The numbers are in fact higher as the SPLC reports that hate crime stats compiled by the FBI are “notoriously understated.”

FBI: Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Remain Relatively High

by Mark Potok on December 10, 2012, Southern Poverty Law Center

Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped up 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels last year, according to 2011 hate crime statistics released today by the FBI.

The bureau reported that there were 157 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2011, down slightly from the 160 recorded in 2010. The 2011 crimes occurred during a period when Islam-bashing propaganda, which initially took off in 2010, continued apace.

The FBI statistics, which are compilations of state numbers, are notoriously understated. Two Department of Justice studies have indicated that the real level of hate crimes in America is some 20-30 times the number reported in the FBI statistics, in part because some 56% of hate crimes are never reported to police and more than half of those that are are mischaracterized as non-hate crimes. Nevertheless, the FBI statistics can be used to get a sense of general trends.

Last year saw continued high levels of anti-Muslim propaganda such as the crusade by some against the alleged Muslim plan to impose religious Shariah law on the United States. There were a number of local battles over the construction of new mosques, and several were attacked by apparent Islamophobes.

At the same time, the FBI statistics suggested that there was a 31% drop in anti-Latino hate crimes, from 534 in 2010 to 405 last year. It’s not clear what might be behind that drop, other than an apparent diminution in anti-Latino and anti-immigrant propaganda as negative attention focused on Muslims.

Other hate crime categories remained relatively steady. Anti-Jewish hate crimes fell from 887 in 2010 to 771 last year, while anti-LGBT hate crimes rose slightly, from 1,256 to 1,277. Anti-black hate crimes also fell slightly, continuing a trend of dropping from a high of 2,876 in 2008 (when Barack Obama appeared on the national political scene, fueling anti-black hatred in some quarters) to 2,076 last year.

The rise of the radical right will continue as will the rise in Islamophobic organizations (h/t: CriticalDragon):

For the Radical Right, Obama Victory Brings Fury and Fear

by Mark Potok (SPLC)

When the word came in last night that Barack Obama and the Democrats had won national elections in a decisive victory, millions of Americans went to bed, satisfied that even if their candidate didn’t win, democracy had survived. The results made it clear that this election had in no way been stolen.

But not so at Ole Miss, which last month marked the 50^thanniversary of deadly segregationist riots. Shortly after midnight, several hundred mostly white students protested furiously, reportedly yelling anti-black racial slurs and throwing rocks at passing cars. An Obama/Biden campaign sign was burned before campus police broke up the crowd in Oxford. There were apparently no arrests or injuries.

The reaction to the re-election of our first black president from the radical right — and that seemed clearly to include some University of Mississippi students — ranged from sputtering rage and name-calling to calls for a new Southern secession, mass emigration to Europe, or even the break-up of the United States. There was one thing large numbers seemed clearly to agree on: The changing racial demographics of our country, expected to lose its white majority by 2050, was key to the result.

“Welcome to a truly white minority world,” wrote one commenter on Stormfront, the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum, which is run by a former Alabama Klan leader. “The future is now. There is no denying this. The sun has set on humanity’s greatest era: 1500-2000. … [T]he only way to survive this war of annihilation is separatism. … [W]e have to choose regions or states.”

“We have truly fallen under God’s judgment,” wrote another. “You will never see another white man occupy the White House again.” Responded a third: “If you can immigrate to Europe you start making plans. … America will become largely a non-white population that is poverty stricken and all those government programs will soon disappear. It will happen. No more Medicare and no more social security.”

The loss of a white majority in the United States has helped drive a truly explosive growth of the radical right in the last three years, and that now seems likely to accelerate. Hate groups in recent years have risen to more than 1,000, and the number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups has shot up from just 149 in 2008 to 1,274, according to research by the Southern Poverty Law Center. For months now, groups on the radical right have increasingly fretted about a possible Obama victory. Now that that has occurred, the radical right may grow more dangerous still.

On Stormfront, given this reality, it wasn’t surprising to find talk of violence in the wake of the election. “I live in a liberal area so many of my ‘friends’ are shouting for joy,” lamented one poster at the racist site. “I don’t actually have many real friends and the ones I do have are scared and talking about arming themselves.”

