A very good and long overdue article on the right-wing witch-hunt against CAIR.

The conspiracies and vilification of CAIR have been incessant over the years. For instance, in 2009, Newsweek labeled the idea that “CAIR was sending Muslim spy interns into the halls of Congress” one of the wackiest conspiracy theories of 2009!

The Vilification of CAIR

By Rabia Chaudry (AltMuslim)

The is the first in a two-part series on the vilification of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and how the American Muslim community has responded.

There is only one national organization in the United States whose primary mission is protecting the civil liberties of American Muslims, and that is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, commonly referred to as CAIR.  Since its inception in 1994, CAIR has battled countless smears and attacks against its work and reputation, which intensified after being named an unindicted co-conspirator in the notorious Holy Land Foundation case in 2007.

In the past five years, this designation has resulted in witch-hunts on Capitol Hill — a repeated talking point for Islamophobes — and most significantly, the severing of ties by the FBI.  A concerted effort to marginalize CAIR by certain right-wing groups and individuals, built on the meaningless label of “unindicted co-conspirator,” has resulted not only in the FBI distancing itself from CAIR, but other Muslim organizations doing so as well. The ongoing campaign against the group has succeeded; CAIR has
effectively been turned into the black sheep of American Muslims organizations.

At the root of allegations against CAIR is its inclusion in a list of almost 250 other organizations designated as unindicted co-conspirators by the Department of Justice in a case against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF).  What exactly is an unindicted co-conspirator?  For all intents and purposes, this title is used to identify parties to an indictment for the purpose of immunity or evidentiary concerns, but its use is heavily criticized and warned against by the U.S. Attorney’s Manual itself.

An unindicted co-conspirator has not been charged with any criminal misconduct, and the common legal practice is to keep such identification under seal with the court. Making these identifications public raises serious due process concerns, since it effectively destroys the reputation of an individual or group that has not been charged with any crime, without providing it a forum to defend itself like someone who has actually been charged with a crime. In the HFL case, this list of 250 unindicted co-conspirators, including CAIR, was made public when it should have kept under seal.

CAIR and other groups appearing as unindicted co-conspirators in the HLF case petitioned the court to remove its name from that list, but failed.  The stigma of this label continues to haunt CAIR as the lynchpin to a widely propagated narrative that CAIR is the domestic front to foreign terror groups.

It is a talking point that will not die. Recently when Best Buy sponsored a CAIR event, an avalanche of petitions and protests erupted, and the Muslim darling of the Islamophobe industry, Zuhdi Jasser, promptly appeared on Fox news to reiterate the litany of smears associated with CAIR.  The investigation of CAIR interns in Congress, the Peter King hearings, and even statements from pundits like former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who recently spoke at an ABA Homeland Security Conference (at which I was personally present),  continue to keep the narrative alive.

At the homeland security conference, I took the opportunity to ask Mr. Mukasey, since he spoke at length about CAIR being a front for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, how a terrorist group could openly continue to operate in the U.S. If his allegations held any merit, why hadn’t the FBI shut them down yet?  Did Mr. Mukasey have evidence the FBI didn’t?

The response, although vague, did point out that the FBI still bars any official engagement with CAIR, which is the larger problem. The FBI’s stance on CAIR, which feeds into the right-wing conspiracy about the organization, has badly damaged CAIR’s reputation and driven away supporters, stripped CAIR of due process, impaired American Muslims’ access to civil liberties advocacy, and harmed the work of the FBI itself by creating distrust from American Muslims.

The greatest irony of this debacle is that not only does CAIR continue to work with other federal, state, and local governments and agencies, but they also continue to work with the FBI in an unofficial capacity. The FBI is routinely engaged by CAIR when hate crimes against Muslims arise, the two groups appear at events together, and on a local level across the country, FBI agents have expressed their hope to Muslim leaders that the official FBI policy towards CAIR will eventually be resolvedso they can continue to work together.

Although the FBI’s official ban of engaging with CAIR has not impeded the organization’s work in any meaningful way (they continue to strongly advocate and litigate civil rights issues), plenty of damage has been done. The group has lost a tremendous number of members and donors, Islamophobes continue to use this point to validate their smears, and other Muslim organizations have been forced to choose whether to align with CAIR and risk their own reputations and legitimacy, or abandon CAIR to be able to continue their own work.

Read the Rest…

In 2008, a poll regarding the public’s view of then candidate Obama’s religious beliefs, found that 1 out of 10 people believed him to be a Muslim – despite him stating the contrary. This perception came about, in large part, due to an Islamophobic Network that has been exposed by numerous independent journalists and research teams. These people and organizations used everything “Muslim” about Obama to “discredit” him (because “Muslim” is currently a political slur) in the minds of American voters, both Right and Left (but mostly Right). They said his name Barack Hussein Obama was proof that he was a devout Muslim; as well as the fact that he spent four years of his childhood in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. Some simple-minded bigots even suggested that Obama “has” to be a Muslim regardless if his personal religious beliefs are aligned with Christianity, because according to “Islamic law” a son of a Muslim remains within the fold regardless if his beliefs match another religion. Obama’s father was an Atheist.

To “solve” the problem, Obama’s Indonesian step-father Lolo Soetoro was then used as proof of his Muslim identity. Since Soetoro was a Muslim, so goes the argument, Obama became an “adopted” Muslim son which means he will remain within the fold for the rest of his life. Soetoro, in Obama’s own words in Dreams From My Father, practiced a syncretic universalist form of Islam prevalent in Indonesian culture, wherein Hindu and other pre-Islamic Indonesian beliefs were melded in with Islamic teachings; and even spoke highly of the Hindu god Hanuman, the same deity that former Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams apologized to Hindus for, when he declared that Muslims worship a “monkey god.”

“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.”

I’am not in the habit of declaring who is Muslim or not, but clearly this position is not really in-line with mainstream Muslim teaching, and takes one out of the fold of Islam according to the type of Muslims these conspiracy theorists fear. There is also the pointed fact that classical Islam does not really recognize “adoption” in the Western sense, but rather recognizes “Fostering” children. So either way you depict it, Obama is not a Muslim by “inheritance”; not that it would  be wrong if he were a Muslim!

On May 10, 2012, four years later, the Huffington Post released the findings of a new poll which found that 1 out of 6 Americans now believe President Obama is a Muslim.

“After nearly four years in the Oval Office, President Obama is incorrectly thought to be Muslim by one in six American voters, and only one quarter of voters can correctly identify him as a Protestant, according to a new poll.”

“While Americans across the board get the president’s religion wrong, the religious group that most often thinks Obama is Muslim is white evangelical Protestants (24 percent). American unaffiliated with a religious group make the error least often: just 7 percent identify Obama as Muslim.” (Emphasis added)

What I find most disturbing about this article, is that Islamophobia is downplayed as an important factor in the public’s perception. Even the executive director of the American Islamic Congress, Zainab Al-Suwaij thinks it is primarily just a “…lack of information than an attack on him,…” If only this were the case. The belief that President Obama is a Muslim is directly followed with demonization of his character. The two claims are inextricably linked in the minds of those who subscribe to this fantasy.

Research director of Public Religion Research Institute, Daniel Cox, also displays befuddlement at the poll data, and suggests that it is because Obama doesn’t “wear his religion on his sleeve” that 16% of Americans believe he is a Muslim.

“Quite frankly, I’m not really sure what to make of it other than this person, although he speaks quite comfortably about his faith, doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve,…”

“It’s an important part of who he is, but it’s not an important part of his public persona.”

While this may contribute a little confusion among 16% of Americans who believe the President is a Muslim, I think Mr. Cox is ignoring the Islamophobic “elephant in the living room” (there is an Islamic pun there for those who search for it.) As mentioned earlier, there is an entire Islamophobia Industry that ceaselessly turns out blogs, books, public speakers and street thugs to depict all Muslims as evildoers who want to destroy the “Western” way of life, and replace it with an Islamic caliphate or theocracy. Moreover, many of the people who promote these conspiracy theories are religious fanatics themselves, and advocate the very things that they decry Muslims for. Rick Santorum, a prominent Muslim-basher and Birther, for example, will slip in a comment about how American law should reflect “God’s law” as enshrined in the Bible, in the midst of his anti-Muslim diatribe. He also won’t correct his supporters who claim that Obama is a Muslim to his face.

This is more than just a misunderstanding among the majority of the 16% of Americans who believe the President is a Muslim. The “white evangelical Protestant” churches have by and large become hotbeds of right-wing political ideology, and indulgers of wacky conspiracy theories, such as the “Pink Swastika.” This “theory” states that the Nazis, and fascism itself, is the culmination of a culture of “masculine homosexuality.” The more the West “tolerates” homosexuals, at the bidding of the Left, the closer we get to a totalitarian political order whereby the “true believers” will be persecuted for “telling the truth”, which also ties into their opposition to hate-crime legislation. Could this be a possible link to the ramblings of Bradlee Dean of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, that Keith Ellison was trying to implement Sharia law through a “homosexual agenda”?

“They are using the homosexuals as a political battering ram to bring forth what? Sharee [sic] law.”

These are the shared sources of the majority of people who believe the President is a Muslim. It’s not just an innocent misunderstanding as some would have us believe, but part of a well-worn and deliberate effort to attach the slur of “Mooslim” to gain political traction. Obama is the most prominent recipient of this jingoistic bigotry, but for as long as the fanatical anti-Muslim movement in the US exists there will be many more who will receive this treatment.

Florida loon Tom Trento is perhaps only out shined in his lunacy by Joe “Nuke the Mooslims” Kaufman. (h/t: JH):

Tom Trento Tries to Rally Shock Troops to Protest Local Muslim Conference

by Jacob Hausner (Islamophobia Today)

That Tom Trento is a hate-filled propagandist is common knowledge by now. He is as much a ‘human rights’ activist as David Duke or any racist who relies on lies, half-truths and innuendo to plead his case.

Trento has for quite some time been active in agitating anti-Islam and anti-Muslim efforts in Florida. In 2008, in the run up to the election of President Barack Obama, Trento was busy peddling the hate-filled anti-Muslim movie, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West.”

The website, Obsession for Hate, both catalogued and detailed the propagandistic efforts of the funders of “Obsession,” Aisha HaTorah and the Clarion Fund, to affect the outcome of the election. The not-so veiled strategy was to freely distribute 28 million DVD’s of Obsession in newspapers inside key electoral swing states, to fear-monger about the so-called pending Islamization of the USA. If anyone recalls the election of 2008, Barack Obama’s faith was a central talking point in which Republicans sought to take advantage, thinking they could sway voters by maligning the president as an evil, madrassa-indoctrinated, fifth-columnist “Muslim.”

“Obsession” failed, but that did not stop Trento.

It is 2012 now, and another election is around the corner, queue-in Trento and his fanatical band of doomsday, fear-mongering naysayers! Once again Islam and the Muslims are to be feared, and even more so, ironically because of the Arab Spring!

Trento produced the video below, calling on his compatriots to join him to protest an upcoming Islamic Society of North America conference in Florida:

Now, I would have been content to just post this article in response: ‘The United West’ Video: Is It From the Onion? No, This Lunacy is Real!, but on further consideration I don’t want to leave the Islamophobes with any excuses!

About the only thing that Trento got right in the above video is that, yes, Hasan Al-Banna did create the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

By now there is a plethora of well researched, academic and even lay literature on the “Muslim Brotherhood.” Just Google “Muslim Brotherhood” and you will come out with dozens of interesting titles.

One does not have to agree with or like the Muslim Brotherhood to, at the very least, concede that the Muslim Brotherhood never “joined” the Nazis in World War II. That is just a blatant lie!

So let’s look at the lies presented by Trento, one by one:

Trento Lie #1.) “Muslim Brotherhood joined the ‘Nazis’ during World War II.”

Truth: As Matthias Kuntzel noted in his book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11″ (Telos Press, 2007),

‘it would be wrong to characterize the Muslim Brothers as ardent followers of the Nazis.’

Richard Wolin in an exchange with Jeffrey Herf (author of “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World”) comments on this, saying,

Here there is simply no squaring the circle; too many aspects of Nazi ideology–its paganism, its Aryan racial doctrines, its conception of Germanic geopolitical supremacy–are incompatible with the key tenets of political Islam. As Küntzel rightly concludes, Hassan al-Banna was too devout a Muslim to latch on to someone as impious as Hitler as a political role model.

Trento Lie #2: “In 1981, that same Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Anwar Sadat.”

Truth: A quick read on Wikipedia could have easily disabused Trento of this embarrassing falsity. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Khalid Islambouli and a group of renegade Egyptian military soldiers. Islambouli, in fact was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood but instead of a group called the “Egyptian Islamic Jihad,”

After graduating from the Egyptian Military Academy with excellent grades, he was accepted as an officer in the Bombardment Forces of the Egyptian Army with the rank of Lieutenant. Sometime after this appointment, Islambouli joined the proscribed Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement.

Trento Lie #3: “In 2011, that same Muslim Brotherhood overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, for the express purpose, as the United West predicted, to establish the Islamic caliphate in Egypt.”

Truth: Trento seems to be living in the past when the internet and new media wasn’t readily available. As it turns out it wasn’t the “Muslim Brotherhood” that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, (who wasn’t really a “president” as Trento so reverently refers to him, but a “dictator”) they were actually late to the protest game, it was a mass popular movement of “Egyptians” that toppled Mubarak. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to spitting on the sacrifices of all those brave souls who were killed, injured and tortured by Mubarak-thugs. Most rational people realize this.

Trento Lie #4: “Obama…gave the Muslim Brotherhood 1.5 billion dollars”

Truth: Seriously? Do we have to even answer this one? In fact, the money was not given to the Muslim Brotherhood, but to Egypt, just as it has been for over thirty years ever since the Camp David accords, when President Jimmy Carter reached a peace deal between Egypt and Israel.

Trento Lie #5: “Now, in May, the Muslim Brotherhood is coming to Tampa Bay, Florida for the express purpose of continuing the ‘cultural jihad’ to turn the United States eventually into an Islamic State.”

Truth: Trento is referring to the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) “East Zone Conference.” ISNA happens to be one of the oldest and largest Muslim organizations in the United States, and perusing their website, ISNA.net, and looking at the program and topics of the conference, there was surprisingly NOT one lecture, seminar or group activity relating to “cultural jihad to turn the United States eventually into an Islamic State.”

If we were to find anything relatively close to what Trento is talking about I am sure it would have been on ISNA’s own website, right!? Alas, it does not exist, and much like Trento’s ludicrous video, this too is an outlandish, kooky lie, ginned up to try and rally anti-Islam bigots and shock troops to counter a peaceful Muslim conference.

Hopefully, Trento’s “protest” won’t devolve into the type of hate-filled “protests” we have come to know and expect from him and his friends:

No surprise that the UKIP is parroting statements like those of Geert Wilders (h/t:githensmazer). I wonder is Julia Gasper like a UK version of Lou Ann Zelenik:

UKIP Candidate: “Koran is Worse than Adolph Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’”

(PoliticalScrapbook)

A candidate for UKIP has compared Islam’s holiest book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Political Scrapbook can reveal. Academic Julia Gasper — a former Westminster hopeful and current council candidate in Oxford – said the Koran was “fascist” and compared those who defend Islam to holocaust deniers.

In emails seen by Scrapbook, Gasper ranted:

“Why is it any more wrong to assert that the Koran is a fascist book than to assert that Mein Kampf is a fascist book? The Koran is a lot more explicit in advocating hate and murder than Mein Kampf is.”

Having dismissed comparisons between sections of the Koran and the Old Testament as “not valid”, Gasper responded to suggestions that her hateful bile was demonising Muslims:

“Words like “demonization” are just self-deception. They are being used to persuade you to keep your eyes shut. In fact, the apologists for Islam are really very similiar to Holocaust deniers.”

To compound matters, the rant comes to light as another UKIP candidate is suspended for expressing sympathies with Norwegian mass-murder Anders Breivik – and just days after Julia Gasper herself was slammed for saying gays should stop ‘complaining about persecution’ and start thanking straight people for giving birth to them.

Looks like they’ll be making that a double suspension then.

Sarkozy’s right-ward lurch is supposedly rankling some feathers in his own party (via. Islamophobia-Watch):

Unease grows in Sarkozy party over rightward lurch

Unease is growing in French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party a week before a presidential election over his lurch to the right in pursuit of supporters of anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen.

Some mainstream conservatives have voiced public dismay at his embrace of the campaign themes, language and even some proposals of Le Pen’s National Front. In private conversations, doubts are widespread about the morality and effectiveness of the strategy.

In the last week, Sarkozy has repeatedly declared that there are too many foreigners in France and vowed to reduce legal immigration. Echoing a Le Pen proposal, he has called for police to be given greater license to shoot fleeing crime suspects. He has accused his Socialist rival Francois Hollande of being backed by Islamists and said Le Pen’s voters are respectable and her party compatible with the French Republic.

“Even though I will vote for Nicolas Sarkozy on the second round, it’s clearly my duty to ring the alarm bell about this strategy,” Etienne Pinte, a UMP lawmaker, told Reuters.

He said former prime ministers Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Alain Juppe, Sarkozy’s foreign minister, had made clear in internal meetings their reticence about the rightward drift. ”All through the campaign, we felt there were misgivings among a number of parliamentary colleagues and the two former prime ministers about the exploitation of these extreme-right themes,” Pinte said.

Sarkozy hardened his discourse as soon as the results of last Sunday’s first round showed Le Pen, with nearly 18 percent, had won twice as many votes as centrist Francois Bayrou. The president needs to draw support from both sides to beat Hollande, the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, in the May 6 second-round runoff.

Raffarin hinted at his distaste in an interview with the newspaperLe Monde last week, saying: “If I were to express reservations today, it would weaken my own side … but I remain attached to the humanitarian values of our program.” Asked whether the strategy drawn up by Sarkozy’s political guru Patrick Buisson, a former extreme-right newspaper editor, had not strengthened the far right, Raffarin said the time for analysis would come after May 6. “We are in a battle now, and in a battle, the honorable thing is to be loyal,” he said.

Another former Gaullist prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, deplored what he called “crossing one republican red line after another (in a) shameless seduction of extremist votes”. Without mentioning Sarkozy by name, Villepin warned the mainstream right in an article in Le Monde against betraying its own values.

“One would think there were only National Front voters in France,” he wrote. “As if there were not more important issues than halal meat, legal immigration and (single-sex or mixed) bathing hours in public swimming pools.” Sarkozy has played up each of those issues in his quest to win over Le Pen voters.

Reuters, 29 April 2012

Another reason people may be turned off and or leave the anti-Islam bandwagon may be because they appeal to an older, lonely, above 60′s year old crowd.

Youth really don’t seem to care about the ‘counter jihad’ so much, as Reza Aslan pointed out most youth are more interested in Snookie’s “underwear” than they are topics related to bigotry or geo-politics (via. Islamophobia-Today):

Anti-Islamism common amongst the over 60s

Men at home over 65, with little education and no children reportedly represent the average reader of anti-Islam websites.

Klassekampen writes it used Alexa to examine eight sites that allegedly inspired Anders Behring Breivik and his manifesto. It claims its investigations revealed readership groups to websites Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch, The Brussels Journal, Islam Watch, Atlas Shrugged, Tundra Tabloid, Vladtepesblog and The Green Arrow showed a clear pattern.

When presented with the results, Andreas Malm, journalist and author of the book ‘The Hate against Muslims’, told the paper, “The typical profile of conspiracy theorists are elderly, lonely men, who become obsessed with a particular question, and who may be attracted to anti-Islamic conspiracy theories.”

“There is a preponderance of older men, often unemployed, who may feel ostracized from society, and seeking for an explanation and a scapegoat,” he declared.

Tor Bach, editor of the magazine ‘Vepsen’, is not surprised. He adds that the anti-Islam organizations’ groups of older members share a common “mistrust of society and the democratic system, sincerely believing someone wishes them harm.”

“These people [also] fully believe in the existence of a conspiracy, where the Arab world will take over the European one,” concluded Mr Bach.

Original post: Anti-Islamism common amongst the over 60s

I have the strange sense that Geert Wilders ‘star’ is fading. The momentum from Fitna, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the calls for deporting Muslims has been blunted by the departure of his former friend Brinkman, the embarrassment over the anti-Polish site his party created and other such incidents. This does not mean that he is less of a force for bigotry but for the moment it seems we may have reached a downward curve in his rise.

In America Wilders will have more luck, and will make tons of money scamming not just poor Christian right-wingers but also the small, rich anti-Muslim cadre who hang on his every word.

If fake ex-terrorist Walid Shoebat can still rake in cold hard cash from Bible thumpers even when it is well known that he is a liar, how much better will the peroxide-dyed anti-Muslim politician do?

Update (via. Al-Bakrastani): The government his (Wilders) Fascist party supported has crashed and most likely new elections will decimate his party.

(via. Hugo Treeds) Today he blew up Dutch governement and yesterday his party blew itself up in his home-district of Limburg. Almost weekly party representatives now leave the party and decimate his powerbase in cities and provinces. So your analysis very probably is correct and he will try to flee the mess he made over here in The Netherlands. So America, beware!

Wilders’ new book aimed at US market may appeal only to his ‘small, rich and fanatical group of followers’

A new book by Geert Wilders aimed at the American market is not due to be officially launched until May 1, but details gleaned from advance and review copies are already doing the rounds.

The book is entitled Marked for Death, Islam’s war against the West and me and according to Wilders’ own website ‘tells the story of Geert Wilders’ fight for the right to speak what he believes: namely that Islam is not just a religion but primarily a dangerous ideology which is a threat to Western freedoms.’

The book will be officially presented at an as-yet secret location in the US, and is regarded by some as Wilders’ calling card to America. The Dutch MP has made no secret of his international ambitions and is keen to launch and International Freedom Alliance, he said last year.

Magazine HP/De Tijd looks at one incident in the book in which Wilders writes how he was robbed by “three Arab youths” in the Utrecht district of Kanaleneiland – an area of poor housing and high unemployment.

In fact, the robbery took place in a more upmarket part of town several kilometres away the magazine says, citing references to the incident in a biography of Wilders published several years ago.

Tom Kleijn, Washington correspondent for television show Nieuwsuur says the book is a dry, almost academic recount of “how Wilders has become what he is”. The book even contains an index and sources, he points out. “Wilders has a small, rich and fanatical group of followers in America,” Kleijn said. “But it remains to be seen if this book will boost Wilders’ popularity.”

Current Dutch president Mark Rutte is not mentioned once, but Wilders states five times that he and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch Somali Muslim critic who now works for a US think-tank, are of the same opinion, Kleijn points out.

Nos correspondent Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal describes how Wilders emphasises his admiration for former US president Ronald Reagan and states current president Barack Obama is a dhimmi – a submissive non-Muslim in a Muslim state.

Dutch News, 21 April 2012

While Robert George has had positive relations with Muslim leaders such as Hamza Yusuf, and has also made positive statements regarding Islam and Muslim in the public, he has still left unanswered lingering questions about his troubling membership on the board of the Bradley Foundation, one of the largest funders of Islamophobia.

George’s unwillingness to answer questions about his position as a board member of the Bradley Foundation since 2006 is one of the main reasons he should not be considered as a commissioner on the USCIRF. His positive statements about Muslims do not give him a free pass in this regard.

Robert George’s Moral Cowardice on Islamophobia

(FaithInPublicLife)

Since it was revealed last fall that Robert George sits on the board of a conservative foundation that funds some of the worst anti-Islam extremists, the prominent Princeton professor has remained silent on the issue. Even when asked directly, he refused to discuss the subject.

Monday, his colleague Jennifer Bryson of the Witherspoon Institute tried to defend him. Unfortunately her attempt comes up short.

Bryson starts by conceding that the anti-Islam organizations in question are “in [her] view, misguided” before moving on. But let’s be clear, the people we’re talking about are indefensibly hateful. They describe Muslims as “Islamic Nazis,” tell lies about the President’s faith, and promote elaborate conspiracy theories about secret Muslim infiltration of the United States government and civil society. They also bear some responsibility for the rise in attacks on the religious freedom of Muslims in the last few years. And their work is being funded to the tune of over $4 million dollars by the board on which Robert George sits.

Bryson goes on to allege that critics are charging George with “being anti-Muslim” or being “hostile to Islam” and rebuts these charges with a litany of George’s statements criticizing anti-Islam bigotry. I might have missed something, but none of the posts I’ve written or read on this subject have said any such thing. In fact, I’ve made a point to laud these very statements and suggested his otherwise positive record on this issue is exactly what makes his place on the Bradley Foundation board so disappointing.

After twelve paragraphs refuting this straw man, Bryson finally gets to the fundamental moral conflict at stake, relaying George’s defense:

Yet what about George’s position on the Bradley Foundation board? Is it inconsistent with his advocacy of the rights of Muslims and his work for Christian-Muslim cooperation? The Bradley Board discussions are confidential and, says George, “what I have to say about Bradley grants and grantees I will say to them and my colleagues on the Bradley board.”

But this of course is a non-answer. Under the guise of confidentiality, George refuses to say what (if anything) he says to the board about the Bradley Foundation’s record of funding the Islamophobia industry. Did he show them the disgusting records of the people they’re funding? Was there a fight about this decision? Even if he protested and voted no, is he embarrassed that his colleagues are contributing to the same religious bigotry he opposes in other contexts? We don’t know any of this, because George won’t say.

Bryson, however, jumps to conclusions:

Frankly I am glad that he is part of the Bradley Board. He can have more influence by participating inside than by protesting from outside, and having so prominent a defender of Muslim rights, and of Islam as a faith, in such a visible place of honor and influence in the conservative movement sends a clear message to other conservatives that they need not, and should not, view Islam with contempt or regard their Muslim fellow citizens with suspicion.

If George’s strategy is to influence the board from within, he’s failing spectacularly. The foundation has been giving money to these extremists since 2001. George’s election to the board in 2006 failed to do anything to stop the flow of funds — publicly available annual reports through 2010 show that grants have been awarded in every year since.

Moreover, Bryson has her cause and effect wrong. George is not a prominent conservative leader because he is on the board, his stature comes from his other work and lends the board credibility and visibility. Given that practically no one knew about this situation until a few months ago, can Bryson really argue with a straight face that George’s secret, silent protest of an unknown issue has “sent a clear message” about religious tolerance to his fellow conservatives?

Of course not. George’s silent participation does the exact opposite, sending the message that these organizations are credible and worthy of funding.

What if the groups in question weren’t anti-Islam extremists, but active racists? Would George act the same way if the Bradley Foundation were funding the KKK? Would being a silent advocate for African Americans be morally sufficient? Would conservatives accept George’s “behind the scenes advocate” defense?

Imagine, though, what kind of message George could send by making public his vociferous opposition to his colleagues’ decision and resigning from the board in protest. Now that would be a moral example that might inspire fellow conservatives to refuse to sit by silently while xenophobic extremists hijack their movement.

But instead, George appears content to whistle past the graveyard. That’s certainly a moral and strategic choice he has a right to make. But it’s a choice that deserves to be made public, especially for someone recently appointed to a prominent position defending religious liberty around the globe. And he and his allies shouldn’t be surprised if others determine that his association with anti-Muslim groups disqualifies him from such an important and prestigious role.

EDL Aarhus demo

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

EDL summit in Denmark humiliated by low attendance

Anti-fascist demonstrators outnumbered far-right supporters more than 20 to one in Denmark as an English Defence League-led attempt to form a pan-European movement was humiliated.

Estimates suggested as few as 160 defence league members from several countries gathered at the inaugural far-right summit in Aarhus for the European counter-jihad meeting, devised to “send a clear message to the leaders of Europe” that Islamism would not be tolerated.

EDL leader Tommy Robinson admitted only 15 supporters from England made the trip, despite earlier speculation that hundreds might attend. In comparison, an anti-fascist demonstration in the same city to protest against the arrival of the EDL attracted up to 4,000 people.

Fears of violence had seen local police mount their biggest operation on the Jutland peninsula with the tense atmosphere amplified by the start of the trial this month of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist and anti-Islamist who confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July.

A cohort of the Norwegian Defence League travelled to Aarhus. Although none condoned Breivik’s actions, some said they shared his frustrations. One, who would be named only as Simon, from eastern Norway, said: “He had some important points. There are people who share his thinking, if not his methods.”

The low turnout in Aarhus is in fact the second time the EDL has travelled abroad to try to forge alliances. Its first attempt, in Amsterdam in 2010, was widely dismissed as a “damp squib” attracting about 60 supporters who were met with fierce opposition from Ajax football fans and anti-racist supporters. Robinson, the main attraction at the Aarhus summit, was unrepentant despite even fewer of his followers appearing, saying: “Just wait until there are hundreds of us coming in.”

Observer, 1 April 2012

Picture: EDL leader Stephen Lennon addresses the rather thin ranks of the European “counter-jihad” movement. EDL second-in-command Kevin Carroll is on the left wearing the T-shirt proclaiming that the EDL hates Nazis – a message just ever so slightly undermined by the fact that the individual on the right is former BNP organiser and bodyguard to Nick Griffin, Stuart Bates.

Update:  See also “Far right militants fail to strike blow against Islam on their Danish awayday”, Observer, 1 April 2012

Update 2:  And “Antifascists humiliate EDL’s cronies in Aarhus, Denmark”, UAF news report, 31 March 2012

Update 3:  Over at Atlas Shrugs mad Pamela Geller has reproduced the speech delivered by Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe at the Aarhus rally. Some excerpts:

Most of us here today know we are in a war. A war that has been fought for centuries. Even those who have not yet realised that we are in a war know we face a big enemy that plans to rule the world. This enemy of freedom is called Islam and Muslims are its soldiers….

Islam is not a religion. It is the world’s biggest hate group. Muslims choose to be members of this hate group….

Islam is in reality a political party because it has its own manifesto to rule the world. Islam is a dictatorship. Its manifesto crushes all freedom. It dictates how people should behave for every second of the day.

Islam is the opposite of freedom, just as communism is. But Islam is worse than communism. It is communism with a vicious, violent god attached. This so-called god commands Muslims to make war on the Kuffar who live around them….

The Koran should be banned for being a manual of hate, just as some European countries have banned Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf means “My struggle”. Jihad also means “My struggle”. The difference is for Muslims, the struggle is to make Islam rule the world.

Both Mein Kampf and the Koran are full of Jew-hating…. Recently we saw in Toulouse just what Islam’s Jew-hatred brings to Europe. 70% of attacks on Jews in France are done by Muslims. And this is being repeated across Europe….

Every mosque being built must be protested against. Not only must protests be held outside mosques, but also the building companies making the mosques. Also the councils allowing mosques to be built.

Whenever a woman, or even worse, a child is raped, we must protest outside the mosque closest to where it happened…. The media must be challenged to report our protests or we will accuse them of supporting the violence of the world’s biggest hate group. Islam.

All anti-Islam groups must work together to defeat our enemy and to win this war.

Victory is ours. NO SURRENDER.

Excellent piece by Adam Serwer exposing Zuhdi Jasser.

Also see our articles: Asra Nomani, Tarek Fatah and Zuhdi Jasser: ‘Please! Pretty Please Spy on Me!’

and: Zuhdi Jasser’s Astroturf Muslim Groups Behind Rally to Support NYPD Spying

Muslim Group Leader to NYPD: Thanks For Spying On Us

by Adam Serwer (MotherJones)

In early March, members of a Muslim group gathered for a press conference at Manhattan’s One Police Plaza to send a clear message to the New York City Police Department about its controversial surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans.

That message was: Thanks for spying on us.

“We are not here to criticize the NYPD,” declared Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), who was joined by House Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.), “but rather to thank them for doing the work that we as Muslims should be doing, which is monitoring extremism, following extremism, and helping counter the ideologies that create radicalization in our communities.”

Jasser later said in an interview that he wanted to provide an alternative voice to the criticism of the NYPD coming from Muslim and civil liberties groups. “We just wanted the media reports to finally show balance, that there’s diversity, that some Muslims don’t have a problem with this.” Several news reports described attendance at the event as light.

An Arizona physician and Navy veteran, Jasser has lately become the right’s go-to guy when it comes to providing cover for policies or positions that many Muslim Americans contend are discriminatory. When controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque erupted, Jasser, a frequent guest on Fox News, accused the builders of trying to “diminish what happened” on September 11, 2001. He has supported statewide bans on Shariah law in American courts and has helped bolster conservative warnings that American Muslims seek to replace the Constitution with a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. “America is at war with theocratic Muslim despots who seek the imposition of Shariah and don’t believe in the equality of all before the law, blind to faith,” Jasser testified during hearings held by King’s committee last year on homegrown terrorism. There he also supported conservative allegations that many American Muslim organizations—and particularly the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—are Islamists seeking to “advance political Islam in the West.” Jasser sometimes refers to other Muslim organizations as “Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups.”

Hate groups solidifying their links:

European “Counterjihad Activists” Making Links with Christian Right

by Richard Bartholomew (Barth’s Notes)

The British Freedom Party reports:

On Friday March 9 a media team from the Christian Action Network came to London to conduct interviews with various Counterjihad activists about the spread of sharia and the Islamization of Europe. Below is their interview with Paul Weston, the Chairman of the British Freedom Party.

The CAN interview with Tommy Robinson was posted yesterday at Gates of Vienna. Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff will be up next.

CAN previously interviewed English Defence League members in 2009, during a visit to the UK with Robert Spencer. CAN used the opportunity to invite EDL activists to a private dinner with Spencer and Douglas Murray, to the embarrassment of the two men; Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion sent me a message asking me to clarify that “CAN asked Douglas to do an interview with them – upon seeing the presence of the EDL at the CAN discussion he refused to deal with them and left the venue.”

