelan government for two films in development. He went on to accuse Hollywood supporters of Chavez of providing “a terrific boost” to the morale of Palestinian “terrorists.” The source for Halvorssen’s unusual claim was Aaron Klein, a writer for the far-right conspiracy site WorldNetDaily (“Hollywood A-Listers Prove Ignorance in Supporting Hugo Chavez,” 31 March 2008).

Venezuelan terror-sympathizer hired by Human Rights Foundation

Also in 2008, Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation hired Aleksander Boyd, a Venezuelan opposition representative based in London. Boyd was a notorious promoter of terrorism against Venezuela’s elected government, having written the following on his website:

“I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” He later declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with Chavez” (“Friends in low places,” The Guardian, 1 September 2007).

When the Norwegian magazine Manifest criticized Halvorssen’s hiring of Boyd in a 12 May 2010 exposé, Halvorssen responded, “We knew of his comments before we hired Boyd and asked him about these comments and he stated, plainly, that it was an entry in his dream diary that was online.” He added that Boyd left the Human Rights Foundation in 2009.

In 2010, Halvorssen invited his first cousin, the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Lopez, the Harvard-educated mayor of a wealthy district in Caracas, was among the politicians who signed as witnesses in the new government after Chavez was briefly ousted in the failed US-backed coup in 2002.

Lopez is the son of a former oil executive — Halvorssen’s aunt — who allegedly funnelled profits from the state-run oil company into his new political party, leading to corruption charges that placed his political ambitions in peril, as the Associated Press reported in February (“Leopoldo Lopez, Opponent Of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Faces Corruption Charges In Venezuela”).

Described by the US embassy in Venezuela as “vindictive, and power-hungry” but also as “a necessity,” Lopez received large sums of financial support from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.

At the 2009 Oslo Freedom Forum, Lopez was a presented as a “human rights leader,”appearing at an event that had been graced by Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel and Nobel nominee Vaclav Havel. He stirred his audience with lofty rhetoric about peace, democracy and the coming wave of freedom, casting the Venezuelan opposition as “David against Goliath.” “We know that we will overcome,” Lopez proclaimed, “we know that change will come in Venezuela.”

Noting that Lopez’s appearance at the Oslo Freedom Forum was covered far more heavily in Venezuelan media than in Oslo, where it was virtually ignored, Manifest accused Halvorssen of using his human rights confab for the purpose of “whitewashing Leopoldo Lopez … to establish a real contender for the Venezuelan presidency.”

The magazine described the Oslo Freedom Forum as a cleverly crafted “Washing Machine.”

The burden of knowing

Are those who gathered on stage at the human rights “Davos” being used to whitewash the ulterior political agenda of an ambitious conservative operative with ties to sectarian plutocrats and conspiratorial Islamophobes? Do they know about Halvorssen’s real history, about his funders and friends among America’s far-right? Most may not.

Unfortunately for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and Amnesty International, they are not among those with the luxury of pleading ignorance.

Presented with the revelations uncovered by The Electronic Intifada, they dismissed them as immaterial, and even irrelevant. In a city still scarred by Breivik’s rampage, it is hard to imagine that these facts could be so easily washed away.

Ali Abunimah contributed research to this article.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.

(Update I and II below)

After the September 11th attacks, many Americans wondered, “why do they hate us?”  President George Bush gave his now famous explanation: “They hate our freedoms.”  Radical Islam, we are told, is to blame.

When someone dares counter this argument by pointing out that “Muslim rage” is due to U.S. foreign policy, accusations of disloyalty quickly abound.  Ron Paul was chastised when he had the audacity to claim that they didn’t attack us because of our freedoms, but rather “they attack us because we’ve been over there [bombing them].”  In other words, they terrorize us because we’ve been terrorizing them.

Yet, the terrorists themselves consistently explain why they attack us.  Osama bin Laden himself responded to George Bush:

Contrary to what Bush says and claims — that we hate freedom –let him tell us then, “Why did we not attack Sweden?” … Bush is…misleading you and not telling you the true reason.

The real reason, explained Bin Laden, was that

we had to destroy the towers in America so that they taste what we tasted, and they stop killing our women and children… Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

Subsequent terrorists have consistently confessed similar motivations, whether it be the Times Square bomber or the Fort Hood shooter.  Time and time again, the terrorists give the same explanations: they attack the United States because the United States is attacking Muslims.

With the Boston Marathon bombings, once again Americans repeat Bushian explanations.  The vapid radio personality Adam Carolla explained:

They hate our culture. They hate our way of life.

Why Americans simply can’t fathom that it is U.S. foreign policy that motivates terrorists is understandable: it would be too difficult on the American psyche to admit fault–to admit that our own foreign policy is criminal and the ultimate source of a legitimate grievance.  It is far easier to lay the blame on another religion.

So, once again, we are told that the Boston Marathon bombers were “motivated by religion.”  This is what “anonymous U.S. officials” told the media, who then unthinkingly regurgitated it:

Two U.S. officials say preliminary evidence from an interrogation suggests the suspects in the Boston Marathon attack were motivated by their religious views but were apparently not tied to any Islamic terrorist groups.

The two brothers, from southern Russia, practiced Islam.

The U.S. officials spoke Monday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.

Notice that the U.S. officials “were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation”–but they discussed it with reporters anyways.  This is typical of the U.S. government-media relationship: journalists grant anonymity to government officials, who can then freely spread their propaganda while at the same time hiding behind the wall of anonymity when challenged.  (Glenn Greenwald has written extensively on this practice.)

And so, Americans will continue to believe the myth that the terrorists attack us simply because of their religious views.  This successfully shrouds the real underlying reason: U.S. foreign policy.

“Muslim rage” toward the United States has to do with the fact that the United States has been continuously bombing, invading, and occupying multiple Muslim countries.  This is a process that began in the early 1990′s–over two decades of U.S. warmongering in the region.  (And actually, U.S. interference in the Middle East begins way before that.)

The Tsaernev brothers may well have been becoming more religious.  But, that’s only half the story–and it’s the half that’s less important.  The more important half is what the government and media isn’t telling.

The Tsaernev brothers were ethnically Chechen.  As has been pointed out by many in the media, Chechens don’t necessarily have a particularly antagonistic view towards the United States.  Why should they?  Their “beef” is with the Russians.

However, the Tsaernev brothers were becoming more religious.  As such, it is only natural that their affiliation and self-identity became closer tied to Muslim.  Once they started identifying themselves more as Muslims, they naturally grew closer in affiliation to the Muslim community worldwide (the Ummah).  This sensitized them to conflicts in the Muslim majority world, including the U.S.-led incursions in the region.  Therefore, the turn to religion did facilitate their eventual commission of the terrorist attacks, but only because it caused them to identify with the people who are being attacked by the United States.

It is true that the Koran commands believers to come to the defense of other Muslims:

And why should you not fight in God’s cause when defenseless men, women, and children are being oppressed and cry out, “Lord, rescue us from this land whose people are oppressors! By Your Grace, give us a protector and give us a helper.” (Koran, 4:75)

But, is this not a universal moral principle?  Few people, aside from extreme pacifists, would argue that it is immoral to defend “defenseless men, women, and children who are being oppressed.”

That the Tsaernev brothers would respond to this call means that they identify the United States as the oppressor.  It is less that the religion itself caused the Tsaernev brothers to plan these attacks, and more the fact that the U.S. is bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim lands.  If this weren’t the case, the Tsaernev brothers would hardly have identified the U.S. with the oppressors mentioned in the Koranic verse.

Islam does advocate fighting oppressors to save the oppressed, but this is hardly something immoral.  Rather, it would be immoral to deny the right of the oppressed to defend themselves against the oppressors.  Where the Tsaernev brothers left the Koranic injunctions and Islamic tradition was in their targeting of civilians instead of military targets. The Koran declares:

Fight in God’s cause only against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression, for surely, God does not love aggressors. (Koran, 2:190)

The Prophet Muhammad is said to have explicitly forbidden the targeting of non-combatants, specifically women and children.

Islamic extremists like the Tsaernev brothers are not following the Koran or Islamic teachings when they commit acts of terrorism against innocents.  Rather, they are flouting long-held Islamic prohibitions against targeting non-combatants.  The extremists justify this departure from Koranic and Islamic law by claiming that the times are so exigent that an emergency suspension of this prohibition must be declared, i.e. the only way to stop them from killing our civilians is by killing theirs.  This twisted logic is the same used by many in the West to justify nuclear warfare.

Other Muslims counter the Islamic extremists by invoking Koranic and Islamic injunction, declaring such suspension of the religious law to be religiously baseless.  So, it is misleading to say that the Tsaernev brothers were motivated by religion and just leave it at that.  Islamic extremists like the Tsaernev brothers follow the Koranic injunction to come to the defense of the innocents (at least in their minds that’s what they are doing), but they suspend and contravene the religious laws regarding the conduct of such defensive war.  In other words, they uphold (part of) the Islamic jus ad bellum (right to wage war) but refuse to follow the Islamic jus in bello (conduct of war).

It is thus important to remember that:

(1) the right to wage war that these Islamic extremists invoke is rooted in not just Koranic scripture, but is part of universal moral principles (and is enshrined in the Just War Theory).

(2) The U.S.’s actions, not religious scripture (since, as discussed in point #1, it is a shared universal moral principle),  are the ultimate cause of inspiration for terrorists.  If, for example, the Koran still existed but the U.S. hadn’t been continuously bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim lands, it is very unlikely that the Islamic extremists would have selected the U.S. to target.  (As Osama bin Laden asked, ”Why did we not attack Sweden?”)  On the other hand, if the Koran and Islam never existed, the people in the Muslim world would still seek to defend themselves against U.S. aggression, the only difference being that their resistance would be colored in national or ethnic instead of religious colors.  (One could reasonably argue that religious motivation instills greater fanaticism to resistance movements, but nonetheless, people of any or no religion would seek to defend themselves against invaders.)

(3) The Tsaernev brothers may have been motivated by religion, but they ignored that same religion when it came to the conduct of war, which reinforces point #2: resistance is colored by religion only, but really it is a universal human desire to fight back against invaders.

Of course, it’s more reassuring to Americans to think that these terrorists keep attacking us because of their religion.  It’s far easier to point the finger at some other extrinsic cause rather than at oneself.  This makes us feel good about ourselves: we are the good guys being attacked by the bad guys.  It’s hard to accept that the pan-ultimate motivator for why they attack us is our own actions in their lands: bombing, invading, and occupying them for over two decades.

