by Emperor

Bye, bye to the shining hope of Islamopobes everywhere, Allen West (though he refuses to concede the election) has likely lost his House seat in a close race against 29 year old businessman Patrick Murphy. I’m sure post-Congress West will hit the speaking and right-wing news circuits railing against the infiltration of the USA by the twin phantom menaces known as the “Communists” and the “Mooslims”.

Florida was also the scene of that other darling of the Islamophobia movement, Adam Hasner. You will recall Hasner is good friends with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, he also shared the stage with the fascist Geert Wilders, who he praised effusively and hosted at a special event in 2009. Hasner lost his bid for the House to West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel.

Also gone is Tea Party politician Joe Walsh who saw “Muslim terrorists” in all of the surrounding suburbs of Chicago, Walsh was defeated by US Army veteran and double amputee Tammy Duckworth.

Charles Fuqua who advocated the “deportation of all Muslims” from the USA was defeated in Arkansas and Chip Cravaack was ousted by Rick Nolan after just one term .

Michelle Bachmann barely squeezed out a victory in Minnesota and Peter King held on, Mike Pence a possible future Republican presidential candidate won the governorship in Indiana and is an Islamophobe to watch.

Overall it was a bad night for the harbingers of anti-Muslim Islamophobic fervor. No doubt, they will try and come back with vengeance, but the electoral defeats they suffered are a good sign that their blatant displays of hate-mongering and scapegoating can be broken.

Obama’s re-election is not going to change much, we are still going to have a corporatist state that continues the policies of Empire, but just on a basic level Obama’s victory staved off a Romney presidency that would be littered with anti-Muslims heavily invested in attempting to intimidate American Muslims and enhancing a global Neo-Con vision. The next four years could have been one in which the likes of Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Walid Phares and others who are intimately tied with the Islamophobia movement would become regular staples of our Loon Politics category.

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Top House Islamophobe Allen West Falls – The Daily Beast

Key members of the Congressional ‘Islamophobia caucus’ swept from Congress

Loonwatch has been reporting on Adam Hasner since 2009 when he first came across our radar screen for his alliance with Pamela Geller and endorsement of Geert Wilders. Not long ago he was pontificating about “Civilization Jihad” and other nonsense,

“We are not in a War on Terror,” Hasner said. “This is a civilizational struggle against an ideology of Sharia Islam.”

“It’s not just a threat on foreign soil,” he continued. “It’s also a threat from those who seek to destroy us from within. And we have a problem of domestic terrorism both in the violent form as well as in the civilizational jihad that we’re witnessing here in our own country and our own state.”

Adam Hasner: Islamophobe for Congress

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD

Congress’s anti-Islam caucus will likely grow in November, and Florida’s Adam Hasner may be its worst new member

Rep. Michele Bachmann has gotten a lot of attention lately for her witch hunt against Muslims in the U.S. government, but she’s not alone. In addition to the four lawmakers who signed on to her letters, there are a handful of others who together might be called the Islamophobia Caucus — and their ranks are likely to swell after November, thanks in part to one of the caucus’ most outspoken members, Rep. Allen West.

After redistricting made West’s 22nd Florida congressional district slightly more liberal, he moved to the 18th. Running in his place is Adam Hasner, the former Florida House majority leader who abandoned a previous bid for the Senate. Hasner has already earned top-flight endorsers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and West himself, as well as several major conservative organizations.

But perhaps a bit farther down the list is Pam Geller, the anti-Islam blogger and activist who spearheaded the effort against the so-called ground zero mosque. While she may not have officially endorsed Hasner, they’re clearly comrades in the fight against Shariah law. “Pamela [Geller] and I were on the front lines of that together, fighting to make sure that we kept her safe here,” Hasner told a Fort Lauderdale crowd in June of last year. For her part, Geller has written numerous blog posts praising Hasner, whom she declared to be “my friend.” “So many patriots and elected officials joined us, like Adam Hasner,” she wrote in June of last year. Here’s a photo of them posing together from her blog. (Hasner did not reply to requests for comment.)

As the Florida Independent noted in September of last year, Hasner has been involved in a “long-time crusade against the supposed threat of Sharia in the U.S.” In 2009, he appeared on a panel in D.C. with Geller and Frank Gaffney, the man behind Bachmann’s with hunt, according to a press release unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge. Robert Spencer, another key figure in the Islamophobia cottage industry, called Hasner a “fearless truth teller” (here’s a photo them posing together via Spencer’s blog, Jihad Watch).