CAN was primarily known for anti-gay activism prior to taking an interest in Islam; CAN’s president, Martin Mawyer, has a history of virulent statements on the subject (in particular, in 1997 he denounced Ellen DeGeneres’ “FILTHY LESBIAN LIFESTYLE”), which Spencer initially dismissed in 2009 as “not jihad-related”. However, in 2010 Mawyer’s views were reported in Dutch media, prompting Geert Wilders to withdraw from the Los Angeles premiere of a CAN documentary entitled Islam Rising: Geert Wilders’ Warning to the West. The premiere, which had been organised by Pamela Geller and Spencer, was quickly cancelled, and Spencer affected to be shocked at the discovery of Mawyer’s “ugly, vitriolic… hysterical, self-righteous, abusive rhetoric”.

The British Freedom Party and the EDL now have several links with Christian Right activists. Weston and Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) are regular guests on Michael Coren’s Arena TV show; Coren is a member of the more intellectual end of the Catholic right, and, like Mawyer, he is particularly known for his objections to homosexuality. Weston and Lennon are also friendly with the Tennessee Freedom Coalition’s Andy Miller (the TFC was in the news recently after arranging for local police to be trained in Islam at an evangelical church in Murfreesboro; the group alsohas links with the British organisation Christian Concern).

Sabaditsch-Wolff, meanwhile, was recently invested as a Dame of “the Knights of Malta — The Ecumenical Order”, by Nicholas Papanicolaou and none  other than Gen William “Jerry” Boykin; the two men are, respectively, the Order’s “Grand Master” and “Grand Chancellor”. Both men are close to the evangelist Rick Joyner, who is a “Deputy Member of the Supreme Council”. Joyner, who receives messages from God about how an earthquake will soon destroy the west coast of the USA, claims that he was introduced to the Order by an “Austrian baron”, and that his books were responsible for a “spiritual renewal” in the Order.

(Hat tip: EDL News)

The home of Anders Behring Breivik. (via. Islamophobia-Watch)

Stop Islamisation of Norway leader claims growth in membership, far right analyst expresses scepticism

A Norwegian group called “Stop Islamisation of Norway” (SIAN) has doubled membership levels in the last two years, its representatives claim.

The group, whose most active membership is located in Rogaland, has also been awarded a government concession to transmit on Radio Kos in Sandnes, western Norway. It alleges Internet radio capacity had to be increased from 25,000 to 200,000 listeners recently because of popularity.

Merete Hodne and Kjersti Margrethe Addehaid Gilje told NRK from Bryne, a small town in Rogaland County, “We have a duty to our country to preserve our Christian values, and not least to protect our children against the terrible, evil forces of Islam.”

According to SIAN’s leader, Arne Tumyr, membership has increased because of the 22nd July attacks. He would not reveal numbers, however, because of Extreme Left press exploitation fears, and being branded as racist by certain groups.

Last year, SIAN arranged a demonstration “Never Forget 9/11″ in front of the US embassy in Oslo ten years to the day. Arne Tumyr told NTB, “We are here to remember and honor those who lost their lives on 11th September ten years ago. We will commemorate the day from SIAN’s point of view, which is that we fear the growing influence of Islam and believe there is a direct connection between the religion of Islam and extremist actions.”

He and six others also participated at another anti-Islam protest in December in the centre of Stavanger. Approximately 10 times as many counter-demonstrators from SOS Racism and extreme Left Party Rødt (the Red Party) shouted him down during his speech, however, declaring, “no racists in our streets.”

Journalist, writer, and Right-Extremist environment researcher Øyvind Strømmen is sceptical about SIAN claims regarding increased membership. “They like to brag that they have a growing number of members, but there are not many people who stand and listen to them when they hold appeals,” he told NRK, “I think recruitment to this type of extremism has declined.”

The Foreigner, 11 March 2012

From Charles Johnson at LGF:

Fox News Commenters React to Afghan Killings: ‘A Dead Muslim Is a Good Muslim’

It’s no longer surprising, but the right wing blogs are full of comments today praising the soldier who allegedly committed mass murder in Kandahar, killing men, women, and children asleep in their beds.

Gateway Pundit:

It’s a start. Now for the rest of the bastards.

[…]

Congratulations to the soldier…give him a heros welcome….buck fobama

[…]

WAAAAAY TO GO!!!!!

But why did he stop? Run out of ammo?

Michelle Malkin’s new site, Twitchy.com:

Good. More, please.

[…]

I don’t think he was unbalanced. I think he was getting some payback. It’s nice to see someone on our side who actually wants to hurt the enemy.

[…]

Forget apologies; Pardon that soldier…

I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama.

But the worst site by far is the right wing’s premier news channel, Fox News:

This is nothing! Wait until you see what happens to the n!qqqers here in the US of A when the new civil war starts!

[…]

THATS 15 LESS AFGAN POLICE WHO HAVE BEEN MUR D ER ING OUR TROOPS AND CIVILIANS

[…]

Obama just announced that he is personally going to provide fe la tio to every Afghani male to compensate for their loss.

[…]

The P O S P apoligizes to moooooooooooooslimes and doesnt have any respect for American solders ! Sent the ragehead obummerdeen and his entire family to Kenya where their dirty s c u m b a g b o d i e s belong !

[…]

This guy only did what the NewBIackPanthers promise to do to white babies.

[…]

What? Our wim mpy prez going, sorry for our troops for getting in the way of your rag head sol diers bul lets. I see the stre ss that our tro ops are under in that f-kin country. Let’s pull out NOW. The only good rag head is a d—d ragh ead

[…]

I don’t see a problem here.

[…]

Obummer what is tragic and shocking that you are a lying P O S P that supports t e r r o r i s m ! Burn in L L E H
moooooooooooooooooooslime

[…]

It’s perfectly okay for the Afghanistan military to mur der our troops, Obama dosen’t even flinch, however, condolences go out when it’s the other way around. I’ll be very glad when the loser-in-chief is on his way out. I hate muslums, big time, in a very big way! Right behind the muslums are the libtards, they’re just as bad.

[…]

What comes around goes around That soldier deserves a medal!!!!!

[…]

Well, that should be enough to start a MASS RIOT. And then that will spiral all thru the middle-east causing more Americans to be killed. We got two choices here…. Keep putting up with this mooslime S H I T..or… Drop a freaking nuke on that islamic radical country and end this cat and mouse game forever. We know its going to happen sooner or later, lets get this World War III started so our economy will come back. Our Industries will come back. Our Jobs will come back. And most important, Our American Patriotism will once again lead…

[…]

I’m tired of apologists, tired of a woosie President and his woosie administration that constantly fall over themselves apologizing. Tell Karzai to pound sand and if one more American is k illed by his crazies, Karzai himself will be assuming room temperature.

[…]

This soldier made a great point. You kiI I our family, we will kil l yours.

[…]

LOL….DUMB_NIGGERS like you are humorous actually. Isn’t there some food stamp line you should be standing in? Oh yes, it’s Sunday and you have to shine your spinners.

[…]

Blahhh, Blahhh, Blahhh…… you’re still just a DUMB_NIGGER. LOL.

[…]

Every M U S L I M that reads the Quran is an enemy combatant…at home or abroad.

[…]

musIim civilians????? Yea Right…Blow Me

[…]

The Muzzie men are P issed they had plans to strap b ombs on the women and childern…just sayin

[…]

Just another day at the office, even up the score

[…]

Must have been one of those G a y soldiers they are letting in now. Probably emotionally distraught that his g a y lover was ki11ed by Taliban rebels in retaliation for Koran burning that the prisoners defaced to begin with. So what? No big deal. Obamao caused this by letting them in the ranks. Now libturds will blame it on our forces and personally attack us for saying so.

[…]

Our mus lum president is on their side

[…]

There is no such thing as a musIim civilian

[…]

A dead Mus lim is a good Mus lim. Give the soldier a medal.

Again, note that these freaks deliberately insert spaces and misspell their racial slurs in order to sneak them past the automatic word filters. Many of the worst comments quoted above had numerous “likes” from other Fox News readers. And this is a tiny selection from more than 2,200 comments; there are many, many more like this.

Far-right supporters agree with armed attacks

Mark Townsend and Richard Orange (The Guardian)

Significant numbers of far-right supporters in the UK consider violence and “armed conflict” a legitimate form of political expression, experts will warn this week.

The first audit into the attitudes and beliefs of Britain’s rightwing extremists, collated in a report by the thinktank Chatham House, will reveal that there is a “significant level of support” for planned violent attacks.

Next month the trial will begin of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who has confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July. Breivik, an Islamophobe, said he carried out the attacks on Utoya Island and Oslo to help protect Europe from a “Muslim takeover”.

The report, which polled 2,152 far-right supporters, raises concerns that the path of extremism followed by Breivik, from membership of a mainstream rightwing party to far-right terrorist, should be recognised as a possibility for UK counterparts.

Matthew Goodwin, an associate fellow of Chatham House and the University of Nottingham, said there was a danger that supporters of theEnglish Defence League (EDL), which had links to Breivik, could be tempted to become more militant. “Perhaps some might feel that more direct, more violent strategies are the way forward.”

On 31 March the EDL will stage an international demonstration in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. The “counter-jihad” summit will discuss the formation of a European Defence League. Representatives from defence leagues in Italy, Poland, the United States, Finland, Sweden and Norway are expected to attend, along with the anti-Muslim group, Stop Islamisation of Europe.

The ramifications of a well-organised, European-wide far-right movement, able to share violent ideologies and pool resources, has triggered concern from anti-fascist campaigners. Last week the Czech government warned that extreme rightwing groups were becoming more sophisticated and that neo-Nazis might resort to terrorism.

Goodwin said: “If the EDL links up with similar organisations in Germany and central and eastern Europe, that is quite worrying. Many of the grassroots groups in Germany are often called ‘autonomous nationalists’, but are very, very closely networked with neo-Nazi groups and organisations that engage quite openly in violence.”

Andrew Breitbart has died of natural causes according to his website. His image will now most likely be rehabilitated in the mainstream and his contributions to the blog world will likely be highlighted above and beyond his racist and Islamophobic antics.

Many may think it is “tacky,” “tasteless” or even “wrong” for  us to say anything negative about Breitbart on the day of his passing. I don’t agree. While it is sad when anyone passes, and our condolences go out to his family, he was a public figure who did much to divide this nation. Commenting on how people such as Breitbart spent their lives is both appropriate and relevant at the time of their deaths.

He was a pivotal figure in transitioning the Right into the contemporary world of new media, which in itself is not a bad thing, but it is how he used his new media platform that was extremely problematic. He played a part in disseminating hate propaganda, undermining the truth and deflecting justice. Who can forget the fiasco with Shirley Sherrod?

On July 19, 2010, Breitbart posted two short videos showing excerpts of a speech by Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010. The videos ensuing controversy resulted in Sherrod being fired from the United States Department of Agriculture on July 19. After Breitbart was criticized for taking Sherrod’s words out of context, he posted the complete 40-minute video of the speech. The NAACP stated that the video excerpts aired by Breitbart were deliberately deceptive and said that he had “snookered” the group.^[42][43] Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack later apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job.^[44] In 2011, Sherrod brought suit against Breitbart for defamation.

Or his targeting of ACORN?

Breitbart was also involved in the 2009 ACORN video controversy. Hannah Giles^[46][47] posed as a prostitute seeking assistance while James O’Keefe portrayed her boyfriend, and clandestinely videotaped meetings with ACORN staff.^[48] Subsequent criminal investigations by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and the California Attorney General found the videos were heavily edited in an attempt to make ACORN’s responses “appear more sinister”,^[49][50][51] and contributed to the group’s demise.^[52][53] Breitbart then provided a forum for O’Keefe on his BigGovernment.com website^[54] and defended his actions on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program.^[55]

(For more on Breitbart’s aiding of racism, Islamophobia, etc. see Max Blumenthal’s piece, Feeling the Hate at CPAC 2010 with Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles and the Crazy Mob .)

His “Big” blogs are quite popular forums for anti-Islam and anti-Muslim screeds. His website “Big Peace” for instance boasts about featuring seminal loon and “Islamization” fear-mongerer Frank Gaffney. His websites also link to Atlas Shrugs and reproduce many of the Islamophobesphere’s articles, videos, etc.

Here is just a sample of how the looniverse is taking his passing:

Pamela Geller thinks of Breitbart as her “fearless leader”:

Andrew was our warrior, our leader. Fearless, unapologetic, brilliant. I admire few, but Andrew was in a league of his own. His herculean contribution to the war is incalculable.

Robert Spencer:

The forces of truth have lost a great and courageous warrior. Unlike most on the Right, he was not a cringing dhimmi eagerly throwing his comrades under the bus in a futile attempt to appease the Left. I hope that his lasting legacy will be legions of freedom fighters confronting Leftists and Islamic supremacists on their hypocrisy, lies and justifications for evil with just as much fearlessness, verve and good humor as he always displayed.

I wish I could say RIP Breitbart, but the above eulogies from the loons make it clear that Breitbart’s abiding legacy is his contribution towards amplifying the most radical voices amongst the Right. I am more inclined to repeating the words of Johnny Cash,

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light

(H/T: BBoyBlue)

Bloodthirsty ‘Anti-Jihad’ Bloggers Rant Crazily About Apologies for Koran-Burning

by Charles Johnson (LGF)

Here’s an astonishingly paranoid article in the Washington Times by anti-Muslim crusader Frank Gaffney, warning right wingers yet again that shariah law is about to take over America, and arguing that people who criticize Gaffney and his conspiracy theories are “precisely the same” as the Ku Klux Klan. In this persecution fantasy, Gaffney plays the part of the civil rights activist.

In short, we find ourselves in what is, properly understood, the civil rights struggle of our time. Those who stand up for freedom against Shariah are quite literally protecting the rights of women, children, people of faith and other minorities sure to be abused by its misogynistic, intolerant and domineering doctrine. That means protecting, as well, Muslim-Americans who have come to this country to escape the long arm of Shariah law. In due course, though, Shariah’s repressive strictures would not simply be a threat to these communities. They would be a toxic blight upon all of us.

Ironically, today, it is defenders of our freedoms who are being denounced as “racists,” “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Such terms are, in truth, being used in much the same way and for precisely the same purpose as the Ku Klux Klan’s members reviled an earlier generation of civil rights activists for loving blacks: to defame, threaten and isolate their opponents. We cannot, and certainly must not, tolerate the Islamists’ intolerance.

This latest crazy rant was triggered by President Obama’s apology to the Afghan people for US troops mistakenly burning Korans. In fact, that apology has triggered crazy rants from all over the bigoted anti-Muslim blogosphere, including, of course, the always insane Pamela Geller — who wants to see wholesale slaughter of Muslims, not apologies: PAMELA GELLER, WND COLUMN: STOP APOLOGIZING AND START CARPET-BOMBING!!!!! – Atlas Shrugs

The fish stinks from the head down, and this is Obama’s foreign policy. Is it any wonder that jihadist attempts in this country have skyrocketed under this president?

And what is he on his belly for? Why would civilized men apologize for destroying materials that were being used to send jihadist messages to kill our soldiers and our citizens? This is madness. Where are Muslim apologies for 1,400 years of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements? Where are their apologies for the relentless jihad warfare against the Jews, the Hindus, Christians and all non-Muslims? Where are the apologies for 9/11, 7/7, 3/11, the U.S.S. Cole, the Khobar Towers, Beslan and Bosnia?

America does not apologize to savages and cannibals and ghouls.

Stop apologizing and start carpet-bombing. Defeat jihad. What’s it going to take?

Stop apologizing to these savages and start fighting. As an American, I do not apologize. I withdraw Obama’s apology. I withdraw Gen. Allen’s apology. I condemn their apology. I do not submit to a culture that suffocates ideas, critical thinking, women, non-Muslims. I do not apologize that the United States of America is “the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”

The incoherent, hate-obsessed Pamela Geller now has the temerity to place herself above the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen. But then, she’s never lacked for self-esteem.

French government is pretty sensitive. It doesn’t like being called out when it flirts with fascists:

French cabinet walks out of parliament over Nazi claim

(Islamophobia-Watch)

The French prime minister and his cabinet have stormed out of parliament after an opposition MP accused the rightwing interior minister of flirting with Nazi ideology.

The Socialist Serge Letchimy, from Martinique, questioned the interior minister and close Sarkozy ally, Claude Guéant, over his controversial comments this weekend that “not all civilisations are of equal value”, and his assertion that some civilisations, namely France’s, are worth more than others.

Letchimy said Guéant was “day by day leading us back to these European ideologies that gave birth to concentration camps”. After a loud interruption of protests, he added: “Mr Guéant, the Nazi regime, which was so concerned about purity, was that a civilization?”

In a rare move, the entire French government stormed out of the question-time session.

The French political class has been at each other’s throats this week over the latest stance by Guéant, who was once Sarkozy’s most senior adviser and is seen as the president’s mouthpiece for rightwing views to court voters from Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National.

Over the past year Guéant has been accused of deliberate anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric after saying the number of Muslims in France was a “problem”, linking immigrants to crime and unemployment, saying the French wanted their country to “remain French”, and that Sarkozy’s drive for military intervention in Libya was a “crusade”.

This weekend he told a meeting with students: “Contrary to the leftwing relativist ideology, for us, not all civilisations are equal. Those who defend humanity seem more advanced to us than those who deny it. Those who defend freedom, equality and brotherhood seem to us superior to those that accept tyranny, subjugation of women and social or ethnic hatred.”

Muslim groups in France sought assurances that Guéant, who is in charge of immigration and religion in the French cabinet, was not referring to Islam and French Muslims. He replied that he had not been targeting any civilisation in particular.

Sarkozy backed Guéant’s comments as “common sense” and dismissed the “ridiculous controversy”.

The French prime minister François Fillon demanded an apology from the Socialist party for the “indecent” and “shameful” Nazi analogy in parliament. The head of the ruling rightwing UMP party’s parliament group, Christian Jacob, said an analogy of this kind was a first in the history of parliament.

The Socialist Letchimy said that as the son of a slave, he refused to apologise. Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialist parliamentary group, said Guéant’s “repeated provocations” had damaged the political climate.

Some in Sarkozy’s own camp had distanced themselves from Guéant in recent days. “He makes a better minister than ethnologist,” said the former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

Guardian, 7 February 2012

Still my favorite picture of Geert Wilders

Last week, rabid Islamophobe Diane West railed against the The Daily Beast for taking “a swipe” at her fellow anti-Muslim bigot, Dutch far right wing opportunist, Geert Wilders. The article that inspired her rant asked, “Can’t Someone Tell Geert Wilders to Stop His Anti-Muslim Diatribes Before Somebody Gets Hurt?” 

Wilders is a master at capitalizing on real fears and conjuring false ones—and then dodging responsibility if people’s lives are ruined or lost. “I am responsible for my own actions and for nobody else’s actions,” he says. In a wide-ranging interview at the offices of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, Wilders complained to Newsweek that the “naive” Obama administration wasn’t doing nearly enough to combat what Wilders regards as the Islamic threat. Expanding on his claims that the Quran should be banned, just as Mein Kampf  has been in some countries, he said the United States should be “getting rid of Islamic symbols—no more mosques—and closing down Islamic schools.” Read the rest here.

Wilders and his ilk have grown accustomed to spreading their hatred with impunity, there are welcome signs the climate may be shifting (h/t: eslaporte):

Wilders angry at German ‘right-wing populist’ label

PVV leader Geert Wilders has demanded the German ambassador explain why he and the anti-islam party are mentioned in a 32-page leaflet warning of the dangers posed by far-right political groupings. The brochure, paid for by the German justice ministry, states that right-wing populist and radical parties could be a breeding ground for terrorism. Wilders is mentioned twice by name and one section includes his photograph. The folder also explains how neo-nazi strategists use social networks. Wilders used the microblogging service Twitter to urge the Dutch government to distance itself from this ‘scandalous’ statement and said questions will be asked in parliament. Some 10% of Germans are said to support populist right-wing groupings. Wilders’ anti-Islam party took around 15% of the vote at the June 2010 general election but support has fallen since then.

Last summer, a Dutch court acquitted Wilders of hate speech charges, this was hailed as a “victory for free speech“ among his hateful kindred on both sides of the Atlantic; it fed well into their “victimhood” narrative and mentality.

Wilders will no doubt continue to portray himself as a besieged champion of “free speech,” apparently oblivious to the irony of simultaneously lobbying to tax the wearing of the hijab, ban the niqab, ban the Qur’an and all things Islamic from the Western world.

“Judenrat Jon” Stewart

by: David Harris-Gershon on January 7th, 2012

Victoria Jackson: Muslim Brotherhood Taking Over America, Six Hour FBI Meeting

Former “Saturday Night Live” actress Victoria Jackson, working on confidential information she as a web talk show host has special clearance to obtain, has claimed that the United States is being overtaken by radical Muslims bent on bringing the nation under Sharia law.

“I just went to a briefing in Washington DC, across the street from the Capitol, at the Longworth building at 8:30 am two days ago and it changed my life,” Jackson said last week on her web show, “Politichicks.” “For six hours, I saw pictures and names and dates and facts and Islamic law books and Korans, Surahs for six hours and they proved to me… that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our highest positions in government and this is serious.”

Jackson also detailed the meeting in an earlier blog post this December. In that post, she details testimony given by John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who worked on the case against former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. Guandolo resigned from the FBI in 2008 after he was caught trying to score a $75,000 donation for an anti-terrorism group from a wealthy Jefferson case witness with whom he was having an affair. Guandolo now gives speeches on the existential threat of Islam, claiming that Muslim groups are using political correctness and political insurgency to stop FBI and police officers from stopping their spread of Sharia law.

The actress-turned-pundit also reported testimony from Maj. Stephen Coughlin, who in 2008 was effectively fired from his post at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because, many conservatives believe, he was a staunch anti-Islamic extremist advocate. Wired reports that his contract was not renewed after a staffer for Gordon England, then the deputy secretary of defense, raised questions about his work. Last January, Coughlin gave a maligned speech during an FBI presentation on Muslim extremism.

Claiming that it was strongly hinted that President Obama was a Muslim — his policies all favor Muslims and are against Israel, she claims to have been told — Jackson says in the video that the ultimatum pushed by terrorist groups in America is “You have to convert or be killed.”

While she says that the meeting forever changed her, Jackson has already long claimed that Muslims — led by secret Muslim and terrorist sympathizer President Obama — are quietly taking over the United States government. She also has famously taken umbrage with gays and “Glee,”including a highly publicized string of attacks last March.

“This new al-Qaida magazine for women has beauty tips and suicide-bomber tips! Gimme a break!” she wrote in a blog post for World Net Daily. “That is as ridiculous as two men kissing on the mouth! And I don’t care what is politically correct. Everyone knows that two men on a wedding cake is a comedy skit, not an ‘alternate lifestyle’! There I said it! Ridiculous!”

This fall, Jackson visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park to challenge protestors, though it did not work out so well for her.

“Michelle [sic] Bachmann and Rick Santorum are the only GOP candidates so far to acknowledge the above facts and warn against the present threat of Islamic Law replacing our Constitution,” Jackson concluded in her blog post on the ex-FBI briefing. In a Fox News appearance early in December, she called Bachmann “my girl” and said, “Very few people in America are informed and educated as I am.”

Right Wing British National Party

The recent case of an assault on a white woman by Somalis in Britain is being fully exploited by loons on both sides of the Atlantic. Islamophobia Watch investigated and exposed the distorted coverage, though as usual, the truth cannot wash away the residue such sensationalism invariably creates.

Daily Mail’s bigoted and inaccurate reporting provokes more right-wing anti-Muslim hysteria

Congressman Mike Quigley addressed a crowd at the American Islamic College and apologized for the “rising Islamophobia” in the United States. Many in the Right-Wing took exception to this with Quigley being castigated as a dhimmi-leftist pandering to “the Mooslims” about a fictional “rise in Islamophobia.”

Bill O’Reilly even thought it fit to do a segment on his show about it, having anti-loon Ahmed Rehab on. At the end of the segment O’Reilly admitted that Rehab’s stats on the “rise of Islamophobia” bolster his argument.

(hat tip: Francis)

Congressman’s Remarks Stir the Blogosphere

by James Warren (New York Times)

Mike Quigley knows about cheap shots on ice. Now he’s an expert on being blindsided on the Internet and cable TV.

Mr. Quigley, a Democratic Chicago congressman, had a relatively light Saturday recently. He played ice hockey in the morning, did a beach cleanup with the Sierra Club and hit four block parties in the 32nd, 43rd and 44th Wards. Along the way he surfaced at a conference held by the American Islamic College. It was a quick in-and-out, with remarks to perhaps 100 attendees about the strengths of American pluralism, the sort he makes to many groups. They included:

“Forms of discrimination come in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think that it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face.”

He then bicycled to the first block party. The Islamic College audience was apparently grateful but didn’t find his appearance especially notable as they returned to the business of their meeting.

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found the address nice and patriotic. “What we’d expect of a congressman,” he said.

Neither he, Mr. Quigley nor anybody else there was prepared for the response initiated in the conservative blogosphere, then intensified on radio and TV.

The congressman was attacked harshly, with at least one death threat on a Fox News site that by week’s end was still not taken down despite requests.

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative activist, blogged that Mr. Quigley made a “surprise appearance”  before “the primarily Muslim audience. He rambled on about the typical racism and discrimination that the liberal left is so convinced America is rampantly infected with.”

The appearance was not a surprise, even if not on the formal program. But the nefarious implication was repeated on blogs and the Fox News Channel. Video links included the lines above but not related comments about the legacies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

Social media posts and hundreds of nasty calls, e-mails and faxes poured in to his offices, which deleted profane and violent posts and passed direct threats to law enforcement.

But the conservative echo chamber was in high dudgeon. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, decided that Mr. Quigley’s remarks were a story and thus conferred high-profile legitimacy to the bloggers’ vituperation on Tuesday. Mr. Quigley could not appear, but Mr. Rehab did, initially nonplused that the remarks were deemed newsworthy.

With “Questionable Apology” emblazoned on the screen, Mr. O’Reilly repeated the same two sentences Mr. Quigley had uttered and declared: “Wow! What discrimination?”  Statistics don’t support claims of bias against Muslim Americans, he said.

Much data and polling contradicts him. As an unabashed Mr. Rehab told him, “You’d have to be living under a rock” to miss the overarching reality.

Mr. Rehab cited federal figures on rising workplace complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination and polls showing both that 39 percent of Americans would require Muslims to carry special identification and that one-third don’t think Muslims should be allowed to run for president.

“O.K., those stats bolster your argument,” Mr. O’Reilly conceded. “But in economic realms, Muslim Americans are doing well, pretty well,” he said. “We don’t want anybody to be anti-Muslim. Thank you for coming on here,” Mr. O’Reilly concluded brusquely, with Mr. Rehab having clearly failed to fulfill a role of self-righteous liberal piñata.

But Fox wasn’t done.

On Wednesday, its morning “Fox and Friends” show saw Mr. Quigley, 52, called a “silly old fool” by Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and advocate of aggressive military actions. He belittled Muslims with a series of mock apologies like “We should apologize for preventing them from beating their daughters to death for flirting.”

Eboo Patel, an Indian-born Muslim and former Rhodes Scholar who runs the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Corps, found the response offensive. But he noted a Gallup poll finding that American Muslims remain very optimistic despite facing discrimination.

He mentioned that his nephew in Houston was hassled when, for religious reasons, he wouldn’t eat school pizza with pork.

Well, at least we occasionally try to curb school bullies. We clearly don’t when it comes to the bullies who can drive our public dialogue.

Imagine, for a minute, that Muslims in America were openly advocating at meetings and conferences to take control of major sectors of public life, such as the government, media, and the law.

Imagine further that Muslims had built law schools, accredited no less, with the agenda to teach its students that America should be governed by Islamic law.

And imagine a little further that the leaders of this Muslim movement to Islamicize America were openly calling for America to become a Muslim nation.

And just imagine that all of the above was being absorbed into a major American political party and that some members of this Muslim mission were in Congress and were also looking to become the next President of the United States.

Of course, there would be mass hysteria and panic at such a notion. But none of the above is actually happening. Instead, replace Muslim with Christian and that is precisely what is currently occurring in America.

But of course, certain Islamophobes would have us worry about an imagined threat from Muslim-Americans–who make up a measly 2% of the U.S. population–rather than the Christian groups out there who are actively working to Christianize America, and who have been working at this for over three decades with the aid of one of the two main political parties.

Many of these evangelical Christian groups are actively looking to restrict the rights of women, members of the LGBT community, and to force their religious viewpoint on to the rest of the country.  Worse yet, advocates of Christian dominionism call for world conquest, to subjugate the infidel nations of the world to Christian domination.

Here is an excellent article from Sarah Posner on dominionism (emphasis added)–just imagine how utterly insane Islamophobes would go if Muslim were substituted for Christian here:

The Christian right’s “dominionist” strategy

by Sarah Posner

An article in the Texas Observer last month about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s relationship with followers of a little-known neo-Pentecostal movement sparked a frenzied reaction from many commentators: Dominionism! Spiritual warfare! Strange prophecies!

All the attention came in the weeks before and after “The Response,” Perry’s highly publicized prayer rally modeled on what organizers believe is the “solemn assembly” described in Joel 2, in which “end-times warriors” prepare the nation for God’s judgment and, ultimately, Christ’s return. This “new” movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, is one strand of neo-Pentecostalism that draws on the ideas of dominionism and spiritual warfare. Its adherents display gifts of the spirit, the religious expression of Pentecostal and charismatic believers that includes speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing and a belief in signs, wonders and miracles. These evangelists also preach the “Seven Mountains” theory of dominionism: that Christians need to take control of different sectors of public life, such as government, the media and the law.

The NAR is not new, but rather derivative of charismatic movements that came before it. Its founder, C. Peter Wagner, set out in the 1990s to create more churches, and more believers. Wagner’s movement involves new jargon, notably demanding that believers take control of the “Seven Mountains” of society (government, law, media and so forth), but that’s no different from other iterations of dominionism that call on Christians to enter these fields so that they are controlled by Christians.

After Perry’s prayer rally, Rachel Maddow featured a segment on her MSNBC show in which she warned,

“The main idea of the New Apostolic Reformation theology is that they are modern day prophets and apostles. They believe they have a direct line to God … the way that they’re going to clear the way for it [the end of the world] is by infiltrating and taking over politics and government.”

Maddow’s ahistorical treatment of the NAR, however, overlooked several important realities. For anyone who has followed the growth of neo-Pentecostal movements, and in particular the coalition-building between the political operatives of the religious right and these lesser-known but still influential religious leaders, the NAR is just another development in the competitive, controversial, outrageous, authoritarian and often corrupt tapestry of the world of charismatic evangelists.

Before the NAR came along, plenty of charismatic leaders believed themselves to be prophets and apostles with a direct line to God. They wrote books about spiritual warfare, undergirded by conspiracy theories about liberals and Satan and homosexuality and feminism and more (my own bookshelves are filled with them). They preached this on television. They preached it at conferences. They made money from it. They all learned from each other.

Before the NAR, Christian right figures promoted dominionism, too, and the GOP courted these religious leaders for the votes of their followers. Despite a recent argument by the Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg that “we have not seen this sort of thing at the highest levels of the Republican Party before,” it’s been there since at least 1980. Michele Bachmann is a product of it; so was Mike Huckabee. Ronald Reagan pandered to it; so did both Bushes; so does Perry.

In 2007, I saw Cindy Jacobs and other “apostles” lay hands on Shirley Forbes, wife of Rep. Randy Forbes, the founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which boasts some Democrats as members and many of the GOP’s leading lights. “You are going to be the mother of an army,” they told Forbes, prophesying that she would “speak the power of the word into politics and government. Hallelujah!”

The idea that Christians have a sacred duty to get involved in politics, the law and media, and otherwise bring their influence to bear in different public spheres is the animating principle behind the religious right. If you attend a Values Voters Summit, the annual Washington confab hosted by the Family Research Council, you’ll hear speakers urging young people to go into media, or view Hollywood as a “mission field.” That’s because they insist these institutions have been taken over by secularists who are causing the downfall of America with their anti-Christian beliefs.

A few days ago, the Washington Post’s religion columnist, Lisa Miller, took Goldberg and Maddow to task for overhyping dominionism as a plot to take over the world. Miller, though, misses the boat, too, by neglecting to acknowledge and describe the infrastructure the religious right has built, driven by the idea of dominionism.

Oral Roberts University Law School, where Bachmann earned her law degree, was founded with this very notion in mind: to create an explicitly Christian law school. Herb Titus, the lawyer converted by Christian Reconstructionism who was instrumental in its launch, describes his mission in developing a Christian law school as a fulfillment of a “dominion mandate.” After ORU was absorbed into Regent University in the 1980s, Titus was the mentor to Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who last week was elevated to chair of the Republican Governors Association and is widely speculated to be a possible vice-presidential pick.

Christian Reconstructionists, and their acolytes of the Constitution Party, believe America should be governed by biblical law. In her 1995 book, “Roads to Dominion: Right Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,” Sara Diamond describes the most significant impact of Reconstructionism on dominionism:

“the diffuse influence of the ideas that America was ordained a Christian nation and that Christians, exclusively, were to rule and reign.” While most Christian right activists were “not well-versed in the arcane teachings” of Christian Reconstructionism, she wrote, “there was a wider following for softer forms of dominionism.”