One could argue that I don’t know for certain that U.S. foreign policy is the ultimate motivator for the Tsaernev brothers because this information has yet to be released, but it’s a matter of such obviousness–and it has been proven over and over again once the motivations of previous Muslim terrorists were revealed–that I say it with utmost certainty.  It’s a simple answer to the question “why do they attack us”, as opposed to the simplistic answer that they hate us for our freedoms or because of their religion.

The Boston Globe declared: “It doesn’t matter why they hate us, they just do.” If fellow Americans really don’t think it matters why they hate us–or think “they just do” for no legitimate reason at all–we shouldn’t expect an end to such horrific terrorist attacks, and we can’t just keep claiming to be absolutely flabbergasted when the next attack comes.

UPDATE:

Incidentally, Glenn Greenwald just published an article on the very same topic, and it is very much worth the read.

UPDATE II:

Just as I predicted: the Huffington Post reports (hat tip: JD):

Boston Bombing Suspects Motivated By Afghanistan, Iraq Wars: Report

The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post…

So, the primary motivation to target the United States was not religious but political.

Danios was the Brass Crescent Award Honorary Mention for Best Writer in 2010 and the Brass Crescent Award Winner for Best Writer in 2011.  Due to a hectic work schedule, Danios took a “sabbatical” from LoonWatch in 2012, but he plans to write from time to time in 2013, as time allows.

Original Guest Post

by Jai Singh

There is currently increasing journalistic scrutiny of the atheist British scientist Richard Dawkins and his ally Sam Harris’ statements about Islam and Muslims. In December 2012, the Guardian published an excellent article highlighting the acclaimed physicist Professor Peter Higgs’ accurate observations about Dawkins’ pattern of behaviour when it comes to religion in general; Professor Higgs (of “Higgs Boson particle” fame) has forcefully criticised Dawkins. More recently, superb articles by Nathan Lean in Salon (focusing on Dawkins), Murtaza Hussain for Al Jazeera (focusing on Dawkins, Harris etc) and Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian (mentions Dawkins but focuses predominantly on Harris; also see here) have received considerable publicity. Readers are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the information in all of these articles.

Before I address the issue of Richard Dawkins, it is worthwhile highlighting some key information about his ally Sam Harris. As mentioned in Glenn Greenwald’s extensively-researched Guardian article, Harris is on record as a) claiming that fascists are “the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe”, and b) stating “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”. Furthermore, bear in mind the following paragraph from a previous Guardian article about Harris: “…..But it tips over into something much more sinister in Harris’ latest book. He suggests that Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are “utterly deranged by their religious faith”. In another passage Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”.”

Richard Dawkins’ “atheist anti-religion” agenda has noticeably become increasingly focused on Islam & Muslims; his online statements (recently including his Twitter account ) have now become so extreme that a great deal of them are essentially indistinguishable from the bigoted, ignorant nonsense pushed by the English Defence League leadership and the main US-based anti-Muslim propagandists such as Robert Spencer etc.

In fact, as Nathan Lean’s Salon article mentioned, the following very revealing information recently surfaced: It turns out that Dawkins has publicly admitted that he hasn’t even read the Quran even though (in his own words) he “often says Islam is the greatest force for evil today”. Mainstream Islamic theology (including the associated impact on Muslim history) is not based solely on the Quran, of course, but Dawkins’ admission is indicative of a number of major problems on his part. So much for the credibility of Richard Dawkins’ “scientific method” in this particular subject. It goes without saying that this also raised questions about exactly which dubious second-hand sources Dawkins has been getting his information on Islam and Muslims from, if he hasn’t even taken the normal professional academic steps of reading the primary sacred text of the religion he has also described as “an unmitigated evil”. Not to mention the question of Dawkins’ real motivations for his current fixation with Islam and Muslims.

Well, it appears that some answers are available. It certainly explains a great deal about Richard Dawkins’ behaviour. In the main part of this article beneath the “Summary” section below, I have listed 54 anti-Islam/anti-Muslim statements posted by Richard Dawkins on the discussion forum of one of his own websites. (The list of quotes also includes embedded URL links directly to the original statements on Dawkins’ website).

Summary of Richard Dawkins’ actions

1. There is a direct connection to Robert Spencer’s inner circle. As confirmed by the URL link supplied by Richard Dawkins in quote #11, Dawkins has definitely been using that cabal’s anti-Muslim propaganda as a source of “information” for his own statements; Dawkins specifically links to the “Islam-Watch” website, which is a viciously anti-Muslim site in the same vein as JihadWatch and Gates of Vienna (both of which were the most heavily cited sources in the terrorist Anders Breivik’s manifesto). More pertinently, as confirmed by this affiliated webpage, the core founders & members of that website include the currently-unidentified individual who uses the online alias “Ali Sina”. This is the same fake “atheist Iranian ex-Muslim” who is a senior board member of “SIOA”/“SION”, an extremely anti-Muslim organisation whose leadership is formally allied with racist white supremacists & European neo-Nazis and has even organised joint public demonstrations with them. “Ali Sina” himself was also cited by Breivik in his manifesto.

Note that the SIOA/SION leadership inner circle includes: a) AFDI and JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer, an ordained Catholic deacon who has been proven to have repeatedly made false statements about Islam & Muslims and has publicly admitted that his actions are heavily motivated by his (unilateral) agenda for the dominance of the Catholic Church; b) AFDI and Atlas Shrugs’ Pamela Geller, who is now on record as advocating what is effectively a “Final Solution” targeting British Muslims, including mass-murder; c) the English Defence League leadership; and d) David Yerushalmi, the head of an organisation whose mission statement explicitly declares that its members are “dedicated to the rejection of democracy” in the United States. Furthermore, Yerushalmi believes that American women shouldn’t even have the right to vote.

Extensive details on “Ali Sina” are available here. Quite a few of the quotes in that article are horrifying. Bear in mind that this is the person whose website Richard Dawkins has publicly cited and promoted. “Ali Sina” is on record as making statements such as the following:

“Muhammad was not a prophet of God. He was an instrument of Satan to divide mankind so we destroy each other. It is a demonic plot to end humanity.”

“I don’t see Muslims as innocent people. They are all guilty as sin. It is not necessary to be part of al Qaida to be guilty. If you are a Muslim you agree with Muhammad and that is enough evidence against you.”

“Muslims, under the influence of Islam lose their humanity. They become beasts. Once a person’s mind is overtaken by Islam, every trace of humanity disappears from him. Islam reduces good humans into beasts.”

[Addressing all Muslims] “We will do everything to save you, to make you see your folly, and to make you understand that you are victims of a gigantic lie, so you leave this lie, stop hating mankind and plotting for its destruction and it [sic] domination. But if all efforts fail and you become a threat to our lives and the lives of our children, we must amputate you. This will happen, not because I say so, but I say so because this is human response. We humans are dictated by our survival instinct. If you threaten me and my survival depends on killing you, I must kill you.”

“Muslims are part of humanity, but they are the diseased limb of mankind. We must strive to rescue them. We must do everything possible to restore their health. That is the mission of FFI [“Faith Freedom International”, “Ali Sina’s” primary website]. However, if a limb becomes gangrenous; if it is infected by necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), that limb must be amputated.”

[Addressing all Muslims] “But you are diseased. You are infected by a deadly cult that threatens our lives. Your humanity is destroyed. Like a limb infected by flesh eating disease, you are now a threat to the rest of mankind…..Islam is disease. What does moderate Muslim mean anyway? Does it mean you are moderately diseased?”

“But there was another element in shaping his [Muhammad’s] character: The influence of Rabbis. Islam and Judaism have a lot in common. They have basically the same eschatology and very similar teachings…..These are all secondary influences of Judaism on Islam. The main common feature between these two faiths is their intolerance. This intolerance in Judaic texts gave the narcissist Muhammad the power to do as he pleased…..How could he get away with that? Why would people believed [sic] in his unproven and often irrational claims? The answer to this question is in Judaism. The Rabbis in Arabia had laid the psychological foundations for Islam among the tolerant pagans…..The reasons Arabs fell into his [Muhammad’s] trap was because of the groundwork laid by the Rabbis in Arabia.”

“Muhammad copied his religion from what he learned from the Jews. The similarity between Islamic thinking and Judaic thinking is not a coincidence.”

“By seeing these self-proclaimed moderate Muslims, I can understand the anger that Jesus felt against those hypocrites whom he called addressed, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

“In Christianity, it wasn’t the religion that needed to be reformed but the church. What Jesus preached was good.”

“The image portrays the words of Jesus, “the truth will set you free.” That is my motto…..After listening to this rabbi, I somehow felt sympathy for Jesus. I can now see what kind of people he had to deal with.”

2. After Nathan Lean and Glenn Greenwald published the aforementioned Salon and Guardian articles, both “Ali Sina” and Robert Spencer rapidly wrote lengthy articles on their respective websites defending Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. It would therefore be constructive for Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to publicly clarify if they welcome or reject “Ali Sina” & Robert Spencer’s support. It would also be constructive for Dawkins and Harris to publicly clarify the nature and extent of their involvement with “Ali Sina” & Robert Spencer.

3. Richard Dawkins’ anti-Islam/anti-Muslim narrative (including the stereotyped caricature and his own convoluted strawman arguments) is essentially identical to the hatred-inciting, theologically-, historically- & factually-distorted/falsified propaganda promoted by Far-Right groups such as the English Defence League and especially the owners of JihadWatch and Gates of Vienna. This is clearly not just a coincidence, considering Dawkins’ online sources of [mis]information.

4. Richard Dawkins is now on record as making a series of extremely derogatory statements in which he bizarrely refers to Islam (a religious belief system) as though it were a conscious, sentient entity (see #5, #32, #36, #49). The nature of those statements suggests that Dawkins is actually referring to Muslims. (Also see #7).

5. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly defending Sam Harris, including Harris’ claims about Muslims and Islam (see #42, #43).

6. Richard Dawkins is now on record as enthusiastically praising the Dutch Far-Right politician Geert Wilders (see #50).

7. Richard Dawkins is now on record as publicly claiming that “communities” has become code for “Muslims” (see #18) and that “multiculturalism” in Europe is code for “Islam” (see #19).

8. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly praising & defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see #20, #26, #50). Hirsi Ali has been proven to have fabricated aspects of her background/experiences (as confirmed by the BBC). Hirsi Ali is also on record as revealing the full scale of her horrific beliefs, including the fact that she sympathises with Anders Breivik and blames so-called “advocates of silence” for Breivik’s mass-murdering terrorist attack.

9. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly promoting the Far-Right conspiracy theory that British police avoid prosecuting Muslims due to fears of being labelled “racist” or “Islamophobic” (see #1, #24, #28, #45). Robert Spencer & Pamela Geller’s closest European allies, the English Defence League leadership, are amongst the most vocal advocates of this ridiculous conspiracy theory.

10. Richard Dawkins is now on record as explicitly describing himself as “a cultural Christian” (see #54).

11. Richard Dawkins is now on record as proposing what is basically an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, specifically in terms of Christians vs. Muslims (see here and here. Also see #16). This raises questions about exactly how much support Dawkins has secretly been giving to certain extremist anti-Muslim individuals/groups, or at least how much he is personally aware that these groups are explicitly recycling Dawkins’ own rhetoric when demonising Islam & Muslims.

12. Richard Dawkins is now on record as exhibiting very disturbing attitudes towards the British Muslim Member of Parliament Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and the British Muslim Independent journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, including repeatedly making highly offensive claims that they are “tokens” with zero qualifications for their respective jobs and are in positions of seniority/influence solely because they are “female, Muslim and brown/non-white” (See #25, #29, #30, #31, #35, #53). Dawkins clearly shares the EDL leadership’s noticeable hostility towards Baroness Warsi in particular; furthermore, note Dawkins’ sneering “open letter” to Baroness Warsi (see #29), and also note the fact that the EDL leadership recently published a similar “open letter” to Baroness Warsi on their main website, written by an unidentified anonymous author.

13. Richard Dawkins has published a lengthy diatribe by Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller/EDL ally/SIOE co-founder Stephen Gash.

14. Richard Dawkins has enthusiastically republished a large number of viciously anti-Muslim comments originally posted on the discussion thread of a Telegraph article written by Baroness Warsi. Dawkins claimed that the only reason he was reproducing these comments on his own website was “because the Telegraph is apparently censoring them”.

15. Despite the claims of Richard Dawkins’ defenders that he is an “equal opportunity offender” in terms of his criticisms of various organised religions, the aforementioned 54 quotes speak for themselves and Dawkins’ real pattern of behaviour is self-evident. Amongst other things, it raises the question of whether Dawkins was already perfectly aware that the anti-Islam/anti-Muslim propaganda he is basing his statements on originates in members of Robert Spencer’s extremist inner circle and their respective hate websites (which would have very nasty implications about Dawkins himself), or whether Dawkins has been astonishingly incompetent about researching his sources of “information”.

16. Further information on Richard Dawkins’ other activities targeting Islam & Muslims is available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Examples of statements by Richard Dawkins:
#1: [Quoting: “No I don’t think it was racist to feel that way. If you saw a European mistreating his wife in public wouldn’t you feel the same? “] “Of course. In that case I might have called a policeman. If you see a Muslim beating his wife, there would be little point in calling a policeman because so many of the British police are terrified of being accused of racism or ‘Islamophobia’.”

#2: “Religion poisons everything. But Islam has its own unmatched level of toxicity.”

#3: “Religion poisons everything, but Islam is in a toxic league of its own.”

#4: “…..But let’s keep things in proportion. Christianity may be pretty bad, but isn’t Islam in a league of its own when it comes to sheer vicious nastiness?”

#5: [Quoting: “He blamed ‘radical stupid people who don't know what Islam is,’”] “They are certainly stupid, but they know exactly what Islam is. Islam is the religion that wins arguments by killing its opponents and crying ‘Islamophobia’ at anyone who objects.”

#6: “This horrible film deserves to go viral. What a pathetic religion: how ignominious to need such aggressively crazed defenders.”

#7: “Muslims seem to suffer from an active HUNGER to be offended. If there’s nothing obvious to be offended by, or ‘hurt’ by, they’ll go out looking for something. Are there any other similar examples we could think of, I wonder, not necessarily among religious groups?”

#8: “Paula’s letter in today’s Independent (see above) will doubtless provoke lots of fatuous bleats of “Oh but Islam is a peaceful religion.””

#9: [Quoting: “But it has nothing to do with islam.”] “Oh no? Then why do the perpetrators, and the mullahs and imams and ayatollahs and ‘scholars’, continually SAY it has everything to do with Islam? You may not think it has anything to do with Islam, but I prefer to listen to what the people responsible actually say. I would also love it if decent, ‘moderate’ Muslims would stand up and condemn the barbarisms that are carried out, or threatened, in their name.”

#10: “What is there left to say about Sharia Law? Who will defend it? Who can find something, anything, good to say about Islam?”

#11: [Quoting: “needed to respect other religions”] “That word ‘other’ worries me and so does ‘respect’. ‘Other’ than what? What is the default religion which makes the word ‘other’ appropriate? What is this ‘other’ religion, which is being invoked in this high-handed, peremptory way. It isn’t hard to guess the answer. Islam. Yet again, Islam, the religion of peace, the religion that imposes the death penalty for apostasy, the religion whose legal arm treats women officially as second class citizens, the religion that sentences women to multiple lashes for the crime of being raped, the religion whose ‘scholars’ have been known to encourage women to suckle male colleagues so that they can be deemed ‘family’ and hence allowed to work in the same room; the religion that the rest of us are called upon to ‘respect’ for fear of being thought racist or ‘Islamophobic’. Respect? RESPECT?”

#12: “All three of the Abrahamic religions are deeply evil if they take their teachings seriously. Islam is the only one that does.”

#13: “Yes, Christians are much much better. Their sacred texts may be just as bad, but they don’t act on them.”

#14: “Quite the contrary. I think the problem [with Islam] is with the MAJORITY of Muslims, who either condone violence or fail to speak out against it. I am now praising the MINORITY who have finally decided to stand up for peace and nonviolence.”

#15: [Quoting: “Actually I think linking to every video this bigot releases does look like an endorsement, even if it's unintentional. Why not link to some news items by some other right wing bigots the BNP or the EDL, they're always banging on about Islam so it should qualify.”] “I support Pat [Condell]’s stance on Islam. It is NOT based on racism like that of the BNP, and he is properly scathing about so-called ‘Islamophobia’.”

#16: “After the last census, Christianity in Britain benefited, in terms of political influence, from the approximately 70% who ticked the Christian box, whether or not they were really believers. With the menacing rise of Islam, some might even be tempted to tick the Christian box, for fear of doing anything to boost the influence of the religion of “peace””.

#17: [Quoting: “What sort of justice is this? My daughter has been beaten to death in the name of justice,” Mosammet's father, Dorbesh Khan, 60, told the BBC.] “What sort of justice? Islamic justice of course.”

#18: “Just as ‘communities’ has become code for ‘Muslims’, ‘multiculturalism’ is code for a systematic policy of sucking up to their often loathsome ‘community leaders’: imams, mullahs, ‘clerics’, and the ill-named ‘scholars’.”

#19: “Forgive me for not welcoming this judgment with unalloyed joy. If I thought the motive was secularist I would indeed welcome it. But are we sure it is not pandering to ‘multiculturalism’, which in Europe is code for Islam? And if you think Catholicism is evil . . .”

#20: “I don’t think this is a matter for levity. Think of it as a foretaste of more serious things to come. They’ve already hounded Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of Holland and their confidence is growing with their population numbers, encouraged by the craven accommodationist mentality of nice, decent Europeans. This particular move to outlaw dogs will fail, but Muslim numbers will continue to grow unless we can somehow break the memetic link between generations: break the assumption that children automatically adopt the religion of their parents.”

#21: “I said that Islam is evil. I did NOT say Muslims are evil. Indeed, most of the victims of Islam are Muslims. Especially female ones.”

#22: “Whenever I read an article like this, I end up shaking my head in bafflement. Why would anyone want to CONVERT to Islam? I can see why, having been born into it, you might be reluctant to leave, perhaps when you reflect on the penalty for doing to. But for a woman (especially a woman) voluntarily to JOIN such a revolting and misogynistic institution when she doesn’t have to always suggests to me massive stupidity. And then I remember our own very intelligent Layla Nasreddin / Lisa Bauer and retreat again to sheer, head-shaking bafflement.”

#23: “Apologists for Islam would carry more conviction if so-called ‘community’ leaders would ever go to the police and report the culprits. That would solve, at a stroke, the problem that has been exercising posters here. ‘Community’ leaders are best placed to know what is going on on their ‘communities’. Why don’t they report the perpetrators to the police and have them jailed?”

#24: “Presumably we shall hear all the usual accommodationist bleats about “Nothing to do with Islam”, and “It’s cultural, not religious” and “Islam doesn’t approve the practice”. Whether or not Islam approves the practice depends – as with the death penalty for apostasy – on which ‘scholar’ you talk to. Islamic ‘scholar’? What a joke. What a sick, oxymoronic joke. Islamic ‘scholar’!
It is of course true that not all Muslims mutilate their daughters, or approve it. But I conjecture that it is true that virtually all, if not literally all, the 24,000 girls referred to come from Muslim families. And all, or virtually all those who wield the razor blade (or the broken glass or whatever it is) are devout Muslims. And above all, the reason the police turn a blind eye to this disgusting practice is that they THINK it is sanctioned by Islam, or they think it is no business of anybody outside the ‘community’, and they are TERRIFIED of being called ‘Islamophobic’ or racist.”

#25: “Apologies if this has already been said here, but “Baroness” Warsi has no sensible qualifications for high office whatever. She has never won an election and never distinguished herself in any of the ways that normally lead to a peerage. All she has achieved in life is to FAIL to be elected a Member of Parliament, twice (on one occasion ignominiously bucking the swing towards her party). She was, nevertheless, elevated to the peerage and rather promptly put in the Cabinet and the Privy Council. The only reasonable explanation for her rapid elevation is tokenism. She is female, Muslim, and non-white – a bundle of three tokens in one, and therefore a precious rarity in her party. You might have suspected her lack of proper qualifications from the fatuous things she says, of which her speech in Rome is a prime example.”

#26: [Quoting: “Muslim extremists have called for Aan to be beheaded but fellow atheists have rallied round, and urged him to stand by his convictions despite the pressure.”] “For one sadly short moment I thought the ‘but’ was going to be followed by ‘moderate Muslims have rallied round . . .’ Once again, where are the decent, moderate Muslims? Why do they not stand up in outrage against their co-religionists? Maybe Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right and “moderate Muslim” is something close to an oxymoron. How can they not see that, if you need to kill to protect your faith, that is a powerful indication that you have lost the argument? It is impossible to exaggerate how deeply I despise them.”

#27: “There are moves afoot to introduce sharia law into Britain, Canada and various other countries. I hope it is not too “islamophobic” of me to hope that the “interpretation” of sharia favoured by our local Muslim “scholars” will be different from the “interpretation” favoured by Iranian “scholars”. Oh but of course: “That’s not my kind of Islam.””

#28: [Quoting: “Richard, I really dislike disagreeing with you. However, female genital mutilation is not really based on Islam. My wife is from Indonesia and I have asked around and none of them know of anyone who does that in their country. From all that I have read and seen, it seems like it predates islam and is mostly found in Africa and to a lesser extent the Middle East.”] “Even if you are right (and I am not necessarily conceding the point) that FGM itself is not based on Islam, I strongly suspect that the British police turning a blind eye to it is very strongly based on islamophobophobia – the abject terror of being thought islamophobic.”

#29: “Dear Lady Warsi
Is it true that the Islamic penalty for apostasy is death? Please answer the question, yes or no. I have asked many leading Muslims, often in public, and have yet to receive a straight answer. The best answer I heard was from “Sir” Iqbal Sacranie, who said “Oh well, it is seldom enforced.”
Will you please stand up in the House of Lords and publicly denounce the very idea that, however seldom enforced, a religion has the right to kill those who leave it? And will you stand up and agree that, since a phobia is an irrational fear, “Islamophobic” is not an appropriate description of anybody who objects to it. And will you stand up and issue a public apology, on behalf of your gentle, peaceful religion, to Salman Rushdie? And to Theo van Gogh? And to all the women and girls who have been genitally mutilated? And to . . . I’m sure you know the list better than I do.
Richard Dawkins”

#30: [Quoting: “Blimey Richard! This really has got up your nose, hasn't it? Your comments are usually a great deal more measured. It's not exactly uncommon for a Minister to “rise without trace”. I think we can all agree that our political system is “sub-optimal” to put it politely. Tokensim is one possibility (though if the Tories were really just after the muslim vote its interesting that they opted for a female muslim token).”] “I didn’t mean to suggest that the Tories were after the Muslim vote. I think they know that is a lost cause. I suspect that they were trying to live down their reputation as the nasty party, the party of racists, the party of sexists, the Church of England at prayer. More particularly, the ceaseless propaganda campaign against “Islamophobia” corrupts them just as it corrupts so many others. I suspect that the Tory leadership saw an opportunity to kill two, or possibly three, birds with one stone, by elevating this woman to the House of Lords and putting her in the Cabinet.
I repeat, her [Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s] qualifications for such a meteoric rise, as the youngest member of the House of Lords, are tantamount to zero. As far as I can see, her only distinction is to have stood for election to the House of Commons and lost. That’s it.
Apart, of course, from being female, Muslim, and brown. Like I said, killing three birds with one stone.”

#31: “Baroness Warsi has never been elected to Parliament. What are her qualifications to be in the Cabinet? Does anyone seriously think she would be in the Cabinet, or in the House of Lords, if she was not a Muslim woman? Is her elevation to high office (a meteoric rise, for she is the youngest member of the House of Lords) any more than a deplorable example of tokenism?”

#32: “I too heard Paul Foot speak at the Oxford Union, and he was a mesmerising orator, even as an undergraduate. Once again, Christopher Hitchens nails it. It is the nauseating presumption of Islam that marks it out for special contempt. I remain baffled at the number of otherwise decent people who can be seduced by such an unappealing religion. I suppose it must be childhood indoctrination, but it is still hard to credit. If you imagine setting up an experiment to see how far you could go with childhood indoctrination – a challenge to see just how nasty a belief system you could instil into a human mind if you catch it early enough – it is hard to imagine succeeding with a belief system half as nasty as Islam. And yet succeed they do.”

#33: “Orthodox political opinion would have it that the great majority of Muslims are good people, and there is just a small minority of extremists who give the religion a bad name. Poll evidence has long made me sceptical. Now – it is perhaps a minor point, but could it be telling? – Salman Taseer is murdered by one of his own bodyguard. If ‘moderate’ Muslims are the great majority that we are asked to credit, wouldn’t you think it should have been easy enough to find enough ‘moderate’ Muslims, in the entire state of Pakistan, to form the bodyguard of a prominent politician? Are ‘moderate’ Muslims so thin on the ground?”

#34: “It is almost a cliché that people of student age often experiment with a variety of belief systems, which they subsequently, and usually quite rapidly, give up. These young people have voluntarily adopted a belief system which has the unique distinction of prescribing execution as the official penalty for leaving it. I have enormous sympathy for those people unfortunate enough to be born into Islam. It is hard to muster much sympathy for those idiotic enough to convert to it.”

#35: [Quoting: “Why do any media outlets keep repeatedly inviting her [Yasmin Alibhai-Brown] (excluding more capable, intelligent, qualified guests) as if she is some kind of authority or expert on anything at all?”] “Do you really need to ask that question? Media people are petrified of being thought racist, Islamophobic or sexist. The temptation to kill three birds with one stone must be irresistible.”

#36: [Quoting: “I'm surprised nobody has acknowledged the elephant in the room -- namely, multicultural appeasement of Islam. The fact that (a) the paper was accepted, and (b) it took only five days to get accepted, suggests that there's something funny going on here. Could it be that the referee of the paper was a subscriber to the popular opinion in Britain that anything associated with Muslims short of murder in broad daylight is somehow praiseworthy and something to be encouraged?”] “Yes, I’m sorry to say that is all too plausible. Perhaps the Editor decided it would be “Islamophobic” to reject it.”

#37: [Quoting: “I seem to remember a very bright young muslim lad”] You mean a bright young child of muslim parents.

#38: “Oh, small as it is, this is the most heartening news I have heard for a long time. What can we do to help these excellent young Pakistanis, without endangering them? If, by any chance, any of them reads this web site, please get in touch to let us know how we might help. If anybody here has friends in Pakistan, or elsewhere afflicted by the ‘religion of peace’ (it isn’t even funny any more, is it?), or facebook friends, please encourage them to join and support these brave young people.”

#39: [Quoting: “The obvious question is: who cares, are we saying when it was a catholic school it was ok and a Muslim school is worse.”] “Yes. It is worse. MUCH worse”

#40: [Quoting: “I was even accused of having converted and married into another religion. But I wasn't worried as I'm a true Muslim," says the feisty young woman.”] If only she were a bit more feisty she would cease to be a Muslim altogether – except that would make her an apostate, for which the Religion of Peace demands stoning. Indeed, you’ll probably find she’d be sentenced to 99 lashes just for the crime of being feisty.”

#41: [Quoting: “Disgusting and hideous as this practice is, I think the article makes it quite clear that it's not limited to any one religion or community. It's common to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, yezidis and many others.”] I just did a rough count (I may have missed one or two) of the named victims Robert Fisk mentioned. As follows:
Muslim 52
Hindu 3
Sikh 1
Christian 0
But of course, Islam is the religion of peace. To suggest otherwise would be racist Islamophobia.”

#42:
“Whatever else you may say about Sam Harris’s article quoted above, and whether or not he is right about the NY mosque, the following two paragraphs, about Islam more generally, seem to me well worth repeating.
Richard”
[Quotes Sam Harris] “The first thing that all honest students of Islam must admit is that it is not absolutely clear where members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, al-Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, and other Muslim terrorist groups have misconstrued their religious obligations. If they are “extremists” who have deformed an ancient faith into a death cult, they haven’t deformed it by much. When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith. Granted, one path out of this madness might be for mainstream Muslims to simply pretend that this isn’t so—and by this pretense persuade the next generation that the “true” Islam is peaceful, tolerant of difference, egalitarian, and fully compatible with a global civil society. But the holy books remain forever to be consulted, and no one will dare to edit them. Consequently, the most barbarous and divisive passages in these texts will remain forever open to being given their most plausible interpretations.
Thus, when Allah commands his followers to slay infidels wherever they find them, until Islam reigns supreme (2:191-193; 4:76; 8:39; 9:123; 47:4; 66:9)—only to emphasize that such violent conquest is obligatory, as unpleasant as that might seem (2:216), and that death in jihad is actually the best thing that can happen to a person, given the rewards that martyrs receive in Paradise (3:140-171; 4:74; 47:5-6)—He means just that. And, being the creator of the universe, his words were meant to guide Muslims for all time. Yes, it is true that the Old Testament contains even greater barbarism—but there are obvious historical and theological reasons why it inspires far less Jewish and Christian violence today. Anyone who elides these distinctions, or who acknowledges the problem of jihad and Muslim terrorism only to swiftly mention the Crusades, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, is simply not thinking honestly about the problem of Islam.”

#43: [Quoting: “I am newish here (and not planning to stay). Could someone please just set my mind at rest by confirming whether or not this poster is the real Prof. Dawkins. I really, really hope not. I used to have respect for him and I supposed that, being a busy man, he would never have time to come here, and therefore could not be held responsible for all the bigotry, against believers in general, and Muslims in particular, which gets aired here in the guise of Reason. If this really is him, then I guess he can't disassociate himself from it and from the charge of providing a platform for bigots and haters. If it's really you, Prof. Dawkins, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Quoting his own comment: “Whatever else you may say about Sam Harris's article quoted above, and whether or not he is right about the NY mosque, the following two paragraphs, about Islam more generally, seem to me well worth repeating. Richard”] “You mean the Koran and the Hadith don’t say what Sam claims they say? I’m delighted to hear that, but can you substantiate it? I do hope you can, then we can all sleep easier. If, on the other hand, Sam is summarising Islamic scriptures accurately, why should I be ashamed of myself for simply quoting Sam’s accurate summary?”

#44: “Some critics have suggested that Paula should fairly have quoted, in equal measure, from Islamic scriptures. Since she was responding to a specific question set by the Washington Post about ‘religious and moral considerations’, it was appropriate for her to concentrate on the religions that dominate the readership of the Washington Post, namely Christianity and Judaism. However, it would be an interesting exercise for one of our Koranically-informed readers to undertake a matching article drawing on the scriptures of the ‘Religion of Peace’. Which of the ‘great’ monotheistic faiths will win First Prize for bloodthirsty nastiness and ethnic cleansing zeal?”