Over at the conspiracist website Infowars, some reactions weren’t that different. “Now is the time to leave this country,” wrote a commenter using the name munglejonkeys. “[T]hey have brought about a communist takeover without firing a single shot. America will resemble Zimbabwe (economically) in a few years and there will be a huge shift in the welfare-dependent knob-slobs who thought that selling their souls for an Obama-phone was such a great deal. … All because white people didn’t oppose political correctness 35 years ago.”

Remarkably, similar sentiments seemed to crop up in what is taken as the political “mainstream.” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, fearing an Obama victory, said last night: “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.” He added: “The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America any more.”

Donald Trump, the billionaire unrepentant “birther,” didn’t mention race. But he tweeted last night that the election was “a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” He went on to characterize the Electoral College, which gave the race to Republican George W. Bush in 2000, as a “disaster for democracy.”

The anti-gay right reacted with fury, as well. In a long thread on the passage of same-sex marriage referenda at the antigovernment site Free Republic, commenters were apoplectic — and frightened. “Get ready for God’s wrath,” wrote one. “The people are choosing Satan’s finest.” “Fudgies win again,” wrote another. “Incidents of HIV [to] rise again.” And a third: “America is going to pay for its unbelief and its love of abortion and homosexuals. … And IT DESERVES IT.”

“SICK SICK SICK,” wrote still another. “What a filthy night this election is.”

In fact, as pointed out on CNN’s religion blog, the whole election was a “nightmare scenario” for conservative Christian leaders. Noting the approval of two same-sex marriage referenda, the re-election of a president who supported such marriages, and the rejection of hard-line anti-abortion candidates, CNN said the election results “seemed to mark a dramatic rejection of the Christian right’s agenda.”

Read the rest…

Robert Spencer and his biggest fan: Anders Behring Breivik

This story comes to us via. Critical Dragon. It is an older story, originally published by the SPLC in November of last year. It is quite astonishing as it clearly proves Robert Spencer‘s links to and parroting of the White Nationalist line. This further adds to the nexus between Western cultural and racist supremacists and Islamophobia.

This piece of Spencer’s worldview seems to be largely overlooked by many when discussing his hate activism.

by Leah Nelson, SPLC

Proving yet again that nothing is beneath him, anti-Muslim propagandist Robert Spencer has put himself firmly in the camp of open white nationalists with an article published yesterday in Crisis magazine, a conservative Catholic publication. Replete with fawning references to the superior accomplishments of Western culture and the Catholic Church, the piece, titled “Is Multiculturalism Evil?,” proposes that Western civilization is superior to all others and that multiculturalists (aligned with “Islamic supremacists”) are colluding to bring it to its knees.

This is nearly the identical view forwarded by Anders Behring Breivik to justify his terrorist attacks in Norway. According to the Breivik and Spencer’s of the world there is a leftist-Muslim conspiracy that is attempting to destroy the West through the “cult of Multiculturalism.”

Spencer’s links to, associations with and citing of White nationalists, individuals associated with Holocaust denying publications, websites that positively review movies that are wildly popular with neo-Confederates and more gets a thorough treatment by Leah Nelson of the SPLC:

Spencer’s piece is punctuated with a recommended reading list that might have been taken from the bookshelf of John Tanton, the racist architect of the modern nativist movement. Of the five tracts he suggests, four were written and/or published by anti-immigration extremists. They include On the Immorality of Illegal Immigration by retired priest and longtime Tanton ally Patrick Bascio; The Immigration Mystique by Chilton Williamson, who is a frequent contributor to the white nationalist website VDARE; Anthony M. Esolen’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, which was published by the white nationalist Regnery Press; and Jean Raspail’s 1973 Camp of the Saints, a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees that was most recently republished by Tanton’s Social Contract Press.

(Interestingly, Crisis claims that Bascio’s book was put out by “Authorhouse,” of Bloomington, Ind. In fact, its first publisher was American Free Press, a hate group founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto that also publishes an anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded weekly.)