Before that, Hasner invited notorious Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders to Florida. “When I invited Geert Wilders to join me for a Free Speech conference in Palm Beach County, not only did the hotel cancel its plans to have him come in, but I was the one who was asked by the Hamas front group, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, to resign from the Florida House of Representatives, because I was an Islamophobe and a hater,” he said in the Fort Lauderdale speech. Wilders has made crusading against Islam his top priority. He was under house arrest for hate speech in Holland and is barred from visiting several countries.

When Hasner caught flak for the invitation, he was unperturbed. “These are the same people who have been attacking me all session. This isn’t about being anti-Islam, this is all about the right to free speech and they are trying to stifle it,” he casually told the St. Petersburg Times in April 2009. Wilders personally thanked Hasner in his speech, saying, “We need strong leaders like we have here today, Allen West and Adam Hasner. We need strong men like that.”

Within just a few days of the Wilders speech, it was an event that Hasner did not attend that raised eyebrows. He apparently boycotted an imam’s opening prayers at the state Legislature. The Palm Beach Post reported at the time:

As usual, the Florida House opened session today with a prayer. But for the first time this year (and possibly the first time ever), that prayer was led by an imam, Qasim Ahmed, from the Islamic Learning Institute in Tampa. The prayer was videotaped by Ahmed Bedier, United Voices of America director, who remarked on the absence of House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Boca Raton. Bedier said he was videotaping the “historic” moment. “We did notice Hasner’s empty chair. That’s definitely noticed,” Bedier said… Hasner said he wasn’t on the floor this morning for personal reasons and noted the iman was in the House at the invitation of Rep. Jim Waldman, D-Coconut Creek. “It’s Jim Waldman’s right as a member to invite whomever he wants,” Hasner said.

In 2011, according to a YouTube video of a speech uncovered by American Bridge, Hasner boasted about the real reason for his absence two years earlier. “When the imam who was invited by a state representative who was a Democrat from here in Broward County, when he was invited to give the morning prayer at the Florida House of Representatives, and I boycotted the prayer, I was the one who was ridiculed,” he said.

In 2008, Hasner helped found an anti-Shariah group called Florida Security Council with an activist named Tom Trento. While Hasner was never an official member, he touted his involvement with the organization, which later changed its name to United West. “You cannot fight an enemy when you will not acknowledge that an enemy even exists, and that enemy has a name, and that is Shariah-compliant Islam,” Hasner told a local conservative group in March of last year. “We cannot allow political correctness and multiculturalism or appeasement to cripple our defenses at home or abroad.”

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon’s political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.
MORE ALEX SEITZ-WALD.

Tom Trento believes the Muslim Brotherhood is behind “Occupy Orlando.” Just watch him in the video below stretching and trying to grasp at anything to come up with his absurd conspiracy theory.

Trento and his friends seem like stalkers. It’s also quite funny how he passes off the “Rifqa Bary” case as a victory when in fact none of the objectives that he and his friends, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer wished to achieve were actualized. The whole Rifqa Bary episode was a colossal and humiliating defeat for the Islamophobes.

Hasner ally says Muslim Brotherhood is behind Occupy Orlando

In a video clip and blog post published today, a right-wing activist with ties to GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner alleges that Occupy Orlando, a Central Florida group that has sprung up in solidarity with the New York-based Occupy Wall Street movement, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Occupy Orlando held its first event this past weekend, beginning its “occupation” at Senator Beth Johnson Park, outside of the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, at 8 a.m. Saturday.

In a recent post on the website for The United West, an anti-”Shariah Islam” organization, the group’s director, Tom Trento claims that his team found what they consider evidence that the Occupy Wall Street-inspired group in Orlando is part of a “move by a Muslim activist to take over control of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ in the ‘spirit of the Arab Spring.’”

Trento writes:

For those with eyes to see, ears to hear and a wee bit of cranial activity, the jury is in, the facts are known and the words “Arab Spring,” are synonyms for “Muslim Brotherhood.” Though there is strong evidence for the Ikhwan’s involvement initiating the various revolutions in Egypt and the northern Maghreb, it is indisputable that the Brothers are exploiting the incoherent chaos in these countries and taking a leadership role either overtly or through compliant proxies to move toward a shariah-compliant state. In the spirit of Rahm Emanuel, the Muslim Brotherhood will never let a good crisis go to waste.

…

As The United West video teams circulated (overtly and covertly) through hundreds of protestors at “Occupy Orlando, “ I was informed that a Muslim activist lawyer with whom  we had confrontations in the past, was at this demonstration. Though it has been two years, we could never forget the easily-agitated, Mr. Shayan Elahi. Yes, Orlando, this is the same Muslim who lost a race in 2010 to become a Judge.

…

After Elahi’s second try at “intimidating” us (yes, it was comical) it became obvious to us that he was not just an observer at this event but a participant…and then it all came together. Shaya Elahi is the leader (of the leaderless) Occupy Orlando! It turns out that he is the “official” legal counsel for this movement and indeed one of the key people, if not the main person calling the shots!