#45: “I have it on the authority of a London schools inspector that the reason the police do not prosecute is that they are afraid of being accused of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the words of the police officer quoted in this article, they “don’t want to alienate communities.” You might as well refrain from prosecuting child rapists because you don’t want to alienate the pedophile community. If arresting these vicious hags really were “islamophobic” (or course it isn’t), I’d be proud to be called islamophobic.”

#46: “Most Muslims don’t do honour killings, but the vast majority of honour killings are done by Muslims, loyally practising their faith and following what their religion has taught them is the right and proper thing to do.”

#47: [Quoting: “Given what the Palestinians have been through in the last 40 years, expecting polite grace & dignity at all times might be a little optimistic.”] “And you think these people were Palestinians? Or were they just Muslims?”

#48: “Islam is surely the greatest man-made evil in the world today, and I think I’d feel a tiny bit more secure against the menacing threat of Islam and Islamic faith schools, under the Tories than under Labour”.

#49: [Quoting Steve Zara: “Now, it seems like the Cartoons were designed to be quite offensive. That was the artistic intention. Putting aside any judgement on that, wouldn't it have been more interesting if the cartoons had been designed to be hardly offensive at all, in the style of the UK atheist bus campaign. It would have make those claiming insult and offence look very silly indeed.”] “..…The Westergaard cartoon implies nothing more offensive than that Islam is a violent religion, a fact that was amply demonstrated by the response to it. Part of the problem, as many here have pointed out, is that Islam expects special treatment: expects to be allowed to take disproportionate offence, far beyond that assumed by anybody else on Earth.”

#50: “I have just watched Fitna. I don’t know whether it is the original version, but it is the one linked by Jerry Coyne. Maybe Geert Wilders has done or said other things that justify epithets such as ‘disgusting’, or ‘racist’. But as far as this film is concerned, I can see nothing in it to substantiate such extreme vilification. There is much that is disgusting in the film, but it is all contained in the quotations, which I presume to be accurate, from the Koran and from various Muslim preachers and orators, and the clips of atrocities such as beheadings and public executions. At least as far as Fitna is concerned, to call Wilders ‘disgusting’ is surely no more sensible than shooting the messenger. If it is complained that these disgusting Koranic verses, or these disgusting Muslim speeches, or the more than disgusting Muslim executions, are ‘taken out of context’, I should like to be told what the proper context would look like, and how it could possibly make any difference.

To repeat, Wilders may have said and done other things of which I am unaware, which deserve condemnation, but I can see nothing reprehensible in his making of Fitna, and certainly nothing for which he should go on trial. Like the film of Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, the style of Fitna is restrained, the music, by Tchaikowski and Grieg, is excellently chosen and contributes to the restrained atmosphere of the film. The horrendous execution scenes are faded out before the coup-de-grace; all the stridency, and almost the only expressions of opinion, come from Muslims, not from Wilders.

Why is this man on trial, unless it is, yet again, pandering to the ludicrous convention that religious opinion must not be ‘offended’? Geert Wilders, if it should turn out that you are a racist or a gratuitous stirrer and provocateur I withdraw my respect, but on the strength of Fitna alone I salute you as a man of courage, who has the balls to stand up to a monstrous enemy.”

#51: [Sarcasm] “How dare you interfere with their culture? Obviously these people should be allowed to follow their own customs, without interference from Islamophobic imperialists. In any case, I expect only SOME women will be stoned for the crime of being raped. And even they will almost certainly deserve it, as they surely wouldn’t have been raped if they hadn’t shown an inch of bare wrist or ankle, or if they hadn’t left the house unaccompanied by a male relative.”

#52: “I am not in favour of banning the burqa, because I am not in favour banning any style of clothing. But I think Pat is right to compare the burqa with a Ku Klux Klan hood or a swastika armband (which shouldn’t be banned either). I think he is right to speak of Islamic fascism, I think he is right to condemn the use of the word ‘Islamophobia’….I think Islam is probably the greatest of all man-made evils in the world today. It takes courage to speak out against it. Pat has that courage. He will be making enough enemies among the Islamofascists. I prefer not to encourage them by attacking him from the other side. “

#53: “For a while now I have carried on a sporadic, and more-or-less friendly, correspondence with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I continually try to provoke her with the horrors of Islam, in order to persuade her to leave it. She roundly condemns the bad bits of Islam, but I wonder where there are any good bits for her to retreat to. I am becoming increasingly curious. Are there ANY good things about Islam at all?”

#54: “I find it hard not to resent the implication of Comment 36645 by oao. I obviously refer to Christianity, by default, more than to Judaism (or Islam) because I am a cultural Christian, writing in a cultural Christian country (Britain) with an eye to a larger audience in another (more than merely cultural) Christian country (USA).”

by Mooneye

Christians face discrimination in many places in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, however it certainly doesn’t help when Fox News, a bastion of Right-Wing fundamentalism (of both the political and religious variety) pushes misleading stories.

In an article published on March 26, 2013, Fox News ran a story on its main page with the inflammatory title, “Egyptian mosque turned into house of torture for Christians after Muslim Brotherhood protest.” The headline paragraph read,

Islamic hard-liners stormed a mosque in suburban Cairo, turning it into torture chamber for Christians who had been demonstrating against the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in the latest case of violent persecution that experts fear will only get worse.

As you can see there is a fair bit of editorializing. Fox contradicts their own narration that this was an “Islamic hard-liners vs. Christians” demonstration,

Demonstrators, some of whom were Muslim, say they were taken from the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in suburban Cairo to a nearby mosque on Friday and tortured for hours by hard-line militia members.

Is this “militia” to go unnamed?

In fact the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Muslim Brotherhood groups clearly transcends the sectarian divide. For months there have been tensions in Egypt between the ruling party and opponents, sometimes spilling into violence; Brotherhood offices have been torched and ransacked while opponents of Morsi have been killed in clashes, jailed and have had peaceful protests disrupted.

Of course, Fox News is trying to fire-up another Randolph Linn and hence any of the complexities and nuance of the situation will be glossed over and left out of the context; we know that Islamophobia is a central position at Fox, being an integral part of Roger Ailes‘ strategy.

A more sober report by Ahram Online on the incident gives us a realistic picture, leaving out the false reporting about the protest as a “Christians vs. Muslims” conflagration:

The board of directors of a community-funded religious centre in Cairo’s Moqattam district – located near the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters – issued a statement on Monday confirming that “members of the Islamist current” had taken control of the mosque during Friday’s bloody clashes between protesters and Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Anti-Brotherhood protesters had accused Brotherhood members and supporters of holding and torturing their opponents inside the mosque during street battles.

The Belal Ibn Rabbah Mosque lies in the Nafoura square where scuffles broke out between both groups on Friday.

Media reports in the past 72 hours had cited witnesses, some of whom said they are Moqattam residents, who claimed to have been brutally tortured at the hands of Brotherhood members inside the mosque on the day of the clashes.

The statement issued by the mosque’s board of directors is the first document to corroborate claims made by anti-Brotherhood protesters that supporters of the ruling Islamist group had occupied the mosque.

Muslim Brotherhood Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein had accused protesters of breaking into mosques following Friday’s clashes.

The centre stated that it had filed an official legal complaint about the incident.

Egypt’s prosecution-general, meanwhile, has subpoenaed on Monday several political activists accused of “inciting and committing violence against the Brotherhood’s headquarters and group members.”

Prosecutor-General Talaat Abdullah ordered the subpoenas based on a complaint filed by Brotherhood lawyer Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud on Monday morning against 169 individuals – including opposition figures and “thugs” – accused of of instigating attacks on the Islamist group’s headquarters.

If Fox News was trying to feed its base’s “Christian persecution complex” they succeeded as the comments were, as you would expect, extremely anti-Muslim, verging at times on the genocidal.

Mick Wagner talks about burning the mosque down and sonarguy thinks Islam should be erased from the earth:

Scott Willis links it back to the USA:

Wilhelm1:

brunsk42 brings Obama into it:

Buck Ofama:

Some want to nuke the Egyptians, like totalpeon doing his best impersonation of Eric Allen Bell:

This is only a representative sampling of the 160 or so comments on the Fox article which was predictably  and faithfully reproduced by the looniverse.

Such media malfeasance at Fox is nothing new or surprising and just highlights how easy it is in our present climate to get away with bashing Muslims and Islam.

The “Glazov gangbangers”

by Garibaldi

Eric Allen Bell (aka Eric Edborg), who has been mostly silent over the past few months, (no doubt taking a “sabbatical” from his self-proclaimed “jihad against jihad” again), returned to the looniverse of hatemongering and kooky conspiracy theories.

This time Bell is relishing in antisemitism and putting forward ideas picked straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Bell got into it with some of his assumedly now “former” Facebook followers. Bell tells “Clark Banner” that he is just speaking truth to power, exposing the social taboo surrounding “Jewish control of banking and media,”

Bell clearly doesn’t know what conspiracy theories are either, they are not simply “theories without evidence.” What he is referring to is just one category of the obvious phony and fake conspiracies that exist. Usually conspiracy theories are based on some evidence, though such evidence varies in degree of reliability, factualness and the way it is framed and contextualized to create a narrative.

Bell also believes the Oscars are part of a Jewish supremacist conspiracy,

“Erick Morgan” used to “look up to” the old bigot Eric Allen Bell when he railed against Muslims being intellectually and genetically inferior and called for the nuking of Muslim holy places but now he finds Bell repulsive:

This protege of Rev. Deacon Robert Spencer has exposed himself to have some very kooky and racist beliefs not only about people of Muslim background and the religion of Islam but also about Jews and Judaism. Will we hear swift condemnations from Rev. Deacon Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller who hailed Bell as a former “liberal” who saw the light of “Counterjihad?” Aren’t they embarrassed and ashamed of supporting and allying with someone who supports this vile antisemitic nonsense?

Don’t hold your breathe. They will likely continue their strategy of pretending such views aren’t held by their friend.