Given its recommended reading list, is should be no surprise that Spencer’s answer to the question “Is Multiculturalism Evil” is a resounding yes. Tipping his cap to his Catholic publisher, he denounces multiculturalism as a “heresy” intent on “[d]enigrating and ultimately destroying the Judeo-Christian West, not stamping out some putative racist devaluation of other cultures.”

“Today, no one questions the idea that one culture is as good as another,” he writes in shocked tones. “No one even whispers the possibility that the achievements of one group in a given area (for instance, medieval Christians) might actually surpass those of another group. No one even dares to think that there might be better indicators of the quality of an endeavor than the number of different ethnicities of the people involved.”

“Multiculturalism in reality is an anti-Christian, anti-Catholic, anti-Western exercise in moral and cultural Relativism. … A true multiculturalist hates all forms of Christianity and Judeo-Christian civilization, but retains particular contempt and bile for manifestations of Catholic piety and culture.”

In one particularly hypocritical section, Spencer complains that “European multiculturalists, working willingly in tandem with Islamic supremacists” are trying to enforce the Islamic prohibition against insulting Mohammad by extending anti-hate speech laws to Muslims, while ignoring insults to “the dominant Judeo-Christian culture.”

It is true, as Spencer says, that free speech is valued in the West – but unlike America, many European countries have laws against hate speech, and Spencer’s suggestion that they privilege Muslims is patently absurd. In 2005, for example, the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard drew a set of offensive caricatures of Mohammed whose publication in European periodicals led to a violent reaction among some hard-line Muslims, including two attempts on Westergaard’s life. The cartoonist wasn’t prosecuted for hate speech against Muslims. Rather, he was placed under permanent police protection. On the other hand, in the same year, authorities in Austria arrested British national David Irving for denying the Holocaust. He was convicted and jailed in early 2006.

Spencer further complains about supposed “double standards” in academia, which he claims is controlled by multiculturalists who hate the West. Inconveniently, Anthony Esolen – whose Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization is on Spencer’s recommended reading list – is currently employed as a professor at Providence College.

Despite his bile, it’s no surprise that Crisis should find Spencer appealing. While claiming that it “explores and articulates the subjects of politics, business, culture, faith, and family life from a Catholic perspective,” the magazine – like Patrick Buchanan, a famous Catholic who has recently written several articles for Crisis – obviously has no interest in the church’s pro-immigration stance. Its interim editor, John Zmirak, has contributed numerous articles to VDARE (which, oddly, has also published anti-Catholic screeds – including a recent attack on the church’s embrace of immigrants). Zmirak has also written for David Horowitz’s conservative and anti-Muslim FrontPageMagazine, to which his contributions include a highly positive review of “Gods and Generals,” a 2003 Civil War drama that minimized the role of slavery and was wildly popular in neo-Confederate circles.

If these “militiamen” were Muslims this would be called terrorism.

What if they were Muslim? (h/t: CriticalDragon)

Alaska Militiamen Convicted in Conspiracy to Murder Officials

(SPLC)

Rejecting Schaeffer Cox’s claim that he was merely exercising freedom of speech when he spoke of killing a judge and law enforcement officials, a federal jury this summer convicted the boyish Alaska militia leader of heading a murderous conspiracy against the government.

Also found guilty on June 18 of conspiracy to commit murder was Lonnie Vernon, a member of Cox’s group, the Alaska Peacemakers Militia. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on that same charge against a third defendant, Coleman Barney. But Barney, 38, of North Pole, along with Cox, 28, of Fairbanks, and Vernon, 56, of Salcha, was found guilty of a host of weapons charges, including conspiracy to possess unregistered silencers and destructive devices.

The convictions cap an FBI investigation that began in August 2009 and culminated with the suspects’ arrest in March 2011, after they began taking concrete steps to carry out a wild-eyed plot to kill, kidnap, and terrorize their perceived enemies in the government.

Described in court documents as “extremely paranoid and narcissistic,” Cox was once something of a rising star in Alaska politics. In 2008, he received 37% of the vote in a Republican primary bid to upset a GOP incumbent in a race for the state House of Representatives.