For the Christian right, it’s more a political strategy than a secret “plot” to “overthrow” the government, even as some evangelists describe it in terms of “overthrowing” the powers of darkness (i.e., Satan), and even some more radical, militia-minded groups do suggest such a revolution. In general, though, the Christian right has been very open about its strategy and has spent a lot of money on it: in the law, as just one example, there are now two ABA-accredited Christian law schools, at Regent (which absorbed the ORU law school) and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. There are a number of Christian law firms, like the Alliance Defense Fund, formed as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU. Yet outsiders don’t notice that this is all an expression of dominionism, until someone from that world, like Bachmann, hits the national stage.

John Turner, University of South Alabama historian and author of “Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America,” said that the NAR’s “Seven Mountains” dominionism is “just a catchy phrase that encapsulates what Bright and many other evangelical leaders were already doing — trying to increase Christian influence (they would probably use more militant phrases like ‘capture’) in the spheres of education, business and government.”

Bright, like Perry’s prayer cohorts, believed America was in trouble (because of the secularists) and needed to repent. One of the most well-known evangelicals in the country, Bright had agreed to let Virginia Beach preacher John Gimenez, a charismatic, organize the rally, despite evangelical discomfort with charismatic religious expression. In his book, Turner describes the Washington for Jesus rally of 1980:

From the platform, Bright offered his interpretation of the source of the country’s problems, asserting that “[w]e’ve turned from God and God is chastening us.” “You go back to 1962 and [196]3 [when the Supreme Court banned school-sponsored prayer and Bible-reading],” Bright argued, “and you’ll discovered a series of plagues that came upon America.” Bright cited the Vietnam War, increased drug use, racial conflict, Watergate, and a rise in divorce, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism as the result of those decisions. “God is saying to us,” he concluded, “‘Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!’” … “Unless we repent and turn from our sin,” warned Bright, “we can expect to be destroyed.”

Unlike Perry’s rally, Ronald Reagan the candidate wasn’t present at the Washington for Jesus rally. At a 2007 gathering at his church, Gimenez recounted how he and Bright later met with President Reagan, and Bright told him, “You were elected on April 29, 1980, when the church prayed that God’s will would be done.”

In August 1980, though, after Reagan had clinched the nomination, he did appear at a “National Affairs Briefing” in Texas, where televangelist James Robison (also instrumental in organizing Perry’s event) declared, “The stage is set. We’ll either have a Hitler-type takeover, or Soviet domination, or God is going to take over this country.” After Robison spoke, Reagan took the stage and declared to the 15,000 activists assembled by Moral Majority co-founder Ed McAteer, “You can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”

That was also a big moment for Huckabee, who worked as Robison’s advance man. It was even imitated by then-candidate Barack Obama, who met with a group of evangelicals and charismatics in Chicago and repeated Reagan’s infamous line. Obama’s group included publisher Stephen Strang (an early endorser of Huckabee’s 2008 presidential bid) and his son Cameron, whose magazines Charisma and Relevant help promote the careers of the self-declared modern-day prophets and apostles. Huckabee appeared with Lou Engle at his 2008 The Call rally on the National Mall (like Perry’s, billed as a “solemn assembly”) in which Engle exhorted his prayer warriors to battlesatanic forces to defeat “Antichrist legislation.”

When I interviewed former Bush family adviser Doug Wead for my 2008 book, “God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters,” he gave me a lengthy memo he compiled for George H.W. Bush in 1985, to prepare him for his 1988 presidential run. In the memo, he identified a thousand “targets,” religious leaders across the country whose followers, Wead believed, could be mobilized to the voting booth.

In my book, I examined the theology and politics of the Word of Faith movement (also known as the prosperity gospel) and how Republicans cultivated the leading lights of the movement. Primarily because of television, but also because of the robust (and profitable) speaking circuit these evangelists maintain, they have huge audiences. All that was in spite of — just as the scrutiny of NAR figures now is revealing — outlandish, strange and even heretical theology. What’s more, Word of Faith figures have endlessly been embroiled in disputes not just with their theological critics, but with watchdogs and former parishioners who charge they took their money for personal enrichment, promising that God would bring them great health and wealth if they would only “sow a seed.”

At Gimenez’s 2007 event, Engle and the other “apostles” were not the stars; rather, the biggest draw was Word of Faith televangelist Kenneth Copeland. In 1998, writing to Karl Rove, Wead called Copeland “arguably one of the most important religious leaders in the nation.” At Gimenez’s church, Copeland, who has boasted that his ministry has brought in more the $1 billion over his career, preached for two hours. The sanctuary was packed, with the audience hanging on every word. Gimenez introduced him as “God’s prophet,” and Copeland urged them to “get rid of the evening news and the newspaper,” study “the uncompromised word of the Holy Ghost,” and take “control over principalities.”

The commenters who have jumped on the NAR frequently overstate the size of its following. Engle’s events, for example, are often smaller than advertised, including a poorly attended revival at Liberty University in April 2010, where one would expect a ready-made audience. When I’ve covered these sorts of events, including smaller conferences by local groups inspired by figures they see on television, it’s often hard to see how the often meandering preachers are going to take over anything, even while it’s clear they cultivate an authoritarian hold on their followers. I meet a lot of sincere, frequently well-intentioned people who believe they must be “obedient” to God’s word as imparted by the “prophets.”

Most chilling, though, is the willingness to engage in what’s known in the Word of Faith world as “revelation knowledge,” or believing, as Copeland exhorted his audience to do, that you learn nothing from journalism or academia, but rather just from the Bible and its modern “prophets.” It is in this way that the self-styled prophets have had their greatest impact on our political culture: by producing a political class, and its foot soldiers, who believe that God has imparted them with divine knowledge that supersedes what all the evil secularists would have you believe.

Last week CNN’s Jack Cafferty asked, “How much does it worry you if both Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have ties to dominionism?” That worry crops up every election cycle. If people really understood dominionism, they’d worry about it between election cycles.

However, it’s the Moozlums we’re supposed to worry about.

To clarify though, LoonWatch is not pressing the panic button: the threat from the religious right is very real, but we don’t think it’s a doomsday situation.  All we’re saying is that the threat from the Christian right is certainly greater than this imaginary threat from Muslims and all this Sharia-nonsense.

Facing Islamophobic Backlash, Whole Foods Instructs Stores Not To ‘Promote’ Ramadan This Year

(ThinkProgress)

In the current era of Islamophobia, anything remotely “Muslim-ish” touches off paranoid delusions of impending jihad, particularly when it involves American emblems — like Whole Foods. Last week, the suburban staple decided to tout “Saffron Road,” a new line of Halal-certified frozen food, to coincide with the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. Halal foods are items permitted under Islamic dietary guidelines. In a post on the company’s website entitled “What’s this halal about,” Whole Foods offered a chance to win free samples because “whether you eat halal because of your religious dietary guidelines or you simply prefer to choose food that’s made with high-quality, responsibly farmed ingredients, then Saffron Road has some tasty offerings for you.”

It seems that a “very small” contingent of consumers and right-wing bloggers simply preferred to throw an apoplectic fit. Thus, in apparent genuflection to this bloc, Whole Foods sent an email to all its U.S. stores specifically telling the franchises not to promote Ramadan this year. The Houston Press obtained a copy of the email:

“It is probably best that we don’t specifically call out or ‘promote’ Ramadan,” reads a portion of that email. “We should not highlight Ramadan in signage in our stores as that could be considered ‘Celebrating or promoting’ Ramadan.”

This reversal marks “a significant departure from years past, when Whole Foods has promoted its halal items during Ramadan with small signs that displayed a crescent moon, the symbol of Islam.” What’s more, the move is hardly likely to placate the small number of fringe bloggers who are already boycotting the chain for “pimping and promoting–’Canaan Fair Trade’ and ‘Palestinian Fair Trade’ Olive Oil.” But given the conservative credentials of Whole Foods owner John Mackey, perhaps its surprising the company even considered recognizing Islam in the first place.

Whole Foods responded that the company has not stopped the campaign. It states it is still highlighting halal but also maintained it is still “not specifically [promoting] #Ramadan after some negative comments.” In any event, as Gawker notes, the whole episode does serve as a kind of flow chart for future faux-controversies: “Are you a racist xenophobe who dislikes anything at all for any arbitrary reason? Simply complain loudly on your blog, and Whole Foods will obsequiously cater to your every last prejudice.”

*Updated*

Despite a wave of false rumors that it was backing out of its Ramadan campaign, Whole Foods has directly stated via Twitter that they are indeed standing behind their efforts.

“We are still carrying and promoting halal products for those that are celebrating Ramadan this month. We never sent a communication from our headquarters requesting stores take down signs or remove parts from this promotion. We have 12 different operating regions and unfortunately, one region reacted by sending out directions to promote halal and not specifically Ramadan after some negative online comments.”

Robert Spencer

By now you probably have read all the details concerning the terrorist attack in Oslo, Norway. This attack has shined a spotlight on the demonization of Muslims at the hands of anti-Muslim bloggers we have profiled on this site. For example, the NY Times published a devastating expose of the shooter’s ideological ties to Robert Spencer. The evidence is so damning that Spencer is in a panicked state of damage control. So his friends at Frontpage Magazine have jumped to defend his Islamophobic enterprise, an apologia worthy of a detailed response from Loonwatch.

The article begins with some whining about how poor Spencer is the victim of the lamestream media:

No tragedy goes long without exploitation, and the atrocities in Norway are no exception to that rule.

Spencer spends his days exploiting bad news about Muslims, but when the news reflects poorly on him and he is criticized, it suddenly becomes exploitation?

Is silencing researchers who have put years of effort into exposing networks of radicals the right response to a terrorist attack? No reasonable person would think so. But that is exactly what media outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic are trying to do.

Who is silencing Robert Spencer? Has his website been shut down? Is he prevented from publishing more books? Rest assured that Spencer’s first amendment rights are intact. The problem here is that Frontpage is cynically playing victim; they cannot distinguish between being fairly criticized and actually being denied rights.

Now let’s turn to the voluminous citations from Spencer found in the Shooter’s manifesto:

The “64 times” cited by the Times and its imitators reflects lazy research since the majority of those quotes actually come from a single document, where Spencer is quoted side by side with Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice.

See, Spencer was only cited 64 times making the argument (unlike Blair and Rice) that terrorism is an essential aspect of mainstream Islam.

Quite often, Robert Spencer is quoted providing historical background on Islam and quotes from the Koran and the Hadith. So, it’s actually Fjordman quoting Spencer quoting the Koran. If the media insists that Fjordman is an extremist and Spencer is an extremist — then isn’t the Koran also extremist? And if the Koran isn’t extremist, then how could quoting it be extremist?

Actually, it’s Fjordman quoting Spencer quoting the Quran (out of context) and explaining that good Muslims are terrorist killers. Why shouldn’t he defend Western civilization from Muslims?

The New York Times would have you believe that secondhand quotes like these from Spencer turned Breivik into a raging madman… The complete absence of quotes in which Robert Spencer calls for anyone to commit acts of terrorism reveals just how empty the media’s case against him is.

See, Spencer is just arguing that good Muslims are terrorists, that Islam is pure evil, and that Muslim immigration, aided by liberals, is destroying Western civilization. He supposedly never* actually calls for outright violence, but he has no problem with people who post violent comments on his website.

If we follow Spencer’s logic, it can be easy to conclude that violence is needed to stem the Hottentot Mongol tide of immigration. This argument ignores the fact that demonization leads to violence:

“When you push the demonization of populations, you often end up with violence,” said Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But the shooter didn’t kill Muslims, so Islamophobia cannot be involved, right?

And even this is irrelevant because Breivik did not carry out violence against Muslims… If Breivik was motivated by Islamophobia, then why did he not attempt to kill Muslims? Why did he not open fire inside a mosque?

This point is refuted by Alex Pareene at Salon:

Opposition to Islam was the killer’s stated motivation. He targeted other white Scandinavians because he considered them race traitors. He wrote all of this down, too, so we don’t even have to make guesses about it! He blamed liberals for enabling jihad by supporting “multiculturalism.”

Just because he didn’t directly attack Muslims does not mean Islamophobia had nothing to do with this attack. In fact, it had everything to do with the attack. But there is one last straw for Spencerites to grasp at:

Not only did Breivik not target Muslims, but he considered collaborating with Muslim terrorists… “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties,” Breivik wrote. “We both share one common goal.”

Interesting, Breivik and the Islamophobic ideology he shares with Spencer do indeed share one common goal with jihadists. They both want a homogenous society that doesn’t tolerate the Other. They both want to incite religious/nationalist war. They both want to increase Islamophobia; Spencer because it is his source of income, and jihadists because it is good recruiting propaganda. So, it is not a surprise to us that extremists share common goals but for vastly different reasons. We’ve known for some time that Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists reinforce one another.

In sum, Spencer and Frontpage want free reign to demonize Muslims and peddle baseless sharia conspiracy theories, but they cry foul when they get criticized in public. They suddenly demand the nuance that they have so far happily denied to Muslims as a whole.

*Admin Note: Spencer has subtly and overtly endorsed violence or a violent posture against Muslim citizens and their “liberal enablers” in the West. Just in January, in a piece titled “Digging Graves for the Next World War,” Roland Shirk a contributor at JW wrote,

The strings that knit together peaceful coexistence among communities are straining under the pressure of millions of resident aliens who should never have been admitted, who can only be tolerated when they are as sure as we that compared to us they are helpless. Islam is a religion of fear and force, and its adherents can only be at your feet or at your throat. We had better decide which posture we prefer. The time is short.

Those words are essentially the theme of Breivik’s manifesto, and Spencer approved it. This is on top of the knowledge that Spencer joined a Facebook group that sought as its objective a Reconquista of Anatolia, a holocaust of Turks and a forced conversion of any and all remaining Muslims. Spencer never denied joining the group, only claiming that he was the victim of a “trick.”

Anders Breivik

In response to Norway attacks, right-wing bloggers suddenly demand nuance

American anti-Islam bloggers aren’t to blame for the Norway Massacre. But their response to the attacks is nonetheless revealing, in that they are now demanding the kind of nuanced analysis of the Norway shootings that they’ve always failed to offer when implicating jihadism or all Muslims for terror attacks.

As the news of terrorist attacks in Oslo broke on Friday, the conservative media were quick to place the blame on al Qaeda even though the details weren’t fully known. Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote that the attacks were “a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.”

At first, it wasn’t unreasonable to reach that conclusion. Given the way the attacks unfolded — multiple targets being hit within a short time period — it was reasonable to assume that Islamic extremists were responsible, rather than anti-Muslim extremist Anders Behring Breivik.

When the truth became known, Rubin, like many others on the right, tried to downplay the right-wing anti-Muslim ideology driving the alleged shooter. She was suddenly far more generic in how she describedBreivik’s motive, referring to it as “undiluted evil.”

What’s notable about the response by conservatives to the attack is that their primary worry was that the anti-Islam cause might be tarnished. Bruce Bawer, writing in the Wall Street Journal, was beside himself that “this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.” He then casts Breivik’s concerns, if not his actions, as defensible, describing “the way he moves from a legitimate concern about genuine problems to an unspeakably evil `solution.’”

It would be hard to imagine a conservative showing such empathy for Hamas, concluding that while terrorism is evil, they are nevertheless acting out of legitimate concerns about Palestinian suffering. What’s pathetic is not so much their reasoning, but the knowledge that their arguments would be the same in substance, if more enthusiastic, had Muslim extremists been responsible.

The most telling reaction was from the anti-Muslim bloggers Breivik cited by name in his manifesto.

Pamela Geller, who along with Professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer has been active in opposing the construction of mosques in the U.S., wrote: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.” Spencer, for his part,wrote: “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.”

Most of Geller and Spencer’s blogging consists of attempts to tar all Muslims with the responsibility for terrorism. At CPAC last year, Geller and Spencer drew a large crowd for their documentary referring to the proposed community center near Ground Zero as “the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.” Yet they’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing — assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association. What’s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it’s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.

These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited — by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it’s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should — terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.

Spencer is working hard to disassociate himself from one of his fans

The anti-Muslim loons of the world are in a major bind right now. Their intolerant anti-Muslim attitude and constant fear-mongering is responsible for the horrible terrorist attack that occurred in Norway at the hands of self-professed Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller supporter Anders Behring Breivik. Recent reports suggest that Breivik was inspired by the writings of anti-Muslim bigots like Spencer and Geller, as well as others in the anti-Muslim circle such as Bat Ye’or and Fjordman.

Spencer himself has come out and attempted to dismiss the connection between Breivik’s violence and his own anti-Muslim bigotry, saying “no one has explained or can explain how this guy’s supposed anti-jihad views have anything to do with his murdering children.” A fair question in light of the tragic violence that Breivik was responsible for.  Did the anti-Muslim hatred inspire the violence in Oslo?

Spencer lays out his version of the logic this way, saying:

1. Freedom fighters preach free speech, freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all people, against Sharia and Islamic supremacism that denies those rights, advocating only legal means of protest and dissent.

2. Some nutcase who allegedly expressed allegiance with the freedom fighters kills people, none of whom are preaching Sharia or Islamic supremacism.

3. Media assumes that #1 caused #2 and blames freedom fighters.

The obvious problem with Spencer’s logic is that it does not include his and other anti-Muslim loons’ consistent denunciations of “leftists” as jihad-enablers. This is a key tenant of the so-called anti-jihadist movement. They hate the left, or more specifically, anyone who treats Muslims with a smidgen of fairness and tolerance. Spencer and Geller consistently and constantly portray the left as those who would sell out the West to the scary Mooslems. Spencer’s hate site Jihad Watch is filled with posts denouncing the “Leftist/Jihadist alliance,” warning his readers of how the left will happily allow the Mooslem hordes to overthrow the West and “dhimmify” its population.

Breivik adopted this view of the left.  Paul Woodward notes that Breivik argued “that cultural conservatives should not identify their main opponents as Jihadists, but instead should focus their attention on those he regards as the ‘facilitators’ of Jihadists, namely, the proponents of multiculturalism.” It was these liberals and “multi-culturalists” that were the target of his rampage.

Therefore, a more logical set-up would be as follows:

1. Anti-Muslim bigots vilify Muslims as a threat to Western culture and civilization, and argue that the left is most responsible for allowing Muslims to undermine Western civilization.  In fact, the left is more the enemy than the anti-jihadists themselves!

2. A right-wing self-proclaimed anti-jihadist chooses the capital of a famously liberal, leftist, and socialist country as the target for his attack.

3. Media is perfectly justified in establishing a link between #1 and #2.

When you preach bigotry and fear on a daily basis, don’t be surprised when one of your followers takes the next logical step.  But Robert Spencer has a reason to feign surprise and indignation over what his hatred has incited, as the link between his hate-writing and this act of terrorism becomes clear:  Richard Silverstein notes that the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik cited Robert Spencer 46 times in his manifesto.  He was clearly quite the fan.  This certainly seems to be right-wing anti-Muslim terrorism inspired by the king of Islamophobia himself, Robert Spencer.

Oslo Terrorism Bombing

Norway attacks suspect admits responsibility

(AlJazeeraEnglish)

The man suspected of a gun and bomb attack in Norway has called his deeds atrocious yet necessary, his defence lawyer said.

“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” defence lawyer Geir Lippestad told TV2 news on Saturday.

Lippestad said his client had said he was willing to explain himself in a court hearing on Monday. The court will decide at the hearing whether to keep the suspect in detention pending trial.

Earlier on Saturday, officials in Norway had charged a 32-year-old Norwegian man with killing at least 92 people in a gun and bomb attack described as the worst act of violence in the country since World War II.

Police confirmed to Al Jazeera on Saturday that the suspect had been named as Anders Behring Breivik.

Breivik, who confessed to firing weapons during questioning on Saturday, belonged to right-wing political groups. But officials said they are not jumping to conclusions about his motives.

Reports suggest he belonged to an anti-immigration party, wrote blogs attacking multi-culturalism and was a member of a neo-Nazi online forum.

But Norwegian authorities said Breivik, detained by police after 85 people were gunned down at a youth camp and another 7 killed in an Oslo bomb attack on Friday, was previously unknown to them and his internet activity traced so far included no calls to violence.

‘Beyond comprehension’

Breivik bought six tonnes of fertiliser before the massacre, a supplier said on Saturday, as police investigated witness accounts of a second shooter in the attack on Utoya.

If convicted on terrorism charges, Breivik would face a maximum of 21 years in jail, police said

If convicted on terrorism charges, he would face a maximum of 21 years in jail, police have said.

Norway’s royal family and prime minister led the nation in mourning, visiting grieving relatives of the scores of youth gunned down at an island retreat, as the shell-shocked Nordic nation was gripped by reports that the gunman may not have acted alone.

The shooting spree began just hours after a massive explosion that ripped through an Oslo high-rise building housing the prime minister’s office.

“This is beyond comprehension. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for those who have been killed, for their mothers and fathers, family and friends,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Saturday.

Though the prime minister cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the gunman’s motives, both attacks were in areas connected to the left-leaning Labour Party, which leads a coalition government.

The youth camp, about 35km northwest of Oslo, is organised by the party’s youth wing, and the prime minister had been scheduled to speak there on Saturday.

‘Christian fundamentalist’ views

The blond-haired Behring Breivik described himself on his Facebook page as “conservative”, “Christian”, and interested in hunting and computer games like World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2, reports say.

On his Twitter account, he posted only one message, dated July 17, in English based on a quote from British philosopher John Stuart Mill: “One person with a belief is equal to a force of 100,000 who have only interests”.

The suspect was reportedly also a member of a Swedish neo-Nazi internet forum, a group monitoring far-right activity said on Saturday.

Nordisk, a 22,000-member web forum founded in 2007, describes itself as a portal on the theme of “the Nordic identity, culture and traditions.”

In comments from 2009-2010 to other people’s articles on another website, Document, which calls itself critical of Islam, Breivik criticised European policies of trying to accommodate the cultures of different ethnic groups.

“When did multi-culturalism cease to be an ideology designed to deconstruct European culture, traditions, identity and nation-states?” said one his entries, posted on February 2, 2010.

Breivik wrote he was a backer of the “Vienna School of Thought”, which was against multi-culturalism and the spread of Islam.

He also wrote he admired Geert Wilders, the populist anti-Islam Dutch politician, for following that school. Wilders said in a statement on Saturday: “I despise everything he stands for and everything he did”.

Nina Hjerpset-Ostlie, a contributing journalist to the right-wing website, said she had met Breivik at a meeting in late 2009.

“The only thing we noticed about him is that he seemed like anyone else and that he had some very high-flying, unrealistic, ideas about marketing of our website,” she said.

Police searched an apartment in an Oslo suburb on Friday, which neighbours said belonged to Breivik’s mother.

“It is the mother who lives there. She is a very polite lady, pleasant and very friendly,” said Hemet Noaman, 27, an accounting consultant who lives in the same building in a wealthy part of town. “He often came to visit his mother but did not live here.”

Oslo Deputy Police Chief Roger Andresen would not speculate on the motives for what was believed to be the deadliest attack by a lone gunman anywhere in modern times.

“He has never been under surveillance and he has never been arrested,” Andresen told a news conference on Saturday.

Populist party member

Breivik, who attended a middle class high school called Handelsgym in central Oslo, had also been a member of the Progress Party, the second-largest in parliament, the party’s head of communications Fredrik Farber said.

He was a member from 2004 to 2006 and in its youth party from 1997 to 2007.

The Progress Party – conservative but within the political mainstream – wants far tighter restrictions on immigration, whereas the centre-left government backs multi-culturalism. The party leads some public opinion polls.

A politician who met Breivik in 2002-2003, when he was apparently interested in local Oslo politics, said he did not attract attention.

“I got the impression that he was a modest person … he was well dressed, it seemed like he was well educated,” Joeran Kallmyr, 33, an Oslo municipality politician representing the Progress Party, told the Reuters news agency.

Progress leader Siv Jensen stressed he had left the party.

Breivik was also a freemason, said a spokesman for the organisation.

Oslo Bombing Suspect Anders Behring Breivik

We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs about how these crazed radical anti-Muslim Islamophobes are inciting violence through their hate-mongering. Anders Behring Breivak, arrested as a suspect in the attack has written glowingly of Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, SIOE, and the EDL. Charles Johnson of LGF reports that he had a link with Fjordman who was a guest writer on Geller’s blog.

Terrorism in Europe has been over linked to an Islamic Muslim threat, even though we reported on how exaggerated the claim was: Europol Report: All Muslims are Terrorists…Except the 99.6% that Aren’t.

What Just Happened in Oslo, Norway? (UPDATES)

(Mother-Jones)

This explainer is being updated as more news emerges. Click here for photos from the sceneand here for details about the man arrested in connection with the attacks. For the latest news updates, click here.

The basics: A massive explosion hit Norway’s government hub in central Oslo on Friday, killing at least seven people and injuring at least 15 others. The six-story building that was most heavily damaged included the oil ministry and is next to the building that houses the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The PM was unharmed in the blast and is now operating out of an undisclosed location. Witness testimony and damage at the scene are consistent with reports of a car bombing. The New York Times reports:

Stunned office staff and civil servants working in the vicinity of the bombed building said two explosions could be heard in close succession. The sound of the blasts echoed across the city just before 3:30 p.m. local time. Giant clouds of light-colored smoke continued to rise hundreds of feet into the air over the city…

Photos and television footage showed windows blown out in the 17-story office building across the street from the oil ministry, and the street and plaza areas on each side were strewn with glass and debris.

The first person on the scene “described it as ‘worse than a war zone,’” says Joe Sivilli, who’s talking to Mother Jones‘ Tim McDonnell from on the ground in Oslo. Sivilli, who speaks Norwegian fluently, works at a home-brewed beer shop about 2 kilometers away from the site of the bombing. He says he felt a “rumble, like a small earthquake,” when the bomb went off, but assumed it was just “construction or something like that.” He’ll be monitoring the Norwegian-language media for us as this story develops.

Wasn’t there another attack? A gunman dressed as a policeman reportedly opened fire this afternoon at a Labour party youth camp on the island of Utoya, about 15 miles outside of Oslo, killing at least 80 people (police officials previously reported at least 10 casualties, but had expect that number to rise). Police have a suspect in custody. Prime Minister Stoltenberg was due to visit the camp tomorrow morning, according to NRK, Norway’s national public television broadcaster. (Stoltenberg has attended gatherings at the camp almost every year in recent memory.) On Friday evening, police found undetonated explosives on the island.

Close to 700 teenagers had gathered on Utoya, and initial reports suggested that some tried to flee by swimming. CBS News reports that Kurt Lier, Oslo’s assistant chief of police, “had little information about what had happened on the island, but said if people are leaving island swimming, it is a ‘long swim.’” Hans-Inge Langø, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), says the “timing and targets [of the attacks are] too similar for this not to be connected.” The AP reports that Norwegian police say the two events were definitely connected.

The Pamela Connection:

UPDATE 1, Saturday, July 23, 12:16 a.m. EDT: Blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is reporting that the Oslo bombing/shooting suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, posted often on a Norwegian anti-immigration site and recommended a post by the prominent anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, who spearheaded the US drive against the planned “Ground Zero mosque.” (We’ve previously covered her activities here, here, here, here, and here.) LGF also asserts a link between Breivik and one of Geller’s guest bloggers, Fjordman.

Geller responded on her own website: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions…this is war. And the left is vicious, amoral and depraved. They mean to win, and that is the only way they know how.”

UPDATE 2, Saturday, July 23, 11:06 a.m. EDT: Oddmy Estenstad, an employee of agricultural retailer Felleskjøpet, tells CNN that Utoya shooting suspect Anders Behring Breivik bought six tons of fertilizer from the company in May:

She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.

“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”

UPDATE 3, Saturday, July 23, 11:09 a.m. EDT: According to the UK’s Daily Mirror, Anders Behring Breivik has been “preliminarily charged with acts of terrorism.” Norwegian police say the 32-year-old Breivik appears to be an extreme right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, due to postings on his website. NRK reports that the suspect is a member of an Oslo gun club, and “was exempted from military service, and thus…has no special education [from the Norwegian] Armed Forces.”

UPDATE 4, Saturday, July 23, 11:19 a.m. EDT: Norwegian media report on eyewitness accounts of the Utoya massacre. The Los Angeles Times also has the story:

Media reports say the gunman apparently used a handgun and a machine gun, and that police arrived at the island possibly 90 minutes after the shooting started. At midmorning Saturday, police were still searching the island for more bodies.  One wounded survivor, Adrian Pracon, described the gunman as “calm and controlled,” shooting people who tried to escape the island by swimming to the mainland…Pracon described his attempt to escape. “We started running down to the water and people had already undressed and started swimming.”

Pracon said he began swimming, but “after 150 meters … I realized I wouldn’t make it so I went back and saw him standing 10 meters from me shooting at the people who tried to swim over.”

From our Loonwatch Readers:

Dane Bargeld:

He has written a number of comments on norwegian website document.no:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/

He seems to be more intelligent than the average loon. His comments are reflective rather than emotional. He doesn’t seem crazier than the average loon. His last comment is from october 2010 though.

He’s expresses support for:

- The Vienna school of thought
- Political movements like Tea Party, PVV (Wilders), EDL and (norwegian) Progress Party
- Israel
- Christianity (he’s a protestant but dislikes modern day protestancism and suggest that christians should unite in the roman-catholic church)
- Countries like Japan and South Korea (for rejecting multiculturalism)

He dislikes:

- Islam
- Totalitarian ideologies
- Cultural marxism
- Multiculturalism

David:

According to Norwegian reports, the organization this CHRISTIAN TERRORIST belonged to tried to establish links with the English Defense League — another Lieblingsorganization von Frau Geller.

Myrpou:

The swedish site realisten.se claim that Anders Behring Breivik claimed to be THE Fjordman over a year ago, so they initially reported when they got his name that Fjordman was the terrorist. However Robert Spencer claims it isn’t Fjordman and an article on Gates of Vienna claims the same, however the former was a bit suspicious to me, they didn’t allow any comments on that particlar article and made it clear that “the discussion was over”. If they’re certain that this guy isn’t fjordman wouldn’t they be more willing to prove it?

Eslaporte:

Breivik has had many posts on the site Document.no, an Islam-critical site that publishes news and commentary…Anders Breivik Behring has also commented on the Swedish news articles, where he makes it clear that he believes the media have failed by not being “NOK” Islam-critical…

As far as the Dutch connection, we still don’t know the total details about the 2009 Queen’s Day Apeldoorn attack – which there were accusations that the ethnic Dutchman, Karst Tates, was a radical right nutjob. The Dutch police appeared to whitewash the report and there appear to be a sloppy investigation of Tates’ past year up to his terrorist attack on the Dutch Royals.

Last April, we had a shoppingmall shooting where the shooter was an unabashed PVV voter and hated foreigners also. Are we going to see the are whitewash by Dutch police?

How Islam Created the Modern World:

He was active in the kind of Huy buoy-like forums in the Netherlands as we know. He was active in SOORTS called Huy buoy-eight forums that even in Kenner Netherlands.

There is another link with the Netherlands. Ice is another link system nand Netherlands. Breivik is also a follower of Pamela Geller, an angry white woman who became famous thanks to the action against the otnmoetingscentrum five blocks from where the WTC once stood. Breivik is a follower of Pamela Geller, an Angry glossy women who shoveled name thanks to the Acti called otnmoetingscentrum Five block from where formerly called World Trade Center stood. Geller invited Geert Wilders and the two support each other. Geller invited Geert Wilders supports a two Elka. Breivnik how close to her is unclear (probably a follower, and no more).

How Hecht Breivnik ice with her was not clear (probably a Volga, a Not anymore). It seems that he wanted to act against the Muslims politically dangerous enough to play offered. It seems that HE is a DAAD Wild Couples against the dangerous politics against Muslims Few games offered.

Apparently, the norwegian far right Anders has also praised Geert Wilders PVV party as being the only true party.

‘Verdachte aanslag en schietpartij heeft sympathie voor PVV’
http://welingelichtekringen.nl/14368-schutter-heeft-sympathie-voor-pvv.html

Google translate from Dutch to English

‘Suspicious attack and shootings have sympathy for PVV’

Anders Breivik Behring, the man suspected of the bombing and the shooting on the island, according to Fox News Utoya sympathy for Geert Wilders. On a Swedish news site he would have said that the Freedom Party is the only “true” conservative party. The media were not critical enough towards Islam.

Wilders said in a statement on Saturday:
“I despise everything he stands for and everything he did.”

Look at the hypocricy, it’s stunning. What a reptilian farce, I mean can’t these muslim haters at least be loyal to one another? Anders at least is honest, but Geert Wilders is a smarmy liar, when he says he despises everything Anders stands for.
How can he say that, when he shares his goals and supports the PVV, is pro Zionist, supports the Israeli far right, anti Muslim,

Death toll at Oslo attacks rises to 92

http://www.ejpress.org/article/52233

Breivik wrote he was a backer of the “Vienna School of Thought,” which was against multiculturalism and the spread of Islam.

He also wrote he admired Geert Wilders, the populist anti-Islam Dutch politician, for following that school.

Wilders said in a statement on Saturday:
“I despise everything he stands for and everything he did.”

Norwegian:

The suspect is not, by all accounts, the blogger known as Fjordman. He is one of his followers in his preachings of class war. Fjordman is widely believed to be one of the two brothers Anfindsens, since part of OJ ANfindsens book about the necessity of the survival of the white race seems written by his brother and bears close resemblance to Fjordmans style of writing.

JD:

Ok so when this story first broke out Yahoo was reporting it as a muslim terrorist see link below ( picture is fuzzy because it a screen shot of whole page click on it to zoom in and you can read it)

http://justpaste.it/2030…

If you scroll down you love the comments

Grobpilot: Kill all muslims even the babies because they will eventually grow up and start killing you.