Related:

-Eric Allen Bell discovers that ‘Jewish supremacists’ control the media and the banks

Some regular commenters criticized my recent post in which I agreed with Prof. Cornel West that President Obama being sworn into office on MLK Jr.’s Bible is very problematic. Some also took issue with my usage of the term “warmonger-in-chief,” and while I think his first four years in office prove the appellation correct, there is a nuanced discussion to be had since Obama did promise in his inaugural to shift the USA away from “perpetual war.”

There is some hope for true change, for instance a draw down in troop presence in Afghanistan, a chance of “mothballing” the drone program, the nomination of Chuck Hagel, but there is also every reason to be skeptical that we are shifting course. The connection between war, an enterprise of empire and Islamophobia is all too evident, dehumanization of those targeted is a prerequisite part and parcel of war propaganda.

To drown the voices of legitimate, concerned criticism however is not the way forward, it is what is most needed at this time.

Obama’s Inaugural and the Danger of an Iran War

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

President Obama addressed the big issues of war and peace in his inaugural address, and despite the vagueness of some of his pronouncements, they contain strong clues to his foreign policy agenda in the Middle East. His announced policy will be one of ending US military engagements abroad, multilateral cooperation with allies to face security challenges, negotiation, and avoidance of further military entanglements in the Middle East. In other words, Syrians are on their own, France can have Mali, and Iran is probably not going to be bombed.

Unfortunately, Obama’s stated vision and commitments are open to revision by reality. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 against nation-building exercises, then took on two countries’ worth of them. Obama’s extreme sanctions against Iran, which are already denying children needed medicine and consist of a kind of blockade (a legitimate casus belli in international law), could well blow up in his face in ways he does not now anticipate.

He said on Monday:

“This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless. . .

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. . . we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear . . . We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.”

Obama has already fast-tracked the end of active US war-fighting in Afghanistan to this spring, and for the next 18 months or so the main activities of US forces in that country will be training troops of the Afghanistan National Army and providing them logistical help and back up in their own fights with insurgents.

What this decision of Obama means is that as of some point this spring, the US will no longer be at war for the first time since September, 2001 (though some fighting may occur in support of Afghan units). And within two years, the US will be largely out of Afghanistan. It is possible and perhaps likely that the US subsidiary drone war in the north of Pakistan will be mothballed as full sovereignty returns to Afghanistan (I certainly hope so).

By his slamming of “perpetual war” (a conception typical of some of the Neoconservatives and former VP Dick Cheney), Obama is anticipating an era of peace and prosperity.

So we may conclude that he has no intention of bombing the Iranian nuclear enrichment research facilities at Natanz near Isfahan in Iran.

Some people will be disappointed at Obama’s diction here. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been jumping up and down until he is blue in the face demanding a US attack on Iran and threatening to do it himself if Washington won’t. I have all along maintained that Netanyahu lacks the capacity to attack Iran, and that the Department of Defense does not want him cowboying that way in the sensitive Persian Gulf. The Department of Defense is aware that the thousands of US personnel at the US embassy in Baghdad (can you say, huge enormous Benghazi?) are vulnerable to attacks by the Mahdi Army if Israel bombs Iran, as are US facilities in the Gulf such as the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain. That is, there is no such thing as a unilateral Israeli military action against Tehran. Any such strike would immediately cause attacks on US facilities in the region and bring the US into the war. Therefore, the DoD and the top brass have repeatedly told Netanyahu not to dare act out.

All the Israeli leadership had been left with was wishful thinking, as with President Shimon Peres’s recent expression of confidence that if all else fails (i.e. if Iran cannot be deterred from its enrichment activities), he is sure that Obama will attack Natanz.

Likewise, the American right wing, whether militarists such as Sen Lindsey Graham or the Neoconservatives in Congress (e.g. Michelle Bachmann, Eric Cantor), are spoiling for a fight with Iran. The arms manufacturers and the thousands of subcontractors to the Pentagon are facing penury in the absence of a new war, unless they find other things to do. (I’ll bet you they can make less expensive, more efficient solar panels if they try.) With the planned reductions in the war budget, which could be quite steep, the US may finally get the ‘peace dividend’ it was promised but never could collect when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Defense-related industries are very inefficient means of creating jobs, and almost anything else they turned their talents to would produce more jobs for less investment. There are going to be enormous demands for more efficient energy storage, inexpensive desalinization, and other tasks related to climate change, to which electronics firms could well make key contributions. They’ll just have to do that instead.

Obama had already signaled his determination not to be pushed into war by the Israel lobbies through his nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. The shameful and outrageous attacks on Hagel by lowlifes such as Elliot Abrams (who should be in jail for lying to Congress and involvement in Iran-Contra and Nicaragua) as an “anti-Semite” have crashed and burned, perhaps forever blunting this sleazy tactic deployed by Jewish nationalists against their critics.

Obama also spoke of reviving multi-lateral institutions for confronting joint security challenges. It is not clear what he meant by that– perhaps reforms to NATO?

There are three dark clouds over Obama’s vision of peace and prosperity.

The first is America’s drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Any time you are dropping bombs on people, whether from an airplane or via a drone, you risk escalation to war. Yemen has too few developed resources to be at risk from an American occupation under ordinary circumstances. But there are things that radical Yemenis could do that would force Obama’s hands, not least an attack on the US embassy. If Obama really wants an era of peace and prosperity, he has to end the drone wars and hand security tasks off to allies.

The second danger is the Israeli Likud government’s final destruction of any two-state solution and permanent denial to millions of Palestinians of the rights of citizenship. Permanently stateless Palestinians will be an element of disorder that is unpredictable, and the near term and medium term actions of their supporters among governments and peoples are likewise impossible to guess at. But this final denial of hope to the Palestinians by Netanyahu is unlikely to pass without incident, and any incident is likely to draw in the US, willy-nilly.

The third danger, more consequential, is the unanticipated outbreak of hostilities with Iran. The financial blockade that the US Congress and the US Treasury Department has imposed on Iran has cut Iran’s petroleum exports by 40% in the past year. It probably does not threaten the stability of the government, and the ayatollahs will find ways of protecting themselves even as the subaltern social classes feel the real pain. But the unilateral interference with Iran’s legal commerce in petroleum, far beyond what UNSC resolutions foresaw, could provoke Tehran to do something stupid. The US financial and, in 1941, petroleum blockade of Japan provoked the Pearl Harbor attack (Japan wanted to break out toward the oil in the Dutch East Indies and resources in British Malaya, were afraid the US would try to stop them, and so wanted to neutralize the US fleet).

The rationale for the extreme US sanctions is that Iran is attempting to construct a nuclear warhead, which is not a proven proposition and against which there is a lot of evidence. Iran once again recently underlined the fatwa or religious ruling by chief theocrat Ali Khamenei that the construction, stockpiling and use of nuclear bombs is strictly forbidden in Islamic law.

Iran could well get desperate this year. An aide to Khamenei, the Iran supreme leader, has announced that the removal of Bashar al-Assad in Syria is an unacceptable “red line.” It would make it impossible for Iran to continue to stretch a security umbrella over Lebanon, protecting it via Hizbullah rockets from Israeli expansionism, since Iran’s land bridge to Beirut through Iraq and Syria would be cut off. An Iran without a pro-Tehran government in Damascus would be much diminished in the Middle East.

The survival of the Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq in the medium term is also not assured, and if (admittedly this is unlikely) a Sunni Arab- Kurdish- Secular Shiite coalition could be forged, the pro-Iran Shiite religious parties could lose control of the Iraqi parliament in the 2014 elections. If Iran lost both Syria and Iraq, it would be effectively contained for the first time since 2003.

Saudi Arabia seems likely to win out over Iran in Bahrain, as well.

Add to all that Iran’s economic woes, imposed by the US Department of the Treasury and by Neocons and Tea-Partiers in the US congress, and the more adventurous elements of the Iranian military and para-military could be provoked to unwise action.

In short, Iran’s leaders may feel as though they are being drowned and about to be snuffed out by geopolitical reversals and American blockade. Obama has Iran in an imperfect stranglehold, the most dangerous possible posture. His theory may be that if Iran’s leaders feel sufficient pain, that will bring them to the negotiating table. If so, he needs to set talks in motion immediately. Allowing the current financial blockade to fester is an enormous risk.

Wanting an era of peace and prosperity and getting one are not the same thing, and everyone in Washington should remember the law of unintended consequences.

Ben affleck in Argo: ‘At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran.’ Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS. PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

One has to ask does the Arts – literature, music, TV shows, films - question the status quo or does it reaffirm it?

And the winner is … Islamophobia

by Rachel Shabi

America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland).

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

When I saw Argo in London with a Turkish friend, we were the only ones not clapping at the end. Instead, we were wondering why every Iranian in this horribly superior film was so angry and shouty. It was a tense, meticulously styled depiction of America’s giant, perpetual, wailing question mark over the Middle East: “Why do they hate us?” Iranians are so irked by the historically flimsy retelling of the hostage crisis that their government has commissioned its own version in response.

Zero Dark Thirty, another blanked-out, glossed-up portrayal of US policy, seems to imply that America’s use of torture – sorry, “enhanced interrogation” – is legitimate because it led to the capture of Osama bin Laden (something that John McCain and others have pointed out is not even true). Adding insult to moral bankruptcy, the movie has been cast as a feminist film, because it has a smart female lead. This is cinematic fraud: a device used to extort our approval.

Homeland was no better. It is the story of an American marine taken captive by a top al-Qaida terrorist who turns out, wouldn’t you know, to be Palestinian. Tortured while detained (though I’m guessing this would be bad torture, not the good kind used in Zero Dark Thirty), the marine turns to Islam and, coincidentally, to terror. Meanwhile, all the Arab and Muslim characters in Homeland – however successful, integrated, clever, whatever – are all somehow signed up to the global terror network. AsLaila Al-Arian, a journalist and co-author of Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians, puts it: “Viewers are left to believe that Muslims/Arabs participate in terrorist networks like Americans send holiday cards.” She describes this celebrated Golden Globe winner as “TV’s most Islamophobic show“.

When challenged, the creators of these travesties respond with pat dismissal: the director Kathryn Bigelow pointed out that Zero Dark Thirty is “just a movie”. Ben Affleck has spoken touchingly of his concern that Argo might be politicised.

But why would these renditions of US policy be seen in the Middle East as anything other than attempts to seize the moral high ground? It’s all supposed to be a massive stride forward in the portrayal of complexity, made to challenge American audience preconceptions – and a far cry from the bad old days depicted in Reel Bad Arabs, a documentary that shows how Hollywood caricatures Arabs as “belly dancers, billionaire sheikhs and bombers“, according to one reviewer.