Once we watched Shayan Elahi in action, running around, signing up speakers, providing direction, telling people what to do, we started to connect the dots to the stated Face Book Mission Statement of “Occupy Orlando,” which reads, “…we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”

In his post, Trento asks United West supporters if they think Elahi “is looking for a place to mark up his first win by coopting a incoherent movement primarily made up of ‘hippies and anarchists’ so that he can build a political base for his Islamic goals?”

Groups that have sprung up in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street have, for the most part, been leaderless — much like the original movement. Occupy Orlando’s Facebook page describes itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”

A recent press release from Occupy Orlando states that there were “approximately 200 speakers and more than 1,500 participants spanning across many political and generational spectrums gathered to share dialogues ranging from pro-life to dismantling the federal reserve” at the event.

As Trento mentioned, he and Elahi have had run-ins in the past. Elahi was an attorney for Rifqa Bary’s parents after she separated herself from her Muslim parents in Ohio as a minor when she converted to Christianity. Trento, along with other anti-Islam activists in Florida, fought in the legal battle to keep Bary in the state and away from her parents.

During an interview in Trento’s video, Elahi pulls aside one of the frustrated protesters Trento is talking to and tells her, “He is one of the biggest bigots in town.” Elahi also turns to Trento and calls him a “racist bigot.”

GOP Senate hopeful Adam Hasner has called Trento a “good friend” and was among the group of Florida activists that tried to keep Bary in Florida. He and Trento founded the Florida Security Council together in 2008; that group eventually expanded to become The United West.

Watch Trento’s “investigation” for yourself:

The last we posted about Hasner he was sitting in rapt attention to a speech from Geert Wilders.

Hasner: We are witnessing a ‘civilizational jihad’ in America, Florida

(Florida Independent)

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner appeared on a Sarasota conservative talk show today, echoing previous comments on the dangers of Sharia in the Sunshine State by saying there is a “civilizational jihad” underway across the country and in Florida. Audio after the jump.

Hasner made the comments on The Dr. Rich Swier Show, hosted by Red County blogger Richard Swier. “We are not in a War on Terror,” Hasner said. “This is a civilizational struggle against an ideology of Sharia Islam.”

“It’s not just a threat on foreign soil,” he continued. “It’s also a threat from those who seek to destroy us from within. And we have a problem of domestic terrorism both in the violent form as well as in the civilizational jihad that we’re witnessing here in our own country and our own state.”

Geert Wilders

We recently wrote about the Freedumb of Speech Summit that was held in Delray Beach, Florida hosted by Republican Representative Adam Hasner (!) and republican hopeful Allen West.  The guest of honor giving the main speech was European Fascist Geert Wilders. 

Geert Wilders is a controversial European legislator who has amongst other things called for the Quran to be banned in the Netherlands and for the enacting of discriminatory laws in regards to immigration that would target and exclude Muslims from the West. Wilders has also been prosecuted for “hate speech” and “inciting discrimination” by an appeals court in the capital of the Netherlands: Amsterdam.

In a racist screed that Wilders delivered over the weekend at the summit, he declared:

“Islam is not a religion… the Quran is a book that calls for hatred, that calls for violence, for murder, for terrorism, for war, and submission…We should also stop pretending that Islam is a religion…the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam.

Wilders also called for “stopping Muslim immigration to the West, for stopping the building of mosques, for closing down Islamic schools because they are “fascist” institutions.”

The obvious contradictions and hypocrisy seem to be going right over the heads of Wilders and his supporters such as Robert Spencer, Brigitte Gabriel and Representative Adam Hasner. In a summit dubiously dubbed as Freedom of Speech they want to curtail the rights of others to practice Freedom of Religion - a pillar of all self-respecting modern Democracies.

One must consider the implications of Wilders’ call and the collusion of American hatemongers with his project.  How does he want to translate his call for Muslims to be denied religious freedom into practical policy?  Will he ask all Muslims to renounce Islam or face deportation, even those born in the West? Would he and his supporters force Muslims to convert from Islam to Christianity or another religion?

Only in the hate world of the far right are insinuations made that, a religion that has been around for over 1400 years - Islam – is in fact not a religion at all.  It is also a world where one finds no contradiction in proclaiming freedom of speech on the one hand but then proudly declaring opposition to freedom of religion on the other.

Do these loons seriously consider themselves the “defenders of Western Civilization” against the “barbaric Muslim hordes” when they proudly flaunt the very foundations of that civilization?  In light of  this contradiction the more accurate description for this group of loony racists and neo-fascists might be ”defenders of delusions.”

From Wilders own mouth: