Rachel Maddow on the hysteria directed at Elena Kagan from the far right! Frank Gaffney considers Kagan an appeaser of Islam. The Washington Times ran his story accompanied with photoshopped images of Kagan in a turban.

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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.

Adrian Morgan

The Neocons, the BNP and the Islamophobia Network

Tom Griffin, 17 September 2009

Events in London in recent weeks have highlighted the growing collusion between American neoconservatives and the European far right in stirring up hatred of Muslims.

Richard Bartholomew has details of a meeting at the George Restaurant in east London in August attended by Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer and Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion at the invitation of the Christian Action Network. Also invited were the English Defence League, the group responsible for a number of recent violent anti-Muslim protests.

Robert Spencer says on his blog that he and Murray refused to meet with the EDL, and cites Adrian Morgan as a witness to this version of events. But the presence of Morgan, who did meet the EDL, is itself evidence of the emerging relationship between the neocons and the far-right.

Morgan is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters, which has been described as a front for the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think-tank run by the ultra-neoconservative Frank Gaffney.

He is also the author of Western Resistance, a defunct blog on which he laid out his view of the BNP:

I am slightly ambivalent about the British National Party, on account of its racist past. Nowadays, under the leadership of Nick Griffin, a skilled politician, the racist agenda has become replaced by an agenda which is highly focused against Islam. With this aspect of its policies, I am in agreement. Islam poses a more serious threat to every aspect of British democracy than anything previously encountered. (via the Internet Archive)

Ambivalent or not, Morgan’s interest in the BNP is reciprocated, according to Searchlight Magazine, which reported in 2007 on the efforts of BNP idealogue Alan Goodacre to tap support from right wing bloggers:

Goodacre also stated his intention to try and gain the help of Adrian Morgan who writes regularly for the Western Resistance website and has previously contributed to The Guardian and New Scientist and was once a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Morgan also contributes to the “Islam Watch” website – “Islam under scrutiny by ex-Muslims” – which would explain Goodacre’s interest in him.

It might also be explained by Morgan’s membership of the 910 Group, an offshoot of the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF), which ran the CounterJihad Europa conference in October 2007.  Among those speaking alongside Robert Spencer at this Brussels event were representatives of European far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of the Vlaams Belang and Ted Ekeroth of the Sweden Democrats.

The CVF’s Christine Brim suggested in November 2007 that the strategy of embracing such parties could be extended to Jean-Marie Le Pen and the BNP:

We suggest looking for the possible movement of Le Pen’s political party Front National towards the center-right, as they may change their platform to pro-active support to improve the situations of European Jews and Israel. The same trend is happening in Austria, and with the BNP in the UK (also not invited and did not attend the conference). If such parties specifically state pro-Israel positions, and take real actions opposing anti-semitism and disavowing previous positions – and reach out to Jewish constituents and encourage Jewish participation in party positions – these are real actions to observe, and to approve. They have not done this yet – but are starting. (via the Internet Archive)

Indeed they were. Alan Goodacre had written to the Jewish Chronicle in 2006 (much to the bemusement of its readers):

We hope that our future behaviour may in time bring you to understand that our repudiation of antisemitism is genuine. We are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat.

Morgan, Brim and Goodacre have each employed the same sleight of hand, attempting to present the embrace of Islamophobia as some kind of atonement for anti-semitism, rather than another manifestation of the same underlying racism. If this strategy seems crude, it may yet take neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini to the Italian premiership.Time Magazine describes the process:

To fulfill his big ambitions, Fini understood in the early 1990s that he had to distance himself from his past. Eventually, he came to believe that the shortest path from marginal Mussolini nostalgic to mainstream political power was unwavering support for the state of Israel. The decisive moment came when Fini traveled to Israel in November 2003, declaring his affection for the Jewish state and his “shame” for Italy’s racial laws under fascism. The following year, Silvio Berlusconi made him foreign minister, where the longtime leader of the National Alliance party stood out amongst his European partners for his pro-Israel policy.

This conversion even impressed some on the ‘Decent Left‘. Harry’s Place wrote of Fini:

He is pro-European Union and pro-US – neither of which fit easy with the claim that he is still a fascist. After September 11, AN posters across Italy declared ‘Solidarity with the United States’ – Italian fascists despise the US for obvious historical reasons.

He is also explicitly in favour of capitalism and the free market. Again this is a break not only with old style Italian corporatist fascism but also the later post-war concept of the ’social right’ which believed in large scale state ownership and nationalisation etc.

AN also supported the liberation of Iraq, a position that I am not aware of any of Europe’s genuine fascists taking.

As Time noted “having “Israel” stamped in your passport and publicly condemning anti-Semitism cannot alone remove lingering doubts about extremist tendencies.” Yet the attempt to prove otherwise has some influential backers.

In addition to being a key player in the CVF, and secretary of another counter-jihad outfit, the International Free Press Society, Christine Brim is a senior vice-president at Frank Gaffney’s Washington think-tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and director of its Victory Coalition Fund, an incubator for anti-Islamist projects.

The CSP is open about its involvement in political warfare and even has a vice-president for information operations who blogs on the subject. Its General Counsel David Yerushalmi heads up the Society of Americans for National Existence, whose material found its way into last year’s Policy Exchange briefing against the Global Peace and Unity event in London.

Gaffney’s sister Devon Cross, a member of the CSP advisory council, heads up the Policy Forum on International Security Affairs, a neoconservative briefing operation for European journalists which was run for some time out of Annabel’s nightclub in Mayfair.

The CSP and the Policy Forum have been endorsed by some of America’s wealthiest conservative foundations. The Philanthropy Roundtable recommended both organisations in its 2006 publication, The Struggle Against Radical Islam: A Donor’s Guide (pdf) which criticised the US Government for failing to develop political warfare and public diplomacy programmes modelled on those of the Cold War, and called on private sector donors to fill the gap.

Neoconservatives had repeatedly come up against resistance in attempting to run political warfare programmes through their powerbase at the Pentagon during the Bush administration. One such proposal was leaked to the New York Times in 2004:

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles.

Some of those are in the Middle Eastern and South Asian countries like Pakistan, still considered a haven for operatives of Al Qaeda. But such a campaign could reach even to allied countries like Germany, for example, where some mosques have become crucibles for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism.

A private sector version of that strategy is clearly visible in the smears and secret briefings directed at British mosques, a campaign which has now taken a step further with the recent wave of street protests by provocateurs like the BNP-connected English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad Europa affiliate Stop the Islamisation of Europe.

Communities Minister John Denham last week announced plans to address issues alienating white, working-class people at risk of being exploited by the far-right. If that approach is to succeed, the wealthy right-wing propagandists who are actively trying to set working-class communities against each other must be exposed.

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.

Frank Gaffney

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

From a Christian Science Monitor article,

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

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

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

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

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