by Daniel Ibn Zayd (Original guest piece)

In May of 2005 I joined a group of students and activists to watch a documentary entitled Paul Robeson: Here I Stand. Paul Robeson was an American political figure, though he remains virtually unknown by most in his home country. Many might recognize him from a booklet of stamps published by the United States Postal Service, entitled “African-Americans on Stamps: A celebration of African-American Heritage”. The booklet opens with Robeson’s smiling face, and states: “By the late 1930s, [Robeson] had become very active and outspoken on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and international peace.” This is true. He was also exiled from the United States, his citizenship revoked and then re-instated; he was poisoned with drugs and tortured with electric-shock therapy, the latter while under American supervision in hospital custody in London. He was repeatedly forced to defend himself during the Communist witch-hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He died in relative obscurity in 1977. For any group that has suffered similar treatment, this will sound all too familiar.

Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat (written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the toil and strife of the black slave working the gambling ferry boats:

Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.

In the score this refrain is marked optional; replaced with “[a] musical part” depending on the whim of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not comfortable with this rendition. This “comfort level” is the driving force of acceptance of Othered minorities as citizens, as well as their presence within cultural manifestations and national mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full freedom.

From this vantage point, the recent presidential election takes on a different significance, the opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic event has taken place with the election of a black American as marking a “post-race” America. Barack Obama’s election instead represents a similar “limit of tolerance”, based on the behavior, thought, and action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new “ideal” on the other hand, wholly separate from actions which make him hard to differentiate from his predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this light, not a contradiction.

One month before the election in 2008 I stopped into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama along with statements of pride and hope. “My President Is Black” read one, against the backdrop of an American flag, and with the words “The American Dream” on the reverse. This explosion in production of T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview of the Democratic National Committee[1] bears witness more to the weight placed on Obama’s shoulders than belief in “Hope” or “Change”. On the wall of the shop was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama’s perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama’s future we simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and globalized nightmare.

Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image as well as in word and deed something much closer to the reality of lived life for many in the country, as stated in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in 1964:

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare….

Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes’s The Dream Deferred[2]; they implicitly contain the projection of what might happen if the dream is put off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an Obama presidency.

Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein as a “lifelong criminal” who did time in prison before his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his assassination, perhaps due to his description of the assassination of John Kennedy as America’s “chickens [coming] home to roost”. This was echoed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright[3] who said the same about the attack on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation.

Full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations

Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto[4], Gilbert Osofsky states:

What was most striking about the Negro stereotype was the way it portrayed a people in an image so totally the reverse of what Americans considered worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and traditional American values were all absent from the Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to take them; childlike in a country of men….Negroes hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations.

The condition of the American black man was a function not just of racism, but of a built-in inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the nature of the problem; an inversion in which the dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted group in question.

It is only relatively recently that we are witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time having defused any revolutionary potential here–along with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In 1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In Dahomey that was so successful it forced the racial integration of many theaters in the States. Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay from 1916 entitled “The Drama Among Black Folk”, he wrote:

In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius into the beginnings of a new drama. White people refused to support the finest of their new conceptions like the “Red Moon” and the cycle apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the growth of a considerable number of colored theatres and moving picture places, a new and inner demand for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk drama built around the actual experience of Negro American life.

This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason it could not be tolerated. Dubois’s appeals for funds for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans, as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own [not] black [enough] faces.

This inversion of Black culture through the mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the jazz-era band leader stated, “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Similarly, when listened to outside of the dominant discourse such as on the radio show L’épopée des musiques noires broadcast on Radio France Internationale[5], such artists speak openly of the racism that they suffered and which continues to plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy and Bess have replaced actual historical memory.[6]

Black to the future
This specter of white men in black face rises every so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a marker of white privilege defended as “free speech”, as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the late ’80s[7]:

The police commissioner’s management authority has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo’s June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the city did not have the right to fire a police officer and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were punished, wrote Sprizzo, “in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.” This “protected speech” involved being part of a float with the banner “Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel 2098,” which the defendants said was a parody of black racial integration into the mainly white Broad Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas two months earlier.

Although we might not remember the vaudeville circuits of the early 20th century, this news item attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an event. This legally protected “free speech” leaves no humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to black stage characters and their disempowering nicknames (Step-‘n’-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon); to the percentage of black blood in a person’s bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one’s renegade slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the “reverse” of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as powerful, and are by contrast comical in their ineffectiveness.

This brings up the main point of any such discussion of representation, which cannot be limited to its visual or aural perception: the power differential involved. Who is the audience, and where do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical, technical, and economic ability to reach them? What are the various legal rights that enable and/or impinge such communication? What is my privilege to make such a statement, and what personal, communal, moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and beyond these other aspects of such expression?

Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in hidden locations out of public view); separated primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of the political parties along racial lines; the voting down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther King (“states’ rights” makes direct reference to George Wallace’s statement of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”); the practice of diluting minority power via the gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the vote for felons; etc.

The equivalent disparity of direct expression within the culture, along similar overt as well as covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile, Alabama for singing Strange Fruit (written by Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently, black students were convicted and imprisoned for their protest and reaction to a noose[8] being hung from a tree on the school lawn; this “warning” to the black student population came after they decided to assemble underneath the “white student’s” tree.[9] A super-mediated* discussion of the word “nigger” took place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the television show Seinfeld), not happy with some black hecklers, informed them that “fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” More disturbing are the commemorative postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these “black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze”, surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses.

A share of the wealth and a piece of the action
It should thus come as no surprise that during the Democratic primaries of 2008 Andrew Cuomo made reference to Barack Obama’s “shuck and jive”, a phrase which has no meaning outside of imposed black vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness, making semantic reference to costume change, rapid dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The attorney general’s disavowal of the term as racist is contradicted by his former statement that voting for his [black] rival for the New York governor’s race, Carl McCall, would result in a “racial contract” between Black and Hispanic Democrats which “can’t happen”.[10] Similar was the statement from Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed “uppity”. Everyone who speaks American English completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that follows, explicitly referring to a black man who should “know his role”.

These terms and images are so loaded that they only need be hinted at to get the message across; even in their denial they hit the target and leave their mark. The resulting backtracking can be seen to be prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged, the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or else by labeling the targets thereof as “oversensitive”, “politically correct”, or “racist” themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble practices and codes of that time most assuredly live on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as “I would never refer to my opponent as a Communist”[11].

Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself against such provocations, and was rewarded with the presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp, indeed, few American history books represent any leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s, and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement at its core:

[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties–terms of “pride”, “ownership”, “private enterprise”, “capital”, “self-assurance”, “self-respect”… What most of these militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power….[12]

The actuality is better known: the former Black Power movement leaders have either been assassinated or put in prison, have come around to parrot the dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less, historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers: Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their white counterparts, especially in terms of politics and culture: “the black Daniel Webster” applied to Samuel Ringgold Ward, or “the black Callas”, attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, “the black Kennedy”, in a reflection of racial privilege, and the one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and political designation.

The rainbow sign
In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God gives Noah the “Rainbow Sign” that ends his estrangement from the land; however the sign comes with a warning that He is done with water, promising “the fire next time”. In his book of the same name, James Baldwin describes Malcolm X’s relationship with the United States thus:

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.

Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby, echoes this when he states that “all the problems [on his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with without violence.” In contrast to the [acceptable] violence of Israel and England (which too has its own “Jerusalem”[13]) Baldwin reveals what is most threatening about the landless or placeless minority nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly, he reveals society’s inherent fear of those who have similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture, Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by the oppressed.

We’re here without any rights
This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern[14] Cohen states:

“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”

In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.

In economic terms, it also reveals the power differential inherent to capitalism and globalization, and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s attacks on “bling”-style rap artists–he doesn’t even admit to their more political precursors–who have managed to acquire wealth and status by following all of the lessons learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but who get punished when they become too competitive (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus rendered docile and brought within the domain of global Capital. “The trillionaire sleeping with models and actresses” is a glorified trope within American culture, so it is odd to find it given populist overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way Sasha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street.

The idea that the struggle against the colonial apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle, might somehow be simplistically reduced to “criticism” of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort. There is no point wasting time considering the cultural “flip”, in imagining an Arab or Muslim “doing the same thing” culturally speaking; there is likewise no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of “reverse racism” when such debates require a thorough examination of said expression along economic and political lines. This, the power differential of the dominant culture as portrayed by that culture’s media, is the central point of this discussion, and however we might examine it, those who are minority, who are Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such representations as they are played out within this mediated system.

A critical black gaze
As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X, despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him, could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image that survives such a pulverization[15], and as such, serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her essays[16] concerning and quoting Malcolm X:

Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.

Proclaimed “hope” or promised “change” should not derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially when this Machine has minimized minority histories to literally belittled images riding on tickets of commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash; to symbolic representations of white privilege embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more reason we must be “fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all images”.

The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism, nor in a homogenizing, “borderless”, “nomadic” neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of resistance to this dominant culture which are able to pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states:

Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation.

This requires, however, that we change our perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we radically re-orient ourselves in terms our relationship to cultural consumption and its source. These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the ability to read them as such, for having been so long out of touch with our own creative potential, and for having forgotten the formerly “local” media manifestations of guerrilla television, public access cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown theater, etc.

True to our native land
On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper[17]. Instead of the Star-Spangled Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the “black national anthem”, resulting in hate mail and an outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her decision was based on “how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person”. Further, she said that she would no longer sing the national anthem because she “often feels like a foreigner in the United States”.

The correct response of the mayor’s office should have been “this is her right; this is her freedom of speech”, like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, Lift Every Voice and Sing (words and music by John Johnson, ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the lyrics: “May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True to our native land.” This takes on a particularly humbling tone given the replacement of the previous attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes with more current almost prideful acceptances of this, their “allowed” place.

This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen’s Hollywood–the scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and described in the music of Bambu[18] among many others, and where a “beautiful” form of dance was created from the “banal” by Tommy Johnston, aka “Tommy the Clown”, borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although performed by both sexes, and used to entertain children and adults at birthday and block parties. The dance is referred to as clowning, and it went on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and reflective of street realities for a generation lost, often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities, called crumping. Both are performed by youth attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future are systemically limited.

In the documentary about this dance form called Rize![19] the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen previous expression from this community. Included in this film is the striking image of a black man now painting his face up in white clown makeup and not minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following Malcolm’s advice to “never accept images that have been created for you by someone else.”

Speak from the street
And so as Arabs and Muslims now targeted with similar minstrelsies, we do ourselves no favor when we simply smear brown paint on our brown features in order to entertain the Master in the Master’s house; we perform no beneficent action by simply parroting endless mediated exchanges with little bark and less bite. Sacha Cohen would ironically represent all of us as tinpot dictators, when it is he, culturally, politically, economically, and in terms of class and avowed ideological affiliation, who has much more in common with this fetid realm of the world stage than does the majority of Arabs and Muslims on the planet. What does Sasha Cohen know about what is going on in his own backyard, much less this world in active revolt? Indeed, it is Cohen who needs to “know his role”.

While we point out this obvious classist and racist arrogance, we must also strive to find the countervailing non-mediated* representatives that exist closer to home and which speak from the street: the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills (not Twitter) led to intifada; similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of the last kufiyyeh factory[20] in occupied and embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their unique creative contributions of craft, art, music, graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and written word, theater, etc.

For of this common resistance might rise the creative manifestations–the “new folk drama”–that feed back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen and his ilk who would define us and confine us; manifestations[21] that do not allow simply for a misconstrued and patently false “comfort level” or status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short, that do not continue to sell us out. In this is perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks of us, once the realization of such mediated deception and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy that would be better put to creative output, once we wean ourselves from the source of our own misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize the creative source all around us; a new nahdah; proving with our creative action what we already know to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in control of his own creative manifestation in concert, changed the formal and staged lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” to better frame his feelings of being an outsider within American society. It is likewise time for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own restaging.

* Mediation
Mediation defines expression as a function of the distance from direct sensorial witnessing, on a spectrum that ranges from non-mediated to super-mediated.

Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of the unsaid.

Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane Katrina, stating: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Super-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such dominant discourse.

Example(s): The television show Cops with an episode concerning drunk driving; drivers’ education movies; a presidential press conference in the aftermath of Katrina.

Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in opposition to the dominant discourse often in its uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the tools, languages, systems, and technologies of super-mediation.

Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of various cities that represent both the individual killed in an accident and their collective whole; the Legendary K.O’s rap song set to mashup videos for “George Bush Don’t Like Black People”.

1 “Dreaming XXL”; Jake Austen. Harper’s, November 2008. pp. 58–59.

2 What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode?

3;

4 Harper Torchbooks, 1966.

5 The Story of Black Musics [sic] < http://www.rfi.fr/taxonomy/emission/187>;

6 Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To note is that “First-day” issue of stamps exists for a very particular audience that collects such stamps for their value; this is a different audience than the subject of the stamps themselves.

7;

8;

9;

10 Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo to claim “whiteness”, as opposed to his formerly equally marking ethnic identity.

11 Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities;;.

12 Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki.

13 William Blake poem and later hymn.

14;

15;

16 Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

17 USA Today, January 31, 2009; “Controversy after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem’ for ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

18 Pull It Back:;

19 Rize!:;

20 Kufiyeh project:;

21;

Daniel Ibn Zayd was adopted in 1963 and returned definitively to his land of birth in 2004; there he teaches art and illustration and in 2009 founded the artists’ collective Jamaa Al-Yad. He has written for CounterPunch, The Monthly Review Zine, Dissident Voice, and The Design Altruism Project, as well as on his blog: danielibnzayd.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Transracial Eyes, a web-based collective of transracial adoptees. He can be reached at @ibnzayd on Twitter and by email: daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com.

By Ilisha

Last October, the loons were celebrating a small victory in their epic battle against THE 99 Comic Stealth Jihad:

THE 99 is an animated series featuring superheroes inspired by Islamic culture and society. The series was scheduled to launch in the US last week on the The Hub children’s television network, but producers have since announced the broadcast will be postponed indefinitely. Vicious anti-Muslim bigots everywhere are gleeful, boasting that their small but boisterous outcry may have prompted the delay.

The New York Post published a scathing article by outrage peddler Andrea Peyser criticizing the series and calling on anti-Muslim bigots to protest loudly so they can “cancel THE 99 before it starts.”  Peyser says the series will indoctrinate impressionable young children with Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes “masquerading as the good guys.”

For Peyser the Hateful, Muslims are always super villains, so characters who represent the 99 virtues of God in the Qur’an will naturally use their powers to wage the ultimate jihad. She conjures up fearsome images of Jabbar the Powerful dishing out a mean stoning, and Darr the Afflicter venting his rage on hapless dhimmis…

…Despite all the controversy, Dr. Al-Mutawa remains optimistic.  He has faced many hurdles in the last eight years, and his frustrations have been chronicled in the PBS documentary Wham! Bam! Islam!  ”One way or the other,” he says, “‘The 99′ will get on air in the U.S.”

Read the rest: THE 99 Superheroes Vs. The Loons

Now it seems professional outage peddler and hate sophisticate, Daniel Pipes, has at last detected THE 99 Comic Stealth Jihad and taken up the battle in his alarmist article, Islam’s Cartoon Missionaries:

Comic books as a method of missionizing for Islam (da’wa)?

Yes. One year ago, Harvard University hosted a workshop to teach comic book artists how to address Americans’ “unease with Islam and the Middle East.” And later this week, Georgetown University will air a PBS documentary, Wham! Bam! Islam! celebrating a comic book called The 99.

The 99 sounds innocuous. Adweek describes its topic as “a team of multinational superheroes [who] band together to fight the forces of evil.” The American children’s network Hub more fully explains that, “Created by noted Middle East scholar and clinical psychologist Dr. Naif al-Mutawa, [it consists of] superhero characters who must work together to maximize their powers. Each member of The 99embodies one of 99 global values such as wisdom, mercy, strength or faithfulness, and they hail from 99 different countries on seven continents. The series’ superheroes portray characters designed to be positive role models, representing diverse cultures, who work together to promote peace and justice.”

Who can object to the promotion of “global values … representing diverse cultures”?

But a closer look reveals the Islamic nature of the comic book. The title, 99, refers to Islam’s concept that God has 99 names, each of which appears in the Koran and embodies some attribute of His character: the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Kind, the Most Holy, and the All-Peaceful, but also the Avenger, the Afflicter, and the Causer of Death.

The comic book, produced by the Teshkeel Media Group of Kuwait, tells a partly-factual, partly-fantastical tale that begins in 1258 A.D., when the Mongols besieged Baghdad. Librarians supposedly saved the wisdom of the city’s main library by encoding it in 99 gems that get scattered around the world. The heroes must find these “gems of power” before an arch-villain does. Each of them is an ordinary Muslim who, through contact with a gem, achieves superhuman powers and represents one of God’s 99 attributes.

The superheroes are all Muslims (i.e., not Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist), some of whom come from Western countries like the United States and Portugal. In contrast, villains are primarily non-Muslims….

….Likewise, Barack Obama praised the comic books for having “captured the imagination of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of Islam.” An Islamic investment bank whose products “fully comply with Shari’ah principles” invested US$15.9 million in Teshkeel and complimented it for “highlighting Islam’s rich culture and heritage.”

In short, The 99, available in both Arabic and English, contains overtly Islamic content and explicitly promotes Islam. Granted, its Islam has modern aspects, but among non-Muslims the series engages in surreptitious da’wa.

In addition to the comic books, Al-Mutawa has developed some spinoffs (online comics, games, lunch boxes, and theme parks) and envisages others (newspaper comics, stickers, and perhaps toys). But most of all, he wants an animated cartoon. Although the Hub network planned in 2011 to air The 99, this never happened, largely because criticism caused it to shy away from a show instilling “Islamic values in Christian, Jewish and atheist children.”

In short, to the Islamic indoctrination of Western children, already present in schools through textbooks ,additional school materials, and classroom trips, now add comic books and their many spin-offs, actual and potential. The 99 might be fine for Muslim children but, support from Georgetown University notwithstanding, non-Muslim children should not be exposed to missionizing propaganda of this sort.

Will THE 99 Comic Stealth Jihad succeed and lure our children into the clutches of the Mooslem supervillains?!? What are we to do now that Pipes the Courageous has revealed that even our Secret-Mooslem-President, Barak HUSSEIN Obama, is in on the plot?!?

Quick! Someone call Spencer Man and Geller Woman…

The 19: Spencer Man and Geller Woman..ugh.

…or before you can say derka derka Mohammed jihad, ”our children” will be snubbing pork rinds, and Mooslamic theme parks will be springing up like mosques in the heartland.

No Islamophobia here right?

Newt Gingrich thinks being a Muslim is a problem and he believes that it should ‘bother’ Obama that people think he’s Muslim. He also blames Obama for people thinking that way.

Can anyone imagine if you replaced Muslim with “Jew” or “Christian”:

Gingrich says it should ‘bother’ Obama that people think he’s Muslim

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is amping up his language on President Obama’s faith and his relationship with Muslims.  Gingrich told ABC News Friday that that he takes the president at his word that he’s a Christian, but finds it “very bizarre” that Obama is “desperately concerned to apologize to Muslim religious fanatics.”

Gingrich said the president’s apology to the Afghan president for the burning Korans by U.S. soldiers happened last month “while they are killing young Americans,” referring to the two Americans killed during protests over the burned books. Gingrich said at the same time, the administration is “going to war against the Catholic Church and against every right-to-life Protestant organization in the country.”

Asked by a member of the press if it concerns him that a large portion of the electorate believes Obama is a Muslim, Gingrich replied, “It should bother the president.”

“Why does the president behave the way that people would think that? You have to ask why would they believe that? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they watch the kind of things I just described to you,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich said Thursday that “Obama’s Muslim friends” would not be reported on by the “elite media,” in a radio interview with Sandy Rios. Gingrich was asked about Rios called the Washington Post’s “two page” report on Rick Santorum’s ties to Catholic organization, Opus Dei. Gingrich used the question to say that the elite media was protecting  Obama from any religious scrutiny.

“You have to understand that the elite media is in the tank for Obama. They are going to do anything that helps re-elect Obama,” Gingrich said. “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic Church?”

On Wednesday, in Port Charles, La., a man asked Gingrich a question and stated that Obama was a Muslim and a student of Saul Alinsky. Gingrich did not correct the man and later said in an interview with Fox News that he didn’t “have an obligation to go around and correct every single voter about every single topic. I also didn’t agree with him.”

ABC News, 23 March 2012

We must start connecting the dots, racism, which is alive and well in the US is very much related to Islamophobia. The tragic slaying of Trayvon Martin exemplifies the point that the USA’s original sin of “racism” is still alive and well:

Trayvon Martin: The myth of US post-racialism

(AlJazeera English) by Linda Sarsour and Khalid and Khaled Beydoun

Washington, DC - Trayvon Martin was just beginning his life. Trayvon Martin was a son. He was a high school junior, with college to look forward to, a career and perhaps a family of his own.

Trayvon Martin was many things, but for George Zimmerman, he was just Black.

The teenager’s race was enough to raise “suspicion” and trigger the neighbourhood watchman – who possessed no training or authority, except for his racist prerogatives – to murder an unarmed and frightened teenager running for his life.

On November 28, 2011, no other colour but his Blackness mattered – and his rush for safe haven was intercepted by Zimmerman, and the structurally entrenched demonisation of Black men codified in our laws, perpetuated by our police forces and subscribed to by our friends and colleagues, classmates and family members.

Trayvon Martin is not, as many writers and pundits commented following his death, “a reminder of American racism”. For Africans Americans and most people of colour, racism, xenophobia and religious animus are common, if not expected, parts of their daily lives.

In the case of Trayvon Martin, a twin set of correlated racisms prematurely ended his life: Zimmerman’s view that a young Black male must be engaged in criminal or thuggish activity by virtue of his race alone; and the neighbourhood watchmen and police alike who execute the structural racism embedded in police departments and penal systems nationwide in the name of the law.

The myth of the Obama era

The election of President Barack Obama, for white America, signalled the shift away from America’s racially charged past. After 2008, white Americans have contended that the United States is experiencing the embryonic stages of a post-racial moment; Martin’s murder is a reminder of the fatal consequences of racism that makes the headlines. Yet, the intermediary steps – the institutional racism and empowering of people like Zimmerman – to police our communities either formally or informally are not deemed newsworthy.

Racism, generally understood as a conscious perspective, action or decision, is a salient core of the US’ history and present. American racism is interwoven into the country’s narrative, codified in its law and entrenched in its institutions. Its authors and gatekeepers were, and are, still largely white.

Whites seldom experience racism, either in its fatal, frequent, or latent form. This constructs the political ideology that the rest of the US has entered this racism-free utopia. Citizenship to this colour-blind state, however, is denied to African Americans, Muslim Americans and Latinos by virtue of a triumvirate of suspicions: crime, terrorism and illegal immigration.

However, whites are not the only culprits of racism. On March 10, an Arab American gas station clerk on the Westside of Detroit gunned down and killed a 24-year-old African American customer after a dispute over the high-price of condoms. Racially charged crimes and murders between Latinos and Blacks are all too frequent, and the sometimes-explosive tension between Asian American and Arab American storeowners is well documented.

Institutional and structural racism is still robust in the US. This is evidenced by the disparate incarceration rates of brown and Black Americans, the decimation of affirmative action and race-conscious legislation in the US, the crumbling public education systems in minority-populated communities and the all too common cold blooded murders of people of colour – both in the US and beyond its boundaries, whether by policemen, neighbourhood patrolmen or soldiers.

The ‘worst of a national psychosis‘

Kumar Rao, a defence lawyer for the Bronx Defenders in New York City, stated that: “Martin’s killing reflects the absolute worst of a national psychosis: The view that Black males – young and old alike – are inherently threatening and unworthy of personal security; and that the state’s commitment to enduring that belief is perpetuated and institutionalised.”

Trayvon Martin’s murder was avoidable, but yet perversely justified through the cold silence of the state.

Zimmerman was a neighbourhood patrolman – not a police officer – but the distinction is thin in this instance. Some police officers, from Miami to Oakland, exhibit the same reckless and cavalier behaviour as Zimmerman. What is more troubling is that police officers and entire departments routinely cover up racially charged arrests, the roughing up of individuals under custody and operate with impunity under the cover of the law.

Yet, for Zimmerman, he had no such cover. This makes this case more absurd and baffling, particularly because he was given police orders to “discontinue his chase of Martin”, as revealed by 9/11 tapes released on March 19. If Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watchman – a volunteer with no training – had obeyed the policeman’s order, Martin would still be alive today.

Zimmerman ignored those order, and took the law into his own hands; he has still not been arrested.

The importance of Trayvon Martin’s is also based on the urgency of the current socio-political moment. The New York Police Department makes every Muslim in the City, whether Black or Arab, South Asian or Latino, targets of illegal spying or worse – unjust convictions of terrorism based solely on their religion and ethnicity. The fact that the NYPD so far as to label Black American Muslims as an “ancestry of interest” shows how far law enforcement would go to justify religious and ethnic profiling.

Connecting the dots

Arab and Muslim Americans in New York are connecting the dots – whether it is the stopping and frisking of young Black and Latino men or the illegal spying on the everyday aspects of Muslims, people of colour are being targeted by the largest police force in the country. In order to defeat the institutionalised racism of the NYPD and set a precedent for the rest of the country, we must build coalitions, connect our struggles and in unison demand accountability for our communities. None of us will win alone.

In June 2009, a Miami policeman shot and killed Husein Shehada, a 29-year-old Arab American, after an evening club-hopping with his brother and girlfriend. Shehada, like Martin, was unarmed and posed no threat. Yet, the white policeman, Adam Tavss, believed that Shehada’s ethnicity substantiated the suspicion to shoot and kill.

The value of Arab life – whether nameless Palestinian children bombed by American-funded fighter jets or American youth profiled, questioned and incarcerated for frequenting a particular mosque – is spiralling downwards rapidly in the US and at a more accelerated rate in the Arab World.

Trayvon Martin is not a martyr or a symbol of racial injustice. Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Malice Green or Ramaley Graham, are all other young African American men shot down and killed because of the colour of their skin and countless others that remain unnamed. Most recently, Troy Davis shook the nation as another victim of a broken justice system that continues to fail people of colour not one person at a time but through mass incarceration and mass conviction rates.

Trayvon Martin was his own person and an archetype of our brothers, our sons, our nephews, grandsons. Trayvon is Mohammed walking down Atlantic Avenue, vulnerable to patrolmen wary of his beard. Trayvon is Carlos, donning Dodger Blue in Pico Rivera, mistaken by the LAPD Gang Squad as a gangbanger because of the colour of his skin.

Linda Sarsour is Palestinian Muslim American, non-profit leader, public speaker and community organiser.

Follow her on Twitter: @Lsarsour

Khaled A Beydoun is a Washington, DC-based attorney and author.

Follow him on Twitter: @Legyptian

A great article from intrepid journalist Jeremy Scahill, questioning why the Obama administration is keeping a journalist in prison in Yemen:

Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?

by Jeremy Scahill (Nation Magazine)

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”

Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to Al Qaeda figures in part due to his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist. While Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to Al Qaeda, he adds that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.”

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

Seven months after the Majala bombing, in July 2010, Sharaf and Shaye were out running errands. Sharaf popped into a supermarket, while Shaye waited outside. When Sharaf came out of the store, he recalls, “I saw armed men grabbing him and taking him to a car.” The men, it turned out, were Yemeni intelligence agents. They snatched Shaye, hooded him and took him to an undisclosed location. The agents, according to Sharaf, threatened Shaye and warned him against making further statements on TV. Shaye’s reports on the Majala bombing and his criticism of the US and Yemeni governments, Sharaf said, “pushed the regime to kidnap him. One of the interrogators told him, ‘We will destroy your life if you keep on talking about this issue.’” Eventually, in the middle of the night, Shaye was dumped back onto a street and released. “Abdulelah was threatened many times over the phone by the Political Security and then he was kidnapped for the first time, beaten and investigated over his statements and analysis on the Majala bombing and the US war against terrorism in Yemen,” says Shaye’s lawyer, Abdulrahman Barman. “I believe he was arrested upon a request from the US.”

Shaye responded to his abduction by going back on al Jazeera and describing his own arrest. “Abdulelah continued to report facts, not for the sake of the Americans or Al Qaeda, but because he believed that what he was reporting was the truth and that it is a journalist’s role to uncover the truth,” says Sharaf. “He is a very professional journalist,” he adds. “He is rare in the journalistic environment in Yemen where 90 percent of journalists write extempore and lack credibility.” Shaye, he explains, is “very open-minded and rejects extremism. He was against violence and the killing of innocents in the name of Islam. He was also against killing innocent Muslims with pretext of fighting terrorism. In his opinion, the war on terror should have been fought culturally, not militarily. He believes using violence will create more violence and encourage the spread of more extremist currents in the region.”

In the meantime, Sharaf was encountering his own troubles with the Yemeni regime over his drawings of President Saleh and his criticism of the Yemeni government’s war against the minority Houthi population in the north of Yemen. He had also criticized conservative Salafis. And he was Shaye’s best friend.

On August 6, 2010, Sharaf and his family had just broken the Ramadan fast when he heard shouting from outside his home: “Come out, the house is surrounded.” Sharaf walked outside. “I saw soldiers I had never seen before. They were tall and heavy—they reminded me of American Marines. Then, I knew that they were from the counterterrorism unit. They had modern laser guns. They were wearing American Marine–type uniforms,” he recalls. They told Sharaf he was coming with them. “What is the accusation?” he asked. “They said, ‘You’ll find out.’ ”

As Sharaf was being arrested, Yemeni forces had surrounded Shaye’s home as well. “Abdulelah refused to come out, so they raided his house, took him by force, beat him and broke his tooth,” Sharaf says. “We were both taken blindfolded and handcuffed to the national security prison, which is supported by the Americans.” They were separated and thrown in dark, underground cells, says Sharaf. “We were kept for about thirty days during Ramadan in the national security prison where we were continuously interrogated.”

For that first month, Sharaf and Shaye did not see each other. Eventually, they were taken from the national security prison to Yemen’s Political Security prison, where they were put in a cell together. “We were transferred to the political security prison built by Saddam Hussein, his gift to Yemen,” he says. “We were moved from the American gift to the Iraqi gift.” (The Nation could not independently verify Sharaf’s claim of an Iraqi role in the building of the prison. And while the US trains and supports Yemen’s counterterrorism force, it is not clear if that aid has been used for the national security prison). Sharaf was eventually released, after he pledged to the authorities that he would not draw any more cartoons of President Saleh. Shaye would make no such deal.

Shaye was held in solitary confinement for thirty-four days with no access to a lawyer. His family did not even know where he had been taken or why. Eventually, his lawyers received a tip from a released prisoner that Shaye was in the Political Security prison and they were able to see him. “When Abdulelah was arrested, he was put in a narrow dirty and foul smelling bathroom for five days.I noticed that one of Abdulelah’s teeth was extracted and another one was broken, in addition to presence of some scars on his chest,” recalls Barman. “There were a lot scars on his chest. He was psychologically tortured. He had been told that all his friends and family members had left him and that no one had raised his case. He was tortured by false information.”=

This cartoon, drawn by Abdulelah Haider Shaye’s friend, Kamal Sharaf, portrays Shaye locked up while US Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein holds the key. The words above the cartoon read: Freedom for the Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye.

On September 22, Shaye was eventually hauled into a court. Prosecutors asked for more time to prepare a case against him. A month later, in late October, he was locked in a cage in Yemen’s state security court, which was established by presidential decree and has been roundly denounced as illegal and unfair, as a judge read out a list of charges against him. He was accused of being the “media man” for Al Qaeda, recruiting new operatives for the group and providing Al Qaeda with photos of Yemeni bases and foreign embassies for potential targeting. “The government filed many charges against him,” says Barman. “Some of these charges were: joining an armed group aiming to target the stability and security of the country, inciting Al Qaeda members to assassinate President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, recruiting new Al Qaeda members, working as propagandist for Al Qaeda and Anwar Al-Awlaki in particular. Most of these charges carry the death sentence under Yemeni law.” As the charges against him were read, according to journalist Iona Craig, a longtime foreign correspondent based in Yemen who reports regularly for the Times of London, Shaye “paced slowly around the white cell, smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.”

When the judge finished reading the charges against him, Shaye stood behind the bars of the holding cell and addressed his fellow journalists. “When they hid murderers of children and women in Abyan, when I revealed the locations and camps of nomads and civilians in Abyan, Shabwa and Arhab when they were going to be hit by cruise missiles, it was on that day they decided to arrest me,” he declared. “You notice in the court how they have turned all of my journalistic contributions into accusations. All of my journalistic contributions and quotations to international reporters and news channels have been turned into accusations.” As security guards dragged him away, Shaye yelled, “Yemen, this is a place where, when a young journalist becomes successful, he is viewed with suspicion.”

In January 2011, Shaye was convicted of terrorism-related charges and sentenced to five years in prison, followed by two years of restricted movement and government surveillance. Throughout his trial, Shaye refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court and refused to present a legal defense. Human Rights Watch said the specialized court where Shaye was tried “failed to meet international standards of due process,” while his lawyers argue that the little “evidence” that was presented against him relied overwhelmingly on fabricated documents. “What happened was a political not judicial decision. It has no legal basis,” says Barman, Shaye’s lawyer, who boycotted the trial. “Having witnessed his trial I can say it was a complete farce,” says Craig.

Several international human rights groups condemned the trial as a sham and an injustice. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

There is no doubt that Shaye was reporting facts that both the Yemeni and US government wanted to suppress. He was also interviewing people Washington was hunting. While the US and Yemeni governments alleged that he was a facilitator for Al Qaeda propaganda, close observers of Yemen disagree. “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of his work,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University who had communicated regularly with Shaye since 2008. “Without Shaye’s reports and interviews we would know much less about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than we do, and if one believes, as I do, that knowledge of the enemy is important to constructing a strategy to defeat them, then his arrest and continued detention has left a hole in our knowledge that has yet to be filled.”

As the US ratcheted up its efforts to assassinate the radical cleric Anwar Awlaki, among the charges leveled against him was that he praised the actions of the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. A key source for those statements was an interview with Awlaki conducted by Shaye broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2009. Far from coming off as sympathetic, Shaye’s interview was objective and seemed aimed at actually getting answers. Among the questions he asked Awlaki: How can you agree with what Nidal did as he betrayed his American nation? Why did you bless the acts of Nidal Hasan? Do you have any connection with the incident directly? Shaye also confronted Awlaki with inconsistencies from Awlaki’s previous interviews. If anything, Shaye’s interviews with Awlaki provided the US intelligence community and the politicians and pro-assassination punditry with ammunition to support their campaign to kill Awlaki. (Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike on September 30, 2011.)

After Shaye was convicted and sentenced, tribal leaders intensified their pressure on President Saleh to issue a pardon. “Some prominent Yemenis and tribal sheikhs visited the president to mediate in the issue and the president agreed to release and pardon him,” recalls Barman. “We were waiting for the release of the pardon—it was printed out and prepared in a file for the president to sign and announce the next day.” Word of the impending pardon leaked in the Yemeni press. “That same day,” Barman says, “the president [Saleh] received a phone call from Obama expressing US concerns over the release of Abdulelah Haider.” Saleh rescinded the pardon.

“Certainly Shaye’s reports were an embarrassment for the US and Yemeni government, because at a time when both governments were seeking and failing to kill key leaders within AQAP, this single journalist with his camera and computer was able to locate these same leaders and interview them,” says Johnsen. “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job, and it remains unclear why the US or Yemeni government refuse to present the evidence they claim to possess.”

In February, Shaye began a brief hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, ending it after his family expressed serious concerns about his deteriorating health. While international media organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, have called for Shaye’s release, his case has received scant attention in the United States. Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers have said he remains in jail at the request of the White House. Some had hoped that when President Saleh stepped down earlier this year, Shaye might be released.

That seems unlikely if the US government has any say in the matter. “We are standing by [President Obama’s] comments from last February,” State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told The Nation. “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin said, “That is all we have to say about this case.”

When Craig recently questioned the US ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, about Shaye’s case, she says Feierstein laughed at the question before answering. “Shaye is in jail because he was facilitating Al Qaeda and its planning for attacks on Americans and therefore we have a very direct interest in his case and his imprisonment,” he said. When Craig mentioned the shock waves it had sent through the journalism community in Yemen, Feierstein replied, “This isn’t anything to do with journalism, it is to do with the fact that he was assisting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and if they [Yemeni journalists] are not doing that they don’t have anything to worry about from us.”

For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicate that simply interviewing Al Qaeda–associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, is a crime in the view of the US government. “I think the worst thing about the whole case is that not only is an independent journalist being held in proxy detention by the US,” says Craig, “but that they’ve successfully put paid to other Yemeni journalists investigating air strikes against civilians and, most importantly, holding their own government to account. Shaye did both of those things.” She adds: “With the huge increase in government air strikes and US drone attacks recently, Yemen needs journalists like Shaye to report on what’s really going on.”

Graham still up to his old lies and fearmongering:

Franklin Graham Calls Obama’s Religious Beliefs Into Question

Evangelist Franklin Graham called President Barack Obama’s religious views into question on Tuesday, stating that he does not know for sure if Obama is a Christian.

Graham, who is the son of Billy Graham and the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Obama “has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.”

“All I know is I’m a sinner, and God has forgiven me of my sins… you have to ask every person,” he said about whether he could say for sure that Obama is indeed of the Christian faith.

However, when asked about GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s religion, Graham gave a much more concrete answer.

“I think so,” Graham said when asked if he believes Santorum is a Christian. “His values are so clear on moral issues. No question about it… I think he’s a man of faith.”

MSNBC’s panelists questioned the reverend’s double standard, but Graham continued to draw distinctions between the candidates on the issue of faith. On Mitt Romney, Graham was again evasive, stating that “most Christians would not recognize Mormonism as part of the Christian faith.”

But Graham was more willing to label Newt Gingrich’s faith. “Newt’s been married several times… but he could make a good candidate,” Graham said. “I think Newt is a Christian. At least he told me he is.”

Later in the segment, Graham also said he could not be sure that Obama was not a Muslim.

“All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries,” he said.

He continued, ”Islam sees him as a son of Islam… I can’t say categorically that [Obama is not Muslim] because Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama.”

Graham drew the criticism of the White House last spring when he suggested in an interview with ABC that Obama had not been born in the United States.

During that same interview, Graham also questioned whether Obama’s actions and values matched up with his identification as a Christian.

“Now he has told me that he is a Christian. But the debate comes, what is a Christian?” Graham said of Obama. “For him, going to church means he’s a Christian. For me, the definition of a Christian is whether we have given our life to Christ and are following him in faith and we have trusted him as our lord and savior.”

Watch Graham’s full interview on MSNBC:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Colbert believes that under the sea, Bin Laden might be finding young impressionable dolphins who are willing to wage Jihad.

Starts at 2:23-4:14

Colbert Report: ThreatDown – Barack Obama, Fundamentalist Flippers & Coked Up Diplomats

Barack Obama plays the same old dirty political trick of being irresistibly appealing, the Navy trains dolphins to sweep for mines, and the U.N. receives 35 pounds of cocaine. (06:11)

To date Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents ever.

Andrew Adler wrote that he thinks Benjamin Netanyahu should assassinate President Barack Obama because he is not pro-Israel enough. Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents out there and still you got the nutbags on the Right who want him dead.

Imagine if an American Muslim publisher had wrote this? He would be getting water-boarded in Guantanamo as we speak. Also, you could bet that the condemnations from Muslim leaders would barely be recognized, unlike in this case, where the outrage at Adler’s statements from within the Jewish community is highlighted very well.

Uproar after Jewish American newspaper publisher suggests Israel assassinate Barack Obama

(Haaretz)

NEW YORK – The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

Adler apologized yesterday for the article, saying “I very much regret it; I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And in an interview with Gawker.com, Adler denied that he was advocating an assassination of Obama.

	The op-ed in Atlanta Jewish Times.

The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta last night issued a harsh condemnation of Adler’s article, saying that his proposals are “shocking beyond belief.”

“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”

Update on SOPA and PIPA

(Washington’s Blog)

In the face of massive Internet protest today, key senate and house backers of the SOPA and PIPA web censorship bills – including Senators Marco Rubio, Roy Blunt, John Cornyn, Orrin Hatch, John Boozman and Jim DeMint, and Representatives Ben Quayle and Lee Terry – have dropped their support. So have a number of other senators.

At least 17,000 websites allegedly joined in the protest.

Indeed, even several congresspeople joined in the protest. Here’s what Congresswoman Anna Eshoo’shomepage looks like right now:

Stop SOPA/ PIPA

And congressman Earl Blumenauer joined in as well.

Google says that 4.5 million people signed their anti-SOPA petition today.

But SOPA’s key sponsor – Lamar Smith – is sticking with the flawed bill.

In fact, the Senate is set to vote on PIPA on January 24, 2012, and the House Judiciary Committeecontinues its markup of SOPA in February.

Hollywood moguls have declared that they will not contribute any more money to Obama since he came out against SOPA. (But given that Obama promised to veto NDAA, and then didn’t, that might not mean very much.)

Given that even the web “dark out” hasn’t killed these zombie bills, Anonymous is calling for physicalprotests to oppose the bills:

This is an urgent emergency alert to all people of the United States. The day we’ve all been waiting for has unfortunately arrived.

The United States is censoring the internet. Our blatant response is that we will not sit while our rights are taken away by the government we trusted them to preserve. This is not a call to arms, but a call to recognition and action! The United States government has mastered this corrupt way of giving us a false sense of freedom. We think we are free and can do what we want, but in reality we are very limited and restricted as to what we can do, how we can think, and even how our education is obtained. We have been so distracted by this mirage of freedom, that we have just become what we were trying to escape from.

For too long, we have been idle as our brothers and sisters were arrested. During this time, the government has been scheming, plotting ways to increase censorship through means of I S P block aides, D N S blockings, search engine censorship, website censorship, and a variety of other methods that directly oppose the values and ideas of both Anonymous as well as the founding fathers of this country,who believed in free speech and press!

The United States has often been used as an example of the ideal free country. When the one nation that is known for its freedom and rights start to abuse its own people, this is when you must fight back, because others are soon to follow. Do not think that just because you are not a United States citizen, that this does not apply to you. You cannot wait for your country to decide to do the same. You must stop it before it grows, before it becomes acceptable. You must destroy its foundation before it becomes too powerful.

Has the U.S. government not learned from the past? Has it not seen the 2011 revolutions? Has it not seen that we oppose this wherever we find it and that we will continue to oppose it? Obviously the United States Government thinks they are exempt. This is not only an Anonymous collective call to action. What will a Distributed Denial of Service attack do? What’s website defacement against the corrupted powers of the government? No. This is a call for a worldwide internet and physical protestagainst the powers that be. Spread this message everywhere. We will not stand for this! Tell your parents, your neighbors, your fellow workers, your school teachers, and anyone else you come in contact with. This affects anyone that desires the freedom to browse anonymously, speak freely without fear of retribution, or protest without fear of arrest.

Go to every I R C network, every social network, every online community, and tell them of the atrocity that is about to be committed. If protest is not enough, the United States government shall see that we are truly legion and we shall come together as one force opposing this attempt to censor the internet once again, and in the process discourage any other government from continuing or trying.

***

EMERGENCY ACTION AUTHORIZED. ORGANIZATION OF LOCAL PROTESTS IS NEEDED. CONVERGE AT FREEWAYS AND HIGHWAYS. LIBRARIES, MALLS, GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, SCHOOLS…ALL ARE ACCEPTABLE AREAS! IF YOUR GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN THE INTERNET … SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT!

Hundreds protested against the bills in front of senators offices in New York today.

In related news, an Occupy protest aims to shut down San Francisco’s financial district on Friday.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Lockup Everyone 

The last thing Barack Obama did in 2011 was sign a bill that eliminates due process for anyone suspected of terrorism in America.

(updated below)

Recently, I’ve been focusing on the double standards in the U.S. media and national discourse with regard to American foreign policy in the Middle East and greater Muslim world.  This leads to absurdities like this:

President Barack Obama said today the U.S. has requested that Iran return the highly sensitive stealth drone that crash landed there two weeks ago, but an Iranian general already said that’s not going to happen.

“We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said at a news conference.

So, let me get this straight: the U.S. has been using surveillance from stealth drones to bomb and assassinate targets inside Iran, one of these drones goes down while flying inside Iran’s sovereign territory, and now the U.S. is asking for it back?  This reminds me of childhood story an Indian friend of mine told me: his mother used to ask for her shoe back whenever she used to throw it at him.

A shocked Iranian military official replied:

No one returns the symbol of aggression to the party that sought secret and vital intelligence related to the national security of a country.

What do you think the United States would do if an Iranian drone was downed in U.S. territory?  We all know the answer: bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.  Or, at minimum we would use drones to drop a few bombs on their heads.

Some Americans wonder why there are so many Muslim suicide bombers.  Well, they don’t have drones, which are the American equivalent of suicide bombers.  Drones have the added benefit that they can be operated without fear of any personal harm.

Drones are now America’s favorite Muslim killer, used against at least six different Muslim countries (Iran could be considered the seventh Muslim country to have this honor).

But, always remember: they (Iranians, Muslims, etc.) are so violent, and we are so peaceful.

Update:

JihadWatch’s Marisol just posted an article complaining about the fact that “Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space.” (h/t Believing Atheist) Marisol huffs: “So, does anyone still say ‘friend and ally?’”

The “threat” comes after U.S. drones violated Pakistan’s sovereignty for the millionth time and committed what under international law is considered an act of war: they bombed and killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.  Some “friend and ally” America is.

This is not the first time American drones have killed Pakistanis.  In fact, they have been doing so for many years, killing hundreds of civilians–including children.

If Mexico routinely sent killer drones across the border to snuff out American lives, what do you think the American reaction would be?

But in the Orwellian world of JihadWatch, it is the party that defends its sovereignty that is at fault (because it is Muslim) whereas the party violating sovereignty is justified in doing so (since it is fighting Muslims).  Unfortunately, this bizarro world is not limited to the loony land of JihadWatch but rather exists in mainstream political discourse and is a part of conventional wisdom.

No doubt Islamophobes will view this as more evidence of “Obama’s Stealth Jihad” against “Judeo-Christian United States.”

Obama Orders Government to Clean Up Terror Training

by Spencer Ackerman (Wired.com)

The White House quietly ordered a widespread review of government counterterrorism training materials last month, following Danger Room’s reports that officials at the FBI, military and Justice Department taught their colleagues that “mainstream” Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the Death Star.

According to a Pentagon memorandum acquired by Danger Room, the White House’s National Security Staff in October requested “Departments and Agencies” to “provide their screening process for CVE trainers and speakers.” (.pdf) CVE refers to “Countering Violent Extremism,” the euphemism du jour for the war on terrorism. The memorandum says that “recent media attention” led to the review, and contains a single attachment to demonstrate that attention: “Spencer Ackerman’s Wired.com article.”

The ongoing review will examine whether counterterrorism training material throughout the government is accurate and relevant, and will make sure the briefings given to federal field offices and local cops meet the same standards as FBI headquarters or the Pentagon.

Jose Mayorga, a retired two-star general who now serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, oversaw the Pentagon’s contribution to the White House review. In the memo, dated Oct. 16, Mayorga asked aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to collect counterterrorism training materials at the “service academies and major academic centers (e.g., Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and National Defense Intelligence College)” by Oct. 31, a deadline that Pentagon spokesman Robert Ditchey says has “been extended” so the department can be “comprehensive and deliberate.” 

The purpose of the review, Mayorga writes, is to “determine the criteria used to establish professional qualifications for teachers and lecturers providing instruction on countering violent Islamic extremism; with particular focus on Military Information Support Operations, Information Operations, and Military Intelligence curriculum.” Mayorga adds that information on “cultural awareness” for troops preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan is also subject to the White House review.

Some security agencies already have their own internal reviews. After Danger Room reported on presentations at the FBI training academy at Quantico and for FBI partners in New York that taught al-Qaida was “irrelevant” compared to the threat of Islam itself, the bureau began what it describes as a thorough scrub of its counterterrorism curriculum. It enlisted the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to purge material that conflates terrorism with mainstream Islam. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department initiated a separate counterterrorism training review, recently told Congress that those instructional materials hurt the U.S. fight against al-Qaida.

But at least one member of Congress is worried that all of these reviews will undermine counterterrorism efforts in the name of political correctness.

In a forthcoming letter to Holder and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) writes that “political nature of these reviews might inadvertently weaken our law enforcement and military counter-terrorism training programs by censoring certain language that is used to objectively identify the asymmetrical threats that are present in today’s world.”

Myrick takes a dark view of Islam. In a foreword to a book titled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, she writes, “Since the 1960s there has been a concerted effort on the part of radical Islamists to infiltrate our major institutions. Front groups of terror now operate openly in our country, comprising a network of support for jihadists.” Last year, Myrick alleged that Hezbollah was planting operatives among illegal immigrants entering the U.S. through Mexico.

“We don’t necessarily disagree with some action being taken,” Myrick’s military affairs aide, Clark Fonda, tells Danger Room. “But we’re concerned that this could inadvertently cause a political reaction within [the Justice Department] and [the Defense Department] that could lead to the censoring of words such as ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ in federal law enforcement and military counter-terrorism training documents.”

Myrick’s letter to Holder and Panetta cites the recommendations of a Senate inquiry into the Fort Hood shooting that also warns against euphemistic treatment of violent Islamic extremism. Yet the leader of that inquiry, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), told Danger Room that the FBI’s anti-Islamic training materials represented a “lie” that “all Muslims support terrorism.”

President Obama has repeatedly tried to assure Muslims that “America is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” a message he delivered in Turkey and Egypt. His chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, argued last year against calling al-Qaida’s adherents “jihadis,” because using a religious term “would play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers.”

These messages are complicated, if not contradicted, by the anti-Islam training that counterterrorism agents and officials at the FBI, Justice Department and Defense Department have received. “Boneheaded is a generous way to describe this training,” says counterterrorism analyst Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice. “I’d lean more towards hateful, paranoid and completely counterproductive.”

Photo: White House

The Sugar Land Tea Party is going to have to move its hate fest from the Hyatt Place Houston to a community center. It looks like the word spread about how loony and bigoted Pamela Geller is and the Hyatt administration took notice.

Kate Shellnutt, the author of the article below alerted us to this fact with her tweet:

a visit by one of the biggest names in islamophobia has caused drama for the tea party in sugar land http://t.co/CZLjGdM4

Shellnutt’s article gives Pamela Geller too much credit by calling Geller a critic of “radical Islam.” Geller is not a critic of “radical Islam.” She is a far right-wing nut job who hates Islam and Muslims, thinks the USA is under imminent threat of Islamic takeover, thinks Obama is a “Mooslim” anti-Semite and radical Jihadist who is working in league with the Iranians to bring about Islamic rule. And those are some of her more tame ideas!

Anyway here is Shellnutt’s article:

The Sugar Land Tea Party was forced to move an event featuring a prominent critic of radical Islam after Hyatt Place learned of opponents’ plans to protest it.

The hotel, where activist Pamela Geller was going to address the crowd and sign copies of her new book Stop the Islamization of America, cancelled their meeting space, forcing the Tea Party to reserve a nearby community center.

“In light of the business disruptions affiliated with this event, it has been moved to an alternate location,” said a Hyatt Place manager, who declined to give further details on the decision.

Geller is known for her views on Islam, including strong opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque (which she is said to have nicknamed), dismissal of liberal politicians for “giving in” to American Muslims and continued belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

On her right-wing blog Atlas Shrugs, Geller urged readers to boycott the hotel for cancelling the event, calling it a setback to free speech and “a stunning surrender to Islamic supremacism.”

The Sugar Land Democrats Club announced their protest on Sunday and still plans to hold a peaceful demonstration at the event’s new location, the Sugar Land Community Center.

“Let’s send a message to the fear mongers and haters in Sugar Land and Fort Bend County that the likes of Ms. Pamela Geller and her bigoted ideology are not welcome here in the 4th most racially diverse county in the USA,” residents Deron Patterson and Q Imam said in a press release.

The community center can be rented out for public or private events, like tonight’s book signing, said Doug Adolph, Sugar Land city spokesman.

All attendees and protestors must follow the law, but the community center does not place any further restrictions on First Amendment rights, he said.

Like Geller, two-thirds of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement say that Islam is at odds with the American way of life, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The survey also showed Tea Party members are nearly twice as likely as the general public to believe that American Muslims want to establish sharia law. They are less comfortable with  mosques in their communities, Muslims praying in airports and Muslim women wearing niqab.

The Sugar Land Tea Party event isn’t the first time Geller has come to the Houston area. The local chapter of Act! For America hosted Geller and fellow anti-Jihadist Robert Spencer in June, when they showed their film, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks.

“We believe presentations such as this also provide an opportunity for citizens to learn more about how Islamic Law (Sharia) contradicts the U.S. Constitution– an excellent example of which we are seeing played out right before us at this event, in that Shariah Law prohibits Freedom of Speech if the speech can be considered to be ‘offensive’ to Muslims,” said Susan Watts, of Act! For America Houston, by email.

Fear, Inc. – a recent report by the Center for American Progress—labels Geller one of the main players in the country’s Islamophobia network and says her blog incites Muslim fear-mongering among the right-wing blogosphere, including some politically conservative Christians.

“She writes about Muslims in the most reductive and offensive way imaginable,” said Matt Duss, an analyst on national security policy at the center. Geller, he said, has been able to strike an emotional chord with her readers and followers by orchestrating controversy and fear over Islam, as she did with the Ground Zero mosque incident.

Geller and Spencer’s organization – Stop Islamization of America—was founded in 2010 to fight radical Islam and terrorism, but their opponents insist the organization’s scope extends far beyond that.

The Anti-Defamation League wrote Sugar Land city officials and religious leaders ahead of the upcoming event, warning them of Geller’s vilification of Islam. The ADL said her group “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” and the Southern Poverty Law Association has labeled it a hate group.

Geller’s supporters, who continue to see radical Islam as a dangerous, real and urgent threat, disagree with these characterizations.

“We see value in presentations like (hers) as one of the tools available in learning more about the creep of Sharia Law and it’s customs, as well as an opportunity to understand the impact of Cultural (or Stealth) Jihad which is usually aided by a complicit media paralyzed by Political Correctness,” Watts said.

MEK-Terror Linked/Terrorist inspirer Robert Spencer is already calling Hyatt officials “dhimmis” and blaming CAIR and the “world wide Muslim conspiracy” for this cancellation. He is also asking his shock troops of Spencerites to flood the Hyatt with calls and emails about how they don’t appreciate the hate event being canceled:

Wherever they succeed in intimidating a group or venue into dropping a talk by a freedom fighter, we have to bring just as much pressure to bear for the cause of justice, and let that group or venue know that we do not appreciate their failure to stand up for Constitutional principles when challenged. So please contact the Hyatt Place in Houston and tell them that since they canceled the Geller event, you will be staying elsewhere:

Hyatt Place Houston/Sugar Land
16730 Creek Bend Drive
Sugar Land, TX 77478, USA
Phone: +1 281 491 0300 Fax: +1 281 491 0325
Farley Kern
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Tel: +1 312 780 5506
farley.kern@hyatt.com

The stakes are very high. If we don’t resist this Islamic supremacist thuggery, the Islamic supremacists will succeed in stamping out all discussion of the truth about Islam and jihad, thereby rendering us mute and defenseless before its advance. That’s why we have to resist now, at every step, before it’s too late. Contact the Hyatt. But don’t just complain: host a counter-jihadist in your area. Stand for freedom.

Spencer believes in Freedom just as much as Kim Jong Il does, that much is clear when you visit Robert Spencer Watch. I think loonwatchers should contact Hyatt Place Houston and let them know how much you appreciate the fact that they won’t allow their venue to be used as a place of hate.

An insightful piece by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverret on the repercussions of the so called “Iranian plot.”

Iranian ‘plots’ and American hubris

Editor’s note: Flynt Leverett teaches international affairs at Penn State and is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Hillary Mann Leverett teaches U.S. foreign policy at American University and is CEO of a political risk consultancy. Together, they write The Race for Iran. They both held senior positions on Middle East policy at the State Department and National Security Council.

(CNN) — Calls by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Hillary Clinton to “unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians,” in response to an alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Washington, reflect a hubristic misapprehension of reality.

The Obama Administration mistakenly believes it can exploit the accusations for strategic advantage. In fact, they are likely to play to Iran’s advantage, not America’s.

The U.S. foreign policy community profoundly misunderstands the Islamic Republic’s national security strategy. The Islamic Republic seeks to defend itself not primarily by conventional military power, in which it is deficient, but by forging ties to proxy allies around the region-actors with the ability to affect on-the-ground outcomes in key regional settings who are inclined to cooperate with Tehran.

In some cases, these actors are discrete political movements, often with paramilitary capabilities, for example, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia political parties-cum-militias in Iraq.

In other situations, Tehran sees public opinion as its chief ally. By contrasting some regimes’ cooperation with the United States and Israel with its own posture of “resistance” to American and Israeli ambitions to regional hegemony, Tehran cultivates “soft power” across the Middle East.

Iran conceives its strategy, especially in a period of relative decline in America’s standing, as one that constrains unfriendly regimes in the short term and undermines them in the longer term. Over the last decade, it has helped the Islamic Republic reap significant political and strategic gains in important theaters across the Middle East-Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories.

With the advent of the Arab awakening at the end of last year, Iranian decision-makers are confident that some Arab states’ shift toward governments more reflective of their peoples’ attitudes and concerns-and, hence, more inclined to pursue more independent foreign policies vis-à-vis the United States and Israel-will work to Iran’s advantage.

Iranian policymakers correctly calculated that virtually any successor to Saddam Hussein ‘s regime in Iraq would be a net positive for Iranian interests. Now, they calculate that a successor to the Mubarak regime in Egypt is bound to be less enthusiastic about strategic cooperation with the United States and Israel and more receptive to Iran’s message of resistance.

Iran’s strategy toward Saudi Arabia runs very much along these lines. Tehran’s approach is to highlight Saudi collusion with Washington and (at least indirectly) with Israel on important regional issues, thereby attracting support from ordinary Saudis-not just Saudi Shia but also Sunnis who dislike their government’s pro-American stance.

In the short term, Iran seeks to constrain the Saudi government from cooperating in military strikes or other coercive actions against it by making this an unpopular prospect for much of the Saudi population.

In the longer term, Iran is working to transform the regional balance of power from one in which the United States, the Saudis, and other American allies dominate to one in which American, Israeli, and Saudi influence is marginalized by the diplomatic realignment of Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Turkey, post-Saddam Iraq, and now Egypt.

The Saudi leadership tries to push back by portraying Iran as an “alien”, Shia/Persian element in its environment. At times, this helps the Kingdom hold the line against the Islamic Republic’s soft power offensive. But the long-term trend is toward rising Iranian influence. In this context, the notion of an Iranian government plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States simply has no logic.

History also suggests we treat the Obama Administration’s claims of Iranian government complicity with deep skepticism.

For eight years, during 1980-1988, the fledgling Islamic Republic had to defend itself against a war of aggression launched by Saddam Hussein — a war of aggression financed primarily by Saudi Arabia. Nearly 300,000 Iranians were killed in that war. But, during the entire conflict, the Iranian government never targeted a single Saudi anywhere in the world.

This is not because the Islamic Republic loves the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is because Iran’s national security strategy ultimately depends on appealing to the Saudi public not to support attacks against Iran, by harnessing popular anger over Israeli actions and U.S. overreach in the war on terror.

Killing a Saudi Ambassador would have exactly the opposite effect. Whatever Mansour Ababsiar and his cousin may have talked about, it is wholly implausible that the Iranian leadership decided that this was a smart thing to do.

The Obama Administration’s calls for more concerted action against Iran will ultimately backfire-because they will be seen in most of the Muslim world (outside Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab monarchies closely linked to Saudi Arabia) as the United States yet again leveling dubious life-and-death charges as the pretext to contain or even eliminate another Muslim power.

President Obama, his advisers, and all Americans need to ask themselves if this is really the time to bring the United States even closer to another Middle East war fought in blind defiance of the region’s strategic realities.

The title may offend some, but here at Loonwatch we do not believe in any sacred cows. By now we have all heard reports about the killing of accused terrorist and mastermind behind the “underwear bomber” and “Fort Hood shootings,” US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. The fact that he was on a “hit list” that included other US citizens was reported back in January:

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.

After several unsuccessful attempts by the US government Anwar al-Awlaki is finally dead. The indefatigable Glenn Greenwald spells out the tendentious nature of the hunt for Awlaki and all the resultant shadiness:

No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.  When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

Awlaki once was a marginal figure, on the run in the mountains of Yemen, his operational role in AlQaeda was nill, now he has been transformed into a martyr with a little help from our brutal friend, the President of Yemen:

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.).  It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its.  The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world.  The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

The implications for our civil liberties and checks and balances on the power of the Executive are clear:

What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.  Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists — criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture.  It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

Greenwald’s evaluation is dark because of the uncomfortable truth he relates: we are cheering the destruction of the very liberties that safeguard us from the abuses of power.

This is all being done under the guise of defending our “freedom” and “security.” In reality, as terror expert Professor Charles Kurzman points out, very few Muslims were interested in Awlaki’s message:

Given that Awlaki’s messages is sitting on the internet, easily accessible to millions of English speaking Muslims, it’s very interesting how few have taken him up on his demand that Muslims join the revolutionary movement.

It is time that US citizens stand up for their rights and say we will not allow the government to take the life of our citizens without due process. We are not going to buy the line that our civil liberties and freedoms must be bargained in the interest of “security,” especially from a threat that is overblown in the first place.

Poll: Many S.C. Republicans think Obama a Muslim, born in another country

President Barack Obama has released his detailed, long-form birth certificate that shows he was born in Hawaii. And the president has said he is a Christian.

But a Winthrop Poll released today shows that large numbers of S.C. Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party don’t believe him.

Nearly 73 percent said the word “honest” does not describe the president well. Almost 30 percent of self-identified S.C. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say Obama is a Muslim, and 36 percent say the president “probably” or “definitely” was born in another country.

For a few years of his childhood, Obama lived in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Obama, however, has insisted he is a Christian, just as he has maintained that he was born in Hawaii.

With some Republicans arguing Obama was not born in the U.S. – and thus is ineligible to serve as the nation’s chief executive – the president released his long-form birth certificate that showed that he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961.

A birth notice in a Hawaii newspaper also indicates that the president was born where and when he says he was.

But the release of that long-form birth certificate has only partially mollified those who questioned the details of the president’s birth.

A Winthrop poll from April, before the president released the detailed birth certificate, found 43 percent of S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners said the president was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country. About 45 percent said he was “definitely” or “probably” born in the United States. Now, that percentage has crept up to 53 percent.

Whether or not they think Obama was born in the United States, S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners still don’t have much use for the president, the poll shows.

More than three-quarters of those polled say the word “intelligent” describes the president “very well” or “well.” But about 75 percent say the same thing about the word “socialist.”

Original post: Poll: Many S.C. Republicans think Obama a Muslim, born in another country

Robert Spencer

Terrorist inspirer Robert Spencer’s proclivity to engage in anti-Muslim Islamophobic conspiracy theories is well known. Recently, he dallied once again in the nutty conspiracy that Barack Obama is a ‘radical undercover Mooslim’ hell bent on destroying America.

In a post titled, Obama reads Biblical passage at 9/11 ceremonies implying that 9/11 was an act of God Spencer writes,

Obama reads Psalm 46, including verse 8: “Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has wrought desolations in the earth.”

The only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being wreaking desolations on the earth are…Islamic jihadists.

Robert Spencer, just like his comrade Pamela Geller believes Obama is a Muslim. They have repeated this claim numerous times, both implicitly and directly, though Spencer has reverted again to not saying it clearly.

Spencer, unlike his friend Geller knows that such a belief is bats*** loony so he attempts to couch his language in euphemism and hints.

It is interesting to note Spencer’s false claim that the “only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being are Islamic jihadists.” Spencer isn’t that stupid, just a week ago he was on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, the same loon pastor who “in the wake of 9/11, had a now (in-)famous exchange with the late Jerry Falwell in which the two religious leaders suggested that the United States ‘deserved’ the attacks for its tolerance of secularism, gays, abortion, feminists and pagans.”

Maybe Spencer thinks that Robertson is an Islamic Jihadist?

However, when have facts ever stopped Spencer in the past? So, with single-minded drive to prove Obama’s radical Islamic Jihadism he continues:

So why did Barack Obama pick this psalm out of 150 psalms, and out of innumerable appropriate Biblical passages, to read at the 9/11 ceremonies? 9/11, after all, was a day when there were indeed wrought desolations on the earth. Did Obama really mean to say that God did it, that it was an act of divine judgment, rather than a monstrous and unmitigated evil?

Or is this just another one of those funny coincidences, of which there are so very, very many when it comes to Barack Obama and his remarkable, unqualified and obvious affinity for Islam?

Robert Spencer long ago went off the rails when he solidified his alliance with Pamela Geller and the fascist anti-Muslim Right-wing network. Ever since then it has been downhill for the anti-Muslim polemicist. No longer does he care to present the facade of impartiality, scholarliness or truth. He has been savaged for it in the mainstream media, it only remains for the national security complex, which still allows him to instruct its employees to catch up to this soon to be bygone “counter-jihad” blogger.

Wallowing in his own self-righteousness, Spencer declares the President of the United States Barack Obama, a professed Christian, the commander-in-chief of forces occupying two Muslim nations and bombing the hell out of several more of being an “Islamist Jihadist.”

Is that called “chutzpah” or just plain right-wing anti-Muslim loonacy?

Joe Lieberman

Sounds like something Pamela Geller might say.

Lieberman: Obama’s concern with offending Muslims is hurting the war effort

By Jordy Yager - 09/01/11 02:03 PM ET

The Obama administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday in a speech blasting the president’s new counterterrorism strategy.

Lieberman said that Obama’s strategy, which was released in June, “was ultimately a big disappointment,” and while it successfully identified the core of the domestic radicalization problem, it did not establish a clear plan of attack to deal with the growing issue.

The four-term senator and one-time presidential candidate said one of the key problems with the Obama administration’s strategy was that it continues to call terrorism that aims to harm the U.S., “violent extremism” instead of “violent Islamist extremism.”

“The administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism,” Lieberman said, speaking at a National Press Club event hosted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

“To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is Al Qaeda and its allies. Now that’s better but it is still too narrow and focuses us on groups as opposed to what I would call an ideology, which is what we’re really fighting.”

Lieberman, who as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has held numerous hearings on the issue of Islamic extremism, said that Obama needs to stop being afraid of offending the overwhelmingly large portion of law-abiding and well-intentioned Muslims with his rhetoric.

“I assume the refusal of the administration to speak honestly about the enemy is based on its desire not to do anything that might feed into al Qaeda’s propaganda that we’re engaged in a cold war against Islam,” he said. “But that is so self-evidently a lie that we can and have refuted it and I think we’ve done so effectively.”

The issue of singling out Muslims in the U.S.’s war against terrorists came to a head earlier this year when Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) held the first in his series of hearings on American-Muslim radicalization.

Nearly 100 Democratic lawmakers wrote to King, who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and asked him to expand the scope of the hearing to include other radical extremists groups, such as white supremacists, environmental extremists, and animal-rights activists. King declined to expand the hearing’s scope and heralded it as a success for drawing attention to an issue that lawmakers and government officials avoid too often.

Lieberman referenced these sentiments on Thursday, saying that though they are extremist groups, they do not constitute the threat the U.S. currently faces.

“We’re not in a global war with those [groups],” he said. “We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists.”

The U.S.’s successful war against terrorists depends on the administration’s ability to correctly identify who its enemy is, Lieberman said.

“To win this struggle, it’s vital that we understand that we’re not just fighting an organization al Qaeda,” he said. “We are up against a broader ideology, if you will, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam, that has fueled this war.

“Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated but when the broader sets of ideas that are associated with it are rejected and discarded. A reluctance therefore to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder I think to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas,” Lieberman said.

Some people have wondered why I focus so much on America’s many wars: isn’t this site about Islamophobia, not U.S. foreign policy? Although it is true that LoonWatch is primarily a site documenting and refuting Islamophobia, I strongly believe that there exists an intimate link between Islamophobia and America’s Endless Wars.

For one, America’s foreign policy is itself Islamophobic.  Our wars are launched thanks to Islamophobia within the most jingoist elements of American society, the neoconservatives, the Zionists (both Jewish and Christian), etc.  It finds an audience within the general public, which has a very poor opinion of Islam.  Our wars can only be sustained by ratcheting up fear-mongering and Islamophobia.  Our wars conveniently serve to complete the loop by feeding Islamophobia itself, as Muslims are Other-ized as the enemy.

Islamophobia operates under the assumption that it is Islam itself that makes Them Hate Our Freedoms.  They hate us (and some of them attack us) because we are the Infidels.  The reality, of course, is that they hate us not for our freedoms or the fact that we are infidels, but the fact that we bomb them, invade them, and occupy them.  As the article below shows, we also make them foot the bill for their own destruction:

Iraq foots the bill for its own destruction

By Murtaza Hussain

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. “Reparations payments” are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.

Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s “free Iraq.” In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to “liberate” the Iraqi people.

In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop ofmassive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.

Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to “pay back” the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.

The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people [of] Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of “liberation” speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.

Barack Obama

Hilarious piece by Alex Pareene, one of the anti-Loons of the year.

Fox: Why does Obama hate Easter and love Ramadan?

Can we all agree that the worst thing about “Fox & Friends” is how clumsy and obvious they are with their political agenda? (Ok, the second-worst thing, after Steve Doocy’s face. And voice. And the things he says.) Good propaganda is supposed to be sort of covert and insidious, right? Anyway, a couple months ago Fox attacked Obama for not issuing a “proclamation” for Easter, even though the president celebrates Easter every year with a massive party. If you wondered why they did this, the punchline came this morning, when Fox trashed Obama for issuing a proclamation… for Ramadan, the Shariah Easter!

It begins with what in a regular morning show would be “news” — the president recognized Ramadan — and then everyone sort of freezes and Gretchen awkwardly just brings up today’s designated attack line, attributing it to “some people.” “Some people are saying,” she says, more than once, to describe what she is saying. What “some people” are saying is that Barack Obama did not release a “proclamation” for Easter. Why didn’t he tell everyone when Easter was? (No president has released in Easter proclamation in at least 20 years.)

As MediaMatters explains, Barack Obama did not actually issue a proclamation for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. He did release a statement. There is a difference. (Proclamations have actual legal weight behind them!)

But none of that matters. The story is, Barack Obama hates Easter and loves Ramadan. I wonder what they’re suggesting, about the president? That he… doesn’t like chocolate?

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

The USA got Osama!

Today people are celebrating but there will be a tomorrow to think about. Are we going to scale back our wars, drone attacks and support for occupations; issues which breed hundreds of Osama’s or will we continue to ignore them?

Osama bin Laden killed in Pakistan

(AlJazeera)

US president Barack Obama said bin Laden, the most-wanted fugitive on the US list, has been killed on Sunday in a US operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, about 150km north of Islamabad.

“Tonight, I can report to the people of the United States and the world, the United States had carried an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people,” Obama said in a statement.

“Today, at my direction, the United States carried out that operation… they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

“The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date against al-Qaeda.

“We must also reaffirm that United states is not and will never be at war against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader, in fact, he slaughtered many Muslims,” Obama said.

US celebrations

Barack Obama called bin Laden’s death the ‘most significant achievement’ against al-Qaeda [EPA]

As the news of bin Laden’s death spread, crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC to celebrate.

Former US president George Bush called his death a “momentous achievement”.

“The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” Bush said in a statement.

According to Al Jazeeera’s Rosalind Jordan in Washington, the operation had been in the making for the last nine or 10 months.

“The fact that it happened inside Pakistan, there have been suggestions that Pakistani intelligence may have been protecting them,” she said.

Patty Culhane, another Al Jazeera correspondent, said the US authorities got intelligence last September and were able to track bin Laden down through his couriers. They followed them to his compound which is reported to be worth over a million dollars.

Reporting from Pakistan, Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder said the development had caught a lot of people by surprise .

“He was considered by many as a hero, but not to the extent that people would come out on the streets. The reaction so far not likely to be strong on the streets, perhaps a protest here or there by the religious parties,” he said.

‘Symbolic victory’

Qais Azimy, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Kabul, said Afghan officials described bin Laden’s killing as a “symbolic victory”, since he was no longer directly connected to the group’s field operations.

Mark Kimmit, a US military analyst, said bin Laden’s death “was not the end of terrorism, but an end of a chapter.”

“Capturing or killing bin Laden has more iconic value. It will have symbolic value, because it has been a number of years since bin Laden has exercised day to day control over operations. We still have an al-Qaeda threat out there and that will be there for a number of years.

“This organisation (al-Qaeda) is more than bin Laden, it may be symbolised by bin Laden, but it definitely is more than bin Laden,” he said.

It is, however, a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team. Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, had repeatedly vowed to bring to justice the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, but never did before leaving office in early 2009.

He had been the subject of a search since he eluded US soldiers and Afghan militia forces in a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. The trail quickly went cold after he disappeared and many intelligence officials believed he had been hiding in Pakistan.

While in hiding, bin Laden had taunted the West and advocated his views in videotapes spirited from his hideaway.

Besides September 11, Washington has also linked bin Laden to a string of attacks – including the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen.

Having the body may help convince any doubters that bin Laden is really dead.

Islamophobes and birthers here is your evidence. Are you happy? I know you won’t stop here, but if this is what you want to see, here it is.

Obama Birth Certificate Released By White House (PHOTO)

WASHINGTON — Per his directive, the White Housereleased on Wednesday President Barack Obama’s “long form” birth certificate, the document whose absence has long been at the heart of the conspiracy-riddled discussion over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as the nation’s commander in chief.

(SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTO OF BIRTH CERTIFICATE AND VIDEO OF OBAMA’S RESPONSE)

The move came as a surprise to the press corps, many of whom had not shown up for Wednesday’s early-morning White House briefing. By the time word had spread that Obama would be making a 9:45 a.m. statement on the matter, however, the top anchors at all the networks had scurried into the briefing room.

Once there, they received a presidential scolding for their concern with “silliness.” Obama began his five-minute statement with the complaint that he wouldn’t be able to get the networks to break into their regularly scheduled programming for a speech on policy proposals.

“I know that there is going to be a segment of people for which no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” Obama said. “But I am speaking for the vast majority of the American people as well as for the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have got better stuff to do. We have got big problems to solve.”

“We are not going to be able to do it if we are distracted, we are not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other … if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts, we are not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by side shows and carnival barkers,” the president declared earlier.

The document released by the White House differs from the one that Obama’s aides made public during the 2008 presidential campaign. Instead of a “certification” of live birth, this was a “certificate,” clearly recording that the president was born on Aug. 4, 1961 in the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.

For years, Obama’s circle of aides had resisted calls to make the latter form public, noting that a certification is legally sound and what any citizen of Hawaii receives upon requesting documents of birth. And indeed, for some time, that explanation — supported by a a wide swath of other contemporaneous evidence – seemed to suffice.

But some who challenged the president’s citizenship remained unsatisfied, and in recent weeks they found a high-profile megaphone for their cause: business tycoon and presidential flirt Donald Trump.

“This issue was resolved in 2008. It has not been an issue,” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said during a morning briefing in which he and other officials took care not to mention Trump’s name. “None of you have asked about it, called about it or reported on it until the last few weeks … [not releasing it] would probably be good for the president politically. Despite that, the president said he was struck by how this was crowding out the debate.”

Last Friday, the president himself wrote Loretta J. Fuddy, the director of health at the State of Hawaii, requesting “two certified copies of my original certificate of live birth.” Fuddy complied. Shortly thereafter, the president’s counsel, Judith Corley of the firm Perkins Coie, flew to Hawaii to pick up two copies of the form. The trip was not taxpayer funded but, rather, paid out of the president’s personal account. Corley returned on Tuesday at roughly 4 p.m. with the copies. The White House announced a “morning gaggle” for reporters shortly thereafter. One aide explained that they did not want to “hold” on to the documents for release on a later date.

Many members of the press confessed to being “stunned” as it became clear what was about to be discussed. White House press assistants handed out a six-page stapled packet of photocopies showing the new and old birth certificates as well as the White House’s legal correspondence with Hawaii’s Department of Health.

And yet it was the press that played a large role in forcing the administration’s hand. CNN’s Ed Henry had pressed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on the issue just one day earlier, despite the fact that his own network had done a thorough investigation debunking the claims of the conspiracy theorists.

“There will always be some selection of people who will believe something. That is not the issue,” Pfeiffer said when asked if Wednesday’s move would silence the doubters. “This issue is, this is not a discussion happening just among conspiracy theorists. It is happening here in this room, on all of the networks, and it is something that every major political figure of both parties — instead of talking about real issues — is being asked about this. So the president decided to release this.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It looks like Sean Hannity and company are getting wackier by the minute. Here a panel group of caucus voters from Iowa say they believe Obama is an evil Mooslim.

Someone in Colorado thought it would be a good idea to put a billboard of Obama as a Suicide bomber, pimp, Mexican bandito, and a gay person.

If you ever wondered what was wrong with Republicans this is it:

The DOJ’s Civil Rights head visits Tennessee to reassure Muslims (hat tip: Eric Allen Bell). While it is a nice gesture wouldn’t it be great if Obama actually came out stronger against Civil Rights violations and harassment of Muslims? For instance reviewing the fact that 50% of cases brought against Muslims charged with crimes relating to terrorism were dismissed outright! As Law professor M. Cherif Bassiouni wrote,

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration, spurred by some in the evangelical right and Neo-Cons, unleashed a campaign against Muslims in the U.S..  This was accompanied by a nationwide PR campaign raising fear about Muslim terrorism in the U.S..  Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzalez, issued numerous reports of investigations, arrests, and prosecutions of Muslim terrorists in America.  These cases were given catchy names like the “Lackawanna Seven” and “Operation Backfire.”  In all, some 500 federal cases were put together.  That they were fabricated is evidenced by the fact that various federal courts across the country outright dismissed 250 cases. This is the highest percentage of dismissed cases of any category of violent federal crimes, which averages 15% across the board. For 50% of the cases brought against Muslims in the U.S. to be dismissed means that these charges were either without a legal basis or unsupported by probable cause, meaning that there was insufficient evidence to convince an ordinary, reasonable person that there is a basis to remand the accused to trial.  This is far from the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard needed to convict.  Thus, for over half of the cases not to have risen to this low threshold, particularly in light of the national percentage in federal cases, is quite telling.

The other cases, with the exception of a dozen or so, were ended by guilty pleas for offenses, which had nothing to do with the original charge.  This means that less than 10% of the charges brought had any potential linkage to terrorism.  Considering that the nationwide rate of federal convictions for violent crimes exceeds 47%, this too is an indicator of the degree of invalidity of the some 500 criminal charges brought against Muslims in America.

DOJ Civil Rights Head Goes To TN To Reassure Muslims

(TPM Muckraker)

Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, went to Murfreesboro, Tenn., last week in an attempt to reassure Muslims there who have been the victims of arson and vandalism.

The Nashville Scene reports that Perez traveled around Murfreesboro on Sept. 28, speaking to leaders of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro and other Muslims.

“Basically, what we’re being told is that if there’s any civil violation of the rights of the Muslim community here, they’ll step in,” said Abdou Kattih, vice president of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.

“It was a very sobering meeting to listen to Murfreesboro leaders describe the climate of fear that they’re living in,” Perez told the Scene. The DOJ has said it is investigating several cases of potential hate crimes against Muslims, including the arson in Murfreesboro.

The Islamic center, which has been in Murfreesboro for decades, is building a new facility just outside the city, including a mosque. Some residents have been extremely vocal in their opposition to the mosque, and three aresuing the county in an attempt to block its construction. They claim officials didn’t post proper notice of the meeting in which construction was approved.

Perez said the DOJ is seeing an uptick in the number of zoning challenges to mosques.

“We have seen a spike in the zoning confrontations, in efforts to keep mosques and the like from being built,” he said. “During times of uncertainty in our nation’s history, people often look for scapegoats.”

The mosque site has also been vandalized and was the victim of arson, when someone torched construction equipment at the site.

(via. Islamophobia-watch)

Daniel Pipes accuses Obama of enforcing Sharia law

Over at the Washington Times Daniel Pipes opines that he found Pastor Terry Jones’ plan to ban the Qur’an “distasteful”. But actual the object of his attack is the Obama administration, who Pipes claims capitulated to the threat of “Muslim violence” when they persuaded Jones to call off his book-burning stunt. Pipes explains: “That violence stems from Islamic law, Shariah, which insists that Islam, and the Koran in particular, enjoy a privileged status. Islam ferociously punishes anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who trespasses against Islam’s sanctity.”

Pipes concludes with the following charge against the Obama administration: “Its pressure on Mr. Jones further eroded freedom of speech about Islam and implicitly established Islam’s privileged status in the United States, whereby Muslims may insult others but not be insulted. This moves the country toward dhimmitude, a condition whereby non-Muslims acknowledge the superiority of Islam. Finally, Mr. Obama, in effect, enforced Islamic law, a precedent that could lead to other forms of compulsory Shariah compliance.”

Pipes has found himself rather sidelined recently by more newsworthy Islamophobes like Pamela Geller or Newt Gingrich. Maybe this is Pipes’ attempt to show he is still a major player when it comes to whipping up hysteria against the US Muslim community.

How many of you have heard of taqiyya?  It’s a religious belief of Muslims where they can lie to infidels.  Read all about this fundamental Islamic doctrine right here.

Basically, it allows them to lie about what religion they belong to, among other things!  I didn’t believe it when I read Robert Spencer’s book, but just today a prominent Muslim-American named Wajahat Ali, known for drinking goat milk (that’s what Muslims drink), spilled his guts and wrote a tell-all piece for The Guardian.  Hear it straight from his own words how all Muslim-Americans know that President, or should I say Imam Barack Hussein Obama, is doing taqiyya and has the seed of Islam in him!  Wajahat Ali demands that Obama return the seed if he is not using it.  Will a fleet enema be sufficient to flush out the seed that Obama swallowed?

Check out the amazing article for yourself:

Great blog from Matthew Yglesias at ThinkProgress. He also links to Inconnu’s piece on Taqiyyah.

Obama’s Porkilicious Taqiyya

by Matthew Yglesias

Steve M at No More Mr Nice Blog falls for the White House spin hook, line, and sinker:

Anyone remember when candidate Barack Obama was getting grief for going to Philadelphia and sampling expensive Spanish ham? Doesn’t sound like something a secret Muslim would eat — nor is the honey-baked ham the Obamas served along with the turkey last Thanksgiving. The half-smoke he got at Ben’s Chili Bowl a couple of weeks before Inauguration Day is a sausage that’s half-pork, half-beef. Oh, and the beer at that beer summit didn’t quite comport with the teachings of the Koran, did it? But all that was just weaving a web of deceit, right?

I’ll admit that for a long time my own views were along these lines. After all, the very first time I met State Senator (and US Senate candidate) Barack Obama we were at a hotel in Boston (I believe it was the Westin Copley Place) on line at a breakfast buffet fighting for the tongs to grab some bacon. But then I learned all about taqiyya which proves that counter-evidence to the “secret Muslim” thesis only demonstrates how far the conspiracy goes.

Barack Obama commented on the Cordoba Center that will be near Ground Zero, reaffirming freedom of religion as an essential American value.

Islamophobes were furious about this. For many of them this probably confirmed their belief that Obama is a Muslim.

Robert Spencer was on record writing,

Obama is in effect saying that you can build a triumphal mosque marking Islam’s superiority and victory — which is how the Ground Zero mosque will be viewed in the Islamic world — and you can lie about your funding, and lie about your commitment to interreligious dialogue and harmony, and refuse to denounce jihad terrorists, and all that is just fine with him.

Pamela Geller had this to say through an SIOA news release,

Obama “has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists and told the ummah (at an Iftar dinner on the third night of Ramadan) that he believes in and supports what will be understood in the Islamic world as a triumphal mosque on a site of Islamic conquest.”

Obama throws support behind controversial Islamic Center

Washington (CNN) — President Obama threw his support behind a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center and mosque near New York’s ground zero, saying Friday that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

“That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances,” Obama said at a White House Iftar dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The president’s remarks drew praise from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who announced his support for the Islamic center last week.

Bloomberg compared Obama’s speech to a letter President George Washington wrote in support of a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. “President Obama’s words tonight evoked President Washington’s own august reminder that ‘all possess alike liberty,’ ” Bloomberg said in a statement.

“I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight,” he said.

To learn more about the “ground zero” mosque, see CNN’s Belief Blog

Critics of the proposed Islamic center quickly denounced Obama’s remarks. “President Obama is wrong,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero. Unfortunately, the President caved into political correctness.”

“While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much,” King said in a statement. “The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero.”

What do you think about this issue? Tell us on video

Obama, who said he was speaking both as a citizen and as president, invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which critics of the Islamic center cite as the main reason for preventing its construction.

“We must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower Manhattan,” Obama said, according to his prepared remarks. “The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.”

“The pain and suffering experienced by those who lost loved ones is unimaginable,” he continued. “So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.”

But Obama said one “reason that we will win this fight” against terrorism is “our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect to those who are different from us — a way of life that stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that September morning, and who continue to plot against us today.”

Repeatedly invoking the nation’s founders and examples of religious tolerance from American history, the president argued that national ideals and the Constitution demanded that the project proceed.

He noted that Thomas Jefferson hosted the the first Iftar dinner at the White House more than 200 years ago and said that the country had previously seen “controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches.”

“But time and again,” he said, “the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues.”

“This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” Obama said. “The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”

The proposed Islamic center has provoked vocal opposition from some families of 9/11 victims and other groups. Nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the plan, according to CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Wednesday.

“Obama came out for the Islamic supremacist mosque at the hallowed ground of 911 attack,” Pamela Geller, a leading foe of the Islamic center, wrote on her blog Friday night. “He has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists.”

Muslim Americans, meanwhile, applauded the speech. “It was pitch perfect and it was cut and dry,” said Eboo Patel, executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core and a Muslim adviser to the White House on faith issues. “He said that our Founding Fathers built a nation on religious freedom where people from different faiths can pray and thrive and that is that.”

Some Muslims said they were surprised to hear the president weigh in on the controversy.

“It’s such a hot potato and he’s already got so much on his plate and people jumping on him for any hint of an Islamic connection,” said Akbar Ahmed, an American University professor who attended Friday’s White House dinner. “But he plunged in and took a very bold position.”

The Islamic center’s leaders say they plan to build the $100 million, 13-story facility called Cordoba House three blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks. The developer, Sharif El-Gamal, describes the project as an “Islamic community center” that will include a 500-seat performing arts center, a lecture hall, a swimming pool, a gym, a culinary school, a restaurant and a prayer space for Muslims.

On Wednesday, the project’s developers declined an offer by New York Gov. David Paterson to relocate the project to a state-owned site.

Earlier this month, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously denied landmark status for the building where the proposed Islamic center would stand, allowing the project to move forward.

Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss, contributing editor to the Nation Magazine and also a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones has a great blog post about anti-Muslim bigot Robert Spencer of SIOA-fame training and explaining Islam to the FBI and Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force.

This is how Robert Spencer will react: “Robert Dreyfuss is a leftard, dhimmi, who is tarnishing and libeling me!! Wah! Wah!”

Dreyfuss also links to us, and I urge our readers to take time out and comment on Dreyfuss’ blog piece, or at the least thank him for bringing this to light.

Anti-Muslim Bigot and Fanatic Explains Islam to the FBI and the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force

By Robert Dreyfuss

The Council on American Islamic Relations is making noise about the fact that an extremist, right-wing anti-Muslim rabble rouser was “invited to offer training to state and federal law enforcement officers.” It sounds like something that might have happened under the administration of President Bush, but no – this happened on Obama’s watch.

Robert Spencer, co-founder of the group Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), is the culprit.

According to CAIR, Spencer was called in recently to pontificate to the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force. (The JTTF’s are law enforcement and intelligence coalitions that began Washington. Soon every jurisdiction wanted the federal dough for a JTTF, and after 9/11 the number of JTTF’s exploded.)

Says CAIR:

“Our nation’s law enforcement personnel should not receive training from the head of a hate group that seeks to demonize Islam and to prevent American Muslims from exercising their rights as citizens,’ said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “Robert Spencer is the same individual who claims in his new book that President Obama is waging ‘war on America.’”

He noted that Spencer recently co-authored the book, “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America,” that sounds a “wake-up call for Americans to stop the Obama administration from limiting our hard-won freedoms, silencing our democratic forming in the 1990s in key areas thought to be vulnerable to terrorism, such as New York and voices, and irreparably harming America for generations to come.”
According to Loonwatch, the SIOA is so extreme that it seems almost satirical. Like a Tea Party phalanx of radical anti-Muslim bigots, the SIOA says that its goal is educate Americans “about about the threat that Islamic doctrine and those who support it present to our freedoms, and the future of our democracy and country.”  Its  organizers call themselves “scholar warriors/ideological warriors in the cause of American freedom and Constitutional government,” as well as in “the defense of… our society of liberty, knowledge, and human decency.”

Spencer’s co-founder, Pamela Geller, is a piece of work, too. Notes CAIR:

“Geller has posted images on her blog that include a fake photograph of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a Nazi uniform, another fake image of President Obama urinating on an American flag and drawings purporting to depict Islam’s Prophet Muhammad as a pig. In a June 25 blog entry, Geller posted a video claiming that Muslims engage in bestiality.”
This needs repudiation – or, as Sarah Palin would say, refudiation – from the Justice Department, and quick.

By Glenn Greenwald

There are many bizarre aspects to Obama’s decision to try to suppress evidence of America’s detainee abuse, beginning with the newfound willingness of so many people to say:  ”We want our leaders to suppress information that reflects poorly on what our government does.”  One would think that it would be impossible to train a citizenry to be grateful to political officials for concealing evidence of government wrongdoing, or to accept the idea that evidence that reflects poorly on the conduct of political leaders should, for that reason alone, be covered-up:  “Obama and his military commanders decide when it’s best that we’re kept in the dark, and I’m thankful when they keep from me things that reflect poorly on my government because I trust them to decide what I should and should not know.”  It’s the fantasy of every political leader to have a citizenry willing to think that way (“I know it’s totally unrealistic, but wouldn’t it be great if we could actually convince people that it’s for their own good when we cover-up evidence of government crimes?”).

But what is ultimately even more amazing is the claim that suppressing these photographs is necessary to prevent an inflammation of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world generally and Afghanistan specifically.  That claim is coming from the same people who are doing this:

Up to 100 civilians, including women and children, are reported to have been killed in Afghanistan in potentially the single deadliest US airstrike since 2001. The news overshadowed a crucial first summit between the Afghan President and Barack Obama in Washington yesterday. . . .

This week’s airstrikes took place in the Taleban-controlled area of Bala Baluk, in Farah province. US military officials in Kandahar said that the number of fatalities was nearer 30, but the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that the death toll was far higher.

Jessica Barry, an ICRC representative, said that an international Red Cross team in Bala Baluk saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations” on Tuesday. “There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children.”

And doing this:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release.

And this:

American soldiers opened fire and killed a 12-year old boy after a grenade hit their convoy in Mosul on Thursday. . . .

“We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm’s way,” a U. S. military spokesman wrote in an email on Saturday.

But eyewitnesses said the boy, identified as Omar Musa Salih, was standing by the side of the road selling fruit juice – a common practice in Iraq — and had nothing to do with the attack.

And this:

The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil — indefinitely and without trial — as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And this:

In a federal court hearing in San Francisco this morning, a representative of the Justice Department said it would continue the Bush policy of invoking the ‘state secrets’ defense, which has been used in cases of rendition and torture.

And this:

The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday. . . .

Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month ..

We’re currently occupying two Muslim countries.  We’re killing civilians regularly (as usual) — with airplanes and unmanned sky robots.  We’re imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years.  Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people — virtually all Muslim — ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind.  We’re denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a “state secret” and that we need to “look to the future.”  We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza.  Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions “inflame anti-American sentiment” is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government’s abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would “inflame anti-American sentiment.”  It’s not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent — people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees — but compared to everything else we’re doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we’re perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

Moreover, isn’t it rather obvious that Obama’s decision to hide this evidence — certain to be a prominent news story in the Muslim world, and justifiably so — will itself inflame anti-American sentiment?  It’s not exactly a compelling advertisement for the virtues of transparency, honesty and open government.  What do you think the impact is when we announce to the world:  ”What we did is so heinous that we’re going to suppress the evidence?”  Some Americans might be grateful to Obama for hiding evidence of what we did to detainees, but that is unlikely to be the reaction of people around the world.

If we’re actually worried about inflaming anti-American sentiment and endangering our troops, we might want to re-consider whether we should keep doing the things that actually spawn “anti-American sentiment” and put American soldiers in danger.  We might, for instance, want to stop invading, bombing and occupying Muslim countries and imprisoning their citizens with no charges by the thousands.  But exploiting concerns over “anti-American sentiment” to vest our own government leaders with the power to cover-up evidence of wrongdoing is as incoherent as it is dangerous.  Who actually thinks that the solution to anti-American sentiment is to hide evidence of our wrongdoing rather than ceasing the conduct that causes that sentiment in the first place?

* * * * *

For a discussion of why the release of these photographs is so imperative and the very real value they could generate, see here and here.

* * * * *

Finally, here’s Rachel Maddow and Jonathan Turley last night excoriating Obama for relying on core Bush/Cheney rhetoric and reasoning to justify the cover-up of this torture evidence:

UPDATE:  Federal District Judge Alvin Hellerstein (.pdf) and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (.pdf) have both rejected the Bush arguments — now the Obama arguments — for suppressing these photographs, and held the the law clearly requires their public disclosure.

For those wishing to defend Obama’s decision here (and, again, were any of you who are doing so criticizing Obama two weeks ago when he announced he’d release these photos?), please read these three paragraphs from Judge Hellerstein’s decision explaining why the Bush/Obama arguments in favor of suppression are so bankrupt, along with his quotation of a passage from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s book arguing that “secrecy is for losers” and documenting how citizen trust in government secrecy is the linchpin of abuses of power.

UPDATE II:  The Washington Post‘s Dan Froomkin:

In trying to explain his startling decision to oppose the public release of more photos depicting detainee abuse, President Obama and his aides yesterday put forth six excuses for his about-face, one more flawed than the next.

Read Froomkin’s full column as he indisputably documents the truth of that claim.

UPDATE III:  Compare this excellent article in today’s New York Times by Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah about the effects of our ariel bombings in Afghanistan to Obama’s claim that concealment of these detainee abuse photos is necessary to avoid spawning “anti-American sentiment” in Afghanistan, and see how persuasive you find that claim to be.

Federal Judge Hellerstein, rejecting the Bush/Obama argument for suppressing the photographs:

Click here to read.

Judge Hellerstein, quoting Daniel Patrick Moynihan:  ”secrecy is for losers”:

Click here to read.

Glenn Greenwald

By Glenn Greenwald

What is wrong with this picture?

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is up to her old antics, employing more over the top hyperbole peppered with frequent cases of verbal diarrhea.  Now she is saying that the Holocaust was the fault of the Mooslims, and that the Nazis were just adopting “Jihad.”

Nazis adopted the Muslim idea of Jihad –  total destruction and complete annihilation in the spirit of a Holy War.

Of course this was the next step for Pam, demonize the Muslims and Islam to its logical end, next she will be saying that Hitler was a Muslim. Where does she get this wild stuff, and then she claims that she isn’t a conspiracy theorist?

Pamela Geller seems to have stumbled on something that World War II scholars and Holocaust historians didn’t know, a fact that has been “suppressed” by the world in a conspiracy to further Islamic Jihad,

As the leading role the Islamic world played in the Holocaust comes out of the shadows and into the fore, and decent peoples recoil in repulsion, it is necessary for Islamic media, “scholars” and asshats-in-residence to rewrite history — as Islam has done so exceedingly and singularly well all throughout history.

Pam wants us to believe that the colonized Muslims in Africa and Asia somehow made the regular trip to Concentration Camps to gas Jews, and then went back home to be ruled by Europeans? Insane.

Other Insane stuff on her blog:

The not so new crusade against Muslim Chaplains in prison is also making the rounds on the anti-Muslim sites, and Pamela Geller is no exception. She lays it out succinctly as only a proud bigot can,

All Muslim Chaplains are Jihadists

Her insanity on Barack continues, calls him an “Usurper,” “Megalomaniac”, and something called “L-Dopa.”

This is the face of the Tea Party right wing, and Conservative blogs love her because she gives them what they want to hear; hate.  At least it’s a good laugh.

Here is a blast from the past from Keith Olberman who recognized the insanity of Pamela Geller a long time ago.(hat tip: Pamela Geller)

Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller

Terry Krepel had an excellent piece on Pamela Geller in the Huffington Post, though what is “pretty” about Pamela?

Check it out:

Pamela Geller’s Pretty Hate Machine

Newsmax has had a bad run of late with its columnists.

Longtime writer John L. Perry penned a column advocating a military coup against President Obama; Newsmax removed it after a public outcry, and Perry hasn’t written for Newsmax since. After giving Bernard Kerik a column and spending months trying to rehabilitate his reputation amid corruption allegations, quietly put him aside after he pleaded guilty to several of the charges.

Then Pat Boone, in a Nov. 2 column, described Obama and his administration as “political voracious varmints” who must be dealt with, “figuratively, but in a very real way,” by “tenting” the White House the way one does with a house infested by rodents; Newsmax had to pull that one too, though Boone has continued as a columnist. (WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, does not object to Boone’s eliminationist rhetoric, as the column still resides there.)

So who’s next? We nominate Pamela Geller as the next Newsmax columnist most likely to have a claim quietly retracted.

Pamela Geller

Newsmax officially added Geller as a columnist in August. Her bio claims that at her regular blog, Atlas Shrugs, she is “bringing you the news you will not hear from the mainstream media, covering little-reported events of great import.” But of course, there’s no attention given to the wacky extremist views she holds.Geller — a former associate publisher of the New York Observer formerly married to a New York car dealer that owned a dealership linked not only to an alleged fraud scam but the killing of two police officers (the dealership is listed as partly owned by Geller, who has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the alleged scam) — is rabidly anti-Obama, anti-Islam and pro-birther. She has also had dalliances with European fascists and promoted the far-right British National Party. (Geller doesn’t think these folks are “neofascist,” apparently feeling that their anti-Islamic activism excuses their political leanings.) Geller’s Newsmax columns reflect these views.

Indeed, Geller — who once notoriously published a video blog of herself in a bikini — is one pretty hate machine.

Her very first Newsmax column, on Aug. 4, went deep into birther territory, rehashing discredited and irrelevant conspiracies regarding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Geller spent a needlessly large amount of space on the case of Jay McKinnon, who in July 2008 posted what he claimed to be Obama’s birth certificate on the Daily Kos website that, according to Geller, “even to the layman’s eye, it was obvious that the Kos COLB had been altered.” Geller touted how the Israel Insider website broke the news that McKinnon “implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images.”

Missing from Geller’s account is McKinnon’s side of the story. In an interview posted on Daily Kos, McKinnon said that he posted the fake certificate to serve as a magnet for conspiracy theorists (like Geller). McKinnon also discussed Israel Insider, a right-wing, anti-Obama blog with ties to WorldNetDaily’s similarly right-wing, anti-Obama reporter Aaron Klein:

Opendna: Reuven Koret, publisher of Isreal Insider, has written that you admitted to forgery.

Jay McKinnon: Reuven Koret wrote me a number of emails before he published his article. Using a kind of Good Cop/Bad Cop style he alternatively offered to keep my statements off the record, and threatened to report me to DHS and CSIS and reveal my identity before an audience larger than DailyKos. When I asked for his questions, he sent me five which required that I both admit to a crime and suggested I implicate other innocent people (including Markos Moulitsas and unidentified members of the Obama Campaign staff) in a conspiracy. I regarded his overtures as a form of journalistic blackmail, in which I either told him what he wanted to hear or he would libel me on his website.

I informed him that I believed his article was based on libel and provided him with this statement: “I believe there is overwhelming evidence that Senator Obama is a natural born US Citizen, and I have no evidence to contradict that belief.”

Evidently that wasn’t what he wanted to hear because a few days he published his article omitting that quote.

Opendna: What do you think of Reuven Koret?

Jay McKinnon: He appears to write under his own name and is skillful at his craft: smearing his ideological opponents. I would not call him a journalist, investigative or otherwise. An internet pundit, maybe. Probably just a blogger who thinks writing scurrilous things about Senator Obama is good for site traffic.

Geller then went on to claim that the birth certificate posted on Obama’s campaign website is a “horrible forgery,” according to the analysis of “Techdude.”Geller summarized “Techdude’s” credentials:

He is an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the American College of Forensic Examiners, the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, the International Information Systems Forensics Association — the list goes on.

He is also board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then.

Only, not so much. Not only has “Techdude’s” analysis of the birth certificate been discredited, his credentials have been called into question as well.

Geller also referenced other baseless Obama conspiracies, such as “the passport on which he traveled to Pakistan in 1981.” Surprisingly, though, she dismissed the Kenyan birth certificate that WorldNetDaily desperately wanted to believe was real as an “obvious forgery.”

Geller then complained about the “veritable birth certificate circus” for distracting right-wingers, blaming not ringleaders like herself for this situation but … Obama:

Let’s not cloud the issue. Obama’s COLB was altered. He should produce the vault copy. Then the opposition can get on with the business of stopping his destruction of the economy and his weakening of American hegemony as he pursues his disastrous foreign policy.

Geller doesn’t seem to comprehend the possibility that the “circus” could easily end when circus clowns like herself choose to stop telling lies.

When a report surfaced in October purporting to describe a college thesis Obama wrote, Geller was among the right-wingers to promote it at her blog — at least, until it was proven to be a fraud. Writing about it in her Oct. 27 Newsmax column, Geller not only embraces the fake-but-accurate defense — that Obama could have plausibly written it — but also invents a way to blame Obama for the whole thing:

If Barack Obama would release his Columbia thesis, this latest media pseudo-controversy would never have happened. But now the tittering hyenas on the left are howling at the moon over the satire of Obama’s thesis that was taken for the real thing by Rush Limbaugh, as well as by Denis Keohane at The American Thinker and Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media.

The fake thesis has Obama criticizing the Constitution, saying that “the so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That sounded to me like something Obama would have said, so I cited it and ran it with it at my blog AtlasShrugs.com. But when I couldn’t find the actual link to what purported to be the “first ten pages” of Obama’s thesis, I took it down.

But bear in mind one thing: as Michael Ledeen says, “it worked because it’s plausible.”

Funny how the same defense right-wingers hated when CBS employed it in the case of the Bush National Guard papers is embraced by them when they’re caught repeating bogus information.

Geller went on to falsely portray Obama’s statements in a 2001 radio interview in order to fit her preconceived script that Obama wants to redistribute the nation’s wealth:

He said that it was a tragedy that the Constitution wasn’t radically reinterpreted to force redistribution of the wealth: “I am not optimistic,” he said, “about bringing about redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.” He praised the civil rights movement and its “litigation strategy in the court” for succeeding in vesting “formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples.”

In fact, as ConWebWatch documented when other right-wingers did the same thing, Obama never claimed it was a “tragedy that the Constitution wasn’t radically reinterpreted to force redistribution of the wealth.” What Obama called a tragedy was the civil rights movement’s reliance on the court system to bring about change instead of grassroots work.

Geller went on to write:

This was the fault of the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”

And that was because of the constraints of the Constitution: “It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

“It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.”

That’s a false interpretation as well. Obama never expressed a desire for the court to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution” during that interview, as Geller claimed; he was merely pointing out that it didn’t.

Sometimes Geller just explodes with visceral hatred for Obama, as she did in a Nov. 17 column on the decision to try suspected terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court instead of a military court:

President Obama is dropping another O-bomb on America with the decision to try the masterminds of the shocking attack of Sept. 11, 2001, in a New York courtroom.

That’s right: Obama is trying to reduce the Sept. 11 act of war to a law enforcement issue. So our wartime enemy is going to face a civilian trial in New York City. It’s another O-bomb on American leadership.

[...]

America going on a witch hunt and prosecuting those who kept this country safe from people like Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, as Obama has announced he intends to do, sets back our moral authority. America turning her back on the jihad against women, Christian, Jews, and non-believers has set back America’s moral authority. America electing a radical for a President has set back America’s moral authority.

America electing an America-hater for president vanquished our moral authority.

[...]

This is yet another vile chapter in the Obama presidency. As long as he is president, the man will never stop punishing America for being so foolish as to elect him.

Geller hates Obama as much as she hates Islam. Here’s one of her anti-Muslim rants, from a Nov. 12 column:

We are witnessing an Islamized America. This is well beyond political correctness. We are enforcing Shariah. We will not insult Islam. That is Shariah. We self censor. That is Shariah. We disrespect ourselves, our nation, so that we might respect Islam. This is dhimmitude.

[...]

Every “Soldier of Allah” who goes jihad is an enemy combatant. Every devout Muslim who believes in the word of the Quran has his duty to Islam, her call to jihad. Hence this terrible act of war, the 14,363 Islamic attacks across the world since 9/11, and all of the relentless plots and plans to take down America in the past month alone. Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?

One of Geller’s biggest cause celebres in her Newsmax column is Fathima Rifqa Bary, an Ohio teen who fled to a Florida pastor claiming her parents want to kill her for converting from Islam to Christianity. But Geller took a one-sided view of the Bary case, ignoring exculpatory evidence.

In an Aug. 13 column, Geller hyperbolically asserted: “Rifqa’s testimony is a plea to the free world to stand for its values and its principles. How far we have fallen when a young woman is pleading to be free in the land of the free, home of the brave. Rifqa Bary’s life hangs in the balance. The West should do everything in its power to save her.”But the full facts of the case diverge greatly from what Geller wrote. As Christianity Today reported, Bary’s story is being promoted by the pastor who whom she fled, Blake Lorenz, whom the girl found through Facebook, and the parents are telling a much different story:

The attorney representing Bary’s mother told Orlando-based 10TV News that they were “allowing [Bary] to explore her Christianity,” and that Bary wasn’t fearful until she met Pastor Lorenz, who holds Bary tightly throughout the video.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Jerry Cupp with the Columbus missing persons bureau disputes Bary’s claims, telling The Columbus Dispatch that Mohamed Bary has known about his daughter’s conversion for months and appears to be caring. And today, the attorney for Bary’s parents issued a statement that they have never threatened Bary: “If this case is perceived as a clash of religions, it is because Mr. Lorenz recklessly and without authorization put someone else’s child in front of television cameras to publicly renounce her previous faith,” McCarthy said in the statement. “The parents who love Rifqa are in the best position now to protect her from the mess that Mr. Lorenz has made.”

Further, as religious blogger Richard Bartholomew points out, the pastor to whom Bary fled, Blake Lorenz, “believes that he receives special personal messages from God about the imminent end of the world,” which raises questions about whether he’s exploiting Bary to promote his own ministry.

Christianity Today concluded:

Of course, believers can rejoice that this teenager has come to Christ in a cultural context in which it would be difficult to betray her parents’ teaching. And if Bary’s claims are true, we can also hope that her legal case is handled fairly and wisely, and that she finds support from Christian mentors and friends. But none of this requires that Christians be quick to use Bary’s claims to prove that Muslims — in this case, her parents and mosque leaders — are intent on killing Bary because their beliefs make them inherently violent.

That last point is exactly what Geller appears to want to push by ignoring the full story. indeed, Geller used an Aug. 17 column to defend Lorenz via misdirection: She doesn’t deny the accusation, asserting instead that Islam, “the group that silently approves of the murder of a daughter who shames her family by not wearing the proper head dress … or by choosing another religion (like Rifqa Bary),” is the real cult and not “the group that offers sanctuary to a poor threatened girl.”

Geller didn’t note that the claim of receiving personal messages directly from God is arguably de facto evidence of a cult leader, nor did she mention that Ohio police have said that Bary’s parents have known about Bary’s conversion for months and “appear to be caring.”In an Aug. 24 column, Geller accused the “media shills and Islamic machinery in the United States” of distorting the Bary case. But of course, Geller was still hurling her own distortions.

Geller’s main target of ire is Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas, whose column pointing the anti-Muslim bias surrounding the Bary case Geller immediately distorted: “Thomas got nothing right. Not one detail. Further, at no point did he consider Rifqa’s testimony. At no point did he consider the consequences of Rifqa’s testimony. At no point did he consider the risk to Rifqa’s life.”

Actually, Thomas got numerous facts correct — facts Geller would rather not have get out, such as pointing out that Bary’s father is “a middle-class jeweler with no documented history of abuse and no record of radical actions or beliefs” and noting pictures of Bary in a cheerleader outfit: “Somehow I can’t imagine a Muslim extremist allowing his daughter to wear short skirts and shake pompoms in front of a crowd of infidels.”

Geller responded to that last point with the nonsequitur: “Thomas knows nothing of honor killings in the West.”

Geller went on to complain: “The media reported only the parents’ Islamist narrative — giving Rifqa’s story no air time or ink. They repeated the lies over and over again.” But Geller does not know that the parents are lying, or that Rifqa is telling the truth. (Nor do we, for that matter.) Yet Geller has already made up her mind to promote her anti-Islam agenda, which of courses he denies she’s doing, insisting instead that “there was an anti-Christian bias. The mainstream media vilified the good Christians who provided sanctuary to Rifqa, who sought only to escape her father’s threat to kill her.” Again, Geller failed to mention the cult-like tendencies of the “good Christians who provided sanctuary to Rifqa.”

Further contradicting herself, Geller concludes with an anti-Islamic rant:

Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Geert Wilders: these truth tellers live under 24-hour guard because of Islamic death threats, which they received because they spoke the truth about Islam. Rifqa Bary has committed a far worse crime from the Islamic perspective: the crime of apostasy. Her testimony is far more dangerous to the stealth jihadists in America.

Rifqa Bary is the highest value target in America. She should be under 24-hour guard. And she should be given a fair shake in the media.

And she’s accusing other people of distorting the case?

Similarly, Geller’s Sept. 14 Newsmax column is one long screed against Newsweek for doing what Geller won’t — tell both sides of the Rifqa Bary story. Geller complained that the Newsweek stated that “Muslim scholars say that in Islam, there’s no such thing as an honor killing for apostasy,” asserting that “Newsweek was conflating two distinct Islamic practices: honor killing and the killing of apostates.” She didn’t mention that it appears that Bary herself is the one conflating the two, as news reports featuring references to “honor killings” indicate. As Richard Bartholomew noted in August:

The girl gives a rather strange interpretation of what an “honour killing” is for; rather than being the remedy for a perceived dishonour suffered by a family, she tells the journalist that to kill her would be an especially ”great honour” because she is the the first Christian in her family for “150 generations” and it would show her family’s love for Allah (Lorenz concurs with a “yes” at 5:03). This seems to me to be a garbled “Christianized” understanding of the phenomenon, making it into something like a human sacrifice.

Geller went on to complain that Newsweek described a “33-page memorandum that Rifqa’s attorney, John Stemberger, filed about the Noor Islamic Center’s connection with Islamic terrorists and radical elements” as being filled with “innuendo and provocative allegations.” In fact, Newsweek supports its claims:

Among them: that the center is connected to an FBI terror probe (which the FBI denies) and that its CEO has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (which, along with every other allegation, the Noor Center denies). The mosque is actually regarded as mainstream and regularly hosts interfaith events.

Geller’s sole source for contradicting the Newsweek article is “Jamal Jivanjee, Rifqa’s friend and confidante.” But Geller offered no independent confirmation of these claims; Jivanjee is clearly too close to the situation to be an objective source of information. Yet Geller treated his claims as incontrovertible truth.

Why is Geller so afraid of the other side being told? That she is so intent on trying to discredit an article that commits the apostasy (as far as Geller is concerned) of telling both sides of the story belies a certain insecurity about the side of the story she’s on.

Geller again declares of Rifqa: “As a high-profile apostate, she is Islamists’ highest value target right now.” If she’s “high-profile,” it’s anti-Muslim activists like Geller that made her one. Which means she’s partially culpable for any harm that comes Rifqa’s way.

Geller’s Dec. 2 column purported to be outraged that Bary — who by this time had been returned to Ohio and placed in foster care — is “in imminent danger of being returned to her family” and is being “deprived of access to the phone and Internet as well as “pastoral guidance,” adding, “Convicts, murderers, rapists, and pedophiles all have access to ‘pastoral guidance.’” Given that the pastor to whom Bary fled believes that he receives special personal messages from God about the imminent end of the world, a lack of “pastoral guidance” is probably a good thing. Of course, Geller is silent about the pastor’s beliefs.

Geller also repeated unsupported claims of hostile Muslims, alluding to “powerful and influential Islamic supremacists” and “myriad busts for jihad activity in recent weeks.” She also again treated “close friend and fellow ex-Muslim” Jamal Jivanjee as a credible source, even though he’s clearly too close to the case to be objective. Indeed, Geller quoted Jivanjee aping her: “If you are incarcerated in an American prison today, you have the right to have a visit from a pastor. Rifqa Bary does not have this most basic right that most criminals have today.”

Geller summed up by claiming that Bary is “isolated, alone, and in danger of being returned to Islamic jihadists who believe apostates from Islam should be killed. What has happened to America?”

The facts, however, are different than what Geller suggests. As the Columbus Dispatch has reported, no credible threats to Bary have been found by authorities in either Florida or Ohio, and Ohio officials are attempting to work out a solution between Bary and her family. A caseworker wrote that there are “severe differences between the parents’ and Rifqa’s perceptions of what has occurred.”

Putting fearmongering before the truth, however, is what Geller does. And that — coupled with her hyperbolic attacks — makes Geller the odds-on favorite to be the next Newsmax columnist to write something her publisher will have to walk back or retract.

The conspiracy theories swerving around Barack Obama continue, now right-wingers are claiming Obama and MoveOn are working with CAIR to harm America. A book needs to be written about all these conspiracy theories.

Obama, MoveOn working with CAIR

Daniel Pipes: Bizarre Fixation on the Hijab

(Read an UPDATE here)

In a running column entitled, “Hijab on Western Political Women,” failed academic turned zaney anti-Muslim blogger, Daniel Pipes, sets out to (in his own words):

For fun, how about collecting those instances when female political leaders, especially leftist ones, don the hijab (Islamic headscarf)?

(What normal person sitting before a computer thinks up of such a bizarre thing to do when trying to “have fun” anyway? Welcome to the world of Pipes I guess. )

Pipes then includes photos of princess Diana, queen Elizabeth, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Angelina Jolie, among others, wearing a Hijab when at various mosques.

This caused us to wonder, surely Mr. Pipes is not sexist. Surely, he would invite the same scrutiny to the men in their lives: princess Diana’s husband and queen Elizabeth’s son (prince Charles, heir to the British throne), Laura Bush’s father-in-law and husband (George H.W and George W., both U.S. Presidents), Chelsea Clinton’s dad and Hillary Clinton’s husband (Bill Clinton, U.S. President) and Angelina Jolie’s dad (actor Jon Voight). Surely Mr. Pipes would not want to give those men a pass, especially given all of them (but the last) are far more important politically than their women.

Well since Daniel Pipes is not very good at holding a mirror up to his face, we here at loonwatch volunteered to do that for him. Seeing that Mr. Pipes is Jewish, we put together the following photo display (true to a Daniel Pipes style presentation) – one that is relevant to his own religion not someone else’s – to see what he thinks of it and what he reckons it signifies.

So “for fun”, Mr. Pipes, how about  collecting those instances when Western (and Eastern) male political (and non-political) leaders, especially leftist (and rightist and centrist) ones, don the kippah or yarmulke (Jewish skullcap)?

We start with the most politically powerful men on the planet, U.S. presidents:

U.S. President Bill Clinton wearing a yarmulke

U.S. President George Bush wearing a yarmulke, flanked by Israeli ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert

U.S. President Barack Obama wearing a yarmulke while praying at the Western Wall

U.S. President George Herbert Bush (the father) wearing a yarmulke as he kisses the Western Wall

U.S. President George Bush wearing a yarmulke as he prays at the Western Wall

President George Bush wearing another yarmulke

American senator Joe Lieberman puts a yarmulke on the head of then presidential candidate, senator John McCain

And other politically powerful world leaders:

British prime minister, Gordon Brown, wearing a yarmulke

Then British prime minister Tony Blair wearing a yarmulke

French president Nicolas Sarkozy wearing a yarmulke

Then Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi wearing a yarmulke as he prays at the Western wall

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin wearing a yarmulke

Prince Charles of Wales, regent to the British crown, wearing a yarmulke

And other American political men:

"America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York City, wearing a yarmulke as then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon looks on

Clinton's Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross wearing a yarmulke

US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, wearing a yarmulke - not in a temple but at a Republican National Convention

And to match Angelina Jolie, how about some entertainers including her own father:

Evangelical Christian actor Stephen Baldwin wearing a yarmulke - not at a temple but at a Republican National Convention

Actor Jon Voight (Angelina's dad) holding up his yarmulke at a Republican National Convention

The king of pop, Michael Jackson, wearing a yarmulke

And how about other world faith leaders:

His holiness, the Dalai Lama, wearing a yarmulke as he prays at the Western Wall

And speaking of political mixing with religious:

The "Mccippah", a play on "McCain" and "Kippah" (yarmulke), a feature at the Republican National Convention 2008

Now, we have a few simple questions to ask Mr. Pipes:

First let’s get real: clearly, Mr. Pipes is not interested in some irrelevant, uneventful “fun” on that merry temple of love and good times of his, danielpipes.com. Everything he writes and puts on there he does so with a purpose in mind. It seems that his “little fun” hijab photo display was yet another sorry attempt to cry “Islamization” and “dhimmi” and all of the favorite concepts he and his friends love to evoke.

So here goes the questions:

1. Do you believe that non-Muslim Western women who wear a hijab when visiting mosques or other Islamic religious settings are doing it as a sign of respect, or a sign of capitulation and a consequence of Islamization?

If the former then what’s the point of your running photo display? And if the latter which more logically seems to be the case, then:

2. Do you believe that non-Jewish Western men who wear a skullcap when visiting a temple or other Jewish religious settings are doing it as a sign of respect, or a sign of capitulation and a consequence of Judaization?

If the former, then why the double standard? And if the latter then why haven’t you sounded the alarm to save the West from Judaization.

More questions:

3. What would you say and how would you react if Western political women not only wore the hijab at the mosque but prayed there while they are at it? Would you see it as a lovely sign of camaraderie, an expression of tolerance, a sign that we all share a common God? Or would you cry “dhimmi”? Just curious.

(If the latter then kindly educate us: what is the “dhimmi” equivalent of a Western political man – a head of state no less – who does the same but within the context of Judaism rather than Islam?)

4. You seem to gloat about the reporter who took off the “Chador” (a traditional Islamic dress worn in conservative Iran) and threw it at Imam Khomeini whom she was interviewing. Now, I personally believe that Khomeini was a loony Imam. But I am just curious, would you also gloat if a reporter threw a yarmulke at some loony rabbi like say, Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef or Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira or Rabbi Jon Hausman? Just curious.

5.  Are you aware that Eritrea is not an Islamic country and that it has as many Christian citizens as it does Muslim. Are you aware that Hillary Clinton is not necessarily wearing a hijab in the photo of her in Eritrea, but a traditional Eritrean loose shawl worn by both Muslims and Christians there? Are you aware that every other American woman in that photo (and there are at least three) are not wearing a similar shawl clearly proving that it is Hillary’s choice not some enforced evil Islamic spell on Western women as seems to be implied. Q: So if it’s neither enforced, nor a hijab to begin with, why do you use that photo. A: expediency. Typical of Mr. Pipes.

6. Lastly, if some blog put up a display like the one above with the insinuation that there is some insidious force at play, would you not cry anti-Semitism? SO, given your photo display and the accompanying shady commentary, aren’t readers then well within their rights and the bounds of reason to cry Islamophobia? Just curious.

Mr. Pipes, we await your response to our questions. For the rest of our dear readers, this has been a little peek inside the  paranoid mindset of an Islamophobe and the convoluted, often petty, ways in which it processes our world.

(For the record, LoonWatch, unlike Mr. Pipes, takes the consistent position that both non-Muslim women wearing hijabs in Islamic religious settings and non-Jewish men wearing yarmulkes in Jewish religious settings is a sign of respect and nothing more. And that wearing them outside religious settings is indeed strange but a personal choice that is no cause for alarm or geopolitical analysis).

- Zingel

Author’s Note: Daniel Pipes makes a lame attempt to address the hijab/yarmulke comparison in a 2008 addendum to his article in which he “rejects” the comparison altogether, stating in typical Pipesian delusional style that such a comparison is irrelevant, and positing that the “tallit” the Jewish prayer shawl is instead more comparable to the Hijab.

This is nonsense.

The tallit is not worn in public everyday life the way Muslim women wear the Hijab in daily public activity (for Hijabis); however, Jewish skullcaps are worn in daily public living (for Jewish Orthodox men). The yarmulke, not the tallit, is the closest Jewish analogy to the Hijab.

He also implies that half the pictures of Western women wearing the Hijab is not in a mosque while most Western men who wear the skullcap are in a temple. Not true, they are exactly analogous and proportional. Most of the pictures of the Western women wearing a Hijab is in fact in a mosque or mosque setting and it is usually a simple headscarf not some full body chador as he implies but even his collection of pictures clearly contradict (Iran, a conservative theocracy, being the exception not the norm). On the flip side, our photo display has photos that debunk his insinuation that Western men wear yarmulkes only in temples.
READ AN UPDATE HERE

Jane Norton

We have already done a few pieces on how the 2010 election season is turning out to be a doozie, and how the Conservative contenders all seem to be playing off of one form of Islamophobia or another. Allen West talks about going “kinetic,” and Lynne Torgerson seems to think saying “Keith Ellison is a Muslim” will automatically give her a victory.

Now we have Jane Norton, former Colorado Lt. Governor giving her full support to tea baggers.

GOP Senate Candidate, Sits Silently as Obama Called a Muslim by Sam Stein

Former Colorado lieutenant governor Jane Norton, one of the five candidates competing in the Republican primary for the state’s 2010 Senate race, is distinguishing herself with her full-hearted embrace of the tea party crowd.

Appearing at a recent coffee-shop event with Colorado voters, Norton sat silently while a female attendee declared twice that President Barack Obama is a Muslim and while a male attendee insisted that the president — who he deemed “an idiot” — wanted to let babies die on the side of the road “with the garbage.”

“Well as you can tell there is a lot of passion around what is happening in our own country,” Norton responded to the crowd, rather than correcting either individual. “And how we can channel that into positive constructive ways that will get our vote out it is going to be absolutely critical.”

Go here to see the Video: Jane Norton, GOP Senate Candidate, Sits Silently as Obama Called a Muslim

Also at the event, Norton praised the “tea-party movement and the 9/12 groups” for pushing a right-wing populist, anti-Washington agenda. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee highlighted that exchange in a video it sent to reporters on Monday.

Colorado remains a hub of arch-conservative politics and anti-Obama sentiment despite its recent Democratic leanings. One month ago, an auto dealer in the state gained notoriety when he put up a billboard asking whether Obama was a Jihadist and demanding a birth certificate be produced for the president.

So it’s not all that surprising that Norton, in an effort to curry favor with the more impassioned voters, would tolerate that kind of over-the-top rhetoric. Indeed, the National Republican Senatorial Committee worked behind the scenes to get Norton into the race.

And yet, the willingness of the general public to stomach this kind of conspiracy-theory vitriol seems limited.

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Note to LW Readers: Please Welcome our newest blogger, “Darter” who will be contributing regularly to the site.

We continue our coverage of the looniest blogger in the world, Pamela Geller, with a collection of her paranoid delusions and distortions from this past week.

First up, the SIOE (Stop the Islamisation of Europe) protest against the building of a new mosque in London. The event garnered an impressive fifteen “freedom fighters”, but Pamela’s outrage was reserved for the local Jews who refused to take part in the divisive event.

KAPO Mentality Takes Hold In The Face Of Islamic Annihilationists’ Second Holocaust

Rabbis attacked the campaign. “The show of unity from the Jewish community is in defiance of a website appeal by SIOE for 1,000 Jews carrying the Israeli flag to turn up.” Even the Rabbis abandon Israel when the going gets rough.

Stop the Islamisation of Europe held a rally protest in what can only be described as an Islamic fortress in the heart of Harrow. I strongly urged Jews to attend. Islamic anti-semitism is more poisonous, more dangerous than even Nazism was to the Jews. This promise of Jewish genocide is made “sacred” by Islamic texts.

As loonwatch has documented before, Euro-supremacists often use the Israeli flag to conceal their anti-Semitic tendencies, believing it gives them a free pass for their anti-Muslim bigotry. Pamela assumes that support for Israel is the only issue concerning Jews. Obviously the rabbis did not appreciate the misuse of the flag of Israel for Islamophobic propaganda.

Next up, a bizarre “stealth jihad” delusion from Pamela, Sharia Coke: 

This is Sharia going global. They are using local Muslims the world over to demand Sharia adherence by corporations and by the market place.

This is slowly leading to Nuremberg like Jewish laws as products are being branded as Jewish.

We all know that taking over the soda industry is one of the keys to the Mooslim domination of the world! Per her modus operandi, anything Muslim related can be assumed to be part of a global plot to impose Shari’ah law on unsuspecting dhimmis. And you can always throw in a Nazi reference for good measure.

Along the same lines, Pamela is upset that a Muslims group in Minnesota has put up an innocuous billboard  inviting people to ask questions about Islam. Ignorance keeps Pamela in business, so I can understand her strong opposition. I say, why can’t Muslims be allowed to educate the public about their faith? Do these same people who rail against Muslims have a problem when Christian groups put up billboards calling people to find Jesus? I imagine not. But with Muslims, it must be a jihadi plot.

Islam: This is Defamation of Religion

As a Jew, I am offended to my core. Muslims have no right to invoke Moses and Abraham. This is a delegitimization of Judaism. It is offensive and vile. And while Jesus is not my guy, the same thing goes for him. It is a delegitimization of Christianity. These are not Muslim prophets.

If people want to convert to Islam, goodbye Charlie. But leave my shiz alone. Vultures.

The belief that all the prophets, from Adam to Muhammad, carried the same message of Islam is a central belief for Muslims. Why not use this to bridge gaps between Muslims, Christians, and Jews? Certainly common ground can be found between the Abrahamic faiths.  But Pamela has such a knee-jerk reaction to anything Islamic that her loony mind can only see it as a delegitimization of Judaism and Christianity.

She then turns her attention to one of her favorite targets, President Barack Obama. Some veiled racism from Pamela the international relations expert, Obama acts “gangsta” but is really buddies with Iran, North Korea and the Mooslims.

Obama Threatens

He gets all tough and gangsta to those who don’t bend to his will, but he kisses the ass of Iran, North Korea and the OIC.

Her thoughts on the GITMO transfer to Illinois?

Outrage: GITMO Comes to Chicagoland

Obama is bringing his jihad to Illinois. Has anyone asked the people of Chicago if they want KSM’s soul mates in their state? Obama’s treachery is breathtaking. A killer’s paradise.

In fact, the town of Thomson, Illinois is looking forward to the economic boost from the prisoner transfer. The filling of the maximum-security prison would bring 3000 jobs to an area where 11% are unemployed. But why let facts get in the way of a good story? Such are the delusions of Pamela Geller. We will continue to expose her Islamophobia despite her efforts to call it common sense.

Frank Schaeffer

There is a new prayer going around in Evangelical Christian circles and beyond for President Barack Obama. It is quite controversial as it seems to be calling for his death.

In this video Rachel Maddow discusses (at 57 seconds) the issue with former Evangelical Christian leader, Frank Schaeffer.

More myths about Barack Obama being a Mooslim and other nonsense from Tel Aviv streets documented by Max Blumenthal.

Temple Protests Geert Wilders

The Geert Wilders speech at Temple University went ahead after some initial signals that it would be canceled. The University cited “free speech” as the reason they allowed Wilders to speak. This decision was over the objection and rejection of the student body and faculty who didn’t want a hate-mongering, David Duke like character on their campus. This was never about free speech but rather was about the principals of not giving a platform to a fascist. The speech was promoted and funded by David Horowitz who also funds JihadWatch.

Wilders was probably expecting to be greeted with warmth and applauds but he was surprised when protesters, employing their right to peacefully assemble and protest expressed their disdain for his backward, racist and anti-Democratic drivel. To give you a rough idea of how it all went down, take a gander at Wilders favorite supporters in the anti-Muslim blogosphere: the shrieking wing-nut Pamela Geller and her best friend Robert Spencer were both crying at the fact that protesters had gathered to counter demonstrate against the fascist. Pam, in her infinite wisdom summed it all up as “pearls before swine.” Spencer reported it as an attack on “free speech.”

It goes without saying that when these two individuals agree with each other on something it’s usually false or a lie. Whenever anyone opposes their hate, they label it “censorship,” an attack on free speech, submission to creeping-stealth-sharia-jihad of the highest order and dhimmitude, but when anyone, (like these Temple University protesters) chooses to then express how they feel about the anti-Muslim hate they get all Soddy and unleash tirades of how the sky is falling and evil is taking over the world. To say the least it is a simple case of double standards: Pam and Bob if you cant take the medicine then don’t try to dish it out.

I digress though, the event turned out to be one Geert Wilders would regret. He was seen for who he truly is, a xenophobic, anti-Muslim Euro supremacist peddling his hatred, and the crowd of protesters let him know it. Included in the Dutch parliamentarian’s profundities were his call for a ban on Muslim Immigration to the West, their deportation and calling the Quran and Islam “evil.”

PHILADELPHIA —  Amid tight security and a large turnout of protesters, Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told an assembly of Temple University students that Europe and America must fight an ongoing “stealth jihad” that threatens democracy and free speech.

“Where Islam sets roots, freedom dies,” Geert Wilders told the students during his 30-minute address organized by a new student group called Temple University Purpose and funded by the California-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, a foundation that promotes conservative scholarship.

His remarks were met by a mixture of applause and boos, and occasionally gasps — particularly when he stated that “our Western culture is far better than the Islamic culture and we should defend it.”

He decried as a “disgrace” a resolution co-sponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, and backed by the U.N. Human Rights Council earlier this month, deploring attacks on religions while insisting that freedom of expression remains a basic right. Wilders also criticized President Barack Obama for his efforts to extend a hand to the Islamic world, saying that such appeasement marks “the beginning of the end.”

If the spread of Islam continues unabated in the Western world, “you might at the end of the day lose your Constitution,” he told the assembly. “Wake up, defend your freedom.”

He also touched on common themes in his speeches, including calling for an end to Muslim immigration and referring to the Muslim holy book, the Quran, as “an evil book” that promotes violence and intolerance.

A question-and-answer session was cut short after the tone of the event began to turn nasty, when some in the crowd of several hundred students began shouting jeers. Wilders’ security detail quickly ushered him from the room…

It would be nice if this article also reported on his call to ban the Quran, tax the hijab and his preference for a white dominated Netherlands. It may be that Wilders wanted to keep a lower profile and not repeat some of his more banal belief’s because he knew the reaction it would invoke in the media. One has to applaud the Temple University students for gathering together and freely expressing their revulsion and rejection at a fear mongering fascist such as Geert Wilders.

This video gives a good feel of the event and the protesters it inspired:

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

The latest in Pamela Geller looniness. An odd assortment of semi-literate and semi-conscious hyperbole.

Her reaction to Obama’s surprise win of the Noble Prize?

Obama’s Embarrassing Nobel Prize

Obama won what? This is embarrassing. Who’s next? Bill Ayers? Stuart just pointed out this Nobel Fun Fact: This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner (Our Esteemed President, peace be upon him) recently refused to meet with the winner of the 1989

Nobel Peace Prize (the Dalai Lama), in an attempt to suck up to China.

Of course Obama didn’t refuse to meet the Dalai Lama. Pamela, the self-proclaimed “greatest patriot” thinks it’s embarrassing that an American president wins the Noble Prize. She also continues the nutty theory of him being Muslim, by putting the honorific “peace be upon him” next to his title, as though that’s supposed to be some sort of put down. I say, yes, let there be peace upon him, nothing wrong with that.

Obama has sided with evil, abandoned the Jews, the Iranians, the Hondurans, the Eastern Europeans, capitalism, individual rights, American sovereignty — in under a year.

Obama is evil incarnate (sided with “Mooslims”), he is the cause of all the problems in the world. We are all victims of the insidious and ruthless guile of the one known as Barack Obama!

Some veiled racism from the queen of conspiracy theories, calling Obama a pimp who at the same time is funding “jihad” (Warning: Misspellings are Pamela’s).

Obama Pimps for Jihad Petrol Dollars

Part of Obama’s continuing plan tpo fund jihad

Here Pamela cheerleads for her close friend Robert Spencer and calls the German police “Nazi.” She links to an erroneous report at the wing-nut Israel News site that states, “American Islam Scholar Defies German Ban on Israeli Flag.” We actually covered that event and highlighted how Spencer was actually colluding with Euro supremacists. Also there was no ban on Israeli flags, nor is Spencer an Islam scholar.

Spencer Defied NaziGerman Police ban on Flying the Israeli Flag at Berlin Rally

Great piece and interview with Robert Spencer over at Israel National News:

American Islam Scholar Defies German Ban on Israeli Flag

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

(IsraelNN.com) Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology and law, author, and the director of Jihad Watch, defied a German police ban on flying the Israeli flag at a Berlin gathering against anti-Semitism and Islamization on October 3, 2009. He discussed the incident with Israel National News on Thursday.

On Obama aiding the Iranians nuclear program,

This is unconscionable. And Obama is assisting the nuclear weaponization of Iran. The world has gone mad.

On Obama being an anti-Semite,

All last year, I documented the numerous, heinous calls for Jewish genocide, incitement to hate, and filthy Jew hatred on Obama’s election blog. He knows the anti-semites post these blood libels on his website. So why did he he retain the platform as President of the United States? It’s evil. Why does he encourage it with his silence?

Her support for the kooky “Stop the Islamization of Europe” group which promote the discredited Eurabia theory. A group which has ties to racists,  and amongst other things equates Islam with totalitarianism and clearly calls for the defacing of Muslim symbols.

Stop the Islamization of Europe Rally December 13-Spread the Word, Save the World

BANNED FROM PROTEST

…3. Totalitarian symbols such as nazi swastikas, communist hammer and sickles, Islamic star and crescent, UNLESS CLEARLY CROSSED OUT OR DEFACED WITH A STOP SIGN.

If I were being generous with Pamela I would say she blogs in stream of consciousness but I won’t because reading her writing is like hearing the babbling of a human infected with the rage disease, transformed into a zombie and foaming at the mouth.

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller, the Looniest Blogger in the World (though her “close friend” Robert Spencer calls her a “freedom fighter”) this past week called for the destruction of the Golden Dome, or as Muslims know it the–Mosque of the Rock–one of the holiest sites in Islam. A crazy notion which would probably provoke World War III and is only supported by the most hardline, right-wing, end-of-times Israeli and American Zionists. She also implies Islam is “evil.”

The dome has got to go. It is sitting atop the great Jewish temple. The dome has got to go. It’s time to push back and stop indulging evil. Evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction (paraphrasing Rand).

The Golden "Dome of the Rock"

She also stated, per her modus operandi of painting all Mooslims guilty before proven innocent, that two “Middle Eastern men” who were taken off of a flight in Los Angeles were “terrorists.” She doesn’t know anything about the men, she doesn’t even know if they are Muslim, but she is all too happy to be judge-jury-and-executioner without any evidence. It reminds us of how she and her Islamophobe friends handled the Fathima Rifqa Bary case, insinuating that the parents were “evil,” and had “abused her,” shamelessly making up information as they went along.

In her piece titled, Jet Halted at LAX, Two Middle Eastern Men are Removed by Police she writes,

Were they Mormons? Christians? Jews? Hindus? Sikhs? Coptic Christians? Who is taking bets on who the terrorists are? I want some of that action.

In her crusade against Barack Obama, who she has proclaimed as “our first non-American Mooslim president” she continues the myth she has created that he is an “anti-Semite who loves it when Jews are hurt.” In this piece she claims that it is his fault that an Israeli Settler got shot. Can the unrelated-random-as-hell links and conclusions she creates between stories get any loonier?

They must be dancing in the White House. Looks like Obama’s policy is starting to bear fruit. Jews are hurt. Hurrah.

Where are the serious people in the right-wing to denounce this drivel, this incitement to hatred and violence? Instead of condemning Pamela Geller why are our elected officials giving her a platform to spout her vitriolic nonsense, straight from the sewers of New York? Why do self-proclaimed scholars on Islam such as Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom continue to lend her insanity credence thereby destroying whatever slender base of credibility they had? It is most likely because of the shared hatred that can be gleaned from their writings for Islam and Muslims, a hatred they attempt to mask in a thin veneer of false objectivity.

Walid Shoebat

ThinkProgress, (hat tip:Ustadh) has an article on a recent conference that was titled “How to Take Back America.” It is pretty much a conference centered around the continuing effort to delegitimize President Obama. In this conference we had a convergence of some of the wackiest and conspiratorial figures in the right-wing. In a made for Hollywood train-wreck, the stars aligned to bring Frank Gaffney, Walid Shoebat and Bill Federer (!) together on the question of what religion is Obama.  As you well know that is a recipe for loonieness!

At the How to Take Back America conference last weekend, attended by several Republican lawmakers, former Reagan official and prominent neoconservative Frank Gaffney, right-wing historian Bill Federer, and Christian activist Walid Shoebat hosted a panel on “How to understand Islam.” An attendee of the panel asked the three speakers if they would consider President Obama a Christian or a Muslim, given his “roots.” While Gaffney gave a now familiar response linking Obama to the Muslim Brotherhood, Federer and Shoebat provided new theories, which elicited praise from the crowd:

GAFFNEY: If Bill Clinton, on the basis of special interest pandering and identity politics, was properly called the first Black American President, on that same basis, Barack Obama should be called the first Muslim American President. […] But there is evidence that a lot of Muslims think he is Muslim. But whether he is or whether he isn’t, the key to me, is is he pursuing that is indistinguishable in important respects from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission ladies and gentlemen, we know from a trial in Dallas last year, is to quote to destroy Western civilization from within by its own miserable hand. That’s what we need to keep our eye on.

FEDERER: In Islam, if your father is a Muslim, you’re automatically a Muslim. Since Barack’s father, stepfather, and grandfather were all Muslim, the Muslim world views him as Muslim. Mohammad allowed his warriors to say they’re not Muslim to gain advantage and um, but he’s uh, Islam permits you to lie to advance Islam, Saul Alinsky allows you to lie to advance your communist agenda, you can put them together.

SHOEBAT: I came from an American mother, Obama came from an American mother. I came from a Muslim father, Obama came from a Muslim father. […] Did you know that your President knows how to do the call to the prayer in eloquent classical Arabic? […] No one can do this in classical Arabic language unless he grew up and was raised as a Muslim.

Watch it:

During the panel, Shoebat advocated entering Arab countries and converting Muslims to Christianity. He also went on a rant about how Muslims in meat packaging plants are contaminating America’s food supply because their hands are unclean.

Gaffney has a record of comparing Obama to Hitler — a major theme of the conference — and spreading other absurd reasons for why he thinks Obama is Muslim. As Matt Duss has noted, although it may be difficult to take Gaffney as a serious analyst, his “transparently bigoted” attacks are given a platform on major media outlets. This reason alone is why Gaffney’s smears shouldn’t be ignored.

In the past week alone, Gaffney has appeared as a pundit on Fox News and MSNBC, has been featured in an article in NewsMax, and wrote an opinion column for the Washington Times.

Talk about having an agenda, in this case the shameless attempt to play on people’s fears to make a few bucks. It is only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the next episode when TownHaller’s like Pamela Geller have their veiws of Obama being a Muslim parroted by Bill Keller.

Pamela Geller

What do you get when you combine the most outlandish gaffes of Anne Coulter, the most awkward monologues of Sarah Palin, the senility of the crazy McCain Lady, filter any remaining logic out of it and give it a keyboard in the Bronx?

The answer is the looniest blogger ever: Pamela Geller. If you are unaware of who Pamela Geller is then we apologize for bringing her being into your world, but she is all too familiar to those of us who browse the internet and have come across her shrill and plainly insane blogging on Atlas Shrugs. (Given the amount of hallucinations on that blog, Atlas Shrugs should properly be renamed Atlas Drugs).

What is it though that Pamela believes in? What does she blog about?

Pam has the distinction of being the originator and pusher of some of the most vile and obscene conspiracy theories on the internet. Mostly dealing with Islam and Muslims but also Barack Obama, and the two are combined — A LOT. In one of her recent tirades titled, CNN Tells, Sells More Lies About Palin — it’s Time to Expose the truth about Obama, Geller writes,

So why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections? My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff. Why aren’t they pursuing that story? Find the ho, give her a show!

Here she calls on CNN to investigate Obama’s “strange sexual predilections.” She also says that it is “well known” but then sneaks in “allegedly” that Obama was “involved with a crack whore in his youth.”  This is just the beginning of the craziness. She then goes on to state that she believes that President Obama’s trip to Pakistan in the 80′s was originally to go for drugs but that he became indoctrinated into Jihad.

Back in the early 80′s, there were only two reasons to travel to Pakistan. Jihad or drugs. I think he went for the drugs and came back with jihad. (He did, after all, change his name to Barack Hussein Obama from  Barry Soetoro, upon his return from that trip).

Real good investigative work Pam! He changed his name to what had always been his name and that shows that he is a Jihadist? For the uber-racist Pam Geller, drugs is a connotation for Black and Jihad is a connotation for Muslim; a Black man can only travel to get drugs, and a Muslim country can only offer travelers Jihad.

Additionally, Pam Geller has an unhealthy obsession with Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. For Pam the old adage do not speak ill of the dead has no resonance, in fact she can’t even stop her self from speaking slanderous lies about the dead.

Pam, that ever-vigilant firecracker of a reporter broke a story that “even CNN didn’t care to touch.” What was this highly neglected breaking story? Obama is the illegitimate son of Malcolm X!  In her 50,000 word rant, Pam Geller toys with all sorts of theories including the suggestion that Obama’s mom somehow had an amorous hook up with Malcolm?

Barack Hussein Obama Jr Malcolm X Barack Hussein Obama Sr. Barack Hussein Obama Sr., Tom Mboya, and Philip Ochieng, all share common physical features of the Kenyan Luo tribe: Modest stature under six feet, round faces, small chins, wide set eyes, slanted back foreheads, and retracted hairlines…none of these features are shared by Malcolm X and Barack Hussein Obama Jr.

She then goes on a long and wide conspiratorial line trying to link Barack’s mother with Malcolm X, and all the possibilities of how they could have hooked up. If you read the post, beware that it is long, like sleuthing through a swamp.

In a most bizarre jab at Obama’s mom, Geller wonders aloud why CNN isn’t pursuing some “story” about the “alleged” nude “pornographic” pictures taken of Obama’s mom by Frank Marshall Davis!

Why isn’t CNN pursuing the nude pornographic photos of Obama’s mom…I never ran the pics, as it was unseemly and wasn’t relevant. But this assault on Palin is too disgusting. It’s time to tell the ugly truth about the enemy in the White House and his whores in the media.

Maybe CNN and the “whores in the media” aren’t running this story because it is a non-story with no news value? Or maybe because it is a figment of a loony blogger’s imagination with no thread of truth in it? Or maybe because it has nothing to do with the job performance of that “Negro Mooslim enemy” in the White House?

That is another card in the loonieness that is Pamela Geller. She believes Obama is an enemy, i.e. according to her he is a Muslim. On the end-of-times loon website World Net Daily, Geller wrote this hysterical post titled Obama’s Islam: Now He Tells Us,

We should have seen all this coming. Obama deceitfully hid his Muslim background and schooling and his agenda. I started writing about Obama’s religious Muslim background in January 2007, and throughout 2007 and 2008 I presented evidence of Obama’s identification as a Muslim when he was a child, his extremist Muslim family and his Islamic schooling. In December 2007, I wrote, “Barack Obama went to a madrassa in Jakarta. A madrassa in a Muslim country. Whether he was devout or secular, he knows what was taught. He knows what is in the Quran. Even if he is ambiguous, he knows the stakes involved. His father was a Muslim who took three wives (without divorcing). His stepfather and close members of his family are devout Muslims. Not an unimportant influence.” And who can forget Obama’s bald-faced lies to the Jews? In February 2008, Obama told Jewish leaders: “If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim.” Yet he was registered as a Muslim in an Indonesian school…And so now we have our first Muslim presidency, just eight years after 9/11. The media can spin their subjugation and adulation a million different ways, but America did not vote for a “Muslim presidency,” which is what this is. Everything this president has done so far has helped foster America’s submission to Islam.

If that weren’t enough then you could predict what comes next. Not only is Obama the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, not born in America, on top of all that it is obvious that since he is a Muslim he must also be an anti-Semite!

Every decision, every move, every policy decision the President has made in regards to Israel has been the act of …. an anti-semite.

So there you have it the Mooslims are taking over! In fact they have already taken over America, so much so that we have a Mooslim president, who is anti-Semitic, sired by the fire breathing Malcolm X, his mom was a whore, and oh yeah somewhere in there he is also a socialist! That comes to you courtesy of the Looniest Blogger Ever!

Her blog remains “popular,” the adjective “popular” however may be a bit misleading as it seems to be popular only with crazies who espouse openly bigoted views. A glance at her comments section demonstrates this,

Posted by: jj | Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 01:24 AM , “Pigs are more humane than Muhammad. And cleaner, too.”

Posted by: En français | Monday, August 31, 2009 at 07:56 AM

What is a man with the name Matthew Polombo doing as the secretaey general of something called the Somali Youth Action? To build this big Islamic style complex exclusively for Moslem Somalis in Minneapolis means someone thinks they are there to stay ….. but as soon as we get rid of the Monster in the White House, we will get rid of them. Since they were imported, the crime rate has soared. They were criminals in Somalia, so they are also criminals in America and have no idea of American ideals and way of life. This sport center would be a hatching center for more crimes against Americans who don’t want them, didn’t ask them to come and want to get rid of them. The people of Minneapolis are insanely stupid if they allow this Obamanation to materialize.

Posted by: Sarastro | Monday, August 31, 2009 at 07:57 AM

WTF?!?!? How many dang Somalis do we have here that they need a frickin’ Youth Center? WhoTF needs Somalis here anyway? What? Are they the world’s best meat-packers?!?!?

Yeah, and I know. . . when the Muslims say “prevent” violence they mean “promote” violence.

Yeah, right. Separate gyms and pools, a place to get married, and maybe a hall or two in which to teach hatred and strategy for Islamic Supremacy?

This article is just more evidence that Muslims, (may their prophet be damned,) have no desire to assimilate or become Americans in support of America.

These comments are just a sampling of what passes as polite discourse on Atlas Shrugs, to get further acquainted with her and the loonieness of her commenters just parse through the comment section there, you will be truly mortified.

Update: Pamela Geller now claims she never penned the Malcolm X article, and that she doesn’t support the theory that Malcolm X is the father of Barack Obama. However, she never made any such qualifier when she originally posted the piece on her site. Which begs the question, why, if she didn’t believe what was written did she post it under her name? How can she not understand how insane it is, even for someone who believes Obama wasn’t born in America, to think he was the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, let alone give credence to such loony conspiracies by posting it on her site?

Update II: Pamela Geller calls for the destruction of the Golden Dome.

Update III: Obama is a Mooslim, Jihadist, Pimp, anti-Semite who is aiding the Iranian Nuclear program

Update IV: Sharia Coke is taking over the world, it is defamation of Judaism and Christianity for Islam to include Moses and Jesus as Prophets of Islam.

Update V: Pamela Geller is a Holocaust Revisionist who claims that Hitler and the Nazis adopted Jihad

Update VI: Not only is Obama a secret Muslim, but according to Pamela Geller, “Obama is bringing his jihad to Illinois…Obama’s treachery is breathtaking.“

Update VII: Pamela Geller calls for the nuking of Mecca, Medina, and Tehran

Update VIII: Pamela Geller promotes a genocidal video

Update IX: Pamela Geller shows sympathy towards white supremacist

Update X: Screenshot of Pamela Geller’s post on June 25th wherein she posted a video claiming that Muslims engage in bestiality

Update XI: Pamela Geller left speechless when called out for drawing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad with a pig’s face

Frank Gaffney

Frank Gaffney is at it again, this time he’s writing for that favorite of warmongers everywhere, The Washington Times. Gaffney stuck a real “unbiased” note right off the bat by titling his article Understanding Islam’s Threat to the U.S. Vital. Yes, in case you didn’t know, that Faith that holds sway over 1.8 Billion people around the world is a threat to the USA. For this former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy nuance is synonymous with unnecessary. It isn’t extremism or radicalism but Islam itself that is to blame for all the problems we face.

The article takes umbrage at the new policies ushered in by the Obama administration. In fact, it starts out by stating that John Brennan, the assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism was wrong when he approvingly recalled a key point in Obama’s speech, “America is not and never will be at war with Islam.” To most reasonable people that statement just sounds like common sense but for Gaffney the real question is whether or not “Islam is at war with us?”

The obvious question is: how does a belief system which has been around longer then America, which has many interpretations and practitioners get cast as the antagonist in a war against America? How do you pit a religion against a whole nation, a nation which itself has many Muslim citizens? The nuanced answers coming from Obama and John Brennan is that we are not at war with Muslims and Islam but against “violent extremists” such as Al’Qaeda. This not only makes more sense but is also more accurate which means it will also be more effective in combating extremism and violence around the world.

The other point of Gaffney’s article, borrowing a term from Robert Spencer, is that even those Muslims who are not violently propagating their murderous vision for the world are engaged in a “stealth Jihad” to undermine America. This is a common and dangerous tactic by those in the Muslim-bashing industry. It asks you to suspend your better judgment and believe that you still have to be aware and afraid of those peaceful Muslims who are law abiding citizens because they are secretly planning to take over America and the world. It is the same kind of rhetoric that was used by Jew haters to further propagate anti-Semitism. The argument went that the peaceful Jew is plotting behind the scenes to destroy the gentiles, this kind of thinking gave birth to the infamous blood libels which eventually contributed to the horrific Holocaust.

Rep. Steve King who recently cast the sole vote against a memorial for slavery which unanimously passed the house believed that if Obama got elected AlQaeda would be dancing in the streets. He also believes that Obama’s middle name matters because Muslims will be dancing in the streets.

Click on the above image

I am never amazed by the Republicans or the Democrats, their mundane and consistent descent into a sort of ritualistic behavior reminds one of visiting the zoo and seeing the zoo animals go about their daily routine without nary a change.  You might say, ‘What did you expect, their symbols are the Elephant and the Donkey?’ Well let’s just say I am tired of them.

First ritualistic behavior: It occurred when Audra Shay who at the time was running to be the Chairman of the Young Republicans responded to one of her friends bigoted and racist remarks on her Facebook page by acknowledging and supporting it. Her friend, Eric S. Piker wrote at 1:54 pm (grammatical mistakes his),

“Osama bin Lauden is the new terrorist….muslim is on there side …..need to take back this country from all these mad coons………and illegals,” eight minutes later at 2:02 Shay responded with “You tell em Eric! lol”

Some young Republicans on her page took exception to her response to the bigotry and racism. When Shay realized her mistake and that it might hurt her chances for the Chairmanship she released a statement,

I immediately deleted the derogatory and outright disgusting comments and subsequently posted a statement on my Facebook Status stating that in no way, shape or form are the comments posted by other individuals a reflection of me or my beliefs as an American, a Veteran, a Mother or a Candidate. I do not, nor would I ever, condone that type of language or behavior.

Did she also delete her comments in immediate response to Eric? She claims that she was unaware of the racial comments until later and that she was replying to her friend’s other comment. This doesn’t make much sense considering she had at least eight minutes to see and read her friend’s comments and what she was replying to. Even if this were the case it is highly suspicious considering that she has made equally ugly remarks in the past.

The Daily Beast noted, after an effigy of Sarah Palin was hung, she said,

What no ‘Obama in a noose? … I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.” She’s also written that President Obama “attacks white people” and posted a video claiming Obama believes he has to help African-Americans over whites to “ensure his own salvation.”

The ritualistic aspects in this is another Republican caught saying or supporting racist and demeaning things about minorities. Also the knee jerk response when feeling the heat to apologize and distance themselves from views that they have a track record of holding.

Second ritualistic behavior: The Democrats in their usual reactionary manner jumped all over this to score political points. In reality, they have a right to jump on this and mock the Republicans but what they fail to do because either they don’t see it as a problem, or they see that they can’t score any political points off of it, is condemn not just the racist reference to remove “coons” and “illegals” but also the implication that all Muslims are with “Osama bin Laden.” No one, not the Huffington Post or any other liberal commentator even brought that up.

It continues the passive and narrow reactionary behavior of the Democrats — to feed off of the present sentimental feelings in culture while not being consistent on their principles by condemning bigotry in all its form and not be selective. We saw this during the Democratic primary in which accusations were leveled at Barack Obama that he was a Muslim. Instead of responding to these charges properly like Colin Powell did when he said, “the proper answer is he isn’t Muslim, but even if he was it shouldn’t matter” the Democrats reacted by in effect saying it was a “smear” to be a Muslim and called on supporters to “combat this smear.”

The lesson is that not much has changed with Republicans or Democrats and their perpetuation, enabling and disregard for anti-Muslimism and Islamophobia needs to be brought to their attention. Most importantly it highlights the fact that Islamophobia is not disconnected from other forms of prejudice. Many times, and this seems to be the rule, when you see an Islamophobe he is also a racist and vice-versa.

Have you ever walked down the grocery aisle and been intrigued or even bemused by the tabloids on the shelf? I can remember as a kid in the check out aisle staring at such titles as Swamp Monster Stalks Outskirts of Town or Michael Jackson Weds Alien but rarely have I ever seen a heading such as the below,

Bigotry on the Checkout

As Kabobfest contributor Mohammad noted the National Examiner is obviously a rag piece of paper but the title is still shocking and if it were any other group, Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Gays who were labeled as the “enemy” there would be a tremendous uproar and response. The other sad truth to note is that a lot of people in fact believe that magazines such as The National Examiner that deal and trade in yellow journalism are legitimate sources of information and news.  Edward J. Streb who has been studying tabloids for the past 17 years says,

many regular readers of the National Enquirer do believe what they read in the pages of the oldest and most successful of the tabloids [and that] tabloid readers- especially those who peruse the National Enquirer-find such papers credible.

So though I don’t want to overblow this obviously ridiculous and strange front page tabloid article it is worthy to note that this wouldn’t happen with any other group and that people who read these papers aren’t doing it for simple entertainment but really believe what they’re reading.

Michael Goldfarb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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