But he soon drifted away from the mainstream, instead embracing militant antigovernment views. In 2009, he was listed as a delegate to the We the People Continental Congress, which brought together antigovernment “Patriot” leaders, conspiracy theorists, tax protesters and other radical-right leaders. As an alternative to the established system he so reviled, Cox also organized a pseudo-legal “common-law court,” which met in the back room of a local Denny’s.

Read the rest…

Frank Gaffney

This is what happens when you call out Islamophobes on their anti-Muslim hate, you get labeled an “Anti-Semite.”

Frank Gaffney Accuses the SPLC of Endorsing ‘Anti-Semitism and Hatemongering’

by Brian Tarshman (RightWingWatch)

Anti-Muslim activist and conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy is joining other conservatives in blasting the Southern Poverty Law Center, and last week on Secure Freedom Radio told CSP’s Fred Grandy that the group is “in the service of people who are really the perpetrators of the worst of the anti-Semitism and hatemongering” by opposing anti-gay and anti-Muslim hate groups. Grandy even said that the group is a “decidedly an anti-Semitic organization” because it calls out the extremist views of Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz.

Listen:

Grandy: The Southern Poverty Law Center, which at least generations ago had a very pristine reputation when we were still fighting the civil rights battle, but now they’ve sunk to a new low and of course one of their partners in this effort right now is the Muslim Public Affairs Council with whom they have conspired to create what is not just I think a coalition of hate crimes centered on organizations like the Family Research Center [sic] because of their support of traditional marriage but this has now become decidedly an anti-Semitic organization as well, tearing into Daniel Pipes at the Middle Eastern Forum or David Horowitz at his Freedom Center and of course we’re part of that mix as well. Interestingly enough Frank, when they were having this conversation on the phone, this conference call about hate crimes the night after the shooting at the Family Research Center [sic] no mention of that hate crime was even brought up.

Gaffney: This is a really extraordinary thing, as you say the Southern Poverty Law Center has fallen dramatically from its past and is now in the service of people who are really the perpetrators of the worst of the anti-Semitism and hatemongering and so on.

Today in the Washington Times, Gaffney said that “the SPLC is hanging out with today’s counterpart to the KKK and the pre-eminent threat to civil rights” and aiding the advancement of Sharia law. “If you lawfully object to, say, the erosion of traditional marriage or open borders, you stand to be condemned by the SPLC as a hater,” Gaffney said. “It seems that if you are militantly in favor of the radical homosexual agenda or racist groups such as La Raza, however, you get a pass from that organization.”

Last week’s near-massacre at the Family Research Council (FRC) put into sharp relief a curious fact: The people most aggressively denouncing others for their “hatemongering” sure are engaging in a lot of it themselves, with dangerous and potentially lethal repercussions.

Take, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the SPLC helped counter the Ku Klux Klan and other racists and anti-Semites. At the moment, though, the SPLC is hanging out with today’s counterpart to the KKK and the pre-eminent threat to civil rights — especially those of women — in America: Islamists bent on insinuating here their anti-constitutional, misogynistic and supremacist doctrine known as Shariah.

A case in point occurred Wednesday night, just hours after a gunman named Floyd Lee Corkins entered the headquarters of the FRC. Mr. Corkins apparently was bent on killing as many of the center’s employees as possible, perhaps because of the social conservative group’s listing (along with this columnist and a number of others) earlier this year by the SPLC as among the worst hate groups and bigots in America.

It turns out that, as with the Family Research Council, what seems to qualify one for smearing by the Southern Poverty Law Center is disagreement with its political agenda. If you lawfully object to, say, the erosion of traditional marriage or open borders, you stand to be condemned by the SPLC as a hater. It seems that if you are militantly in favor of the radical homosexual agenda or racist groups such as La Raza, however, you get a pass from that organization.

Leonard Pitts

Anti-loon Leonard Pitts demands an honest accounting of right-wing terrorism. It is time for the right-wing to call out and distance themselves from the extremists in their midst instead of giving them aid and comfort.:

Demanding an honest accounting on homegrown terrorism

Can we finally say the thing we have not said so far?