Bob: They rounded up japanese americans during ww2 and put them in basicly concentration camps in the desert
maybe thats what need done with the muslims till they are shipped out

Hakepeszip:When will civilized countries finally learn not to allow in Islamist in especially not if they are from any
of their garbage countrys

Another Article Few Hours Later ( keep in mind this is mid day we still dont know who what where when why )

http://justpaste.it/2031

People blamed by journalist Louise Nordstum and Matt Lee at AP were..
Al-Quida
Helpers of Global Jihad
Libya
People Pissed off at Mohammed Cartoons.

This lead to more wonderful comments which are at bottom of the pic you can read them

Uncle Remus: Welcome to the rest of the world norway see how far the muslim cancer has spread.

Thaddeus : Lets Hope if it is a white christian patriot then he took out plenty of left wong traitors
and some muzzie immigrants Europe must cleanse itself of third world immigrants
and left wingers Me and my mates are ready herer in England blah blah blah(+5 thumb up)

Norwegian national broadcaster NRK identified him as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik and said police searched his Oslo apartment overnight. NRK and other Norwegian media posted pictures of the blond, blue-eyed Norwegian.

“He is clear on the point that he wants to explain himself,” Roger Andresen told reporters Saturday.

National police chief Sveinung Sponheim told NRK that the suspected gunman’s Internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views, but whether that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen.”

Andersen said the suspect posted on websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies. He did not describe the websites in any more details.

George Carty:

Here’s an extra interesting piece of info: the island camp had hosted a pro-Palestinian rally the day before. I wonder if the gunman got his dates mixed up?

Salam:

He has written a 1400 page islamophobic book where he described in detail how the bombing/massacre would go down. I take back what I said about his ideology not being extreme. This is fucking insane. He used this as a publicity stunt to spread his propaganda. Oh wow.

You can download the book in English here: http://www.sharepdfbooks.com/3TZOU0V52W6B/2083_-_A_European_Declaration_of_Independence.pdf.html…

A quote from the book:
“7a. Apprehension
If you for some reason survive the operation you will be apprehended and arrested. This is the point where most heroic Knights would call it a day. However, this is not the case for a Justiciar Knight. Your arrest will mark the initiation of the propaganda phase.
7b. Your trial offers you a stage to the world”

When I thought this couldn’t get more surrealistic..

Damian:

This video calling for European Christians to take up arms against the Islam and the multicultural left seems to have been posted by Anders Breivik (here anglicised as “Andrew Berwick”) yesterday before he put his plans into action (please note: Youtube have removed original by Andrew Berwick, so this is a repost, which may also be moved):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mZ29eUVAxg

The video shows him holding a gun a the end. From the text of the video, it seems he is hoping to start a new Crusade, a civil war that will finally rid Europe of Islam once and for all.

His thinking on these issues is clearly influenced by Robert Spencer of “Jihad Watch”, who also calls for a new “Crusade” against Islam in his books. Much of what Breivik says in online comments comes straight out of Spencer’s thinking on these issues: e.g. that the leftists/multiculturalists are the greatest threat to Western civilisation, because they are facilitating the “Islamisation” of Europe:

http://translate.google.com/translate?client=firefox-a&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&u=http://www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/

In these comments Breivik cites Spencer’s “Jihad Watch”, as well as Pamela Geller’s anti-Islam/anti-leftist hate-site “Atlas Shrugs”, as sites that all Europeans should read.

Eugene Robinson takes a stand against bigot Herman Munster Cain.

Stand up to Herman Cain’s bigotry

by Eugene Robinson (Washington Post)

It is time to stop giving Herman Cain’s unapologetic bigotry a free pass. The man and his poison need to be seen clearly and taken seriously.

Imagine the reaction if a major-party presidential candidate — one who, like Cain, shows actual support in the polls — said he “wouldn’t be comfortable” appointing a Jew to a Cabinet position. Imagine the outrage if this same candidate loudly supported a community’s efforts to block Mormons from building a house of worship.

But Cain’s prejudice isn’t against Mormons or Jews, it’s against Muslims. Open religious prejudice is usually enough to disqualify a candidate for national office — but not, apparently, when the religion in question is Islam.

On Sunday, Cain took the position that any community in the nation has the right to prohibit Muslims from building a mosque. The sound you hear is the collective hum of the Founding Fathers whirring like turbines in their graves.

Freedom of religion is, of course, guaranteed by the Constitution. There’s no asterisk or footnote exempting Muslims from this protection. Cain says he knows this. Obviously, he doesn’t care.

Cain’s remarks came as “Fox News Sunday”host Chris Wallace was grilling him about his obsession with the attempt by some citizens of Murfreesboro, Tenn., to halt construction of a mosque. Wallace noted that the mosque has operated at a nearby site for more than 20 years, and asked, sensibly, what the big deal is.

Cain launched into an elaborate conspiratorial fantasy about how the proposed place of worship is “not just a mosque for religious purposes” and how there are “other things going on.”

This imagined nefarious activity, it turns out, is a campaign to subject the nation and the world to Islamic religious law. Anti-mosque activists in Murfreesboro are “objecting to the fact that Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, sharia law,” Cain said. “That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”

Let’s return to the real world for a moment and see how bogus this argument is. Presumably, Cain would include Roman Catholicism among the “traditional religions” that deserve constitutional protection. It happens that our legal system recognizes divorce, but the Catholic Church does not. This, by Cain’s logic, must constitute an attempt to impose “Vatican law” on an unsuspecting nation.

Similarly, Jewish congregations that observe kosher dietary laws must be part of a sinister plot to deprive America of its God-given bacon.

Wallace was admirably persistent in pressing Cain to either own up to his prejudice or take it back. “But couldn’t any community then say we don’t want a mosque in our community?” Wallace asked.

“They could say that,” Cain replied.

“So you’re saying any community, if they want to ban a mosque. . .,” Wallace began.

“Yes, they have the right to do that,” Cain said.

For the record, they don’t. For the record, there is no attempt to impose sharia law; Cain is taking arms against a threat that exists only in his own imagination. It makes as much sense to worry that the Amish will force us all to commute by horse and buggy.

This demonization of Muslims is not without precedent. In the early years of the 20th century, throughout the South, white racists used a similar “threat” — the notion of black men as sexual predators who threatened white women — to justify an elaborate legal framework of segregation and repression that endured for decades.

As Wallace pointed out, Cain is an African American who is old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation. “As someone who, I’m sure, faced prejudice growing up in the ’50s and the ’60s, how do you respond to those who say you are doing the same thing?”

Cain’s response was predictable: “I tell them that’s absolutely not true, because it is absolutely, totally different. . . . We had some laws that were restricting people because of their color and because of their color only.”

Wallace asked, “But aren’t you willing to restrict people because of their religion?”

Said Cain: “I’m willing to take a harder look at people that might be terrorists.”

Generations of bigots made the same argument about black people. They’re irredeemably different. Many of them may be all right, but some are a threat. Therefore, it’s necessary to keep all of them under scrutiny and control.

Bull Connor and Lester Maddox would be proud.

Eugene Robinson will be online to chat with readers at 1 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.

Disturbing alliance between Right-wing Zionists and Russian Nationalists. (Hat tip: SR)

The Unholy Alliance: how Israeli wingnuts befriended Russian Hitlerophiles

by Sergey Romanov (LGF)

On an Israeli Russian-language site IzRus we can see this news item from 12.07.2011:

Russian nationalists met in Israel with a right-wing Zionists

One of the leaders of Russia’s National Democratic Alliance, who visited Israel together with his colleagues at the invitation of religious-right-wing Zionists, came to the conclusion that the two political forces have a lot in common …

Since last week, in Israel there is a group of moderate [ethnic] Russian nationalists from Russia, arrived here at the invitation of the religious-right bloc “Ihud ha-Leumi” (“National Unity”). The leaders of an interregional public association of the National Democratic Alliance (established in March 2010) made several trips to the Holy Land, visited the Knesset, and the memorial complex “Yad Vashem”. Following the visit, co-chairman of the movement Ilya Lazarenko came to the conclusion that the Russian nationalists and right-wing Zionists have much in common. “We are very much in common, and first of all – rejection of violent Islamism, which is a threat to civilization – he said to the portal IzRus. – We also have some ideological overlap associated with the objectives of nation-building and its operation.”

Russian political leaders in recent years emphasize the multi-ethnic country and its citizens need to instill ethnic and religious tolerance. However, Lazarenko is convinced that in Russia today it is not only appropriate but also very important to talk about national component. “The national problem in Russia – this is primarily a[n ethnic] Russian problem, all the rest follow. The problem is that [ethnic] Russians don’t have their own national state, their homeland. Just as Jews didn’t have it for a long time,” – said Lazarenko.

The Russian version of the Israeli 7th channel - Arutz Sheva – that caters to the religious right-wing segment of the population provides further details of the visit.

www.7kanal.com/news.php3?id=283314

Yesterday in Knesset leaders of the Russian National Democratic Alliance (NDA) met with the representative of the bloc “National Unity” MK Aryeh Eldad, head of the parliamentary lobby against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

Member of the “Union of Professors for strong Israel” Dr. Michael Pavlov
accompanied the group and translated during the meeting.

The meeting took place in a warm, friendly atmosphere, – said Dr. Pavlov. Aryeh Eldad was interested in the political platform of NDA and the opinion of the alliance about Israel and to certain Israeli politicians. In response to Ilya Lazarenko said he had been impressed by the visit to the Deputy Minister of Negev and Galilee Ayoob Kara. Mr. Lazarenko also warmly praised the bloc “National Unity”, believing members of this unit to be the real patriots of Israel.

[...]

Ilya Lazarenko said he hoped for further cooperation with the patriotic forces of Israel. MK Aryeh Eldad assessed the meeting as productive.

On the photo in the article are NDA’s Ilya Lazarenko (right) and Alexey Shiropayev(left).

www.7kanal.com/news.php3?id=283299

For one week representatives of Russian public movement “National Democratic Alliance” (NDA) were in Israel.

Guests from Russia visited the memorial complex “Yad Vashem”, toured the West Bank, walking on Hebron and Jerusalem, and had a conversation at the “Round Table” in Netanya, with the extra-parliamentary and informal social and political organizations and movements, including “The Jewish Memorial “and the” Altalena – New Zionist revisionists.”

Guests from Russia, accompanied by Shlomo Lensky, editor of “7th channel” [Arutz Sheva] Tuvia Lerner and Dr. Michael Pavlov. Conversation with the deputy minister Ayoob Kara was also recorded by television reporters from “Israel Plus” channel (the same day, two representatives of the NDA were guests at the “Open Studio” show with David Cohn).

Says Dr. Michael Pavlov: “About a month ago I was contacted by my friend, asking for help in organizing the visit to Israel of the movement of Russian National-Democrats. I was a little confused, because, in my understanding a Russian nationalist is a drunken member of Pamyat society, brandishing an ax, shouting “Beat the Jews – save Russia.” However, looking at information about the movement of the national democrats, I was pleasantly surprised. It turns out that for a long time the movement takes the Israel-friendly stand, and was one of the few Russian organizations that fully supported Israel during “Operation Cast Lead.”

Yesterday there was a meeting of the co-chairmen of the NDA Alexey Shropayev and Ilya Lazarenko and the movement’s press secretary Alexander Galitskij and representatives of the St. Petersburg branch of the movement with the Deputy Minister development of Negev and Galilee Ayoob Kara. During the meeting, Mr Kara told about the blood relationship of the Druze – and specifically of his family – with the people and the State of Israel, as well as his vision of the Israeli national policy and current global threats. Russian leaders of the National Democratic Alliance Alexey Shiropayev and Ilya Lazarenko told about similar aspects of political life in Russia and have found many points of mutual understanding.

The Deputy Minister told guests that he had only recently returned from a trip to Europe, where he had met with representatives of right-wing national parties [Vlaams Belang/Dewinter - S.R.]. “Some accuse me of having links with the ultra-Right movements and leaders. But I say – Israel must find allies to fight the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism. Left-wing leaders can not understand what I explain to them for many years: we have no partner for negotiations among the Arab countries – they do not want the existence of a Jewish state at all. This is proved by our retreat from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Israel returned to the boundaries defined by the UN, “Hezbollah” and Hamas failed to cease hostilities against Israel. Every day I read the Arabic-speaking press and see all the duplicity: while in English the Islamists broadcast their love of peace, then in Arabic – they call for Islamic expansion and the destruction of Israel.”

[...]

Russian National Democrats were satisfied with the visit to Israel. “In Russia, most of the media lie about the Jewish occupation and discrimination against the Arab population. We visited Hebron, and have not seen any signs of occupation. On the contrary – most people in the Russian provinces would envy those conditions which are at the Arab residents of Hebron. We have seen in Israel the only effective model of national state in the world, preserving the democratic structures, and we believe that Russia has a lot to learn from Israel in this field “- the movement’s leader Alexey Shiropayev said.

Shlomo Lensky (deputy adviser to Michael Ben-Ari on ‘Russian’ Affairs) who accompanied the NDA group to the Knesset (as well as on a trip to Hebron, and to the “round table” in Netanya) noted that both for the Russian nationalists and for the Israeli right it was very important to break down stereotypes. “It is believed that if you’re a Russian nationalist – automatically you’re an anti-Semite and a fascist, etc., etc., and if you’re an Israeli right-wing you are always an extremist, a fanatic, a schismatic, and both – marginal. Meeting with Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara was an indication that it is the people who value and care about their country’s national interest who will find common language, who have a space for dialogue and may cooperate in the fight against common enemies, without being burdened with an inferiority complex and a variety of prejudices, “- said Shlomo Lensky.

Ayoob Kara has expressed willingness and even the desire to visit Russia as an official guest of the NDA, and said he would prefer St. Petersburg – a city about which he had heard many things, but, unlike other cities in Russia, and he hadn’t visited. “I am pleased to become a mediator between Russia’s NDA and similar national parties in Europe” – said Ayoob Kara.

OK, so who are Ilya Lazarenko and Alexey Shiropayev?

Ilya Lazarenko is best known as the founder of the so-called “Society of Nav“, a defunct pseudo-occult organization. Another name – “Church of the Great White Race”. It is described as a “racist ariosophic Gnostic-neo-Pagan organization which calls for the “rebirth of the Russian people as a part of the Aryan nations of the white race”. The organization “copies several elements of the KKK symbolics – gowns, pointy hats – but are very hostile to Abrahamic religions”. Lazarenko called this society “the Russian KKK”. See this link for some photos of their symbols, including the swastika.

In an old interview with Moscow News (quoted here) Lazarenko explained why the organization was founded on April 20:

April 20th was pointed out by the prevailing astrological situation. This is pure coincidence. Although we have nothing against Hitler. He was a good man, loved animals, children and his people.

Lazarenko claims: “We’re not fascists”, but then adds:

If we come to power, we will immediately introduce martial law, arrest the current government, restore the death penalty, will make Moscow a restricted area. We will revive the slogan “Beat the kikes, save Russia!” Modern rotten society is unable to resist. Like a goat on a string, it will follow the leader.

Lazarenko has a blog at LiveJournal, “ariognostic”. Here are a couple of his comments:

igni-ss.livejournal.com/268535.html?thread=8354039

2009-05-06 04:01 pm UTC

No trolling, actually.
That the NSDAP regime was Judeophobic is a fact.
That 6 million of specially killed Jews during the Holocaust are a myth – it is also a fact.
The method of “proving” the “6 million” is pure hysterics, nothing more. This myth doesn’t hang together.

ru-gnostik.livejournal.com/102455.html?thread=9303 59

2007-02-02 10:17 pm UTC
It would be more reasonable for Jews to admit that 80% of the “Holocaust” consist of inventions of the Allied war propaganda. The war propaganda was never “objective”. [...]

Being in sound mind, it is difficult to believe that “death camps” were effectively killing Jews up until the 70s, to get to the 6 million victims.

Nowadays even an attempt to get to the bottom of this causes hysterics.

[...]

There is no evidence of intended, massive extermination of any groups by national criteria in NS Germany.

Now Shiropayev. You can look at the Wiki article about him through Google Translate, or at this note. He was writing essays in defense of swastika back when he was still a Christian. He is well-known for his radical poetry. Some samples are here (use Google translate). Two examples of raw translation:

The sacred springOver Moscow – stormy expanse.
People and greenery come to life.
The day is such – the birthday of Adolf.
It means – the joy is in the sky.

Celestial strings rattle,
Continuing as flows of rain.
With undiluted bass of Perun
The Führer’s name responds.

Führer is with us – neither black bones
Nor the poor product of Hollywood.
He is the air in discharges of energy,
Which is clear as the Buddha.

He is a breath of spring tillage,
Washed clean by the triumphant sky.
He is the zenith with the Kolovrat of Salvation
And the jubilant roar of Messerschmitt.

Collapsed on Moscow as a flood
And as a pagan baptism Spree -
From the volatile mountains of airy Europe,
From the peaks of cloudy Hyperborea.

Zeus strikes the golden aegis,
Without giving cheap warranties.
This Spartan name – Hitler -
Comes to life under the sun, as an antique.

Führer with us! In the glow of a halo,
Shuddering roofs and grounds,
The sun-faced messenger of Olympus,
Who awakened the mystery of the Race.

Führer is alive! Wheel of Helios
Like a tsunami will crumple paranoia.
No, not the flocks of geese from Laos -
It is the souls of heroes are returning.

What is left is the shifting pile
From banners, legions and steel -
The Doric world of thunder and sun
Will rise from the hot ashes.

(C) Alexey Shiropaev, 2001

From another poem:

Greetings, our stern happiness,
The steel of space, the steep sky!
Catacomb symbols of swastikas
Hallow the concrete.

And from yet another (2005):

Singing “Horst Wessel”
I go out on the trail.
I hanged a Communist
On a high oak.[...]

How easy and pleasant it is
To pass through the woods,
While falling apart into the spots
Of the SS camouflage.

In his 2002 book “Prison of the Nation” [pdf] Shiropayev blames the Ukrainian famine of 1933 on the “Jewish Kremlin”. He writes:

But what can one say about nobility and aristocracy, if even in XIXth century the Jews, this, using Menshikov’s words, “Asiatic, extremely dangerous, extremely criminal people” have introduced their blood in the the Russian Imperial family?[...]As we see, the St. Petersburg emperors have inherited from the Moscow tsars the tradition of interracial sodomy. But the asiatic element was the new one. Instead of Tatar princes – Jewish bankers.

And further:

So, during the pre-October decades an organic “changing of the guard” in the elite layer of the Russia-Eurasia took place. “Steppe” element replaced by “desert” element, which was – because of many religio-historical features – far more anti-Aryan. Moreover, in contrast to the “nomads”, the “desert children” had developed an ideology of Talmudic racism, which proclaims religio-racial superiority of the Jews over “goyim” and, accordingly, the right of the “people of God” to rule and even the massively physically exterminate the “heathens”. Add to this the Jewish control over a significant part of international financial capital and the world’s masonic structures. All this did not promise the white population of Russia anything good. Tatarism must have seemed like “flowers”. This is what happened. Compared to Trotsky, Batu-Khan was an Asiatic liberal.[...]

Jews entered the Project to pursue their own goal – the power over the world, and that means primarily the Aryan world.

[...]

It was’t difficult for Jews to push Russia into war with Germany.

[...]

The organizers and main implementers of the the Tsar’s murder were, of course, the Jews.

[...]
By killing the Romanovs the Jews were exterminating the living memory about mother Europe, about Rus.

[...]

After the murder of White tsars, a genocide of the white population began on a monstrous scale. The second after oprichnina, but incomparably more powerful and fanatical Asiatic terror apparatus was created – the Cheka, in which acronym is hidden the Hebrew word meaning “slaughterhouse for cattle”, i.e. for all non-Jews-goyim according to the Talmud race theory.

And so it goes on, and on, and on…

Finally, some photos: 1, 2, 3.

These are the people who were invited by Ichud Ha-Leumi to Israel, whom Lensky and Lerner of Arutz Sheva promised to promote while they were visiting. What’s worse, judging by this interview an Arutz Sheva reporter took from Shiropayev after the latter visited Yad Vashem, AS people knew about his background – he is asked about his views about Hitler, about his poems (he, of course, dismisses it as mere poetry, says he grew out of it, and dishes out a boilerplate speech about the dangers of Islamism).

More ironically, these people are complete political non-entities in Russia – they have no influence, so this visit cannot be excused even as “Realpolitik”. In fact, it serves as a legitimization of these people in Russia.

This is a GOP candidate who is getting 6% of the popular vote right now, and this sort of rhetoric is acceptable for a large portion of Americans.

Herman Cain: Americans Can Stop Mosques

Herman Cain said Sunday that Americans should be able to ban Muslims from building mosques in their communities.

“Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” Cain said in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community, and the people of that community do not like it. They disagree with it.”

Last week, the Republican presidential candidate expressed criticism of a planned mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, telling reporters at a campaign event that “This is just another way to try to gradually sneak Sharia law into our laws, and I absolutely object to that.”

“This isn’t an innocent mosque,” Cain said.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Wallace pressed him about those comments.

“Let’s go back to the fundamental issue,” Cain said. “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws — Sharia laws. That’s the difference between any one of our traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”

“So, you’re saying that any community, if they want to ban a mosque…” Wallace began.

“Yes, they have the right to do that,” Cain said.

Cain has made a number of controversial comments about Muslims, including a vow to be cautious about allowing a Muslim to serve in his administration.

On Sunday, Cain defended his position, telling Wallace that it’s not discrimination.

“Aren’t you willing to restrict people because of their religion?” Wallace asked.

“I’m willing to take a harder look at people who might be terrorists, that’s what I’m saying,” Cain replied. “Look, I know that there’s a peaceful group of Muslims in this country. God bless them and they’re free to worship. If you look at my career I have never discriminated against anybody, because of their religion, sex or origin or anything like that.”

“I’m simply saying I owe it to the American people to be cautious because terrorists are trying to kill us,” Cain said, “so yes I’m going to err on the side of caution rather than on the side of carelessness.”

Original post: Herman Cain: Americans Have The Right To Ban Mosques In Their Communities

via. Islamophobia Today

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network

By TIM DICKINSON MAY 25, 2011 8:00 AM ET

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

This article appears in the June 9, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive May 27.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Photo Gallery: Roger Ailes, GOP Mastermind

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

Slideshow: An hour-by-hour look at how Fox disguises GOP talking points as journalism

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”

Read about the GOP’s dirty war against Obama

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”

>> Continue reading: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

Athens at this point sounds like Geert Wilders idea of heaven. (hat tip: Elizrael)

by Sara (via. her website: Neocolonialism and its Discontents)

I just got back from a study trip to Athens, Greece, and it was definitely an interesting experience. Although my specialization is gender, the trip ended up being more about migration and race-relations in Greece.

Before we went there, we had no idea that Greece is having a huge immigration problem. Some things we found out while we were there:

–Mosques are not allowed to be built in Athens, which means that there are only informal mosques in basements.
–Over the past few years, right-wing Greek people have trapped Muslims inside these informal mosques and then thrown petrol bombs inside, killing everyone.
–The second day we were there, a Greek man was robbed and then killed by 3 “dark-looking people” who were assumed to be immigrants. Later that night, neo-Nazi TV channels (yes) and blogs called for Greek people to go out and attack and beat immigrants.
–The next day over 17 immigrants ended up in the hospital after being stabbed.
–There was also a clash between the left-wing and the police, who are overwhelmingly right-wing (surprise, surprise).
–There is a huge back-log in terms of applications for legal status as a migrant, and some have to wait up to 20 years. Thus they can be arrested at any time, and they are kept in 2-by-2 cells with no toilets, little food, and no dignity.
–There are reportedly 2 million undocumented migrants in Athens, who are now at risk of being attacked.

While Athens is certainly extreme, these discourses can be found all over Europe now, including the Netherlands. Anti-Islam rhetoric has become so widespread and acceptable, it is no surprise that in some countries, like Greece, it has led to violence.

Some feminists criticize porn because they say it leads to violence against women, since it objectifies and dehumanizes them. The same can be said about discourses on Islam in Europe today. By dehumanizing, stigmatizing, and insulting Muslims, violence is only a few steps away.

And why exactly is Greece allowed to have a neo-Nazi channel if it is a member of the EU? Honestly, the EU needs to stop criticizing other countries when it has members who 1) have neo-Nazi media outlets, and 2) do not allow Muslims to build places of worship.
Uffff.

On a positive note, Greek men are very good-looking!

I liked Chuck Norris. I really did. I can still remember the scene from Invasion USA where Chuck heroically saves a school bus of innocent children from a dastardly terrorist bomb plot. Oh, how we look up to our childhood heroes! How we admire their selfless bravery! But alas, the truth is stranger than fiction.

I once thought Mr. Norris was pretty level headed when I heard him challenge Steve Emerson on Fox News, saying:

Don’t you believe that only 2% of the Muslim world are extremists? That 98% of the Muslims want, believe that the Koran teaches a tolerance for other religions?

That’s my hero! So understandably I was quite surprised and disappointed when I saw Mr. Norris’recent article published on the notorious conspiracy mongering website, World Net Daily, a.k.a. the “biggest, dumbest wingnut site on the Web.” For those of you unaware of the site’s “journalistic standards,” WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah admits the site knowingly peddles misinformation if it supports their political goals. And this is the absurd context in which Chuck Norris has chosen to warn Americans about the alleged pernicious influence of American Muslims.

Chuck begins by paying homage to the uncontestable dogma of the anti-Muslim conspiracy movement:

There’s no mystery that radical Islamists intend to use the freedoms in our Constitution to expand the influence of Shariah law.

And what is Chuck’s smoking-gun-proof for sounding the alarm? None other than the completely paranoid and discredited book, Muslim Mafia, authored with the help of David Gaubutz, an anti-Muslim crazy who claimed in all seriousness that he found Saddam’s WMD, that President Obama is a “crack head,” and who belongs to an organization claiming White Christians deserve special distinction for creating America. Gaubatz is the former employee of the rabidly racist hate group, Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), who promoted blatant anti-Muslim bigotry on their website:

Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US. [sic] Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People…It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.

So this is the inSANE man whose work Chuck recommends for reliable information on Sharia law. Not exactly befitting a Texas Ranger, I must say. But then Chuck has the brassiness to claim he welcomes Muslims:

First, let me categorically state that I’m not an Islamaphobe. I welcome the plurality of religions in America and am a firm believer in the First Amendment.

Chuck, you say you are not an Islamophobe, so why are you citing one? Why do you get your information from a racist Islamophobe? Why are you arguing that Americans should fear normal law-abiding Muslims? Honestly, I think (I hope!) Chuck means well in his heart of hearts, but it should be clear here that he has been thoroughly duped by WND’s orchestrated misinformation campaign, only a modest part of which are Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

Anyhow, after admitting that there is a plurality of interpretations of Sharia Law, from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal, he then proceeds to contradict himself by essentializing (generalizing) about Sharia in the most negative way, saying:

The main point here is this: Where Muslim religion and culture has spread, Shariah law has shortly followed.

Of course, many Americans watch on video a Middle Eastern woman allegedly caught in adultery, buried in the ground up to her head and being stoned to death, and think, “That could never happen in America.” But they fail to see how Shariah law has already been enabled and subtly invoked in our country, and that any such induction like it is brought about by understated lukewarm changes, like a frog boiled in a kettle by a slow simmer.

Thus, Chuck thinks that we should be afraid of “Muslim religion and culture” because “Sharia law” will surely follow. According to him, the essence of Sharia law is stoning women, yet he seems not to realize that stoning laws are not found in the Quran (the primary source of Sharia law) but, ironically enough, stonings are explicitly and repeatedly endorsed in his own holy scriptures:

Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.

[Deuteronomy 21:21]

(See also Leviticus 20:2, 20:27, 24:16, 24:23; Deuteronomy 13:10, 17:5, 21:21, 22:23-24; Numbers 15:36; Joshua 7:25; and 1 King 21:10)

That’s somewhat like the pot calling the kettle black, no?

Before you know it, the Moozlims will start stoning American girls left and right, up and down, all around the town! Back in reality, however, the truth is that if stonings ever take place in America, they are much more likely to be carried out by our own homegrown Christian dominionists.

So if America is on the brink of destruction due to Sharia law, what is the proof? Chuck cites three bogus examples, all of which are actually proofs against his argument. As Tim Murphy of Mother Jones explained:

Of course, each of these points has its self-refuting flaws. Judges turn cases over to pre-selected religious arbitrators all the time, for instance, and not just for Muslims. None of the state legislators in question have produced a single example of Sharia being forced upon their states. And as for the argument that Sharia has been “oversimplified,” I would just point you to the fact that a quasi-mulleted martial arts actor from the mid 1990s feels qualified to explain to a national audience what Sharia is.

It only makes sense if you give weight to the fanatic conspiracy theories at WND. Apparently, for an aging action star, kooky internet goons are better sources of information than peer-reviewed scholars who spend years actually studying these things under other peer-reviewed scholars. Regardless, Mr. Norris intends to publish more articles on this topic, most likely including the same misunderstanding of basic facts and logic. We’ll be looking forward to see what he comes up with.

What happened, Chuck? You were such an American hero. You were MY hero.

Why did you decide to jump kick it on the Loon Band Wagon?

Elliot’s main point echoes a lot of what we were saying in our article, Islam and the Media in the Age of Islamophobiapalooza.

Fox’s favorite Muslim radical

By Justin Elliot

On Thursday, the radical Muslim and veteran provocateur Anjem Choudary plans to hold a demonstration in front of the White House calling for an extreme form of sharia to reign in America.

Whether the protest actually goes forward — there’s a real chance it won’t, if Choudary’s past stunts are any guide — doesn’t really matter. Choudary, who is known for applauding terrorism and calling for stonings of gay people and the overthrow of democratic governments, has already logged several appearances on Fox and CNN, generated a bunch of articles in the right-wing press, and even prompted a member of Congress to demand that he be banned from the country. All that in the last month.

Choudary is a London-based preacher who has over the past decade become the face of radical Islam in the British press — especially in the tabloids, and even more especially the right-wing papers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — despite having no religious credentials and virtually no public support. In fact, according to those who have tracked his career in Britain, Choudary is wholly a press creation.

“He’s a media whore,” says Mehdi Hasan, a senior editor at the New Statesman who has covered Choudary. “There are real Islamist groups that can get crowds together but his is not one of them. He doesn’t have the numbers to make good on his claims. What he does have is a media that’s very happy to play the game with him.”

Now, Choudary, 43, is using the same formula — making deliberately offensive statements and trumpeting plans for provocative demonstrations — in the United States, where the media has proved all too willing to accommodate him. He can be understood as the Muslim analogue of Terry Jones, the obscure Florida preacher who created an international controversy last year with plans for a “Burn the Quran Day.” He is a radical with minuscule public support, but one who can, given enough free airtime, do real-world damage.

Last month on Fox Sean Hannity had a sparring match with the preacher that ended with Hannity calling him “one sick, miserable, evil SOB.” (It’s worth noting that Fox has the same parent company, News Corp., as some of the U.K. tabloids that obsessively cover Choudary.) Here’s a taste of the exchange:

Two weeks later, Choudary was back on the network, where an angry Gretchen Carlson told him that “I can tell you one thing, Americans don’t want sharia law.” Adam Serwer has argued that Choudary is, for Fox, a “cartoonish buffoon who can be counted on to confirm every stereotype about Islam and Muslims.”

But it’s not just Fox. Late last year Eliot Spitzer had Choudary on CNN and heroically derided him as a “violent and heinous terrorist.” In February, Spitzer hosted him again to argue that the revolution in Egypt was an “Islamist uprising.” Choudary has also been on programs with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

So where did Choudary come from? Born and raised in Britain, his rise to prominence came as the right-hand man of Omar Bakri, a founder of the extremist group Al Muhajiroun. Like Choudary today, Bakri was a press-hungry provocateur, but he also played a role “in the radicalization of some young men,” according to the BBC. Bakri left the U.K. for Lebanon after the 7/7 bombings in 2005. The British government has since barred him from re-entering the country, and Bakri has been charged in Lebanon with forming a militant group to undermine the government there.

In Bakri’s absence, Choudary became the leader of Al Muhajiroun’s successor group, Islam4UK. Both were proscribed in 2010 under a British law that allows for groups to be banned if they “unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism.”

(Choudary has not always been so devout. The Daily Mail published an exposélast year revealing that, while he was student at Southampton University, he had been a hard-partier who gambled, drank, used drugs, looked at porn and had sex with Christian women. The paper had pictures to prove most of the charges.)

When I spoke to Choudary Tuesday, he refused to discuss how many followers he had, beyond claiming that he can attract 150 people to his lectures. “I’m not going to give you details of our administration,” he said. But according to Inayat Bunglawala, a Muslim commentator who is involved in combatting extremism in Britain, Choudary’s record for getting large numbers of people to turn out to events is thin. Bunglawala points to a 2009 demonstration at a parade in the town of Luton in which Choudary and his cohort held signs assailing British troops returning from Iraq as “butchers” and “terrorists.”

Choudary and some of his followers had advertised the event by leafletting for a week among the 20,000-strong Muslim population in the town, says Bunglawala, who has closely tracked Choudary’s career. But the turnout was vanishingly small. “Literally only 20 people showed up and yet they got the front pages of just about every right-wing tabloid the next day. Even the BBC gave them a lot of coverage on that.” Bunglawala observes: “It’s almost a symbiotic relationship between Choudary and the right-wing papers.”

Choudary also has a long history of publicizing demonstrations that never actually happen. In 2009, for example, he planned a “March for Sharia” in central London that drew widespread press attention. The promotional effort included Photoshopped images of what Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square would look like under Choudary’s vision of the caliphate, with minarets and the like. But at the last minute, he canceled the event, claiming threats from right-wing groups.