But such slick, award-winning cinema isn’t about nuance, it’s just self-serving moral ambiguity – and in this sense it is a fitting cultural reflection of actual US policy in the Middle East.

An excellent article by Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon.com on the background, import and history of the #MyJihad campaign and the “counterjihad” effort to derail it.:

Can “jihad” survive Pam Geller?

by Alex Seitz-Wald (Salon.com) 

MyJihad.org bus ad featuring two volunteers, an American-Muslim and an Israeli-Jew. (Credit: MyJihad.org)

Another excellent article by Haroon Moghul, who takes on the demented historicity of Islamophobic claims regarding Jihad, Muslim empires and those who’ve died in conflict throughout the ages in relation to the historical population growth of the world.

The title, “The Myth of the Murderous Muslim,” perfectly highlights the attempted dehumanization by Islamophobes of Muslims, it is undeniably true that they want Muslims to be viewed as “murderous.” This article will go some way in aiding those debunking myths about the “eternal violent jihad in the cause of totalitarian Islam.”

The myth of the murderous Muslim

by Haroon Moghul (AlJazeera English)

Muslims are subversive jihadists. The Middle East is perpetually unstable. “Islam has bloody borders.” If you’ve already made up your mind, you’ll find a way to twist the facts to support your conclusion. And if the facts don’t do the job, you can always hire new ones.

In the last year, American anti-Muslim hate groups have increased threefold. As playwright Wajahat Ali and others have found, the farther we move away from the September 11 terrorist attacks, the worse discrimination, prejudice and violence against Muslims become.

There’s a simple enough reason for this: Islamophobia has become an industry. In the absence of alternative narratives, which can make sense of Muslim extremism, place it into context and guide American domestic and foreign policy, we are stuck with the voices we have – too often, these have been unqualified and uninformed.

It will take us a long time to get past the damage done by years of well-funded Islamophobes, who have dominated the media landscape (finally answering, incidentally, why it is that “Muslims don’t do more to condemn terrorism” – nobody was listening). But the resistance to bigotry has already begun and has already scored a number of successes.

There is only so long, after all, you can lie to people.

The boy who cried Islamist

Islamophobia promotes a racialised view of Islam, viewing Arabs and Middle Easterners and Muslims generally as one interchangeable, subversive, homogenous mass; the actions of the few represent the intentions and aspirations of the whole. Thus we were led to believe there could be a plausible connection between bin Laden and Saddam. The resulting cost in American lives, treasure and credibility, is hard to quantify. This is Islamophobia’s fruit: poisonous policies.

For reasons of strategic shortsightedness alone, Islamophobia would be discredited soon enough. But there’s another reason: Islamophobia doesn’t correspond to reality. The more likely an American is to know a Muslim, the more likely she is to have a positive view of Islam. Exposure undermines prejudice. That is, meeting real Muslims pushes aside the media narrative that is so pernicious and harmful. Why? Because much of what Islamophobia peddles is hyperbolic, fanciful, or meaningless.

Let’s see how Islamophobia does its damage. The value extends beyond anti-Muslim bigotry, by the way. The same type of “reasoning” is employed by all bigotries – radical Muslim voices, who require a conflict between a homogenous West and an ideally homogenous Islam, make the same types of arguments, often down to the disturbing details. But then it shouldn’t be any surprise that extremisms are broadly similar, or that they need to see opposites in the world, for their own identities to take root and thrive.

A lie told often enough feels true

Consider this interview from The New York Times, in which a prominent anti-Muslim voice makes the following remark:

Why isn’t it a shrine dedicated to the victims of 9/11 or the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements?

The woman behind these words, who I have no interest in naming (I don’t want to give her any more attention than she already has), used to be a regular on Fox News, but has lost even that perch. Her extremism was too extreme. (Indeed, one of the best ways to fight Islamophobia is to give the bigots a microphone and let them keep talking. Their disturbing rhetoric will soon unsettle the overwhelming majority of people, who recoil from such extremism.)

But let’s spend a moment to reflect on this allegation; namely, that “270 million” are victims of a homogenous jihadi juggernaut. It is certainly an amazingly precise claim. It is often frequently repeated – Islamophobia resembles nothing if not an echo chamber of incorrectness. In the months since, I’ve encountered many anti-Muslim voices repeat or inflate this number. Most recently, I’ve been challenged to explain the “300 million” killed by “jihad”.

Even if we stick with the lower number, I can tell you that this number was probably pulled out of thin air. (Even if it wasn’t, as I will show, it doesn’t matter.) But for the sake of argument, let’s take this claim seriously. Namely, that “Muslims” killed somewhere between two or three hundred million. Can that be possible? Where does this number come from? Does it reveal a uniquely and dangerously recurrent Islamic aptitude for mass violence? In short, no, out of nowhere, and no.

1,000 years of jihad

First, I think, it’d make sense to choose a time period. We’re told there were 1,000 years of jihad, although to be fair, elsewhere the same person described millions of years of jihad, but this is a thought exercise. I imagine she means the period from roughly 600 to 1600 AD, which covers the time when Muslim states were generally not (as was subsequently true) on the receiving end of colonial conquest.

When Islam emerged in western Arabia, around 610 AD, the total population of the world was likely between 300 and 400 million. Fast forward to right past our period. The United Nations Census Report suggests that the world’s total population in the year 1800 was 1 billion; since then, of course, it has shot up to some seven billion.

At that point, the world’s largest Muslim population, which would be located in South Asia, was almost entirely under British rule. (In 1947, the population of the Indian subcontinent was under 350 million.) We are being asked to believe that jihadis killed, by the year 1600, more people than lived in South Asia in the year 1600. Keep in mind that India is one of the most densely populated parts of the planet and has long been a centre of world culture and civilisation.

How did Muslims kill so many people?

India, or properly most of northern India, was under Muslim rule from 1200 to 1800. By the Islamophobe’s logic, millions of these Indians should have been slaughtered. But by whom? Muslims were never more than a minority and Islam was never imposed by force. The proof for this is in the geography – the capitals of Muslim India rotated between cities like Delhi and Agra, but conversion proceeded most widely on the fringes of these empires, in what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is like saying the Roman Empire imposed Christianity and Christian populations were found farthest from the centre of imperial power.

Further, under Muslim rule, India became increasingly wealthy. (The same happened, by the way, in Muslim Spain, as Arab rule brought with it an agricultural revolution and an urbanising boom.) How was India becoming increasingly wealthy while its Muslim rulers were slaughtering Indians left, right and centre? How were they able to cause so much damage, for so long, without being overthrown? Muslims never enjoyed the kind of decisive advantage in military technology the West enjoyed after 1800. And the organisation of Muslim India gives the lie to the entire edifice of eternal jihadism.

The capital of the world 

We often look to the Ottomans as the world’s most powerful pre-modern Muslim dynasty. But the Mughals, rulers of much of South Asia, ruled over far more people and were far wealthier – compare Istanbul’s monuments to the Taj Mahal and you’ll see what I mean. There is however one thing both empires had in common: both ruled over majority non-Muslim populations.

Under the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, some 30 percent of this Muslim dynasty’s nobility were not Muslim, a proportion that had risen to 50 percent in the reign of his son Aurangzeb (1658-1707). By nobility, I mean those individuals given land and status based on their ability to muster troops to defend and expand the realm. If Islam was perpetual jihadism, why would so many non-Muslims join in – and be allowed to join in?

If Muslims were savages bent on perpetual terror, by what moronic logic would they arm their enemies, teach them to fight and incorporate them into their armies? What would we make of the fact that the greatest threat to late 17th century Mughal rule was the remarkable rebellion of a Hindu king named Shivaji, who was finally captured and defeated by the Mughals’ senior most general, whose name was Jai Singh – he, too, was not a Muslim.

Somewhere jihadis are killing everyone they come across, more or less, but still Muslim dynasties remain in power, their wealth increases, the urbanisation of their population increases and they leave behind magnificent public and private structures, which suggests they had quite a bit of free time. When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed at the end of World War I, its capital, then called Constantinople, was over 50 percent non-Muslim. This is not to suggest the Ottomans were liberal democrats. But it also suggests they were remarkably tolerant for their time. Probably no other city in Europe was so diverse.

And we’re not even talking about most of the planet.

Muslims aren’t everywhere 

Many of the territories conquered, ruled or dominated by Muslims, such as Central Asia, North Africa and Arabia were comparatively empty. Muslim dynasties never touched the Americas, Australia or East Asia; the last of these undoubtedly held a significant percentage of the world’s population throughout the last 1,000 years plus.

So Muslims, who ruled over vast desert spaces and many sparsely populated areas of the world, still killed something of the equivalent of one-quarter of the world’s population in 1800. When the first Mughal emperor Baburconquered north India – from another Muslim dynasty, I might add – his army is estimated to number around 10,000; his opponent’s army is estimated at several times than that.

Is it conceivable that Muslim empires, such as the Umayyads, Ottomans and Mughals, who ruled over majority non-Muslim populations, could have contributed to the killing of huge percentages of the world’s population while staying in power for centuries? How would they, as minorities, have been capable of sustained carnage for decades at a time? When did they get the time to build huge public works projects, establish towns, rebuild cities, fund wells, hospitals, mosques, pools and fountains?

What technological advantage did they have that made them so superior to their enemies that they could sustain such a bloody and vicious record – for 1,000 years? The Mongols exploded out into the world and caused horrific damage, but they managed that for only a few centuries and left nothing of the kind of legacy the great Muslim empires did. Indeed, the Mongols ended up adopting the religion of the peoples they conquered, whereas the reverse happened early in the Muslim period.

A most post-modern warfare 

And thus we are left with an implausible and absurd suggestion that jihad killed 270 million people. But even with all this, still three more points need to be stressed, because in recognising their significance, we recognise the ultimate absurdity of the Islamophobic worldview.

First, more Muslims died fighting each other than died in battles against non-Muslim dynasties. Armies were often mixed too, which drives bigots off the wall; when the Ottomans were defeated at Vienna in 1683, they were finished off by a charge of Polish Muslim cavalry, allied with their enemies. Where do these casualties fit in? Should we arbitrarily decide that “intra-Muslim jihad” killed 50 percent of the total number? Why not, considering most of Islamophobia’s made up? How were Muslims who so often fought each other also able to fight everyone else?