Last week, a white supremacist shot up a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, killing six people and wounding three. It is considered likely that the shooter mistook the Sikhs, whose men wear beards and turbans, for Muslims. The massacre came a few weeks after a characteristically baseless charge by Michele Bachmann and several other conservative legislators that a Muslim aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ties to Islamic extremism.

The juxtaposition of those two events is emphatically not meant to suggest Bachmann somehow “caused” the Wisconsin rampage. No, the point is that we are looking for terror in all the wrong places. Or, perhaps more accurately, that we are not looking for it in all the right places.

In the almost 20 years since the first attack by Muslim extremists on the World Trade Center, the following things have happened:

The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City leaves 168 dead and 500 injured; one person is killed, more than 100 wounded, in a bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta; seven people are arrested for plotting to attack U.S. military bases; Dr. Barnett Slepian is shot and killed in Amherst, NY; five people die in a shooting spree near Pittsburgh; the FBI arrests a man who tried to buy ingredients for sarin, the deadly nerve gas, from an undercover agent; Dr. George Tiller is shot and killed in Wichita; a man and his daughter are killed in their home in Arivaca, Ariz; a man flies a small plane into a building in Austin, killing himself and one other. And now, this.

These incidents and dozens more make up a list maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. What they all have in common is that they spring from motivations (i.e., opposition to taxation, government, immigrants, blacks, gays, abortion and Muslims) that more or less define modern, mainstream, conservatism.

So yes, it is time to say the obvious thing no one seems to be saying:

America is under attack by right-wing terrorists.

And here, again, it is necessary to say what the point is not. Namely, it is not that conservatism equals terrorism. These criminals are fanatics, and fanaticism is restricted to no particular ideology. Ironically, that’s an argument to which conservatives often turn deaf ears when it is made on behalf of Muslims, but that doesn’t make it any less true — or applicable here.

That said, what’s telling is that we won’t even call this what it is. When the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground were committing violence in the 1970s, we were not slow in decrying leftwing terrorism and requiring progressives to disown it. When al Qaida kills and maims, we are not shy about branding it Islamic terrorism and requiring moderate Muslims to disown it.

For some reason, though, we are reluctant to call right-wing terror by name. And you can forget requiring conservatives to distance themselves from it.

Rather than see a pattern that grows more glaring every day, we see a series of discrete events — this individual tragedy here, that one there, regrettable certainly, but surely not suggestive of any larger picture.

Maybe this is because the perpetrators of these crimes are overwhelmingly white Christian men and thus, invisible in a nation where danger is routinely defined as Them, not Us. Maybe it’s because media have become cowed and self-censoring, reflexively flinching from that which might bring accusations of anti-conservative bias.

Either way, one wonders how we can confront what we won’t even name. These plots hatched in the fetid backwaters of conservative paranoia ought to be called what they are. The blood of victims demands an honest accounting.

We have given them a dishonest silence instead.

The SPLC has a report on the leadership of the Radical Right, including a profile of the queen bee of the looniverse, Pamela Geller. Most of what they document about Geller is well known, but it is good to see the SPLC be more persistent in cataloguing anti-Muslim hate.

Pamela Geller

Ideology: Anti-Muslim

Pamela Geller is the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead. She’s relentlessly shrill and coarse in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam and makes preposterous claims, such as that President Obama is the “love child” of Malcolm X. She makes no pretense of being learned in Islamic studies, leaving the argumentative heavy lifting to her Stop Islamization of America partner Robert Spencer. Geller has mingled comfortably with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists, defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and denied the existence of Serbian concentration camps. She has taken a strong pro-Israel stance to the point of being sharply critical of Jewish liberals.