None of this has stopped the tabloids from regularly calling Choudary to weigh in on pretty much anything in the news. There is, for example, this typical lead from a recent Daily Star piece: “Hate preacher Anjem Choudary last night urged a Muslim uprising against the royal wedding … He said it would be against Islam for Muslims to celebrate the nuptials.”

Choudary does his part by making himself extremely easy to reach; his mobile phone number is posted all over his website and he responded to my e-mail seeking an interview in just a few hours. He even once agreed to have a bull session over milkshakes with Vice Magazine, which noted his favorite flavor is chocolate.

Now, in advance of the planned “Shariah4America” demonstration in Washington, Choudary is following a familiar script. His group has postedimages online of the White House with minarets and the Statue of Liberty wearing a veil. It’s not hyperbole to say that everything he does is for media consumption. When I asked him about a 2003 episode in which Al Muhajiroun unveiled posters hailing the Sept. 11 hijackers as the “Magnificent 19,” Choudary was candid: “It was a media ploy in order to attract the attention of the media and the general public about why such things take place.”

Whether or not the demonstration actually happens Thursday, the Choudary phenomenon is at least as much about the laziness — and, arguably, irresponsbility — of the media as it is about Islam. Says terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross: “One lesson from our experience with would-be Quran burner Terry Jones is that when fringe or relatively fringe figures … are given a great amount of media exposure, it generally increases their power rather than diminishing it. Unfortunately, the media either has not absorbed that lesson, or else does not want to.”

Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More: Justin Elliott

Glenn Beck recently has been harping on and on about the impending doom of Armageddon, and he has figured out who the Anti-Christ is, an “Islamic figure” known as the “12th Imam” or “Mahdi.” To help promote his pseudo-religio-apocalyptic propaganda he had Joel Richardson (fundamentalist Christian) and Zuhdi Jasser, token Muslim beloved by Neo-Cons and wacko Islamophobes.

Beck claims he has been studying this “issue” for nearly five or six years, which is hard to believe when he can’t distinguish between Shi’as and Sunnis:

This hysteria is quite revealing. The Christian right-wing has always scapegoated or somehow cast America’s perceived “enemies” at one time or another as the Anti-Christ. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and its Premieres were the Anti-Christ, during the Gulf War it was Saddam Hussein, at various points throughout history it has been the Pope, and Jerry Falwell thought it obvious that the Anti-Christ was a “male Jew.”

It would almost be an exercise in futility (since they are so obvious) to rebut the horrendous, blatant factual inaccuracies regarding Islamic Eschatology here, but a brief response is necessary.

In the first instance it must be noted that Islamic Eschatology is a debated topic with various theological opinions amongst scholars, and both Sunni Islam and Shia’ Islam have different views of the events and also place different levels of importance on these End Times characters/scenarios. For Shia’ Twelver Islam the Mahdi is a central figure of their Faith whereas amongst Sunnis he is not central to the Faith.

Before we approach this subject it must be made abundantly clear that Muslims believe that no one, not the Prophets, Saints nor the Angels know when the Last Day/End Times will begin. This knowledge belongs only to God because he is the one who has decided it:

“They ask you about the Hour (Day of Resurrection): ‘When will be its appointed time?’ Say: ‘The knowledge thereof is with my Lord (Alone). None can reveal its time but He. Heavy is its burden through the heavens and the earth. It shall not come upon you except all of a sudden.’ They ask you as if you have a good knowledge of it. Say: ‘The knowledge thereof is with God (Alone), but most of mankind know not.’”

[al-‘Araf 7:187]

2 – God says:

“People ask you concerning the Hour, say: ‘The knowledge of it is with God only. What do you know? It may be that the Hour is near!’”

[al-Ahzaab 33:63]

Ibn Katheer (3/527) said:

God tells His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) that he has no knowledge of the Hour and that when the people ask him about that, he should refer the matter to God.

Al-Shanqeeti said (6/604):

It is known that the word innama (translated here as “only”) has the effect of limiting or restricting the meaning, so what the verse means is: No one knows when the Hour will come except God alone.

3 – God says:

“They ask you (O Muhammad) about the Hour — when will be its appointed time?

You have no knowledge to say anything about it.

To your Lord belongs (the knowledge of) the term thereof

You (O Muhammad) are only a warner for those who fear it”

[al-Naaz’iaat 79:42-45]

al-Sa’di said:

Because knowing the time of the Hour serves no spiritual or worldly purpose for people, rather their interests lie in it being concealed from them, the knowledge of that has been kept from all of creation and God has kept it to Himself. “To your Lord belongs (the knowledge of) the term thereof.” (via. IslamQA)

It also must be made abundantly clear that according to Islamic doctrine no one, I repeat no one has the ability to hasten the Last Day/End Times. The logic goes: How can one hasten something God has already decided? Nothing any Muslim or non-Muslim does or doesn’t do has one iota of an effect on hastening or bringing closer the End Times. This is completely and utterly in the power of God. To believe otherwise is considered disbelief and counter to Orthodox Islamic teaching amongst all Sunni groups and schools of thought, and I would venture to say most Shia’ groups and schools of thought as well (Shia’ readers feel free to add comments).

Furthermore, Islamic ‘Aqeeda, belief that Allah knows everything and all things happen through His power and Will is so profound and deeply ingrained that the idea of hastening the Last Days never occurred as a theological possibility, it was unimaginable! There is not much said about it over 1400 years of Islamic history precisely because it was inconceivable and absurd from an Islamic viewpoint.

In fact, throughout history individuals who have claimed to have been mahdis or messiahs have generally not had a very happy end: they have either been persuaded to repent, forced to repent, jailed, killed or castigated as false pretenders. (hat tip: Ahmed)

The cult of Juhayman al-Otaibi is a case in point. He is the famous mastermind behind the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979. He was forwarding the concept that his brother-in-law was the awaited Mahdi. To do so — amongst other things — he attempted to fulfill some of the “signs of the Last Hour” mentioned in Hadith. Juhayman and 67 of his followers were (after being captured) summarily executed.

What we are really seeing from Glenn Beck and the Christian Right crowd that he is pandering to with these insane antics is a classic case of PROJECTION. It is in fact many in the Christian Right who believe that the End Times, the Last Days can be hastened. They actually believe they have a role in bringing Jesus Christ back to Earth!

One of the violent consequences of this disastrous theology is that they believe the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque must be destroyed and the Third Jewish Temple be built for Jesus to return to earth. Imagine the repercussions if they are successful in this mad dash to instigate cataclysm?

The one piece of evidence that Islamophobes, Beck and his ilk use to try to instill fear in the populace is their de-contextualized recital of a hadith (saying of the Prophet Muhammad) and its variations that says, ‘the Last Day will not arrive until the Jews fight the Muslims and the Muslims defeat them.’

Beck and company want to pass off and interpret these ahadith as somehow calling for a hastening of the End Times. Not only is this interpretation antithetical to Islamic creed, not only is it an interpretation NEVER forwarded in the 1400 years of Islamic history by any of the hadith commentators (I have Fath al-Bari by Imam Ibn Hajar al-’Asqalani, Sharh Sahih Muslim by Imam Nawawi, and other commentaries open in front of me right now), but it exposes a profound and disgustingly immense historical amnesia.

Why wouldn’t Muslims over the course of 1400 years, at a time when Christian Europe was murdering and enslaving Jews under the doctrine of Perpetual Servitude have exterminated Jews if Beck and his cohorts are right? Why were Jews thriving in the Muslim world? Why were they being appointed as Viziers, Advisors, Diplomats, Physicians to the Caliphs, Sultans and Amirs? Why was the Golden Age of Jewish thought and culture, the revivification of Hebrew (a previously near dead language) in lands ruled by Muslims? (I am currently writing a book review for LW on The Oranament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal).

No doubt these ahadith have been used in a bellicose and bigoted manner over the past 80 or so odd years due to the political situation in the Middle East, i.e. the conflict between the creation of Israel and occupation and repression of Palestinians. But can the anti-Muslims who forward the claim that Muslims are using these ahadith to hasten the End Times bring one shred of evidence in which these ahadith have been used to instigate or incite pogroms or to usher in the Last Days over the last 1400 years? Maybe Bernard Lewis can help in this regard?

What Beck and co. are saying would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that it was so dangerous. Some nut or group of nuts is going to see his show and start arming himself against the evil Mooslims and think to himself that he has to get the Mooslims before they get him.

A good piece from Charles D. Ellison on the differing usages of the “terrorism” and the double standards it reveals.

(hat tip: Blue)

Why Aren’t We Calling Loughner a Terrorist?

by Charles D. Ellison (Huffington Post)

I can’t help but wonder why folks are so afraid to call the mass shooting in Tuscon, Arizona an act of terrorism.

The fear of the “T” word seems almost palpable in describing the gruesome events that took place this past Saturday. There is little explanation or reasoning for the omission, except that it’s very obvious what most Americans won’t call 22-year-old Jared Loughner. It goes without saying that the man is deranged. Fairly obvious that he’s unstable. But, tell us what we don’t know. Get straight to the core of the matter here. Let’s not fool ourselves and everyone else struggling to make sense out of it. Loughner is a terrorist, clearly fit within the strictest definition of the term.

While other top public officials tip-toed around it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton almost went there, just short of dropping the “T” word. Instead, she chose “extremist.” While clearly holding back, it was one of the braver rhetorical stands we’ve heard in the past few days. Her comparison to the Middle Eastern “extremism” we routinely see plastered on global headlines is sure to raise a few brows and ‘how-dare-she’ remarks back home, especially since she said it while in Abu Dhabi.

But, let’s keep it real. The “T” term gets quickly applied within every second a suicide bomber blasts a busy street corner in Pakistan or when a crowded European commuter train is vaporized. We find some sort of geopolitical logic, however violent and horrific, to explain the indiscriminate mass killings of innocent civilians in various corners of the world. Even before responsibility is investigated or admitted by some obscure political fringe group wanting their spot blown, we’re already using the “T” word.

When a “crazy” white guy with a gun, wound up on polarized talking points and manifestos, indiscriminately kills innocent Americans in broad daylight, it takes several days in the aftermath before the larger public will even accept a hint of premeditation. Typically, the collective American psyche will initially trivialize the event by calling the perpetrator “deranged” or “mentally unstable.” The social response script is fashioned to fake us into a false sense of security. It’s isolated, they say. Just one crazed nut with a gun.

That dude who flew his plane into an IRS building? Isolated. Or the cat who waited for, scoped, then killed three Pittsburgh police officers? Crazy. What about the man who shot at the Panama City school board then shot himself? Off the edge.

Brown skin man with bombs strapped to his torso? Oh, that’s a terrorist.

Yet, in every instance, the “isolated” or “crazed” Americans each expressed some form of political reasoning for committing the act. Loughner, whose elaborate musings are outlined in lengthy Internet entries on MySpace and YouTube, was apparently hanging with anti-government dudes who probably have posters of Sarah Palin in a bikini brandishing a semi-automatic prior to the attack.

So, what’s the difference between a mass political killing in Tuscon, Arizona and the same in Any Town, Middle East?

Part of it is that we don’t want to accept that Americans are actually capable of politically motivated destruction. Clearly, the level of invective in our political discourse has reached a feverish pitch in recent years, matched by the worrisome lack of civility and old fashioned decency we use to pride ourselves on. It’s another conversation, but we’re much meaner, much more hyper-competitive and much less compassionate — some can fairly argue with that assessment, especially after 400 years of slavery and institutional racism peppered by mass lynching. We don’t want to admit it, but we all talk about how foul our social attitude is these days.

But, as we enter this 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, we are afraid to accept the comparisons. While the North vs. South battle lines disappeared with every history lesson, we can see a scary repeat of similar passions which led to the first cannon shots at Fort Sumter in 1861. Congress, in the 1850s, was also a scene of unadulterated political mayhem, Members beating each other senseless on the House floor and Senators drawing guns on one another. While it’s not that bad today, we are seeing an alarming deficit of decorum in the House chamber which, if left unchecked, could lead to unbridled outbursts of ideology we’ll end up regretting one day.

We’d be irresponsible not to reassess our national discourse. There are serious consequences to the ideological bubbles we’ve created while we self-isolate ourselves in Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts, interacting only with those we agree with.

Disagreeing is our national legacy and right, but how we disagree is a national discipline we should embrace before Tuscon becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Expect more bellicose rhetoric from Allen West and actual attempts to ban Sharia’ and Muslim religious rights.

From (ThinkProgress)

Rep. Allen West (R-FL), a newly-elected member who has loudly scapegoated Muslims and campaigned on a promise to oppose religious diversity, appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio program last week. Gaffney, who routinely says that Obama is both a secret Muslim and a member of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” asked West about how the new Republican Congress plans to “take on Sharia as the enemy threat doctrine?”

West said that, although he has not spoken with all of the new members, he hoped that Congress would focus on the “infiltration of the Sharia practice into all of our operating systems in our country as well as across Western civilization.” He explained that targeting Sharia should be part of America’s “national security strategy” and that a response to Sharia would somehow include “tailor[ing]” American “security systems, our political systems, economic systems, our cultural and educational systems, so that we can thwart this”:

ALLEN WEST: So there are many different ways we need to understand this 21st century battlefield, how we can leverage all elements of our nation’s power against — and like I said we need to get away from this nation building focus. I think that is economically hurting us.

GAFFNEY: In terms of understanding our enemy, and I think you’ve done as much as any congressional candidate to help expand the awareness for not only your constituents but others. I count on you to be carrying that on in your new capacity. What is your sense of the willingness of this new Congress to take on Sharia as the enemy threat doctrine?

WEST: Well, I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down with all of the new members, giving all the new members of the freshmen class a phone call to talk to them. I think one of the critical things that we must come together is that there is an infiltration of the Sharia practice into all of our operating systems in our country as well as across Western civilization. So we must be willing to recognize that enemy. We cannot have a national security strategy that does not recognize it in specific and understand its goals and objectives. So once again, we can tailor you know our internal goals and objectives as far as our security systems, our political systems, economic systems, our cultural and educational systems, so that we can thwart this. And it comes back to one of those strategic goals that you mentioned, reducing the sphere of influence of this Sharia you know ideology that is tied into Islam. But I think that is our most threatening part, is the Sharia philosophy.

Listen here:

West also said that he would get rid of the “nation building” aspect of the ‘war on terror.’ Instead, he would prefer a focus on the type of ethnic and religious witch hunts against Muslims that Gaffney specializes in. Gaffney of course helped plan the protests against the Park51 community center in Manhattan and galvanized support for the anti-Sharia constitutional amendment in Oklahoma.

An interesting piece from Soumaya Ghannoushi published at AlJazeera English.

Islamophobia acting like free speech

by Soumaya Ghannoushi

The caricatures of Prophet Muhammad first published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten then reprinted in a string of European newspapers have exposed the gulf separating the West from the Muslim world.

The cartoons and the reactions they have sparked across the Muslim hemisphere, many have conjectured, symbolise the confrontation between two irreconcilable value systems, one based on the Enlightenment tradition, the other clinging to religious dogma.

These simplistic explanations would have stood a better chance of being accepted if the majority of those offering them had been more vocal in denouncing the continuous assault on free speech in Western societies in the name of the war on terrorism. The reality is that the controversy over freedom of expression and its limits is a symptom of an infinitely deeper crisis affecting the relation of the West, European and Atlantic, to the vast Muslim world from Tangier to Jakarta.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Since we are historical beings, we cannot be detached from our hermeneutical tradition and historical condition.

Only by reference to these contexts are our actions understandable. Any explanation of the cartoons crisis that does not take into account the explosive climates of the post-September 11th world and the rise of the right wing in Europe and the United States is bound to remain superficial.

Islam, which had lain forgotten during the cold war and the obsession with the communist threat, has now come to the fore, penetrating into the heart of the public domain.

It is no coincidence that the cartoons were published in Denmark in a right-wing paper under a right-wing government then reprinted in countries notorious for their hostility to their Muslim minorities and opposition to the cultural and racial diversity of today’s European societies.

That reactions to the cartoons have been so passionate should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following developments in the Muslim world closely. To Muslims, the caricatures vividly brought back the scenes of Israeli bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes in Jenin, the invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of Baghdad, terrors of Abu Ghraib and humiliations of Guantanamo Bay.

Cultural arrogance was added to political aggressiveness. Muslims have grown used to the torrent of terrifying images that associate them and their faith with the most horrifying of practices, from violence and cruelty to fanaticism and oppression. When it comes to Islam, all boundaries and limits could be dispensed with. The unacceptable becomes perfectly acceptable, proper and respectable.

The truth is that today racism, intolerance, xenophobia, and hatred of the other hide behind the sublime façade of free speech, the defence of “our” values and protection of “our” society from “foreign” aggression.

Let us not be deceived about this rhetoric of liberalism and free speech. The Danish cartoons have nothing to do with freedom of expression and everything to do with hatred of the other in a Europe grappling with its growing Muslim minorities, still unable to accept them.

Muhammad, who had been depicted in medieval legends as a bloodthirsty warrior with a sword in one hand and a Quran in another, is now made to brandish bombs and guns. Little seems to have changed about Western consciousness of Islam.

The collective medieval Christian memory has been recycled, purged of eschatology and incorporated into a modern secularised rhetoric that goes unquestioned today.

The medieval world abounded with hostile stories, folktales, poems and sermons of Muhammad where the imagination was given free reign.

About Muhammad, or “Mathomus” all could be said since, as the 11^th-century chronicler Guilbert of Nogent had put it: “One may safely say ill of a man whose malignity transcends and surpasses whatever evil can be said about him” (Dei Gesta per Francos, 1011).

Guilbert’s Muhammad, like that of most medieval authors, bears little resemblance to the historical Muhammad, or his journey.

Just as in the Danish caricatures, he appears as a scoundrel who used licentiousness and the promise of paradise with its many beautiful virgins to lure men into following him. His career was devoid of virtue. His vast empire was built on slaughter and bloodshed.

In the popular Chansons de Geste, written from the 11th to the 14th century at the height of crusading fervour, reflecting sentiments and beliefs that were widely accepted, Muhammad and his followers, the “Saracens” are described in the most grotesque of terms.

Creatures of Satan, they are painted with huge noses and ears, blacker than ink with only their teeth showing white, eyes like burning coals, teeth that can bite like a serpent, some with horns like the antlers of stags.

Humans inherit their prejudices as they do their language. Europe has inherited an enormous body of stereotypes of the Muslim elaborated in the course of many centuries of confrontation with Muslim civilisation.

Islam could not be regarded with the same detached curiosity as the far away cultures or beliefs of China or India. Islam was always a major factor of European history.

As the historian Richard Southern put it, Islam was Latin Christendom’s greatest problem, a mighty military and cultural challenge, dazzling in its power, wealth, learning and civilisation.

In the heart of Europe, its poor northerly neighbour, it generated an array of emotions that ranged from fascination to fear and resentment.

When in the 11th century European writers began to form a notion of what it meant to be European, they found themselves faced with a powerful Islam, which they were neither able nor willing to understand.

Islam was integral to the European notion of the self. The encounter with the Muslim other was fundamental to the formulation of the Western world view, particularly in the centuries that began in the Crusades and culminated in the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire.

By forcing the continent to find ways of concerted action, Islam encouraged Europe towards a stronger sense of “self” and a stronger sense of the “other”. In more ways than one, Islam was Europe’s midwife.

In the tense post September 11th climate, with its pre-emptive strikes, growing military interventions and increasingly powerful right-wing parties, the medieval arsenal of fantasies and stereotypes of Islam and Muslims has been brought back to life. Gone are the devils and Antichrists of medieval legends and polemics.

But their bleak outlook on Islam and the Muslim lingers on unchanged. It survives in an essentialist self-enclosed discourse centred on a mythical pure self permanently pitted against an imaginary dehumanised, demonised Muslim other.

In the past as in the present, religion, culture and the politics of fear are placed at the service of the great games of dominance and mastery.

Make no mistake about it: This is a political conflict that speaks in the language of culture and religion. The conflict is not between “we” and “they”, not between cultures and civilisations, but within the same cultural and political front.

The battle must be fought, a battle against intolerance, hatred, myth of cultural superiority and will to hegemony over the other.

Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.

The opinions expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of Aljazeera.

Ghannoushi is currently writing a book on Western Representations of Islam Past and Present.

Haartez reports an interesting development amongst the anti-Muslims who are trying to forge ties across borders.

Europe far right courts Israel in anti-Islam drive

Far-right political parties in Europe are stepping up their anti-Muslim rhetoric and forging
ties across borders, even going so far as to visit Israel to hail the Jewish state as a bulwark against militant Islam.

National Front leader Marine Le Pen has shocked the French political elite in recent days by comparing Muslims who pray outside crowded mosques — a common sight during the holy month of Ramadan — to the World War Two Nazi occupation.

Oskar Freysinger, a champion of the Swiss ban on minarets, warned a far-right meeting in Paris on Saturday against “the demographic, sociological and psychological Islamisation of Europe”. German and Belgian activists also addressed the crowd.

Geert Wilders, whose populist far-right party supports the Dutch minority government, told Reuters last week he was organising an “international freedom alliance” to link
grass-roots groups active in “the fight against Islam”.

Earlier this month, Wilders visited Israel and backed its West Bank settlements, saying Palestinians there should move to Jordan. Like-minded German, Austrian, Belgian, Swedish and other far-rightists were on their own Israel tour at the same time.

“Our culture is based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism and (the Israelis) are fighting our fight,” Wilders told Reuters in Amsterdam last week. “If Jerusalem falls, Amsterdam and New York will be next.”

While he seeks anti-Muslim allies abroad, Wilders said some older far-right parties such as France’s National Front or the British National Party were “blunt racist parties I don’t care for” and he would avoid cooperating with them.

Campaigns aimed at Muslims have been gaining ground in Europe, most notably with the Swiss minaret ban last year and France’s law this year against full facial veils in public, which Wilders said the Netherlands should copy next year.

Support for these steps has spread beyond anti-immigrant parties and towards the political centre as globalisation and the ageing of Europe’s population fuel voters’ concerns about national sovereignty, according to a leading French analyst.

Political scientist Dominique Reynie said the financial crisis had prompted more voters to agree with the far right that their political elites were incompetent.

“Some people refuse what they see as a change in their cultural or religious surroundings,” he told the Paris daily Le Monde. “These are the problems posed by mosques, burqas and the provisions of halal food.”

Some on the far right see similar trends in the United States. Wilders attended a rally in New York on Sept. 11 to protest against a mosque planned near Ground Zero and the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, Heinz Christian Strache, has said he wants to visit the United States to meet leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Marine Le Pen, who is preparing to succeed her father Jean-Marie as head of the National Front, had in recent years toed a more moderate line before her anti-Muslim comments. She notably refused to echo the anti-Semitic views expressed by her
father.

On Sunday, she insisted all public subsidies for building mosques must stop. Several politicians and Muslim leaders have said Muslims often pray in the street because they do not have enough space in mosques and urged that more be built.

The rightists’ Israel visits set what some analysts call the “new far right” apart from older extremists who were often anti-Semitic and backed Arab countries against the Jewish state.

Declaring support for Israel gives them an opportunity to oppose Muslim opinion in their home countries, since European Muslims are often pro-Palestinian, as well as celebrate the Jewish state as the front line against militant Islam.

“It is not Israel’s duty to provide a Palestinian state,” Wilders said in a speech in Tel Aviv. “There already is a Palestinian state and that state is Jordan.”

A so-called “Jerusalem Declaration” issued by four other European rightists during their Israel visit also staunchly defended the country’s existence and its right to defend itself
“against all aggression, especially Islamic terror.”

Heinz-Christian Strache from Austria, German Freedom Party head Rene Stadtkewitz, Sweden Democrat MP Kent Ekeroth and Filip Dewinter, head of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party, denied they were stoking Islamophobia with their statement.

“The Arab-Israeli conflict illustrates the struggle between Western culture and radical Islam,” Dewinter said in Tel Aviv. Strache made a similar link to Europe, telling a conference in Ashkelon — a city that has been hit by rockets from the nearby Gaza Strip — that Israel faced “an Islamic terror threat that aims right for the heart of our society”.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz accused the rightists of “trading in their Jewish demon-enemy for the Muslim  criminal-immigrant model” and visiting Israel only to get
“Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power”.

Coexistence with Islam will destroy America because the Moozlims are sinisterly planning to undermine Western civilization. That is the message of a new editorial in the Washington Times. Yes, the stealth jihad conspiracy turns its ugly head again as we are warned – without any academic studies or proof – that the imminent “Islamic tsunami” and “Islamic tidal wave” are threatening everything we hold dear.

Is an Islamic tidal wave coming? “There is a plan to take over Western civilization,” warns David Rubin, “and we need to recognize it for what it is.” Mr. Rubin is a native New Yorker who served as mayor of the Israeli town of Shiloh. He spoke to The Washington Times about his new book, “The Islamic Tsunami: Israel and America in the Age of Obama.”

Who is David Rubin and what are his credentials to speak as an expert on Islam? Well, none, unless you consider rave reviews by far-right extremist demagogues like David Horowitz and Pat Robertson something to be proud of.

The entire editorial speaks of a monolithic, singular-minded, totalitarian Islam bent on destroying America. Not just extremists, but Islam itself. This perfectly fits the accepted textbook definition of Islamophobia by the Runnymede Trust:

1.      Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.

2.      Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.

3.      Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.

4.      Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’.

5.      Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.

6.      Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.

7.      Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.

8.      Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Islamophobia (irrational fear of Islam) is exactly what the Washington Times is spreading when they speak of the menacing hoards of Saracens secretly teaming up with Democrats to undermine Western civilization. The Times continues:

Confronting the growing threat to Western civilization first involves admitting the problem exists, something President Obama not only refuses to do but strongly denies. The administration has censored any discussion of the problem in these terms within the government, preferring to focus on ill-defined “violent extremism” when the real extremist threat is only partly violent and wholly Islamicist. Mr. Rubin notes that Mr. Obama‘s vaunted outreach effort to the world’s Muslims has been “a total failure in generating respect for the Judeo-Christian world.” The president keeps reaching out, but Islam is not reaching back.

It is very strange to see how “Islam” (1.5 billion people) can be collectively accused of snubbing President Obama’s outreach. Never mind the research which shows most American Muslims are mainstream moderates citizens. Ignore their insidious attempts at interfaith peace! We can only assume our government officials should stop using the term “violent extremism” and instead declare outright holy war against Islam. The Times continues:

Instead of pandering to Islam in hopes that somehow the threat will go away, Mr. Rubin says the United States needs to rediscover its roots. “The United States is a country built on Biblical foundations,” he said. “The United States needs to cease apologizing for what it is and where it comes from.” That America is a pluralistic nation in which people from many cultures may live, work and flourish doesn’t overshadow the fact that the country was founded on a specific set of ideals that enabled this pluralistic culture to take root. Islamism constitutes a mortal threat to those ideals, just as fascism and communism did for previous generations.

Despite what moral relativists believe, all belief systems are not created equal. A moral defense of the American ideal is possible and increasingly necessary. Mr. Rubin believes Americans “do not have to be ashamed” of the religious basis of the country’s founding. “America is built on freedom of worship, but of a particular religious root,” he says. The United States has to reclaim and defend the civilization on which it is based or risk declining into second-rate status and being overwhelmed by the tsunami steadily building on the horizon.

Now we are told the “threat” will not go away until we stop “pandering to Islam,” whatever that means. We can only assume that America should immediately stop all diplomacy with Muslim nations and forego any attempt at peaceful interfaith coexistence. If we don’t stand up now, the Moozlim hoards will quickly achieve the ¾ majority of states needed to change the Constitution into Sharia law!

So there you have it. Western civilization is under immediate existential threat by a shadowy, vague Islamic tsunami. The sky is falling! How exactly the religion of Islam will bring Western civilization crashing down is left to the imagination. No specific prescriptions are given to deal with this allegedly clear and present danger, so worried readers are left to find their own ways of saving their doomed civilization; such as attacking random Imams, bullying the local Muslim school boy, vandalizing or pipe bombing a random mosque, stabbing a random Muslim cabby, or agitating to nuke Muslim cities.

What can we do to save our civilization? We can only assume.

European Loonieness keeps marching on. Instead of focusing on combating the anti-Muslim sentiment raging in France they French elite chose to focus on the 500 women who wear Niqab. Go figure!

French far-right star compares praying Muslims to Nazi occupiers

(Reuters)

Marine Le Pen has put paid to the idea she would put a softer face on France’s National Front for elections in 2012 with anti-Muslim comments that have aroused a storm of criticism. Le Pen, the likely next far-right challenger for the French presidency, compared overflowing mosques in France with the Nazi occupation — remarks indicative of a drift to the right in parts of Europe that could let the National Front eat into support for the ruling conservative UMP party in 2012.

Le Pen, the frontrunner to succeed her father Jean-Marie Le Pen as head of the party, made the comments on a television show last Thursday with about 3.4 million viewers watching. On Monday she dismissed any suggestion of a gaffe. “My comments were absolutely not a blunder, but a completely thought-out analysis,” she told a news conference, adding she was merely saying out loud what everyone thought privately.

Given support of 12 to 14 percent in recent opinion polls, Marine Le Pen is regarded as more electable than her father, who was convicted in 1990 for inciting racial hatred. But her remarks suggest that far from moderating the party line, she will go all out to outgun conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to secure the slice of the French electorate that opposes high immigration.

(Photo: Marine Le Pen at National Front headquarters in Nanterre near Paris December 13, 2010/Jacky Naegelen)

“The National Front has changed: it’s more dangerous than before,” said an editorial in the left-leaning Liberation daily after mainstream politicians and Muslim leaders slammed Le Pen’s comments. “Given a lick of paint by Marine, xenophobia is back in the spotlight.”

On Thursday, she told a party meeting that after a steady rise in the number of Islamic veils and burqas worn in France, home to five million Muslims, the crowds praying outside mosques were akin to an occupation.

Her remarks chime with a growing right-wing mood among voters in Europe, where far-right parties are taking up worries that high immigration facilitates Islamic fundamentalist terror cells and makes tight labour markets even tighter. Since France banned burqas, which cloak a woman’s face and body, calls for bans have been heard elsewhere in Europe, most loudly in the Netherlands where populist politician Geert Wilders wants to tighten rules on immigration and ban the Koran.

In France the National Front scored a strong result in regional elections in early 2010, even after Sarkozy offered tough solutions of his own on immigration and crime. The party is enjoying a revival reminiscent of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise showing in the 2002 presidential election when he got through to the second round before losing to conservative Jacques Chirac.

(Photo: German troops march past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 14 June 1940/German Federal Archive)

Marine Le Pen’s remarks on Muslims provoked angry comment. Several UMP politicians spoke out against them, and government spokesman Francois Baroin called them “one more provocation”. Veteran socialist Laurent Fabius called them shameful and France’s anti-racist group MRAP filed a lawsuit against Marine Le Pen for incitement to racial hatred.

“These remarks constitute a serious attack on the dignity of Muslims in France and are synonymous with an incitement to hate and violence,” France’s Muslim Council (CFCM) said in a statement. CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, also protested: “The Crif is outraged by the comments of Marine Le Pen comparing prayers in the street to the Occupation, which were made only to stigmatise the Muslim community. These remarks amount to a double and dishonest manipulation of history and language.”

Analysts view Le Pen as much closer to Wilders than far-right leaders of her father’s generation, but note that to keep her party faithful from drifting towards the UMP she needs to cling more than ever to hardline principles. “Le Pen has realised the limits of de-demonising the National Front — it works on the outside but less so with her militants,” analyst Sylvain Crepon told Liberation.

(Photo: Jean-Marie Le Pen with a campaign poster that reads “No to Islamism. Youth with Le Pen” and shows a map of France covered by an Algerian flag and minarets, March 7, 2010/Jean-Paul Pelissier)

Analyst Dominique Reynie said that by reinforcing her base, Le Pen would bite into Sarkozy’s first and second-round scores if he seeks reelection in 2012. “If the National Front gets a high score, that means it has taken votes from the left. Those may not necessarily go to the candidate on the right afterwards,” he wrote in a column.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck puts forward the lie that ten percent of Muslims are terrorists.

Glenn Beck: Ten Percent Of Muslims Are Terrorists (AUDIO)

(Huffington Post)

Glenn Beck said he thinks ten percent of all Muslims are terrorists.

As ThinkProgress pointed out, Beck’s estimate would mean that roughly 157 million Muslims in the world are terrorists.

Speaking on his radio show Monday, Beck decried the relative lack of coverage that the news media is giving to the figures he discusses day after day on his radio and television shows.

“We have revolutionaries here in America speaking — American citizens speaking — about an open violent revolution and no one will cover it!” Beck said. “Would they cover it if you had tape of al Qaeda saying they’re going to get out in the streets, they want violence? Of course you would!”

Beck surmised that the media don’t think that the threats he describes are sufficient enough to cover seriously. However, he said, they should look at the havoc a relatively small number of “Islamic terrorists” had caused:

“What is the number of Islamic terrorists? One percent? I think it’s closer to ten percent but the rest of the PC world will tell you, ‘oh no, it’s minuscule.’ OK, well, let’s take you at your one percent. Look at the havoc one percent of Muslims causing in the rest of the world. You don’t think one percent, half a percent here in the United States of radicals, of people who want to violently overthrow the government, is a problem?”

UPDATE: As The Huffington Post’s Sebastian Howard pointed out on Twitter, Beck’s figure of ten percent is hardly new. In fact, Beck used the same statistic in his 2003 book, “The Real America.” In it, Beck says that he has concluded, after “reading and prayer,” that, while ninety percent of Islam is peaceful, “ten percent wants to see us dead.” The remaining ten percent, he writes, is “composed of extreme radicals who have taken Islam through a time tunnel and twisted it into something ugly and barbaric.”