Unless of course it’s not about Islam versus non-Islam.

Second, this isn’t real history. It’s dumping “facts” on the unawares, hoping that the sheer flood of information covers up the lack of an explanatory framework. Not only does the Islamophobe play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples, but she ties events together without attempting to explain why. If jihad is really the most murderous ideology ever and it is equal to Islam, then why would so many people become Muslim? What motivated their violence? What sustained it? And how come most Muslims live peaceable lives?

Bigots make up history because actual history undermines them.

Third, let’s say for the sake of argument Muslims killed 300 million people over a 1,000 year span. That doesn’t meananything. One could just as easily construct a counter-narrative that works like Islamophobia does: arbitrarily, ignorantly and entirely unself-consciously. I mean, we’d link disparate events based on the religious (or cultural) identity of the culprit.

We could construct a narrative of Western perfidy in response.

According to Charles Mann’s 1491, which explores the pre-Columbian Americas, nearly 100 million perished during the European “Age of Discovery”, making that the most violent contact between peoples in human history. Nothing in Islamic history remotely compares. With the typical sloppiness of the Islamophobe, we could note how Western ideologies like Communism and Nazism led conservatively to the deaths of another 120 million people; we could note the brutal colonial exploitation of Africa and Asia, in which millions more perished and then breathlessly announce, “Five Hundred Years of Western Civilisation Kills Hundreds of Millions!”

We could toss in the fact that the West has invented weapons of mass destruction and used them in ways no other parts of the world have. (Chemical weapons in World War I; aerial bombing was invented by the Italians against Libyan civilians; and, of course, only America has used nuclear weapons, and twice, both times against civilian targets.) But this would be stupid, because it assumes that people in different times and places are the same, responsible for each other’s actions and should only be judged by the dark chapters of their history.

Osama bin Laden portrayed the history of Islam and the West as one long narrative of confrontation, as do many intemperate and extremist voices. He chose to ignore all the countervailing evidence and ignored the differences between times and places, peoples and their leaders. He downplayed and dismissed the achievements of Western culture and civilisation, of which there are so many I’m hard-pressed to know where even to begin. Penicillin? Goethe? The modern museum?

Islamophobes play a similar game, linking events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart, and they want us to take this seriously. And so you get numbers like “270 million” or “300 million”. And these are brought up talismanically, as if they constitute overwhelming proof. The Islamophobe is completely and congenitally incapable of reflexivity. They cannot, in other words, look in the mirror; their mind has been made up, and what history is marshalled is not to engage in discussion but to preclude it.

The jihad on accuracy

There is this last little problem.

The Muslim proportion of the world’s population has accelerated dramatically in the past centuries and continues to do so today; during our 600-1600 AD window, there were far fewer Muslims in the world, proportionally speaking. Which means we have to figure out what everyone else was up to.

What about the people killed by other peoples – or, the biggest killer of all back then – disease and its most vulnerable victims, infants and the young? Where do we put the Crusades, the Aztecs and the Incans, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mongols (good heavens), Slavs and Byzantines, the Chinese, Korean and Japanese?

Add them all together, and more people were probably killed than ever lived, which is about as accurate as you can expect this kind of nonsense to be.

Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University. 

Follow him on Twitter: @hsmoghul

Barack Obama signs the “Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act” and so we have the United States doing what it does best, interfering in the affairs of other nations. One would have thought that after years of overt and covert wars of aggression in Latin America, organized campaigns of terrorism for instance against Latin nations such as Cuba and an endless fear-mongering about phantom security threats we would have changed our approach to the region.

Now it seems we have another vivid reminder of the intersection between Islamophobia and imperialism:

Reviving the cold war

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

During the four-and-a-half decade US-Soviet standoff known as the “cold war” despite the untold amount of blood spilt in international proxy conflicts and superpower support for various forms of repression, the US used the alleged threat of Soviet penetration of the western hemisphere to justify its own meddling throughout the Americas.

US penetration of its southern backyard was characterised by everything from an illicit war against Nicaragua to the facilitation of state terrorism in South America - where suspected leftists were dropped en masse from airplanes - to the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, which helped kicked off an era of violence in which over 200,000 people were killed.

Contrary to the US establishment portrayal of Arbenz as a Kremlin agent, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s acclaimed book Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala demonstrates that the man was a bourgeois capitalist whose activities merely included offering $627,572 to the United Fruit Company – the US corporation that had established a parasitic presence on Guatemalan territory – in compensation for unused acreage appropriated by the Guatemalan government.

This was precisely the value of the land in question as declared by the company itself for purposes of tax evasion. Upon appropriation it assumed a spontaneous worth of $16m and became proof of apocalyptic communist imperialism – a fabricated danger that would be dealt with via concrete forms of US imperialism in Latin America.

The green-and-red menace 

Two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a new expansionist enemy has been trotted out. According to certain policymakers in Washington, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now lurking along the southern fringes of the US – necessitating the “Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act” just signed by Barack Obama in order to “address Iran’s growing hostile presence and activity”.

Conveniently, the change in existential threats has been made easier by the fact that many aspects of the old communist menace have been conserved. Allegations that Iran’s hemispheric encroachment is being facilitated by left-leaning Latin American regimes, specifically that of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, have spawned a compositegreen-and-red Islamo-Bolivarian menace.

This helps to ensure a negative reaction in an American public already conditioned to respond viscerally to the colour red – much as the labelling of Obama as a socialist has been known to trigger automatic revulsion in swathes of the population despite the man’s failure to pursue any policies that resemble socialism.

Neoconservatives have discovered numerous smoking guns indicating nefarious collaboration between the Islamic Republic and the Latin American left, such as the existence of regular commercial airline flights between Tehran and Caracas and the enrollment of more than two dozen offspring of Iranian diplomatic personnel at the international school in La Paz, Bolivia.

Norman A Bailey – the former Mission Manager for Cuba and Venezuela under Director of National Intelligence John D Negroponte, patron saint of Honduran death squads -announced in a February 2012 report for the US House Foreign Affairs Committee that Iran’s protégé Hezbollah “is known to have opened numerous military camps inside Venezuela… with the express purpose of training young Venezuelans to attack American targets”.

Readers unaware that this factoid is indeed “known” can pursue its citation in the report’s endnotes. These direct us to a working paper by the Israeli International Institute for Counter-Terrorism’s Dr Ely Karmon, who - as I have previously noted - is also an expert in the art of plagiarism.

True to form, Karmon has reproduced almost exactly word for word a paragraph from a 2008 FrontPage Magazine article called “Hugo’s Hezbollah”. Without properly signalling the paragraph’s appropriation, he writes:

“It was reported… that the Venezuelan Minister of the Interior, Tarek El Aissami, was working directly with [Venezuelan diplomat] Ghazi Nasr al-Din to recruit young Venezuelans of Arab descent that were supportive of the Chavez regime to train in Lebanon with Hezbollah. Reportedly, the purpose was to prepare these youths for asymmetric warfare against the US in the event of a confrontation. According to this report, Hezbollah also established training camps inside Venezuela, complete with ammunition and explosives, courtesy of El Aissami.”

The FrontPage article itself includes a hyperlink directing us to the apparent source of the training camp reports – a2008 column in Spanish by a Venezuelan exile in Miami who happens to be tied to the perpetrators of the 2002 coup against Chavez – and throws in the additional ludicrous claim that “Hezbollah has been responsible for converting a number of indigenous tribes in Latin America to their radical version of Islam”.

Terror on America’s doorstep 

During an April jaunt to Colombia, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta was quoted by the American Forces Press Service as remarking:

“We always have a concern about, in particular, the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and efforts by the IRGC to expand their influence, not only throughout the Middle East but also into this region… In my book, that relates to expanding terrorism”.

Of course, the title of the article – “Panetta: Violent Extremism Threatens Latin America” – seems somewhat misdirected given that it is the US and not the Islamic Republic that is known for things like massive financial support for a Colombian military that wantonly slaughters civilians. The participation of the US Drug Enforcement Agency in the massacre of peasants in Hondurasmight also qualify as a level of violent extremism to which Iran has not aspired.

Crusaders against the green-and-red menace, however, are committed to their hallucinated reality, capitalising on cold war precedents to underscore the urgency of the situation. A 2011 dispatch from Vanessa Neumann, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, defines one of Iran’s “principal motivations” in Latin America as “a quest for a base of operations that is close to the US territory, in order to position itself to resist diplomatic and possible military pressure, possibly by setting up a missile base within striking distance of the mainland US, as the Soviets did in the Cuban Missile Crisis”.

In this same vein, ex-presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann incoherently warned audiences on the campaign trail of Hezbollah’s possible “missile sites or weapons sites” in Cuba, while other scholars have moved slightly further afield, inventing Iranian intermediate-range missile launch pads on the Paraguana Peninsula in Venezuela. Never mind the un-invented ubiquity of US, NATO and Israeli weapons sites in the vicinity of Iran.

Former diplomat Roger Noriega, whose claims to fame include assisting in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Haiti, has displaced the blame for continental meddling with his confirmation of the presence of “two Iranian terrorist trainers” on Venezuela’s Margarita Island and of an Iranian-Palestinian-Lebanese-Venezuelan plot to “cultivate a terror network on America’s doorstep”.

These calculations appeared in the Washington Post in 2011 despite the fact that Noriega should have ostensibly been banned from news outlets after his alarmist 2010 headline in Foreign Policy - “Chavez’s Secret Nuclear Programme” – came with the self-discrediting qualifier: “It’s not clear what Venezuela’s hiding, but it’s definitely hiding something -and the fact that Iran is involved suggests that it’s up to no good.”

As for cold war-era US propaganda according to which a Soviet-infiltrated Guatemalan regime was scheming to appropriate the Panama Canal, a potential modern-day equivalent of such a threat turned up in late 2010 in a Haaretzarticle about the “ambitious plan by Venezuela, Iran and Nicaragua to create a ‘Nicaragua Canal’ linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that would rival the existing Panama Canal”.

Unfortunately for the anti-Islamo-Bolivarians, it appears that such ambitions may involve the Chinese menacerather than the Islamic one.

To be sure, the resuscitation of fearmongering rhetoric about hemispheric penetration is a source of endless entertainment – until one remembers that the aim of some of these fearmongers is not a cold war but a hot one.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.