In Her Own Words
“Islam is not a race. This is an ideology. This is an extreme ideology, the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.”
— Pam Geller On Fox Business’ “Follow the Money,” March 10, 2011

“Obama is a third worlder and a coward. He will do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords.”
— Pam Geller, AtlasShrugs.com, April 13, 2010

“Hussein [meaning President Obama] is a muhammadan. He’s not insane … he wants jihad to win.”
— Pam Geller, AtlasShrugs.com, April 11, 2010

“I don’t think that many westernized Muslims know when they pray five times a day that they’re cursing Christians and Jews five times a day. … I believe in the idea of a moderate Muslim. I do not believe in the idea of a moderate Islam.”
— Pam Geller, The New York Times, Oct. 8, 2010

“Now do I see everything through the prism of Israel? No, I don’t, but I do think it’s a very good guide. It’s a very good guide because, like I said, in the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man. … If you don’t lay down and die for Islamic supremacism, then you’re a racist anti-Muslim Islamophobic bigot. That’s what we’re really talking about.”
– Pam Geller, The New York Times, Oct. 8, 2010

Background
Pamela Geller spent most of the 1980s working at The New York Daily News in financial analysis, advertising and marketing. Later, she became associate publisher of The New York Observer and stayed in that position until 1994. According to one online resume, she also served as senior vice president for strategic planning and performance evaluation at Brandeis University.

Married in 1990 to Michael Oshry, Geller spent the 1990s and most of the 2000s as a well-to-do Long Island housewife. After divorcing in 2007, she mostly busied herself rearing her four children, writing blogs and posting slam poetry-style videos trashing all things liberal on her YouTube channel.

Geller and Oshry were co-owners, along with Christ Tsiropoulous, of at least two car dealerships before the Gellers divorced in 2007. That was the same year Collin Thomas, one of their salesmen, was gunned down while closing their dealership, Universal Auto World, one evening.

The investigation into the murder uncovered an alleged fraud ring. According to the New York Daily News, employees enabled “underground characters,” including “known” drug dealers, to buy luxury cars using fake identities. Eleven people who worked for the dealership, including Tsiropoulous, were arrested, but Geller escaped the scandal unscathed. According to The New York Times, she received a $4 million divorce settlement, a portion of $1.8 million from the sale of the Long Island home and then a $5 million life insurance payment when Oshry died a few months after remarrying in 2008. The criminal case has not moved forward since the 2008 arrests.

In October 2010, Geller told The New York Times she was profoundly affected by the 9/11 attacks. After contributing essays to various websites that examined Muslim militancy, including Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs, she launched her own website. She named her website “Atlas Shrugs” in honor of right-wing hero and self-described objectivist author Ayn Rand, a Geller idol whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged celebrates pure capitalism unrestrained by government regulation or social welfare measures. The unvarnished anti-Muslim stridency of Atlas Shrugs won followers; Geller republished the 2005 cartoons of Muhammad from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, for example, when most other media demurred.

Johnson, a moderate conservative, later broke sharply with Geller, calling her an anti-Muslim “hatemonger.” After Geller, who is Jewish, posted a critique of the Islamic halal practice of slaughtering animals for food in September 2010, Johnson pointed out that kosher practice is almost identical and observed, “My GOD she is stupid.”

Geller began her evolution from blogger to public activist in 2007 when she joined Stop the Madrassa, a project of a group of intense anti-Muslim activists determined to block the opening of a secular public Arabic-English school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, in Brooklyn, N.Y. The campaign was intended as an early stand in a planned nationwide movement to counteract the efforts of American Muslims to meld into American society, according to one of its leaders, prolific anti-radical Muslim polemicist Daniel Pipes. Though the school ultimately opened anyway, Stop the Madrassa’s efforts to cast the school’s widely admired founding principal, Dhabah “Debbie” Almontaser, as a radical extremist succeeded in pressuring her to resign.

A proposal by a New York City imam and his financier partner to renovate an abandoned building in lower Manhattan into a 13-story mosque and community center would prove to be Geller’s ticket to anti-Muslim superstardom. Geller first blogged about the project, originally known as Cordoba House but later called the Park51 project, in December 2009. Four months later, she and longtime radical Muslim alarmist Robert Spencer joined forces, taking over the organization Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), then an unexciting adjunct of a Denmark-based group called Stop Islamization of Europe. One of SIOA’s first projects was to purchase controversial bus ads in New York and Miami inviting Muslims to reject Islam.