Loonwatch has previously reported the links between the Tea Party and the far-right English Defense League or individual loons like Rick Lazio, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, and aBrooklyn group protesting Park51. We’ve posted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams’ “Allah is a Monkey God, Muslims are His Animals” remarks along with his amusing charges that the NAACP is a “racist” group. We’ve posted the NAACP’s resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party.

Now the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has released a study of the Tea Party showing that nativism and bigotry is rampant within the movement. It’s not just blacks, gays, Latinos, immigrants, and Muslims.

Tea Partiers are equal opportunity haters.

The complete 94-page report, which studies six of the national Tea Party organizations and includes a forward by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes several efforts that the various Tea Party organizations have made to soften criticism for their racism. For instance, Mark Williams was eventually fired for his Islamophobic remarks, as was Tim Ravndal for his calls for violence against gays. It also cautions that not everyone within the Tea Party movement is a racist:

“It would be a mistake to claim that all Tea Partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another, and this report manifestly does not make that claim. As this report highlights, however, all of the national Tea Party factions have had problems in these areas. Of the national factions, only FreedomWorks Tea Party, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues — an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents.”

But the report takes the Tea Party to task for the nativism found within most groups, suggesting that its core issues are less economic and more xenophobic:

“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”

“While Tea Partiers and their supporters are concerned about the current economic recession and the increase in government debt and spending it has occasioned, there is no observable statistical link between Tea Party membership and unemployment levels.”

The report warns:

“Tea Party organizations have given platforms to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots. Further, hard-core white nationalists have been attracted to these protests, looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protestors towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy. One temperature gauge of these events is the fact that longtime national socialist David Duke is hoping to find money and support enough in the Tea Party ranks to launch yet another electoral campaign in the 2012 Republican primaries. [...] The leading figures in one national faction, 1776 Tea Party (the faction more commonly known as TeaParty.org), were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. Tea Party Nation has provided a gathering place for so-called birthers and has attracted Christian nationalists and nativists.”

The largest and fastest growing group is Tea Party Patriots. The report describes its May 2010 convention in Gatlinburg:

“Notable among the workshops were presentations by Pam Geller, an anti-Islam agitator; and a set by the Oath Keepers, a quasi-militia group that focuses on recruiting law enforcement officers and military personnel, and defending their version of the Constitution. A similar workshop with Spike Constitution Defenders, mixed a bit of Posse Comitatus-style rhetoric into their propaganda. Another workshop presenter, Samuel Duck, conducted a workshop advocating repeal of both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendment.”

The second largest Tea Party group is ResistNet which is described as “notable” as a home to nativists and Islamophobes. It includes a number of militia members and anti-immigration activists, including Robert Dameron, founder of Citizens for the State of Washington (Yakima, WA); Wendell Neal, leader of the Tulsa Minutemen (Broken Arrow, OK); Mike Jarbeck, director of the Florida chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (Orlando, FL); David Caulkett, creator of IllegalAliens.us and Report Illegals (Pompano Beach, FL); Robin Hvidston of the Southern California Minuteman Project and Gilchrist Angels (Upland, CA); Ruthie Hendrycks, founder of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (Hanska, MN); Evert Evertsen, founder of Minutemen Midwest (Harvard, IL); and Rosanna Pulido, the founder of the Chicago Minutemen and a former staffer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Chicago, IL).

The report adds:

“Another ResistNet partner organization is TakeAmericaBack.org, a website launched in April 2009 to publish anti-immigrant propaganda. One article claimed that ‘multiculturalism’ demands that ‘Americans learn to speak Spanish so illegals can take over America with foreign cultures.’ Another article on this site concluded that ‘a Kenyan, Communist, son of a terrorist, as our wannabe president, who has not only expressed his hatred of America, but is also an avowed Muslim…’ Also included among the official partners is a trio of groups run by anti-Islam activist Pam Geller.”

“It is this untenable attempt to vilify President Obama as ‘non-American’ and ‘foreign’ that pushes a significant number of ResistNet Tea Partiers out of the ranks of a responsible opposition and into the columns of bigots and xenophobes.”

One minor quibble: it’s not just the attack on President Obama that moves these wackos into the column of bigotry and xenophobia.

Next in membership and growth is Tea Party Nation. Describing its Convention in Nashville in February 2010:

“Despite all of these pre-conference difficulties, the convention in Nashville was well attended. Sarah Palin spoke there, generating discussion about her speaking fee, rumored to be over $100,000. Underneath the hoopla attending Palin’s appearance, the convention highlighted the place of Christian conservatives, indeed Christian nationalism, inside this movement generally, and in Judson’s Tea Party Nation specifically. The convention also built bridges to nativists and so-called birthers. There was a marked shift away from a supposed focus on bailouts and budget deficits towards a culture war.”

The convention was also attended by an inexplicable (and to this Jewish writer, a disgusting) number of Jewish ultraconservatives, including Andrew Breitbart, Orly Taitz, and members of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It wasn’t that long ago that we were reviled by such bigots; now some of us are sleeping with these people.

At the bottom of the list and the bottom of the barrel is the 1776 Tea Party, heavily loaded with vigilante militiamen. These guys (and the membership is overwhelmingly male) practically define the word “fringe.”

“On February 27, 2009, Robertson attended a Tea Party event in Houston with a sign reading ‘Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.’ He’s also sent out racist fundraising emails depicting President Obama as a pimp. Robertson also has a history of promoting anti-Semites on his ‘Tea Party Hour’ radio program. Both incidents increased the negative publicity surrounding the 1776 Tea Party, but its notoriety did not stop two leaders of an anti-immigrant vigilante group, Minuteman Project, from stepping in to run the 1776 organization.”

The report includes a chapter, Tea Parties – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. The Tea Party is riddled with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, militia members, and Christian Identity spokesmen. Dale Robertson, chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, supports the views of Pastor John Weaver:

“According to [Weaver's] particular theology, Jews are considered a satanic force (or the incarnation of Satan himself), and people of color are considered less than fully human. By contrast, the white people of northern Europe are considered racial descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel, and the United States of America is considered their ‘promised land;’ a theory descended from a theology known as British-Israelism. Although Weaver describes his particular outlook as a variant of ‘Dominionism,’ his essay, ‘The Sovereignty of God and Civil Government’ was listed in a book catalogue published by the British-Israel World Federation. As such, this would place Weaver just one step to the right of the most radical forms of Christian fundamentalism. The list of out-front anti-Semites on Tea Party platforms includes an event in July 2009. One thousand people gathered in Upper Senate Park for a rally in D.C. A full line-up of speakers included representatives from several tax reform groups, FreedomWorks, and talk show hosts. Also on the platform that day was the band Poker Face, playing music, providing technical back up, and receiving nothing but plaudits from the crowd. The band, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, already had a reputation for anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete was on the public record calling the Holocaust a hoax, and writing and performing for American Free Press — a periodical published by Willis Carto, the godfather of Holocaust denial in the United States. According to Topete, ‘The Rothschilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.’ Because of their bigotry, the band had been kicked off venues at Rutgers University in 2006 and a Ron Paul campaign event in 2007. But they made it to the stage of the Tea Party without any questions asked.”

And there’s a lot more in the IREHR document: David Duke, European fascists, neoconservatives, and loons like Pamela Geller. But in the interests of space and time, read the frightening report yourself.

http://teapartynationalism.com/index.php

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is on a rampage.  It’s been one conspiracy theory after another, often with an anti-Semitic twist. In June, Beck promoted The Red Network, a book by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Elizabeth Dilling. In September, Beck promoted another book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, written by Eustance Mullin, described in his obituary as a “nationally known white supremacist and anti-Semite.” And lately, Beck has devoted several days of coverage to his crusade against Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Soros is no stranger to criticism, but is it right for a so-called “news anchor” to invoke the holocaust for cheap political points?

Several Jewish groups have spoken out against Mr. Beck’s pattern of anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering, such as the Jewish Funds for Justice and the Anti-Defamation League. Media outlets joined the criticism as well, like Howard Kurtz on CNN, Reason magazine , and Commentary magazine.

Apparently, Beck’s shenanigans have gone too far this time, prompting conservatives like David Frum to complain about the right-wing’s “closed information systems based upon pretend information.” Frum writes in the New York Times:

Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

More like alternative delusions. We’ve seen how quick CNN was to fire Rick Sanchez for his off-the-cuff remarks about Jews and Jon Stewart. Such is the nature of professional news organizations who don’t want to be seen as pandering to anti-Semitism. But has Beck gone too far for Fox News?

Sadly, no. Fox stands by the nutty professor Beck. Apparently their cost-benefit analysis has concluded that Beck’s rabble-rousing anti-Semitic flirtations bring in more profit and ratings than harm to the company’s reputation. So much for “fair and balanced.”

So now I have to ask: what if Beck was Muslim? What if, for example, Fareed Zakaria of CNN had spewed anti-Semitic nonsense on national television?

Following Islamophobic doctrine, as articulated by Pam Geller and company, we’d see the anti-Muslim blogosphere fired up by the same less-than-lazy comparisons between Muslims and Nazis. Then we’d see more of the same outpour of vitriolic hate speech from the Stop the Islamization of America crowd. Fox News would continue to aid and abet the anti-Muslim counter-culture by smearing () ordinary mainstream Muslim leaders. (Yawn). And as usual, missing from the story would be good examples of Muslims saving Jews during World War 2 out of religious conviction to love thy neighbor, or mainstream American Muslims standing alongside Jews under attack by extremists, or the myriad of interfaith initiatives that bring together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others to promote world peace. If mentioned at all, these positive stories would be explained away as silly Muslims who don’t know that their faith equals Nazism or just more ultimate intellectual cop-outs.

What we are witnessing here is the phenomenon of selective outrage, a tribalistic notion of us-versus-the-Moozlims, my country right-or-wrong, a rejection of immutable ethical principles applied evenly to all human beings regardless of race, color, gender, or religion. Rather, we see that when one of “them” is an anti-Semite, it gets projected onto all Islam and Muslims forever, but when one of “us” is an anti-Semite, well… nothing.

Closed information systems based on pretend information, you say? Precisely.

Ann Coulter advocates profiling Mooslim looking people

Hmmmm…are terrorists all foreign looking?

Judson Phillips is a complete and utter loon

Notice the assumptions: 1) assuming that Rep. Keith Ellison does not support the U.S. Constitution, 2) that Islam instructs its adherents to kill those who disagree with Islam, and 3) that Islam tells its adherents to kill Jews.

This is irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric that can and will lead to the continuing demonization of Muslims in the United States as well as to violent actions against Muslim Americans. Judson Phillips is not just a loon, but a disgusting human being without an ounce of knowledge about the religion of Islam. The statements he made below are completely contradictory: he says voters shouldn’t not vote for a Muslim politician because of their religion, but at the same time he says that Islam tells Muslims to not be loyal to the United States and to kill people who disagree with them (meaning, don’t vote for the people with the crazy religion!). His bigotry is as apparent as it could possibly be.

Tea Party Nation founder: I have a real problem with Islam (Salon.com)

Judson Phillips, the Tea Party Nation leader who recently called for the defeat of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., because he is Muslim, has put up a new blog post clarifying his views:

Should we vote out Keith Ellison just because he is a Muslim? No.

So that’s that, then? Nope. Phillips goes on to suggest that maybe having a Muslim in Congress isn’t such a good idea after all:

But his beliefs define his character and his character is a central issue. Do we want someone who supports and defends the Constitution or someone who supports the imposition of a theocracy?

Should Muslims be denied the right to run for office because of their religion? No. The Constitution specifies that no religious test can be used to exclude someone from public office. But when someone adheres to an ideology that says kill people who disagree with you, that is something voters should seriously consider when they vote.

Liberals go nuts when they hear this stuff. They think we should simply forget and just be “tolerant.”

I learned everything I needed to know about tolerance on September 11th.

And he also talks to Chris Moody at the Daily Caller:

“A majority of Tea Party members, I suspect, are not fans of Islam,” Phillips said. “I, personally have a real problem with Islam. With Islam, you have a religion that says kill the Jews, kill the infidels. It bothers me when a religion says kill the infidels. It bothers me a lot more when I am the infidel.”

So, to summarize: Phillips does not believe Ellison should be voted out because he is Muslim. But Phillips has a “real problem” with Islam, and he also thinks voters should “seriously consider” whether to vote for an adherent of Islam.

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:

From accused murderer to member of Congress?

BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT

In a race that has largely been flying under the national radar, a former Marine who killed two unarmed Iraqi prisoners in 2004 and who has made the threat of Islam and the “ground zero mosque” centerpieces of his campaign has a real shot at being elected to Congress.

Republican Ilario Pantano, 39, is taking on incumbent Mike McIntyre, a seven-term conservative Democrat, in North Carolina’s 7th District, which takes in the state’s southeast corner. If Pantano wins, he would surely be one of the most compelling — and right-wing — members of Congress. He told Salon in an interview Friday, for example, that he welcomes the endorsement of the far-right blogger and anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller.

Though there haven’t been recent polls on the race, two local political analysts told Salon that Pantano has a real shot, and the National Republican Congressional Committee recently started buying ads in the race after naming Pantano one of its top-tier “Young Guns.” While McIntyre has represented it since 1997, the 7th District actually voted for John McCain by 5 points in 2008.

Pantano’s biography has made him an irresistible subject for newspaper and magazine profiles even before this campaign (see, for example, this New York magazine cover story) and would almost certainly make him a darling of the neoconservative wing of the GOP if he is elected.

Pantano, who describes himself as a “born-again Christian and a born-again Southerner,” grew up in Manhattan, where he went to a fancy private high school on scholarship and then on to the Marines during the first Gulf War. When he got back, he went to NYU and worked as a trader at Goldman Sachs for a few years before becoming a consultant. He was in the city on Sept. 11, and that’s when he decided to rejoin the Marines. He was sent to Iraq.

It was there that, in a disputed April 2004 incident south of Baghdad, Pantano killed two unarmed Iraqi prisoners, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil. The incident occurred after the two men had been arrested as suspected insurgents and Pantano directed them to search their own car. According to Pantano’s version of events, the men moved toward him in a threatening way and he opened fire in self-defense, shooting up to 60 rounds and killing both of them. He then put a sign next to the bodies with a Marine slogan: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” Pantano told New York magazine: “I believed that by firing the number of rounds that I did, I was sending a message” to other potential insurgents.

In 2005, Pantano was formally accused of premeditated murder, partly on the strength of testimony of other Marines present during the incident who believed it was not justified. But after a series of hearings, the military brass agreed with Pantano’s version of events and he was cleared of the murder charges.

By that time, Pantano’s ordeal had became a cause célèbre among conservative media like the Washington Times, which reported on the ins and outs of the trial. His cause was championed by talk radio host Michael Savage and others who felt the U.S. military had no business prosecuting one of its own over the killings of Iraqis. Capitalizing on that publicity, Pantano wrote with a co-author a book on his experiences, “Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.” On the ensuing book tour, he charmed many of his interviewers, including Jon Stewart.

Pantano took some criticism last week for editing a reference to the killings out of news clips he was using in a campaign ad. But one of the remarkable things about the campaign in North Carolina this year is that the murder charges are not only not an issue, but have barely even been talked about.

David McLennan, a political scientist at North Carolina’s Peace College, told Salon that the issue could backfire for McIntyre, the Democratic incumbent, particularly in a district with a large ex-military population.

“There are some people in the district who consider Pantano to be a hero. For McIntyre to raise that issue is just way too delicate,” McLennan says.

Some of the only criticism of Pantano’s past has ironically come from the man he beat in the GOP primary, fellow Iraq war vet Will Breazeale. He told the Daily Beast after his primary loss that he considers Pantano “dangerous,” adding: “I’ve taken prisoners in Iraq and there’s no excuse for what he did.”

Asked by Salon if he is surprised that his critics have largely ignored the Iraq incident, Pantano was defiant. “If they want to question my war effort — if they think that’s prudent, they can go ahead … I’ve served my country proudly in two wars.”

His campaign has focused to an unusual extent on opposing the Park51 Islamic community center project in New York, which he refers to as a “Martyr Marker” that’s really about “territorial conquest.”

“If they think that the threat of inflaming the Muslim street is enough for Americans to back down, they’re deluding themselves,” he said. “We have our own street to worry about being inflamed.”

Or as he wrote in a Daily Caller Op-Ed over the summer that connected the mosque organizers to the threat from Iran and the Gaza flotilla:

If Mosques go up like mushrooms everywhere there is a bombing or a shooting we will create a perverse incentive, not a deterrent. This mosque at Ground Zero will serve as a big Trojan trophy; and we are welcoming it?

This kind of rhetoric has attracted the enthusiastic support of Pamela Geller, the blogger who leads a group called Stop the Islamization of America and who played a key role in creating the “ground zero mosque” controversy. Most candidates might tread carefully when dealing with a Geller (among the conspiracies she subscribes to is a theory that Malcolm X is President Obama’s real father).

But not Pantano.

Geller’s endorsement is proudly reprinted on his website. “I very much appreciate Pamela Geller’s endorsement,” Pantano told Salon, calling her a “patriot.”

He said he had no qualms about speaking at an anti-mosque rally on Sept. 11 near ground zero earlier this month with Geller and other controversial figures like Geert Wilders, a Dutch parliamentarian who advocates restricting civil liberties for Muslims.

Says Pantano of the mosque issue and his campaign: “I see this as a war for the heart of our country.”

Here he is speaking at ground zero, introduced by Geller:

More European loonieness. An Austrian right-wing party has created a game that takes aim at minarets and muezzins.

Austrian Anti-Muslim Game Stokes Outrage

A right-wing Austrian political party’s published a flash game in which the countryside is overrun with minarets and mosques and players must stop their construction. Because nationalism and xenophobia’s so much more fun when it’s in the German language!

Moschee Baba (“Bye-Bye Mosque”) is a minute-long, shooting-gallery type game in which a stop sign is clicked on a minaret, mosque, or muezzin (the guys who sound the morning calls to prayer). It’s a political ad for the Freedom Party in the Styrian province; regional elections are coming at the end of the month.

No one’s killed and nothing’s destroyed in the game, but its tone is pretty hateful and paranoid and it’s pissed off political opponents but good. Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Muslim community have demanded the game’s removal and an investigation for “incitement.”

The game is, of course, a gross caricature of the reality of the situation in Austria. Only four mosques with a visible minaret exist in the country. None are in Styria, whose population is 1.2 percent Muslim.

After the game ends, it serves players with a push poll, asking if there should be a ban on minaret construction, wearing of burqas, niqabs or other Islamic garments, and if Muslims should sign some oath accepting Austrian law’s primacy over the Koran. Fun stuff.

Far-Right Anti-Mosque Video Game Triggers Outrage In Austria [Reuters]

Send an email to the author of this post at owen@kotaku.com.

Also see AlJazeera: Fury in Austria at anti-Mosque Game

Robert Spencer popularized the term “Stealth Jihad,” and some in the Conservative wing such as Newt Gingrich have ran with it and are using it all the time. As has been exposed on Loonwatch and other sites, “Stealth Jihad” is paranoid speak and just another anti-Muslim conspiracy theory.

Lisa Miller takes on this term in her recent article which no doubt will have Spencer, whose site is described as “a hyperventilating anti-terror blog,” in fits.

The Misinformants

By Lisa Miller

Here is the latest semantic assault from the party that brought you “Islamo-facism” (circa 2005) and “Axis of Evil” (2002). The term “stealth jihad” is suddenly voguish among politically ambitious right wingers who see President Obama’s approach to terrorism as insufficient. If it sounds like a phrase from a military-fantasy summer blockbuster, that’s on purpose: in its cartoonish bad-guy foreignness, “stealth jihad” attempts to make the terrorist threat broader and thus more nefarious than it already is. The only thing scarier than an invisible, homicidal, suicidal enemy with a taste for world domination is one who’s sneaking up on you. In the words of former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich at a July speech at the American Enterprise Institute, “stealth jihad” is an effort “to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.”

The term wasn’t Gingrich’s invention. It’s the title of a two-year-old book by Robert Spencer, whose hyperventilating antiterror blog, Jihad Watch, is cited and circulated widely on the far right. But the recent vicious debate over the proposed community center and mosque near Ground Zero gives Gingrich an excuse to use “stealth jihad” and its variants frequently—not just at the AEI but in an interview with this magazine. (In an essay on the conservative Web site Human Events, he referred instead to “creeping sharia.”) Gingrich’s like-minded peers have seized on the language, too. “Muslim Brotherhood operatives, like [Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the center’s founder and leader] are extremely skilled at obscuring … their true agenda,” said Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, on FOX’s Glenn Beck show. “It’s part of the stealth jihad.”
‘A Little Intolerant, But Good Reason To Be’ Protesters for and against the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero talk about their reasons for supporting or opposing the project.

Words matter, and if you say them often enough and with enough authority, they start to sound true—even if they’re not. Abdul Rauf, for instance, has no affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood and is an “operative” (another nefarious word) only in the sense that running a small, progressive interfaith nonprofit is an “operation.” As for his “stealth jihad,” it’s virtually impossible to imagine how such an event would—logistically—occur. Would the construction of an Islamic prayer site near Ground Zero inevitably lead American women to wake up one morning and find themselves veiled and confined to their homes? “The term is ever-so-slightly goofy,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. The paranoia conveyed by “stealth jihad” brings to mind the anticommunist campaigns of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, Nunberg adds. Just as McCarthyites imagined a communist behind every lamppost, the word “stealth” conflates all Muslims with terrorists. In a stealth campaign you never know who your friends are.

Also, simply put, foreign words freak people out. “Jihad” and “Sharia” reinforce the sense among Americans that Muslims in general have an unfathomable world view. During World War II, formerly obscure words like “hara-kiri” and “kamikaze,” which suggested the “warlike ferocity” of the Japanese, became common parlance, Nunberg says. “There was this sense of being confronted with this hostile, alien culture.” The Japanese were “literally demonized,” he says.

Gingrich has already used the mosque debate to evoke many of America’s historic enemies, comparing Muslims indirectly with Nazis and communists and even the Japanese. “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor,” he said on FOX recently.

But that is not true. Fourteen percent of Hawaiians call themselves ethnically Japanese, according to the U.S. Census, and dozens of Japanese temples stand near Pearl Harbor—as they have for decades. One of them, the Buddhist Aiea Hongwanji Mission, is less than half a mile away. “You can see Pearl Harbor from the roof, maybe. We’re really close,” says Wade Yamamoto, the temple’s treasurer. The temple allows people “to practice their religion from back home,” he says. Gingrich, a historian, might take a lesson here. After the attacks of Dec. 7, 1941, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent—two thirds of them American citizens—were interned in camps in a shameful episode that later legislation called the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Last week, a New York City cab driver was stabbed for answering the question “Are you a Muslim?” in the affirmative. Our enemies are dangerous. Let’s be clear about who they are.

With Johannah Cornblatt

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Google Buzz
• Yahoo Buzz
• Reddit
• Stumble
• Twitter
• RSS
• Email
• Print

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show continues to take on the mosque controversy. this time Aasif Mandvi was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the site of a different mosque controversy.

An excellent article by Nicholas Kristof on the issue of the Park51 Islamic cultural center and mosque. He portrays accurately how those fighting this are feeding into the ideology of Bin Laden and company.

Taking Bin Laden’s Side

Is there any doubt about Osama bin Laden’s position on the not-at-ground-zero mosque?

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores — not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

And this is an earnest effort. I know Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan — the figures behind the Islamic community center — and they are the real thing. Because I have written often about Arab atrocities in Darfur and about the abuse of women in Islamic countries, some Muslim leaders are wary of me. But Imam Feisal and Ms. Khan are open-minded and have been strong advocates for women within Islam.

The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don’t forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.

Remember also that historically, some of the most shocking brutality in the region was justified by the Bible, not the Koran. Crusaders massacred so many men, women and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian chronicler, Fulcher of Chartres, described an area ankle-deep in blood. While burning Jews alive, the crusaders sang, “Christ, We Adore Thee.”

My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor — but her family is Christian, not Muslim.

Precisely because Palestinian violence has roots outside of Islam, Israel originally supported the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials thought that if Gazans became more religious, they would spend their time praying rather than firing guns.

President George W. Bush was statesmanlike after 9/11 in reaching out to Muslims and speaking of Islam as a religion of peace. Now many Republicans have abandoned that posture and are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes. It is mind-boggling that so many Republicans are prepared to bolster the Al Qaeda narrative, and undermine the brave forces within Islam pushing for moderation.

Some Republicans say that it is not a matter of religious tolerance but of sensitivity to the feelings of relatives to those killed at ground zero. Hmm. They’re just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.

On my last trip to Saudi Arabia, I brought in a Bible to see what would happen (alas, the customs officer searched only my laptop bag). Memo to Ms. Palin: Should we learn from the Saudis and protect ground zero by banning the Koran from Lower Manhattan?

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.

A powerful piece by Ahmed Rehab in the Huffington Post laying the bottom line about the swelling controversy surrounding the “mosque at Ground Zero.”  (hat tip: Schmorgus)

The Untold Story of the Mosque at Ground Zero

by Ahmed Rehab | Huffington Post

Americans have a right to assemble and worship freely in this country, period. It’s not only a founding principle of this nation, but a main justification for its founding. It is why many White Christians flooded to this country in the first place.

Those opposed to American Muslims practicing their right to build a religious and cultural center on their private property near Ground Zero and in concordance with all laws and regulations reluctantly concede that they have no legal grounds to challenge it. So they argue instead that they should voluntarily forgo their right out of sensitivity for the sacredness of that site.

This is a particularly disingenuous line.

If it is about sensitivity for the sacred, then why aren’t those same people opposing the deli, bar, coffee shop, and offices, or strip club for that matter, that are open for business in that same sacred vicinity?

What is particularly indecent or insensitive about American Muslims building a house of peace, community, and worship that doesn’t apply to the New York Dolls gentlemen’s club?

Let’s be blunt: it is only indecent and insensitive if you buy into the canard that American Muslims are somehow collectively guilty for 9/11. That is the coded message at the heart of opposition to the center. It is a message we reject on its face.

American Muslims bear no collective guilt or blame for the crime of 9/11. We have nothing to apologize for and everything to be proud of, including our loyalty and hard-earned livelihoods. We are not guest citizens, we are not second-rate citizens; we reject marginalization and require no validation. We are equal citizens living and worshipping in our country.

We are part and parcel of the diversity of America including the diversity of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11. We are part of the diversity of the hundreds who were injured and those who were first responders to Ground Zero. We are part of the diversity of the millions who grieved and still grieve. When “they” attacked “us,” we were attacked. We are part of the “us” not the “they.”

The whole brouhaha about the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is frankly bogus. It has little to do with sacred ground, or sensitive hearts. It does however have everything to do with the exploitation of the sacred and the sensitive for the furtherance of the sacrilegious and the insensitive: the phenomenon of Muslim-bashing that is ravaging our nation today.

The Cordoba House, now Park51, is an old story. In fact, it was reported on in the New York Times and other mainstream media as far back as two years ago. Why the frenzy now?

That’s not all: Muslims have been worshipping at Mosque Manhattan a few blocks away from Ground Zero, long before Ground Zero was Ground Zero; in fact, since 1970, before the twin towers were the twin towers.

So again, why the sudden frenzy?

Failure to ask “why” is a collective indictment of the media establishment (with a few notable exceptions). Just as the media shirked its responsibilities in questioning the Bush administration on the justifications for the war in Iraq, now too it fails to properly investigate, scrutinize, and report the origins of this controversy. Here is what it failed to tell you:

The”Ground Zero Mosque” fiasco is a fabricated controversy that traces its origins to a couple of long-time anti-Muslim goons from the annals of the hate blogosphere by the names of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller as a flagship campaign of their newly founded organization, Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA). SIOA is part of an emerging phenomenon of astroturf anti-Muslim organizations that seek to project any public expression of Muslim life in this country as tantamount to a stealth “Islamization of America.” (Except it’s not so stealth since everyone and their mother is talking about it).

It was SIOA that first coined the misnomer “Mosque at Ground Zero,” purposely twisting the reality that the proposed Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero. It was the SIOA that sought to redefine Imam Rauf as a radical Imam even though he was heralded by the Bush administration, the FBI and others as a moderate voice of reason. It was the SIOA and its partners that ruthlessly sought to stoke the fears and suspicions of otherwise good, unsuspecting Americans.

The fact that bigots see fit to peddle sensational drivel for a living is not shocking.

The fact that the media is unwilling or incapable of calling it out is disturbing.

The fact that a significant segment of this population stands to be duped by it is disappointing.

And the fact that public officials who should know better are all too content pandering to the bigoted, misguided, and confused in search of votes this election season is outright nauseating.

Here’s another under reported fact:

The battle raging on now is not one that pits Muslims on one side and non-Muslims on the other as critics would have you believe. It is in fact a showdown between Americans of all backgrounds (Muslim and otherwise) who are fighting for the freedom and dignity of what it means to be American, on one side; and those who are willing to throw those values under the bus in exchange for publicity, notoriety, ratings, or votes, on the other.

It is a struggle between those wishing to affirm our pluralism and our equality as color-blind, race-blind, and faith-blind citizens and those wishing to immerse us into identity politics that make some more equal than others.

The Park51 battle is a microcosm of this generation’s struggle for the soul of America.

That’s the untold “Mosque at Ground Zero” story any red-blooded American journalist who still has respect for the integrity of the profession should be telling.

Justin Elliot has a good piece on Salon.com, but he would have benefited from our pieces, Pamela Geller: The Looniest Blogger Ever and SIOA is an anti-Muslim Hate Group.

How the “ground zero mosque” fear mongering began

by Justin Elliot

A group of progressive Muslim-Americans plans to build an Islamic community center two and a half blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan. They have had a mosque in the same neighborhood for many years. There’s another mosque two blocks away from the site. City officials support the project. Muslims have been praying at the Pentagon, the other building hit on Sept. 11, for many years.

In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast?

In a story last week, the New York Times, which framed the project in a largely positive, noncontroversial light last December, argued that it was cursed from the start by “public relations missteps.” But this isn’t accurate. To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Here’s a timeline of how it all happened:

• Dec. 8, 2009: The Times publishes a lengthy front-page look at the Cordoba project. “We want to push back against the extremists,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer, is quoted as saying. Two Jewish leaders and two city officials, including the mayor’s office, say they support the idea, as does the mother of a man killed on 9/11. An FBI spokesman says the imam has worked with the bureau. Besides a few third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site, no one much notices the Times story.
• Dec. 21, 2009: Conservative media personality Laura Ingraham interviews Abdul Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, while guest-hosting “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox. In hindsight, the segment is remarkable for its cordiality. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” Ingraham says of the Cordoba project, adding at the end of the interview, “I like what you’re trying to do.”
• (This segment also includes onscreen the first use that we’ve seen of the misnomer “ground zero mosque.”) After the segment — and despite the front-page Times story — there were no news articles on the mosque for five and a half months, according to a search of the Nexis newspaper archive.
• May 6, 2010: After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father. Seriously.)
• May 7, 2010: Geller’s group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launches “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!” (SIOA ‘s associate director is Robert Spencer, who makes his living writing and speaking about the evils of Islam.) Geller posts the names and contact information for the mayor and members of the community board, encouraging people to write. The board chair later reports getting “hundreds and hundreds” of calls and e-mails from around the world.
• May 8, 2010: Geller announces SIOA’s first protest against what she calls the “911 monster mosque” for May 29. She and Spencer and several other members of the professional anti-Islam industry will attend. (She also says that the protest will mark the dark day of “May 29, 1453, [when] the Ottoman forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses against the Muslim siege of Constantinople.” The outrage-peddling New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser argues in a note at the end of her column a couple of days later that “there are better places to put a mosque.”
• May 13, 2010: Peyser follows up with an entire column devoted to “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” This is a significant moment in the development of the “ground zero mosque” narrative: It’s the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months. Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a “human-rights group.” Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House’s opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011.

Michael Berry is un-American

I just discussed the profound double standards in the mainstream media here.  Here’s another one: right wing radio host Michael Berry says that he hopes someone blows up a mosque should one be constructed.  Remember when the Revolution Muslim clowns posted on some obscure internet forum saying that the producers of South Park might end up being killed?  These radical Muslims didn’t say they would kill anyone, or even that they hope for that (although you can and should read between the lines).

Yet, now we have someone who has upped the ante and said that he hopes a mosque is blown up.  Imagine the ruckus if a Muslim American leader said that he hopes a church or synagogue should be blown up.  The story would go viral, and the mainstream media would whip up a storm of crazy.  Meanwhile, Michael Berry says that he hopes a mosque should be blown up, and the story barely gets any coverage whatsoever.  It certainly doesn’t evoke a sense of national panic as a similar case would should Revolution Muslim publish a statement saying “we hope such-and-such Jewish synagogue is blown up.”

When Berry asks “what is your real name”, by this he means to say that only people with white names are real Americans.  Sorry to say, buddy, but our president is named Barack Hussein Obama.  Don’t like that?  Then you can leave this country.  If you don’t believe in our pluralistic society, then you can go to the Israeli Occupied Territories, the last place on earth where racial apartheid is in place.  But here in the U.S., we believe your name can be Barack Hussein Obama, Sanjay Gupta, or Muhammad Ali…and such people are just as American as Bob, Pete, and Michael.

As for his tribalistic response dividing the world into “us vs. them”, this is the same type of mentality exemplified by the jihadists.  What do Muslim Americans–many of whom were born and raised in the United States–have to do with what happens in Saudi Arabia?  Are all Muslims the Borg?  Are they somehow one sentient being?  If some Muslims in Saudi Arabia do something then that somehow falls on the shoulders of all Muslim Americans?  If some Muslims in Saudi Arabia prevent churches in Saudi Arabia, then Muslim Americans should pay for that and not be allowed to build mosques in America?  What is ironic is that this typifies the tu quoque fallacy that Robert Spencer and the rest of the Islamophobic world invokes when questioned about their two-faced hypocrisy.

Glenn Greenwald responded to this “tribalistic response” by pointing out that we wouldn’t fair so well in such an “us vs. them” comparison when it is considered that we are invading at least five Muslim countries, occupying two, launching illegal attacks against others, killing thousands of Muslim civilians, aiding the state of Israel in the enforcement of the most inhumane blockade today, etc. etc. etc.  The list goes on and on.  If you want the Official List and Score Chart, go ask Usama bin Ladin for it, because he likes tallying up the rights and wrongs of Team Muslim vs. Team Christian, which is the “us vs. them” mentality that is shared by Islamophobes and radical Muslims alike.

Berry’s guest, Tony, is wrong about one thing: Tony is not just as American as Berry.  Tony is way more American.  This country was founded upon the freedom of religion, which includes the right to build mosques.  Michael Berry is quite simply un-American if he can’t understand that.

Jerry Kane, a radical right-winger who belongs to the sovereign citizen movement gunned down two police officers and injured two others. Is this an instance of politics and race mixing with religion and ending in terrorism? Imagine if Kane had been a Muslim, this would be headline news across the nation, pundits and Islamophobes would be waying in on the “threat of homegrown terrorism” and we would all be frightened into hiding under our beds.

West Memphis Shooter: ‘If I have to kill one, Then I’m not going to be able to stop (via. Little Green Footballs)

Here’s some more information on the far right “sovereign citizen” wingnut who murdered two police officers in West Memphis before being shot to death (along with his son). Included is a video clip in which Jerry Kane says:

I don’t want to have to kill anybody. But if they keep messin’ with me, that’s what it’s gonna have to come out. That’s what it’s gonna come down to, is I’m gonna haveto kill, and if I have to kill one, then I’m not gonna be able to stop.

If you ever wanted proof that the Christian right-wing is filled with opportunists and charlatans who will exploit the masses and smear others for their own diabolical ends look no further than Ergun “Mehmet” Caner. This guy jumped onto the bandwagon of anti-Muslim haters, created a powerful (and false) testimony about being an ex-terrorist and laughed all the way to the bank until all the lies caught up to him. (hat tip: iSherif)

Christian Right’s Favorite Muslim Convert Exposed as Jihadi Fraud

By Peter Montgomery

Ergun Caner’s rise to the top of conservative evangelical celebrity — and to the presidency of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell — was fueled by how aggressively he capitalized on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to portray himself as a personal example of the power of Jesus to save even someone raised as a jihadist, which he claimed to be.

There’s only one problem with that part of Caner’s story: it appears not to be true.

In 2001, Caner was pastoring a church in Colorado. After 9/11, he became a hot commodity on the speaking circuit as someone who knew about the evils of Islam firsthand. Before the shock waves from the terror attacks had died down, he was lacing his sermons with his own tale of having been raised in Turkey as the son of a religious leader and trained in a madrassa to wage jihad against Americans.

He said he’d learned about America from TV shows — “Dukes of Hazzard” in some tellings, “Dallas” or “Andy Griffith” in others. He talked about learning English after moving to Brooklyn as a teenager. His personal testimony was used to sell books and videotapes. In one 2001 sermon, “From Jihad to Jesus,” he said he didn’t know much about Christians the first 17 years of his life because “there’s not that many of them in Turkey.” One CD was until recently marketed this way: “Do you believe God can change the heart of a hardened terrorist? Former Muslim Ergun Caner, who came to America to be a terrorist, shares his testimony of how he came to know Jesus Christ.”

All that made for great post-9/11 storytelling. And it helped Caner and his brother, Emir, sell a lot of books. (In 2002 they published and promoted Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs, one of many books bearing the Caner name.) In 2005, Caner was appointed to his current post as president of Liberty University Theological Seminary.

In recent months, a group of Muslim and Christian bloggers have made an airtight case against many of Caner’s fabrications using the kind of documentation — videos, podcasts, recorded sermons — the digital age makes possible.

The Life Stories of Ergun Mehmet Caner

Here’s the basic outline of Ergun Caner’s actual life story, as told in some of his books and public appearances and pieced together from public records in recent months by bloggers. Ergun Caner was born in 1966 in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Turkish father. His parents settled in Ohio a few years later and were divorced when Caner was 8. Caner lived with his mother and spent time and religious holidays with his father.

His parents tussled over the terms of the divorce settlement and the degree to which his Muslim father would control his religious upbringing. As a teenager, Caner became a Christian. His father disowned him after his conversion, but his brothers, mother and grandmother also eventually became Christians. Caner earned undergraduate and graduate degrees (some of which he misstated until a recent bio revision on Liberty’s Web site), and entered the ministry.

Before 2001, he seems to have gone by Ergun Michael Caner or E. Michael Caner — or Butch Caner, which is what he says his wife calls him. Ergun Michael Caner is the name on his concealed carry gun permit, issued in 2009 by the Commonwealth of Virginia. But after 2001, Caner’s middle name, Michael, was replaced with the exotic-to-American-ears “Mehmet” on the covers of his books.

Ergun Caner is unquestionably a polished and entertaining performer. He stands out among conservative evangelicals with defiant rhetoric designed to elicit “did he really say that?” titters and a frisson of naughtiness from his audience. Part of Caner’s performing persona is his own brand of shock humor, which often relies on racial, ethnic and sexist humor. Speaking to one largely white audience, Caner joked about worship in black churches, where he said they pass the plate 12 times, women wear hats the size of satellite dishes and men wear blue suits that match their shoes and a handkerchief that matches their car. One black Baptist preacher asked for an apology.

At a conference in Seattle a few years ago, Caner joked about the Mexican students at Liberty this way:

“The Mexican students and I get along real well. They’re my boys. I always joke with ‘em, I say ‘Man, if I ever adopt, I want to adopt a Mexican because I need work done on my roof. [laughter], and, and uh, I got a big lawn….

At an Ohio men’s conference in 2007, he got the audience whooping and shouting with this gem:

“Dr. Caner, do you believe in women behind the pulpit? My answer is well, yeah, of course, how are they going to vacuum back there unless they get behind it….[laughter]…..and that’s going to be in half of your pulpits next Sunday. FEEL FREE!!! I LOVE THAT LINE!! But you know one line like that shuts it all up, ’cause they’re not going to talk about it, and they’re not going to talk to you for a while, which is good, which is good.

Sin and Redemption

The human story of sin and redemption is a fundamental theme in Christianity. When stars of the conservative evangelical movement have succumbed to the lure of sexual temptation, they have often won forgiveness on the force of a public confession. It has worked for politicians as well as preachers. So why is Ergun Caner, under fire for lying about the life story that catapulted him to evangelical stardom, refusing to repent and passing up the chance to earn redemption? And why is Liberty University supporting his stonewalling?

Since ascending to the helm of Liberty’s theological seminary, Caner has tripled student enrollment, due in no small part to his celebrity. That’s given him a prominent platform from which to speak and publish. It’s also given him some powerful allies with a strong incentive to protect his reputation. Rather than admitting that Caner lied about his upbringing in ways that made his “from jihad to Jesus” story (not to be confused with a book by that title by Jerry Rassamni) more compelling and marketable, Caner and Liberty University have hunkered down, portraying Caner as the victim of persecution and lashing out at his critics. At the same time, they’ve been working to strip some incriminating material from the Internet.

That’s going to keep the story boiling in the Baptist — and Muslim –blogosphere. And some think it’s a disastrous course for Caner, for Liberty, and for the religion and movement they represent.

It was a 20-something Muslim blogger, Mohammed Khan, who started bringing attention to problems with Caner’s public “testimony.” Khan believes Caner is out to give Muslims a bad name, and his Web site, fakeexmuslims.com, has used YouTube commentaries of Caner on video to challenge Caner’s expertise on Islam and to question whether Caner was, as he insists, a “devout” Muslim. (As this story was being prepared, many of those were taken down at least temporarily by a copyright claim.)

But that question hasn’t generated nearly as much interest among Christian bloggers as the easily verifiable discrepancies in Caner’s personal story. It’s especially troubling, they say, because that story is tied to the story he tells about the power of the gospel, the story that fueled his rise to a position of authority.

Here’s how Oklahoma pastor and blogger Wade Burleson summarized it, disputing Caner’s claims:

The myth Dr. Caner has created about himself seems now to be unraveling. He never came to America “via Beirut and Cairo.” He has never been trained as a fundamentalist Muslim. He has never had been a jihadist. He has never debated top Muslim scholars, in Nebraska or anywhere else. It is impossible for any of us to understand why someone would fabricate or embellish his past, but there’s a great deal of money to be made selling books and DVDs about Islam in post 9/11. Who’s a better expert on the subject than a radical jihadist who has converted to faith in Jesus Christ, right?

Here’s how Tom Chantry, pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Milwaukee puts it:

Preachers are witnesses to the gospel of Christ, and like all witnesses, when they are compromised they weaken the case. Furthermore, no witness can do more damage to his own case than an expert witness….When a preacher allows himself to deceive in any way he invites the sinner to pounce upon his error and heap scorn upon the gospel. Embellishment from the pulpit is therefore a deadly error which may do inestimable damage to the immortal souls of our fellow men. What are we to think of any preacher who regularly and repeatedly tells stories which are not true and publishes facts which are not facts?

Baptist blogger Tom Rich recalls being in the pews at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, when Caner came to speak just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. When he started reading about the Caner controversy recently, he went back and listened to that sermon, and it confirmed what he remembered: With people still reeling from the terror attacks, Caner portrayed himself as someone who had been trained to carry out that kind of attack on America. It made for a powerful testimony.

Now, Rich says, he believes Caner was simply being opportunistic:

Unbelievable. Standing in front of shell-shocked Christians after 9/11, and Caner betrays their confidence by lying about where he was raised, where he learned English, and when he came to America. That is deception. A man that is misusing the pulpit to purposely mislead people about who he is and where he is from has no business being in the pulpit.

But several of Caner’s most vocal critics have said they’re not trying to get him fired — they just want him to tell the truth and apologize to those he deceived. But Liberty University officials have apparently decided it’s more important to protect the Ergun Caner brand. Southern Baptists and Liberty University have invested a lot in Caner’s persona, and now, in the words of one blogger, he’s “too big to fail.”

Back in February, in an effort to brush the controversy aside, Caner put out a statement some of his defenders characterize as an admission or apology. Here’s a portion of what it said:

I have never intentionally misled anyone. I am sure I have made many mistakes in the pulpit in the past 20-plus years, and I am sure I will make some in the future. For those times where I misspoke, said it wrong, scrambled words, or was just outright confusing, I apologize and will strive to do better.

This statement satisfied some people who want the controversy to go away, but it only inflamed others. Trying to pass off his false claims as mistakes feels to some critics like compounding the original lies with equally and embarrassingly transparent new ones. Caner has since pulled that statement from his Web site, but it’s still online at a Southern Baptist news site.

The Persecution of Ergun Caner

The current controversy about Caner’s “embellishments” is not the first one the pugnacious Caner has found himself in. He’s been part of sometimes heated debate over Calvinist theology within the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s a critic of one evangelical strategy for proselytizing to Muslims, and in February he called the president of the denomination’s International Mission Board a liar, for which he has since apologized. His word for fellow Baptists who might complain about Glenn Beck, a Mormon, being asked to speak at Liberty’s graduation? “Haters.”

Caner and his backers have energetically played the religious persecution card and attacked the motives and even faith of his critics. Caner wrote in a memo to Liberty faculty that “I never thought I would see the day when alleged ‘Christians’ join with Muslims to attack converts.” Both Khan and Baptist bloggers who continue to call for Caner to come clean have been barraged with hostile commentary.

Pastor Wade Burleson says that when one of his congregants, blogger Debbie Kaufman, first asked him about the Caner controversy, he told her he wasn’t interested. She poked around on her own and wrote a post asking questions about some of the discrepancies in Caner’s record. The response from Caner and his supporters was swift.

Burleson says he got an urgent call from someone insisting he get Kaufman to take down her post, which the caller said was putting Caner’s life and family in jeopardy. Startled, Burleson read the post and was astonished to discover that Kaufman was only asking questions about Caner’s truthfulness. He said as much in a comment on her blog. But the pressure intensified; Burleson says Caner even called Burleson’s father to put pressure on him.

Liberty University pulled Caner’s disputed bio, and put up a stripped-down version that reportedly was personally approved by the chancellor. Other incriminating or embarrassing materials have been pulled offline after Caner critics called attention to them. Focus on the Family, for example, broadcast Caner’s 2001 “From Jesus to Jihad” sermon on its April 26, 2010 program. In that sermon, Caner said he didn’t know much about Christians the first 17 years of his life because “there’s not that many of them in Turkey or in Sweden.” But that broadcast has since disappeared from the online Focus archives.

Liberty University was silent until last week, when Elmer Towns, dean of the school of religion, told Christianity Today the university’s board was satisfied that Caner has done nothing “theologically inappropriate.” Said Towns, “It’s not an ethical issue, it’s not a moral issue. We give faculty a certain amount of theological leverage. The arguments of the bloggers would not stand up in court.” The Christianity Today headline framed the story as an attack on Caner: “Bloggers Target Seminary President.”

In response to the Christianity Today story, one of Caner’s critics wrote on his blog:

So Caner’s deception is not “ethical” or “moral.” If I were a lost person, this would be a huge step forward in my belief that Christianity itself is a lie, and Christian leaders are mostly hypocritical charlatans selling their spiritual elixirs, whose “ethical” and “moral” standards are much lower than the average non-Christian.

Some Baptist bloggers say Liberty is sending a message to its students that celebrity is more important than integrity. One of them, Oklahoma pastor Burleson, says he can no longer recommend Liberty to potential students.

‘Get out of our way’

Caner’s critics insist their goal is not his personal destruction. Several of the bloggers campaigning for truth-telling and apologies said they believe Caner is a powerful speaker and talented leader. They would support him keeping his job if only he would apologize. Tom Rich says that in one of Caner’s books, Why Churches Die, the besieged seminary president wrote that public sin requires public repentance. And what is more of a public sin, Rich asks, than standing in the pulpit at First Baptist Jacksonville and lying to thousands of people about having been trained to kill Americans the way the 9/11 hijackers did?

Asked why Caner and Liberty would refuse the path of public repentance in the face of such clear evidence, Burleson says he is “baffled,” and insists he is not Caner’s enemy. “He is my friend and my brother in Christ.” Burleson says he, like many others, is not above the temptation to embellish. He thinks that a public admission of wrongdoing and an apology would bring an end to the story. But the Liberty response — pretending it never happened, circling the wagon, making other people the problem — is “the height of dysfunction,” he says. And the longer such stonewalling persists, the worse it will be — for Caner and for Liberty.

It’s not clear how this will end. Some bloggers have circulated a draft resolution with the notion that they would bring it before the Southern Baptist Convention, but it’s extremely unlikely that convention officials would ever let it get to the floor. After the story broke out of the blogosphere last week into Christianity Today, the Associated Baptist Press did a more in-depth story. The increased attention to Caner’s well-documented deceptions may make it harder for Liberty University to make them go away.

Caner seems to hope his celebrity and his bluster will carry him through. His attitude toward his critics seems to mirror the attitude he expressed in his speech at last fall’s Values Voter Summit. He ended his talk with this message to Christians he said were not being outspoken enough on the issues of the day: “You need to preach, teach, and reach, or just shut up and get out of our way.”

NOTE: This article has been corrected. The quote from Elmer Towns, dean of Liberty University’s school of religion, contained an error in transcription in the original version.

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Is this woman worth covering anymore? Do our readers even care to read the verbal diarrehea that she recycles endlessly? Contradicting herself at every turn? The lunatic, fanatic, charlatan Pamela Geller has now thrown her support behind a Nazi sympathizer and leading figure in the former apartheid regime of South Africa, Eugene Terreblanche.

For us at LW it is not surprising that she would throw her support behind Terreblanche. She is an avid supporter of Israeli Apartheid and supremacy and so when a historical parallel such as South African apartheid comes to the fore she has no option but to condemn Nelson Mandela and the struggle for freedom of the Black South Africans. For her it is a matter of consistency in hatred, oppression and injustice. She sees clearly that Palestinians are the new Black South Africans and the TerreBlanche’s of White South Africa are today’s Avigdor Lieberman’s and Benyamin Netanyahu’s.

One has to ask Pamela to step back for a moment. Maybe she is writing before thinking? Or maybe she just doesn’t care? Pamela, as a Jew can you honestly say you support a man whose emblem is eerily similar to the Nazi bent cross? Have you lost any shred of reason and integrity that you may have had left?

Eugene Terreblance addressing his followers

So what does Pamela have to say?

Every single headline calls Terreblanche a “white supremacist,” alluding to his position in the waning days of the apartheid government, thirty-odd years ago. But the real story here is not that Terreblanche was a “white supremacist” — if he really was (and I know how the left loves to throw around those labels).

Ridiculous. Only Pamela doesn’t seem to get the fact that Terreblanche was an avowed white supremacist.

we have been taught to believe that the ANC and Nelson Mandela are the “good guys.”

So now Nelson Mandela is one of the bad guys? This woman is in her own world. This is the exact same thing that Pamela and her buddies tried to do to Jimmy Carter. Paint him as some sort of crazy evil radical and an anti-Semite. Don’t be surprised if next Nelson Mandela is called an anti-Semite.

Maybe she should read the following article in the Daily Mail to remove her ignorance but my guess is we won’t be seeing a retraction anytime soon.

Funeral of Eugene Terreblanche Takes Place Amid Tight Security by Jane Flanagan

Their arms raised in a Nazi salute, thousands of angry white followers greet the coffin of Eugene Terreblanche as it leaves church.

The South African white supremacist was buried on Friday, six days after being hacked to death by two black farm workers.

Supporters travelled from across the country to mourn his murder and, in some cases, plot revenge.

Children and even babies were dressed in the uniform of 69-year-old Terreblanche’s party, the AWB.

Haunting: Mourners give the Nazi salute as a hearse containing the body of slain white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche drives by in South Africa today

Flags bearing the swastika-like emblem of Terreblanche’s party, the AWB, are waved as mourners give the salute today

A massive security operation was mounted for the ceremony amid fears of violent clashes between whites and blacks.

But there were few black faces to be seen. Some mourners muttered ‘housemaid’ in Afrikaans when a black government minister paying official respects walked past.

Despite calls for calm from political leaders following Terreblanche’s brutal killing, the crowd were united in the view that the death of the white supremacist leader was a political assassination.

‘None of us are safe,’ said Jan van der Merwe, a small scale farmer.

‘White farmers are always been murdered in this country, but now they have killed our leader, there must be consequences.’

Mourners still appear to be giving the Nazi salue as Terreblanche’s coffin goes by – but in reality they are simply taking pictures with their cameras

Enlarge

Enlarge

A little girl reads the order of service, left, while a dog and guard provide security, right

Terreblanche, the 69-year-old leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) was bludgeoned to death last weekend, allegedly by two of his farm workers.

But the Afrikaner community is increasingly convinced his death is part of a sinister plot to decimate the descendants of South Africa’s original white settlers.

Although the funeral, in Terreblanche’s rural home town of Venterdorp, passed off peacefully, the country’s worst racial crisis since the end of apartheid is far from over.

And with only nine weeks until the start of the World Cup, funeral goers expressed fears for the safety of the 32 competing teams.

‘This government has lost control of the country,’ Cornelia Jonck said.

‘They cannot even protect those of us who live here, how can they guarantee the safety of hundreds of thousands of football fans.

‘There will be bloodshed and then people of the world will know what we have to face every single day of our lives.’

Mrs Jonck, 61, was among the first to pitch a camping chair on the lawn in front of the brick church in the North West Province town, to hear the funeral broadcast on loud speakers.

As strains of the Afrikaner national anthem, Die Stem, meaning The Call, blasted out, police helicopters hovered overhead.  The bumper of an armoured police car, parked outside the church, provided a seat for some elderly mourners who were unable to find room inside.

Laid to rest: Terreblanche’s brother lays the flag of the AWB over the coffin

There was audible tutting and a vigorous shaking of heads among those lining the road outside the church as the convoy carrying family of ‘the leader’ was followed by police cars with black officers at the wheel.

‘It is not that we don’t like the blacks,’ said Margarite Dreyer, a lifelong member of Mr Terreblanche’s AWB party.

‘It is just that we want to be apart from them.  We have our God and our ways, and they have their ancestors and the things that are important to them.

‘God did not want us to be mixed like this. It is not a coincidence that Oom Gene [Terreblanche] died at Easter.

‘He died so that we may be saved – so that God will give us our own homeland at last, so that the Afrkaners may be alone, like the people of Israel.’

A number of homemade banners blamed the country’s President Jacob Zuma, and the firebrand leader of the ruling party’s youth wing, Julius Malema, directly for the killing of Mr Terreblanche, a father of one daughter.

Tension: Supporters of Eugene Terreblanche raise their hands in a Nazi salute and sing (above) while others waved supremacist flags (below) ahead of his funeral in Ventersdorp today

‘That black group from Julius, it doesn’t matter to them who you are, if your skin is white, they are going to kill you,’ shouted one tearful woman as she queued for a seat in the small church.

‘He is a monkey auntie, he belongs in the bush,’ a young boy added.

Mr Malema’s resurrection of the township refrain ‘Shoot the Boer’ has stoked anti-white feeling within the country in recent weeks, many in the crowd claimed.

A number of mourners called for Mr Malema to be ‘taken out’ for his part in creating an atmosphere of rural lawlessness.

At least two white farmers are murdered each week in South Africa.

‘I would have no trouble pulling the trigger myself,’ an AWB member from Ventersdorp said. ‘I am happy to kill him, but I don’t want to go to jail for doing it. I’d rather die myself.’

Andre Erasmus, a pastor who was among the crowd, was adamant that Mr Terreblanch was not murdered in a row with his workers over pay.

He believed that about 10 years ago, ‘a war was declared on the white man in the country and nobody has done anything about it’.

Enlarge

Loyal: AWB members stand guard outside the church grounds

There were audible wails of grief as the murdered Afrikaner’s coffin was carried into the church draped in the red, black and white Nazi-like flag of his AWB movement. Two men wearing the group’s military-style uniform stood at each end.

On the other side of town, the country’s trade union federation called a mass meeting to ensure there would be no repeat of the black versus white clashes that had taken place earlier in the week when the alleged killers appeared in court.

Police and army units were drafted into the tiny town to ensure the funeral service and burial on Terreblanche’s farm passed off peacefully.

Terreblanche was an iconic figure in the country; a large man with silver beard and piercing blue eyees, he attended rallies on horseback.

He was a fervent opposer of black rule.  He had lived in relative obscurity since his release from prison in 2004 after a sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.

Despite fears to the contrary, his death has not sparked wider violence.

The acrimonious aftermath of Terreblanche’s murder revealed strained race relations 16 years after apartheid collapsed and Nelson Mandela became president, urging all races to come together.

Terreblanche was hacked to death while he slept at his farm, apparently after a row over wages.  The attack with machetes and pipes is said to have been so violent that Terreblanche’s body was ‘unrecognisable’ .

His alleged killers worked for him on the farm outside Ventersdorp, north-west of Johannesburg.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1264753/Funeral-Eugene-Terreblanche-takes-place-amid-tight-security.html#ixzz0kvBLF30a

"I'm just a regular guy trying to make money"

This is the male Sarah Palin and even saying that might be too big of diss to Sarah Palin. One can clearly see that he has been prepped by his agent to deliver talking points and repeat them over and over. Does he have an original thought in his head?

"Obama is an evil Moooslim"

We have been tracking the “Obama is a Mooslim” myth for quite some time now, so much so that those who conducted this study could have easily used our posts and articles as a sufficient reference for their research. It is still quite obvious that the saga about Obama being a Muslim will continue for a long time.

New Study Sorts Through Obama-Muslim Myth

A new academic study finds that Americans who believed during the 2008 campaign that Barack Obama was a Muslim generally held tight to that misconception, despite efforts by the media, fact-checking Web sites and his own campaign to debunk the myth.

The number of people who incorrectly identified Mr. Obama as a Muslim held steady, at about 20 percent, between September and November 2008, according to an article in the coming issue of The Journal of Media and Religion.

During that time, many news outlets confronted the rumor, and Mr. Obama tried to set the record straight — that he is Christian — in a highly publicized interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“The efforts of journalists to correct this misperception seem to have had no effect for some people,” said the study’s author, Barry Hollander, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia. “There was this core group of people who were convinced for whatever reason that Obama was lying.”

Mr. Hollander analyzed the responses of 2,409 participants in the National Election Study survey. Asked the same questions over three months, the percentage of people who identified Mr. Obama as Muslim was 20.2 percent in September and 19.7 percent in November.

But some respondents did change their minds. Ten percent of those who believed Mr. Obama was Christian in September shifted that opinion by November. Likewise, 40 percent of those who believed he was Muslim in September gave a different answer by November.

Respondents who were younger, less educated, less politically interested, politically conservative and interpreted the Bible literally were more likely to be among those who shifted from answering that Mr. Obama was Christian to answering that he was a Muslim.

The study reinforces a common finding among psychologists: that memory and knowledge are selective, and that people often reject information that contradicts their beliefs. That’s not a partisan issue, Mr. Hollander said.

For instance, he said, Democrats were quick to believe untrue rumors aboutGeorge W. Bush’s service during the Vietnam War.

“It shows that many people want to believe the worst about a candidate or a politician that they don’t like,” he said. “Negative information is just more memorable. That’s why everyone hates negative advertising, but everyone does it.”

Glenn Beck

I guess when you are a supporter of fascists you are to the right of some of the most hardline and dogmatic Conservatives. It looks like Glenn Beck is going to be getting some grief from the extreme Right-wingers of the Horowitz-Geller-Spencer axis if he doesn’t take back his statement that Geert Wilders is a fascist. Sit back and enjoy!

From the Atlantic Wire:

Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and outspoken critic of Islam, sparked outrage across Europe last week when he showed his anti-Islamic film in the UK’s House of Lords. Though the backlash against Wilders from America media has also been harsh, some of it has come from the unlikeliest of sources: Fox News. The conservative network ran a special report from Bret Bauer on Wilders, and Glenn Beck indirectly lumped him in with French politician Jean Marie Le Pen as members of a rising fascist movement in Europe (starting at the 13:00 mark).

Beck’s comments were relatively benign–at least for him. But that didn’t appease hardline conservatives, who slammed Beck and Fox in general for denigrating Wilders. The backlash has taken on several forms, but the one consistent theme on the right is anger.

• What’s Up, Glenn? “What is he doing?” asks a befuddled Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs. “Was Beck saying that the UK was right to ban Wilders in the interest of ‘community harmony?’ And the fact that he was allowed to enter the UK last week was a dire sign?” After extolling Wilders’ virutes, Geller warns Beck to think twice in the future. “Is this going to be be Beck’s narrative? If so, he is wrong. And he ought to be silent until he learns everything.”

• Next Time, Know Your Stuff At Power Line, Paul concludes Beck was simply uninformed. “It was apparent to me that Beck was out of his depth with Wilders. [...] I’ve said before that the European ‘right’ is a complex phenomenon that does contain fascist elements. It takes a little bit of work to identify those elements.”

• Denigrating a ‘Hero’ “Shame on you, Glenn,” chastises The RightScoop’s Cubachi, who proceeds to heap praise on Wilders.

Geert Wilders. A hero, a man who is risking life and limb to rescue the Netherlands and Europe from radical Islamization and communism taking grip of his country and continent. Everyday he has to wear a safety vest and hide his family and give them 24-hour security because he is willing to say the unpopular thing to protect and defend his nation.

• No More Beck for Me Vowing never to trust Beck again, iOwnTheWorld’s BigFurHat embarks on a screed-worthy tirade to set the Fox News host straight. “Glenn – there is NO MODERATE ISLAM. This is what you get when you go out on a limb with a guy that is largely fueled by emotion rather than brains. I’m not saying Beck isn’t smart, but he is a bit Howard Bealish for me, and this is what you will have to endure with him.”

Nonie Darwish

We are going to have an explosive breakdown of the clownish Nonie Darwish, another charlatan akin to Wafa Sultan who is milking the Islamophobic cash cow for all it’s worth. Jim Holstun, a professor at SUNY Buffalo wrote this great piece in 2008 that lays bear Nonie’s excessive Islamophobia, as well as her contradictions and lies.

Nonie Darwish and the al-Bureij Massacre

StandWithUs is a Zionist advocacy group in Los Angeles. It concentrates on US colleges and universities, offering fellowships, book donations, lectures, training and hands-on activism. I first heard about the group in 2005, after its Executive Director, Roz Rothstein, wrote my university’s president, provost and Arts and Sciences dean to warn them that I was teaching courses in Palestinian culture. She passed along some hysterical libels from anonymous community members (not my students), gave a detailed critique of my syllabuses, encouraged them to investigate me and two other colleagues, and helpfully suggested a few questions they might want to ask.

StandWithUs manages an impressive stable of Zionist speakers, including several who are Arabs, Muslims, or ex-Muslims: Brigitte Gabriel, Ishmael Khaldi, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Nonie Darwish. Darwish, born an Egyptian Muslim, now an American Evangelical Christian, is one of the most energetic. She manages the website Arabs for Israel and has appeared on FOX News, on the website Frontpage Magazine, and in the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. She is also the author of Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Penguin Books publishes it under its Sentinel imprint — a special line of conservative titles. Since her book’s publication in 2006, Darwish has toured extensively, speaking primarily at colleges and universities.

Now They Call Me Infidel has blurbs from all the usual crew: Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’Or, former Senator Rick Santorum, Representative Tom “Nuke Mecca” Tancredo, and General Paul Vallely, who advocates the final ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the book itself, Darwish interweaves stories of her Egyptian girlhood with potted accounts of female genital mutilation, arranged marriages, polygamy, veiling, domestic abuse, honor killings, sharia law, jihad, censorship, hate-oriented education, the rejection of modernity, the cult of martyrdom, Islamic imperialism, and the pathological, groundless hatred of Israel.

In her interviews and in her book, she insists that she is not anti-Arab or anti-Islamic, and even suggests from time to time that she is still a Muslim. Then she pivots nimbly and attacks “the Arab mind,” “the seething Arab street,” and “the Muslim world,” with its “culture of jihad,” “culture of death,” and “culture of envy.” There are “no real distinctions between moderate or radical Muslims,” and no significant differences within or among Arab or Muslim cultures: for Darwish, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism was essentially jihadist. Darwish is allergic to social history: “I realized that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a crisis over land, but a crisis of hate, lack of compassion, ingratitude, and insecurity.” Instead of history, scholarship, and footnotes, she gives us a watered-down version of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind: a dictionary of Islamophobic commonplaces underwritten by the authority of an ex-Muslim native informant: I was there — I know.

Darwish’s portraits of Israel and of the US, to which she emigrated in 1978, are diametrically opposite but equally fatuous: Israeli Jews are tolerant, pragmatic, and peace-loving. From 1967 to 1982, they made the Sinai bloom. Americans are honest, charitable, industrious, self-sufficient, intellectually curious, and benevolent toward the foreign nations to whom they bring liberty. They err only in their excess of credulous goodness: because of “the simplicity of American values such as truthfulness,” they risk falling prey to duplicitous jihadist immigrants and dangerous professors, who “indoctrinate American young people with the radical Muslim agenda.”

Her outsider’s view of America complements her insider’s view of the Arab and Muslim world, for imperial states want not only other people’s land and labor, but their love. Here, we may compare Now They Call Me Infidel not only to recent anti-Islamic conversion narratives like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (her conversion was to neoconservative atheism and the American Enterprise Institute), but to earlier works in the genre. In her 1964 Editions Gallimard autobiography, O mes soeurs musulmanes, pleurez! (O My Muslim Sisters, Weep!), Zoubeida Bittari recounts her escape from Algerian Muslim patriarchy to French Christian bliss as a domestic servant to a Pied-Noir family; Nonie Darwish finds friends, family, and faith in southern California, including a Republican women’s group, an American husband, and Christian fellowship in Pastor Dudley Rutherford’s Shepherd of the Hills Church. As Bittari helped French colons feel better about their ungratefully rebuffed civilizing mission in Algeria, so Darwish helps Americans feel better about the long and bumpy road to global democratization.

There are occasional flashes of something more individual and authentic in Darwish’s book. For instance, her reiterated heartfelt attack on Nasser’s rent control laws (her mother lived partly off of her Cairo rentals) helps us understand why she feels so much more at home in southern California, where she arrived with enough money to buy a house with a swimming pool. But as a whole, the book is tedious, predictable, and badly edited — born to be bought, scanned and displayed, not actually read. But this will not diminish the demand for Darwish as a lecturer, which derives not from her writing but from her parentage: her father was Colonel Mustafa Hafez, head of Egyptian army intelligence in the Gaza Strip in the early ’50s, who was killed by an Israeli letter bomb in July 1956. Every lecture notice, every interview, even the title page of her book announces her as “a Muslim Shahid’s Daughter.”

Throughout her book, Darwish struggles to maintain love and loyalty both to the father she lost at age eight and to the Israeli state that killed him. In a parting flourish, she says that “My father — and potentially my whole family — was sent to his death in Gaza by Nasser, who was consumed by his desire to destroy Israel,” and she fondly imagines him surviving and flying with assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel. But this argument sometimes requires a torturous chronology: “When, on January 16, 1956, Nasser vowed a renewed offensive to destroy Israel, the pressure on my father to step up operations increased. More fedayeen groups were organized, and their training expanded to other areas of the Gaza Strip. Often my father was gone for days at a time. In an attempt to end the terror, Israel sent its commandos one night to our heavily guarded home.”

The problem here is that this early, failed assassination attempt occurred in 1953, when Hafez was struggling to prevent destabilizing Palestinian infiltration from Gaza into Israel. Things changed dramatically in February 1955, when then military commander Ariel Sharon’s Gaza raid killed 37 Egyptian soldiers and wounded 31. This raid brought shocked international condemnation, the end of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s ongoing negotiations with Nasser, mass demonstrations of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, and Nasser’s decision to have Hafez organize and arm Palestinian fedayeen for cross-border forays. Israeli historians Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris see the raid as a turning point in Israeli-Arab relations. Darwish never mentions it.

Continuing with her discussion of the earlier undated raid on her family’s home (it actually occurred on 28-29 August 1953), she says, “My father was not at home that night, and the Israelis found only women and children — my mother, two maids, and five small children. The commandos left us unharmed. I personally did not even wake up or know of the incident until later in life, when I read a book written about my father. After I read it, I called my mother immediately, and she confirmed the story. The Israelis chose not [to] kill us even though the Egyptian-organized fedayeen did kill Israeli civilians, women and children.”

Young Nonie must have been a very sound sleeper, since one squad blew the gate off her house, injuring several civilians, and, by one account, proceeded to demolish the house. Grown-up Nonie seems not to know that the Israeli commandos were part of Ariel Sharon’s newly-organized Unit 101. While the one squad attacked her house, Sharon’s was cornered nearby in al-Bureij refugee camp. He decided they would bomb and shoot their way through the camp rather than retreat from it. General Vagn Bennike, the Danish UN Truce Chief, reported to the Security Council on the ensuing massacre: “Bombs were thrown through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons. The casualties were 20 killed, 27 seriously wounded, and 35 less seriously wounded.” Other sources estimate from 15 to 50 fatalities.

The Israeli army blamed the raid on rogue kibbutzniks, and Ariel Sharon tried to reassure his men, telling them that all the dead women were camp whores or murderous Palestinian infiltrators. But some of them remained shocked at what they had done. Participant Meir Barbut said they felt as if they were slaughtering the pathetic inhabitants of a Jewish transit camp: “The boys threw Molotov cocktails at [innocent] people, not at the saboteurs we had come to punish. It was shameful for the 101 and the IDF [Israel army].” Another asked, “Is this screaming, whimpering multitude … the enemy? … How did these fellahin sin against us?” In 2006, Palestinian journalist Laila El-Haddad interviewed a survivor for Al Jazeera English:

“Mohammad Nabahini, 55, was two at the time and lived in the camp. He survived the attack in the arms of his slain mother. ‘My father decided to stay behind when they attacked. He hid in a pile of firewood and pleaded with my mother to stay with him. She was too afraid, and fled with hundreds of others, only to return to take me and a few of her belongings with her,’ he said. ‘As she was escaping, her dress got caught in a fence around the camp, just over there,’ he gestured, near a field now covered with olive trees. ‘And then they threw a bomb at her, Sharon and his men. She tossed me on the ground behind her before she died.’”

Though Darwish never mentions it, the al-Bureij Massacre hasn’t exactly been a secret — both Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have described it clearly, with little disagreement save the number of fatalities, with the high-end estimate coming from an Israeli history. If it tends not to loom large in Palestinian historical memory, that’s because it was overshadowed just two months later by the Qibya Massacre, during which Sharon’s Unit 101 killed 67, women and children, demolishing buildings over their heads and shooting them down when they tried to flee — the tactic pioneered at al-Bureij. Given its propensity for civilian soft targets, this daredevil elite unit might be better described as a death squad.

We probably shouldn’t expect Nonie Darwish to alter her campus presentations anytime soon. The bookings by StandWithUs might dry up if she were to start supplementing her cautionary tales about sharia law, jihadi immigrants, and female genital mutilation with a serious discussion of Israeli massacres at Deir Yassin, Tantura, al-Bureij, Qibya, Kfar Qasim, Sabra and Shatila, and Beit Hanoun. In any case, Darwish prefers simple cultural generalities and intimate personal reflection to historical analysis. But since that’s the case, someone at her next lecture might ask if she remembers playing with any of the refugee children murdered at al-Bureij, and why the kindly Israeli commandos who spared her family decided to blow up Mohammad Nabahini’s mother.

Jim Holstun teaches world literature and Marxism at SUNY Buffalo and can be reached at jamesholstun A T hotmail D O T com.

A far right Swedish businessman by the name of Patrik Brinkmann has contributed €5 million to an anti-Islam party in Germany called the Pro-NRW, a party that is behind the rabidly fascist group Burgerbewegung whose supremacist ideology we exposed and also the SIOE (Stop the Islamization of Europe) campaign.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch)

Swedish far-right businessman Patrik Brinkmann has announced he will pour €5 million into the coffers of Pro NRW, an anti-Islam populist party based in Cologne. In a report to air Sunday night on Germany‘s public broadcaster WDR, Brinkmann says he fears Germany is becoming “too foreign” and that Sharia law will be introduced in the country.

“However, there are no, or very few, politicians who take this seriously,” Brinkmann said. “That’s why I believe that a new right wing (in Germany) can not only succeed, but in five or ten years be as large as the FPÖ in Austria or the SVP in Switzerland,” he added, referring to Austria’s Freedom Party and the Swiss People‘s Party, two far-right groups which have enjoyed a certain amount of electoral success.

The millionaire, who reportedly already has ties to Germany’s extreme-right NPD and DVU parties, will finance a building for Pro NRW to be used as an anti-Islam centre.

The un-American Senator James Inhofe

The Republican senator from Oklahoma has called for passengers to be “racially and ethnically profiled,” because according to him, “all terrorists [or at least 90% of them] are Muslims.”  Yes, that’s true: all terrorists are Muslims…except of course the 94% that aren’t.

Does the good senator not know the ugly history of racial profiling?  Based on this same logic, white racists justify the racial profiling of blacks.  A white supremacist on the white nationalist website Stormfront.org says:

Blacks looking ghetto in an affluent neighborhood should send up flags. For some reason, I doubt that they are there to do the plumbing, though I am sure they wouldn’t mind relieving you of a few of your more valuable items.

These white nationalists ask, just like Inhofe: “why should my white wife be considered on the same level as a ‘ghetto’ black guy?”

That racist forum is in fact full of calls for a return to racial profiling.  And they justify their belief based on “practicality” just like Inhofe and other loons do.  These white nationalists argue that according to the Department of Justice, blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder than whites:

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders
In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm

…In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites……………..

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm

In another thread, they argue that blacks commit fifty times the number of violent crimes as whites.  There are also other points brought forth by such people, such as the fact that one in twenty adult black men are incarcerated.  Or that “more than three times the number of black Americans live in prison as in college dorms.” Or that over 55% of offenders admitted under the age of 18 are black. And on and on…All justifications to legalize racial profiling.

So if you justify profiling on airplanes by arguing that 90% of terrorists are Muslims (which is false anyways), then by that same logic you ought to be OK with profiling blacks, especially those “ghetto blacks” who happen to be walking through the suburb.  Whatever arguments you use to justify profiling of Arabs/Muslims can be used for blacks…What?  You’re not OK with that?  Then why is it OK to do that to Muslims or Arabs?

I am an American, and I oppose these un-American calls to racially and ethnically profile.  I don’t believe in such discrimination, and know that it is prohibited by the fourth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution (that annoying document that right wingers always try to circumvent).  If you don’t believe in the ideals of this country, then kindly leave.  You, Senator Inhofe, are un-American.

And if you want to lament about your wife being pulled aside for extra searching, maybe think about changing the war mongering policy that has been shoved upon us by the right wing.  You can’t really kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and not expect there to be a handful of disgruntled Muslims who seek revenge.

I know that people are annoyed by the added costs of airport security.  Well, I have a very low cost solution: the U.S. would save trillions of dollars if it withdrew all troops from foreign lands, and stopped aiding the state of Israel.  (Then put the money into universal health care.)  That would take away the motivations of Islamic extremists.  But I get it: you don’t want to do that…then stop complaining when that policy ends up fueling terrorism.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

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.

Is Joyce Kaufman related to Joe Kaufman by any chance? Florida seems to have a high percentage of loons!

Cerabino: Publix Calendar Yanked through Political Mischief

Hey, don’t bother looking for your free Publix calendar.

The coupon-loaded calendar, which had been a yearly giveaway for the past five years, was yanked this past week from all of the chain’s South Florida supermarkets.

Why? Collateral damage of today’s political climate.

On Dec. 7, the 2010 calendar lists Islamic New Year, not Pearl Harbor Day.

There are two ways to react:

1. To get into a xenophobic tizzy while weaving this into a narrative of a vast anti-American conspiracy that leads right up to the subversive undercover-Muslim, Kenyan interloper in the White House.

Or …

2. To assume that the grocery store chain has no reason to offend people, and that Publix, in an effort to be inclusive, inadvertently became a victim of a synchronicity of dates and an unconscious omission.

Publix pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day had never been listed in the store’s calendars . And the Islamic New Year had been on the Publix calendar since 2006.

And nobody complained.

Not a political document

The rub is that this year the Islamic New Year, which changes dates because it is based on a lunar calendar, falls on Pearl Harbor Day.

And why does the calendar list Islamic New Year? For the same inclusive reason it lists the Jewish High Holidays, Chinese New Year and an international array of other dates, including Puerto Rico Commonwealth Constitutional Day, Haitian Flag Day, Boss’s Day and Administrative Assistant’s Day.

It’s not a political document. It’s a calendar with pictures of animals that you get for free, along with discount coupons. To make more of it is to engage in political mischief.

“I was driving home Tuesday night and Allen West told me to look at the Publix calendar,” said Joyce Kaufman, a WFTL-AM talk-show host.

West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a Republican candidate running for the congressional seat held by Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton.

Radio host urges audience uprising

Kaufman, who advertises her radio show with the words “America first. No apologies,” didn’t require much arm twisting to parlay the quinella of Islamophobia and flag waving to her audience the next day.

“What relevance does Islamic New Year have in my country?” Kaufman told me. “Islam is an ideology, and it’s not friendly to me.”

She said World War II veterans were “terribly offended” and she urged her audience to show up at their local Publix to complain.

“You show this calendar to the manager and say, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ”

Meanwhile, a “Dear Fellow Americans” e-mail was urging a boycott, citing an “un-American attitude” of Publix for “recognizing the Muslim New Year over Pearl Harbor Day.”

Publix wisely yanked the benign calendar, which had become a talking point in a cartoonish alternate universe.

“Based on feedback we have received this year, if a free calendar is produced for 2011, we will also include Pearl Harbor Day,” Publix spokesman Kim Jaeger said in a statement.

~ frank_cerabino@pbpost.com

Only dhimmis eat shawarmas!

Fellow comrades, this week we sent a powerful message to the stealth jihadists by banning minarets in Switzerland.  This was truly a watershed issue, one which I believe saved the country from the imminent stealth jihadist takeover and their terrorist plot to store nuclear warheads in their minarets.

But we must not stop here.  Rather, it is time to ride this wave of awareness to pass further legislation to curb radical Islam–and by this, I mean Islam in general.

It has come to my attention that Muslims use cemeteries to bury suicide bombers–often plotting future attacks from such locations and other ground based areas.  Furthermore, several Muslim cemeteries were funded by groups connected to someone whose brother knew someone whose neighbor was an unindicted co-conspirator in the WTC bombing, who also attended the same mosque that the mother of a member of CAIR attended–and as we all know, CAIR is a part of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda, a Wahhabist-Hezbollah and Al-Baik run organization, headed by Tariq Ramadan, Usama bin Ladin, and Haifa Wehbe.

The Jewish news source JTA.org reports:

Swiss leader calls for Jewish cemetery ban

December 3, 2009

BERLIN (JTA) — A mainstream Swiss political leader is calling for a ban on separate Muslim and Jewish cemeteries.

Christophe Darbellay, president of the Christian Democratic People’s Party of Switzerland, made the statement in a television interview Tuesday, two days after Swiss voters passed an initiative to ban minarets.

The anti-minaret initiative came from the opposition ultra-conservative Swiss People’s Party and other right-wing political organizations. Critics say Darbellay is starting a “crusade” to attract voters by proposing similarly xenophobic measures.

Mainstream politicians and religious leaders across Europe have reacted with dismay to the anti-minaret vote.

According to the Swiss online daily Tagesanzeiger, Darbellay also wants to ban the wearing of burkas, head-to-toe veils worn by some fundamentalist Muslim women.

Darbellay reportedly said that existing cemeteries would not be affected by a ban, but that there should be no separate cemeteries in the future.

The Swiss People’s Party called for crackdowns on expressions of Muslim fundamentalism in 2006. Observers said the demand for separate cemeteries is an escalation.

Yesterday, the minarets.  Today, the cemeteries.  Tomorrow, shawarmas.  My research indicates that shawarmas are the number one food source of terrorists, and cutting off this supply will cause them to suffer from severe hypoglycemia, which shall considerably weaken their capacity to commit terrorism.

Jewish bagels are very close to the burqa wrapped jihad-shawarmas, so those ought to be banned too.  We must not slacken in our resolve.

Cordially,
Obert S. Pencer.

Disclaimer: The letter by “Obert S. Pencer” is fictional but the news story about cemeteries is real.

The Swiss people will be going to the polls on Sunday to vote on a referendum on whether or not to ban Minarets. Amnesty International has stated that if a ban on Minarets passes it will be a breach of religious freedom.

Amnesty International: Ban would breach religious freedom

A ban on the construction of minarets would breach Switzerland’s obligations to uphold freedom of religion, Amnesty International said ahead of a referendum on Sunday 29 November on a constitutional amendment on the issue.

The proposal, which was initiated by members of two Swiss parties, will ask Swiss voters if they wish to add the sentence ‘The construction of minarets is forbidden’ to Article 72 of the Constitution.

The initiators of the referendum claim that the construction of minarets is not protected by the freedom of religion as they have ‘no religious significance’. They assert that minarets are ‘symbols of a religious-political claim to power and dominance which threatens – in the name of alleged freedom of religion – the constitutional rights of others.’

Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said:
‘The people of Switzerland should reject this proposal outright. This would make a strong statement that they support equality of rights for everyone living in the country.

‘Freedom of religious belief is a basic human right and changing the Swiss constitution to ban the construction of minarets would clearly breach the rights of the country’s muslims.

‘Of course, someone building a mosque should be subject to the same reasonable planning restrictions as anyone else. But these must be applied equally to all. To specifically target minarets while, for example, allowing the construction of church spires would discriminate against muslims on the basis of their religion.’

Islam is the second largest religion in Switzerland after Christianity, and its followers represent over 4 per cent of the country’s population.

There are hundreds of places of worship (mostly in commercial buildings or private residences) in Switzerland but only four minarets have been built.

The Swiss government and all the other major political parties are recommending a ‘no’ vote in the 29 November referendum. Local Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have also joined forces to reject a ban on minarets.

They say that the referendum also poses a threat to peaceful relations between the religions and inhibits the endeavours of Muslims in Switzerland to integrate with the rest of the population.

Debbie Schlussel

Debbie Schlussel, a self-obsessed wanna be Anne Coulter lays the smack down on fellow right-wingers and Islamophobes. It is delightful to see her throw her fellow travelers under the bus. This is the woman who Robert Spencer calls a “freedom fighter” but in reality is obsessed with her image and makes regular genocidal bayings against Muslims and Palestinians. Any perceived slight or miscalculation against Debbie can result in drawing her wrath. So far her victim list has included Walid Shoebat and Steven Emerson now you can add to that Zuhdi Jasser and Brigitte Gabriel.

Debbie Schlussel goes after the neo-Con, Cheney-Bush loving, Iraq war supporting Zuhdi Jasser for contradicting himself on the Flying Imam’s case and labels the Right Winger a “radical Muslim,” which kinda makes you think what can a Muslim do to not be considered a radical in Schlussel’s book? Debbie is correct to point out that when the Flying Imam case first broke Zuhdi denounced them, he even wrote a lengthy article condemning the Imam’s, now though since the Imam’s have settled their lawsuit he has changed his tune. Let Debbie tell it,

Today, Jasser  exposed himself, yet again.  While this sweaty snake oil salesman previously denounced the Flying Imams lawsuit and went all over TV to do so and make a name for himself, he had a different tone upon learning, yesterday, of the settlement of the lawsuit, with a US Airways pay out…

“People are going to wonder: Am I going to be another captain who will end up costing my employer X dollars because I made a bad decision that was a bit quick,” Jasser said.

Debbie also goes after radical extremist Brigitte Gabriel whose real name she claims is Hanan Tudor. Debbie’s own words on Gabriel,

Jasser’s lies and lack of sincerity remind me of another phony, Hanan Tudor, who goes by the porn name “Brigitte Gabriel” (unlike Jasser, she isn’t a radical or a Muslim, just a fraud, a complete ignoramus, and a liar).  Tudor/”Gabriel” also slips up, talking out of both sides of her mouth.

In speaking to a Black Detroit-area church, she gushingly praised Barack Obama and said how glad she is that he’s President.  On FOX News’ “O’Reilly Factor,” she praised Obama’s Muslim outreach (she repeated this on “Real Time” on HBO) and said he’s “doing a better job than Bush” did at it.  This was just after Obama pandered in several speeches and comments to Muslims in Turkey and called America a “Muslim nation.”  Then, Tudor/”Gabriel” sent a mass e-mail featuring an article someone ghostwrote for her (as they did her books), denouncing Obama on Islamic outreach.  (Yup, this woman isn’t just two-faced, she’s got several of them.)  But she’s a fraud, and, like Jasser, because she’s not a very good fraud, she slips up.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg on her.  Stay tuned.

Rest assured Debbie we certainly will stay tuned.

The Family of Fathima Rifqa Bary

This is another great article from Michael Kruse. He combines thoughtful and exhaustive research with insightful  research. It sheds more light on the Fathima Rifqa Bary case which will hopefully be resolved soon. Will the daft anti-Muslim bloggers who were pushing all sorts of wild conspiracy theories and slander about this family finally apologize? Don’t hold your breath!

The Life Rifqa Bary Ran Away From

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Rifqa Bary saw a girl. She kept seeing her. She saw her in the bathroom and the lunch room and the locker room.

“And for some reason,” Rifqa said later in a video posted on YouTube, “I told her I was a Christian.”

Which she wasn’t. Not yet.

“Wanted to fit in, maybe,” she said.

Eventually she would run away from her home here and flee to Florida, believing her Muslim family had to kill her because of her conversion to Christianity. Eventually she would become for some a crucial character in a culture war. Eventually her story would fill TV airtime, stoke partisan blogs and spark dueling custody cases in courts in two states.

But this is where it started: Rifqa saw a girl. The girl asked her to go to church. So she went.

The Korean United Methodist Church is a brick building with a low roof on a busy road in Columbus. The sign outside says “Welcome.” Inside, on Nov. 18, 2005, people stood and sang, “with fire in their eyes,” Rifqa said, and so she did, too. The pastor talked about salvation and invited newcomers up to the altar.

“I felt nothing but love,” Rifqa said in the video.

She was 13 then. She is 17 now. The story of her life in between is the journey of a teenage girl, the only daughter in an immigrant family, a brown-skinned, lower-middle-class high school student in a mostly well-to-do, white suburb, looking for a place to belong.

What started as adolescent identity issues and predictable tensions with her parents ultimately became a plan to escape. In her mind, it was her role in an epic battle between God and the Devil, in which she was both a prize and a prophet.

• • •

Home for the Bary family is a second-floor apartment with a tan carpet and two bedrooms. The table in the dining room sits on unsteady legs. The living room couches are draped in blankets to cover the worn upholstery.

This is where Rifqa lived, with her father, Mohamed, her mother, Aysha, her 19-year-old brother, Rilvan and her 6-year-old brother, Rajaa. Her father sells jewelry at weekend trade shows around the South and Midwest. Rifqa shared a bedroom with Rilvan. Rent for the apartment: $850 a month.

They’re here because of her.

The Barys are from Galle on the southern coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. When Rifqa was 5 she fell on a toy airplane that pierced the cornea of her right eye. Scar tissue built up over the next couple of years. Doctors told the Barys they might have to remove the eye. So they went to New York in 2000 for medical treatment.

Four years later they moved here in large part because of the schools. The school district of suburban New Albany is considered one of Ohio’s best. It’s 80 percent white, 9 percent Asian, 6 percent black. The campus with its red-brick buildings and tall white columns feels almost collegiate. Average income in the district: $185,000 a year.

At New Albany High, where last year she was a sophomore, Rifqa was on the honor roll and the junior varsity cheerleading team. She was known as a diligent student in the classrooms, and as a friendly, even gregarious presence in the hallways.

At home, her mother cooked traditional dishes, curries and rice with dahl, but Rifqa preferred chili from Wendy’s and soup from Panera.

On weekends, she shopped for clothes at stores like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch, spending money she made babysitting and waitressing at the Chinese restaurant in a nearby strip mall.

At home during dinner, over the past few years, she stopped speaking Tamil, her family’s native language. Her family spoke Tamil to her, and she spoke English to them. When her grandparents called from Sri Lanka, her mother says, she spoke only “small, small words.”

The Bary parents prayed five times a day. Rilvan did not. Neither did Rifqa.

In 2006, she made a baby­sitting flyer that said she was Christian; in 2007, her father found in her room Rick Warren’s Christian bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life.

This sometimes made her parents sad, but not mad, they say — their children were growing up in America, not Sri Lanka, so they understood.

Her father says he told her: “You know, Rifqa, you have a brain of your own, you do whatever is good for you, but you were born Muslim — it’s your responsibility to learn that, too.”

Rifqa was always well-behaved — she didn’t even have a curfew, her parents say, because there was no need. In the months before she ran, though, her behavior changed. She turned sullen and stopped spending as much time with her little brother. She started locking the door to her room.

Tensions crested in the spring.

Rifqa says her parents confronted her about her Christianity — her father angrily, her mother tearfully. They threatened to kill her, she says, or take her back to Sri Lanka.

Her parents say that’s not true. They both say the confrontations had to do with her overall behavior — late-night Facebooking with guys in their 20s and what seemed to be a new set of friends whom they didn’t know.

One night, they say, she stormed out of the apartment.

“It’s my life!” she said.

Her friends noticed a change, too: On Facebook, Rifqa Bary became Anna Michelle Matthew.

• • •

Rifqa was forced to live a secret life of sorts, she has said — to friends, in court files, to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — praying and reading her Bible in the middle of the night in her room or the bathroom or the porch on the back of her family’s apartment.

Her parents say they knew.

At school, meanwhile, she did nothing to hide her faith.

“She’d read her Bible in class,” said Tony Hou, a junior at New Albany. “She brought her Bible with her just about everywhere.”

It became, he said, one of the things she was known for — her blue Bible, her name written on the front, in shiny silver letters.

Last fall, she listened to an online sermon given by Jamal Jivanjee, a local evangelical pastor who also was a Muslim who became a Christian. She e-mailed him. They met at Starbucks.

And at some point she started reading the Facebook writings of an Ohio State University student and an aspiring pastor named Brian Michael Williams.

In Williams’ writings, evolution is bunk, abortion is murder, Armageddon is near. He said he needed “an army of prayer warriors” for the end of days.

Rifqa grew to consider Williams a friend and a mentor. She started last spring proselytizing students at school. Her father scolded her for it, he said, because it was against school rules.

At home, when Rilvan had friends over, she started coming out of her room and telling them about the Bible, saying they were listening to “demonic” music.

“She was really aggressive about it,” said David Sharpe, who last year graduated with Rilvan.

Last spring was when Rifqa also started exchanging Facebook messages with Beverly Lorenz. She and her husband, Blake Lorenz, are the pastors at Orlando’s Global Revolution Church, an evangelical, end-times group that says it’s “about changing our culture.”

Brian Williams baptized Rifqa in June, in Big Walnut Creek at Hoover Dam park, not far from her parents’ apartment. She cried and laughed and kept falling over so Williams had to hold her up.

“After she was submerged in the water,” said Hou, her New Albany classmate, “she pretty much fainted, she pretty much passed out, literally, from joy.”

Rifqa wrote in her journal.

“I am called to the nations,” she said. “Send me to the deepest darkest places into the pagan land.”

“Lord is preparing me.”

“Enemy is after me.”

• • •

Some of her friends got a Facebook message from her in the middle of July.

“She basically said: ‘My bags are being packed,’ ” said Jivanjee, the pastor. “She said: ‘The day that I have dreaded is now upon me. Pray for me that I would not deny my faith.’ ”

Sunday, July 19, 2:30 a.m.: Her mother woke up and saw her out on the porch. Her mother begged her to come inside. Her father was out of town for work.

Rifqa came into the living room.

Pictures of her in her cheerleading uniform were on the top of the TV next to the trophy she won in 2003 in an oratorical contest. On the wall in a frame held together by tape was a poster with some verses from the Koran.

“In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Say: O you that reject faith! I do not worship that which you worship, nor do you worship that which I worship. … To you be your way and to me mine.”

Rifqa shut her door.

Sometime between then and 8 a.m., she took her toothbrush and her travel pack, wrote a note to her parents, and left.

She took a right on Longrifle Road and a left on Mardela Drive and went to a small brown house a third of a mile away. The Hopsons live there. Their daughter is one of her friends. They knew she was coming. They knew where she was going.

Later that day Williams picked her up and drove her downtown to the Greyhound station. He knew where she was going.

So did people in Orlando. Global Revolution director of operations John Law bought her ticket, she later told FDLE, and the Lorenzes had decorated a room just for her in their home.

Her mother walked into her room Sunday morning. No Rifqa. She called her husband. He came home early from his trip. He called Rifqa’s cell phone. Straight to voice mail. He called some of her friends. Nobody knew where she was. He called the police.

In her room they found some books she had been reading. Did God Forsake Jesus? The Prayer of Jabez for Teens. Page 55: “Are you ready to ask God for something huge, something outrageous?”

They found the note she left.

“Jesus is my saviour, I cannot deny Him, nor will I ever. I pray that you find His mercy and forgiveness just as I have. Love you both dearly.”

No sign of her Monday. No sign of her Tuesday. On Wednesday, her father went to the Golden Valley Chinese restaurant, where she was scheduled to start work at 5. Maybe she would show. He sat at a table by the window. He looked out at a bank, at a gas station, at traffic on Sunbury Road.

It was 4:45.

It was 5.

It was 5:15.

Rifqa had been in Florida for almost two days.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

What’s next?

The next hearing in the case is Tuesday in Orlando. A Florida judge is expected to talk in court with an Ohio judge to discuss the possibility of sending her back to her home state.

About the story

This story is based on court records, police reports, Brian Williams’ diary, reporting in Orlando and Ohio, interviews with Rifqa Bary’s friends and family, and her words — written on her laptop, said to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and spoken into video cameras and then disseminated on YouTube.

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.

Fathima Rifqa Bary

Mike Thomas is a journalist with the Orlando Sentinel which has been following and reporting on the Fathima Rifqa Bary case. The case of the young runaway has garnered much attention and many of the Islamophobes and anti-Muslims have much invested in it. Recently, conservative attorney John Stemberger who volunteered to represent Rifqa is now claiming that the real danger to the girl comes from the Mosque that her father attends.

Mike Thomas wanted to check if these sentiments were truly held by the neighbors of the Mosque or those who knew it, in a blog titled This is a Terrorist Mosque?, Thomas writes,

Attorney John Stemberger, who volunteered to represent Rifaq Bary, now claims that the real danger to the girl is her father’s mosque – the Noor Islamic Cultural Center - which he says is radical and has ties to terrorism.

I checked that with Rabbi Misha Zinkow, of Temple Israel, who spoke at the Noor center earlier this year at an inter-faith gathering.

“Their presence in the community is a positive one,” he said. “My interaction with the Muslim community has been very positive.”

I then asked the Rabbi if Columbus was a hotbed of Islamic extremism, another charge I frequently hear.

“I don’t think I would echo those sentiments,” he said.

The Noor Islamic Cultural Center also is a member of B.R.E.A.D., a social justice organization that includes a number of Protestant churches (Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, etc) , Catholic churches, Episcopalian churches, Temples and even the Unitarians.

Earlier this month, the Center had an interfaith session on homeland security.

Here is a promo the Center put out on Youtube. You can see all those middle-aged, crazy terrorists flipping burgers and hot dogs on the grill.

Mike Thomas shows that this Mosque is far from the “terrorist Mosque” that it is being painted as by Rifqa’s attorney, but will it be enough for those who are using the Fathima Rifqa Bary case for their own agenda to stop their crusade to paint the Mosque as a haven for terrorism whose members will kill Rifqa if returned?

LoonWatchers might have noticed that the anti-Muslim blogsphere with the likes of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have been reporting on this case constantly and have invested a lot in it, pushing full throttle to see to it that Fathima R. Bary does not end up with her parents and instead stays in Florida. Just today Robert Spencer posted a blog requesting his supporters to contact (pressure) the Florida court to keep Rifqa there. For them it is a high stakes game in the war against Muslims, so if Fathima is returned to her parents and the courts find that her life  is not in threat they will end up with major egg on their faces.

Fathima Rifqa Bary

There is a great editorial in the Fairfield County Weekly that highlights some of the obfuscation and outright prejudice that has resulted from the Fathima Rifqa Bary case. The girl who ran away from her house in Ohio and joined a Christian pastor’s family in Florida and is now being held in foster care until a judge can ascertain whether or not she should be returned home. She has made serious allegations against her family that they will kill her if she is returned to them.

The article points out some logical fallacies that many in the right wing propaganda media have been perpetuating such as the one from loony blogger Pamela Geller who says that according to a secret “source” of hers, she knows that Fathima’s father has forced her to wear hijab. How does this jibe with the fact that her father also allowed her to be a cheerleader? Or the fact that there isn’t one picture of her on the internet when she is with family or not where she is wearing a hijab?

You Don’t Have to Act like a Refugee

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Comments (2),By FCW Editorial

Rifqa Bary says that if she’s sent back to Ohio her father Mohamed will kill her. The 17-year-old, whose family immigrated from Sri Lanka, says she converted to Christianity from Islam four years ago, having picked up the religion from friends at school where she’s an honors student and cheerleader. This led to four years of beatings from her father and brothers, according the right-wing blogs salivating over Rifqa’s story.

“Beatings were random, violent, unprovoked,” writes Pamela Geller, the “citizen journalist, citizen soldier” who runs the site Atlas Shrugs. “Take, for example, when Rifqa and her father Mohammad [sic] were driving in the car. He would force her to wear the hijab, which she hated. In her discomfort she would slouch down, embarrassed, and her father would haul off and sock her in the face so that she never forgot to sit up straight in her costume.” Finally, her father told her he’d kill her for shaming the family, the teen says.

So Rifqa met a husband-and-wife Christian ministry team on Facebook, ran away from home and rode a Greyhound to their doorstep. Luckily, they live in Florida, a state where no dispute can ever be handled quickly or sensibly. (Elián González, Terry Schiavo, the 2000 recount.) She is now in foster care and a Florida juvenile court is deciding whether or not to send her back to Ohio.

Newsmax, WorldNetDaily and other conservative news sources have dedicated a lot of bandwidth to this story. Faux News is the most reliable national news source to more than glimpse at it, and only the Columbus Dispatch and Orlando Sentinel are dealing out real information.

This may be why no one has realized this story is full of holes. (Most of these people haven’t even noticed the Book of Genesis is full of holes.)

Mohamed Bary, a jeweler, beats his daughter for being embarrassed at wearing a hijab but also lets her prance around in a cheerleading uniform before a crowd every Friday night? We’ve never even seen a picture of Rifqa Bary in a hijab; in the myriad pictures floating around the Internet, she’s in typical Gap-ish clothing. She also had very unrestricted Facebook access for someone living in tyranny. She says she was at the bottom of a family dogpile for four years, but neither school officials in Ohio or the DCF agents in Florida have found as much as a bruise. The chief of the Columbus police missing persons bureau said Mr. Bary “comes across to me a loving, caring, worried father about the whereabouts and the health of his daughter.”

Christian crusaders haven’t dug up any dirt on Mr. Bary. They note a radical cleric and members of a terrorist cell have passed through Columbus area mosques and that a similar “honor killing” happened in Dallas — in other words, They’re all the same! They cite not the Koran but interpretations of Islamic law saying Bary would have to kill his daughter. Good thing she is not coming back to a family of Christians; their holy book says rebellious teens should be stoned (Deut. 21:18-21).

Clearly, this is not about Mohamed Bary; it’s about Islam and continuing irrational prejudice against it.

Rifqa Bary may not be lying exactly — the repressed memory fad proved confused people can come to believe terrible things about their families — but her story only adds up if you assume all Muslim men are secretly savages sworn to kill the infidel.

This is how the rabid right operates. Disregarding evidence or common sense, they follow the story line that makes sense to them — be it that Democrats are overhauling health care to implement “death panels” or that an ethnically complicated liberal in the White House must be a Kenyan citizen at the heart of a Dan Brown–sized conspiracy.

Here’s where this kind of thinking (of lack thereof) can lead us: The law-abiding Bary family is worried, reunion or no, it may have to return to Sri Lanka because of all the negative attention. So because of right-wing paranoia, a family may actually leave the U.S. because of religious persecution.

I wonder if Pamela Geller or her friends Sheikyermami and Robert Spencer have an answer to this?