In June 2010, just two months after taking over SIOA, Geller and Spencer staged a rally in Lower Manhattan to oppose the Park51 project. It drew thousands of demonstrators, and plenty of media coverage. As had been done with Almontaser, Geller and Spencer led an effort to depict the project’s planners as radical extremists. They insinuated – with little to go on – that the project’s financing might be tied to terrorists. They absurdly described the project as an Islamic “victory mosque” to celebrate the 9/11 attacks, modeled after Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, though no Muslim had ever suggested such a thing. Geller and Spencer were able to build SIOA into a propaganda powerhouse that the Southern Poverty Law Center listed as an anti-Muslim hate group in 2010.

By mid-2010, the telegenic Geller had become a virtual fixture on Fox News, invited to comment not only on the supposed threat posed by Muslims and Shariah law in America but even on popular unrest in Arabic countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Through her website, Geller has promulgated some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories found on the extreme right, including claims that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that Obama was once involved with a “crack whore,” that his birth certificate is a forgery, that his late mother posed nude for pornographic photos, and that he was a Muslim in his youth who never renounced Islam. She has described Obama as beholden to his “Islamic overlords” and said that he wants jihad to be victorious in America. In April 2011, Geller accused Obama of withholding evidence in the then-upcoming trial of accused Fort Hood mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

Geller uses her website to publish her most revolting insults of Muslims: She posted (and later removed) a video implying that Muslims practiced bestiality with goats and a cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad with a pig’s face (observant Muslims do not eat pork). Geller also has denied the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces in Srebrenica – calling it the “Srebrenica Genocide Myth,” even though the Serbian government itself issued a state apology for the massacre. She wrote, “Westerners are admitting to their role in something that didn’t happen, and digging their own graves.”

Geller will ally with virtually any individual or movement that expresses stridently anti-Muslim sentiments, no matter how otherwise repugnant. As a result, she has frequently rubbed shoulders with elements of white radicalism. In 2009, Geller was invited to address the German far-right organization Pro Köln [Cologne], described as a successor group to the neo-fascist German League for People and Homeland. Pro Köln at the time was under investigation by the German authorities because of its defamation of foreigners and suspected violations of “human dignity.” As of early 2011, Pro Köln was officially deemed a right-wing extremist group by the German authorities.

Geller is an enthusiastic fan of Dutch anti-Muslim extremist Geert Wilders. He was charged in 2009 with hate-incitement in the Netherlands, but not convicted. She invited Wilders to speak at the June 2010 “Ground Zero Mosque” rally. In June 2010, Geller spoke at an event in Paris put on by the Bloc Identitaire, which opposes race-mixing and “Islamic imperialism.”

Geller invited the notorious British anti-Muslim group English Defence League (EDL) to her September 2010 anti-mosque rally in New York. The previous May, a report by the British newspaperThe Guardian revealed the EDL as thugs who hold anti-Muslim protests intended to provoke violence. Because of its racism and history, the EDL’s leader, Tommy Robinson, was denied entry at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and sent back to England.

Yet Geller described the EDL in May 2010 as “courageous English patriots” when the group mobilized popular anger to oppose the construction of a mosque in the town of Dudley, near Birmingham, England. “There is nothing racist, fascist, or bigoted about the EDL,” she wrote. In February 2010, she wrote in her blog, “I share the E.D.L.’s goals. We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”

In February 2011, she spoke favorably of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s forced relocation and genocide of Chechen Muslims after World War II, arguing – wrongly – that they were allied with Adolf Hitler. Historians say Chechens were fighting to preserve their own freedom and culture.

Geller’s incendiary rhetoric and readiness to deny civil freedoms and the presumption of innocence to Muslims hasn’t prevented her from gaining a measure of mainstream acceptability. In late March 2011, she was even invited by the Alaska House of Representatives to testify on a proposed anti-Shariah bill.

Geller’s anti-Muslim stance has also drawn the admiration of white nationalist and even neo-Nazi proponents on the extreme right – a rather remarkable feat, considering she is Jewish. She has been the subject of positive postings on racist websites such as Stormfront, VDARE, American Renaissance and the neo-Confederate League of the South.

United States of America Defence League

Shouldn’t the United States of America Defence League (USADL for short) spell “defence” with an “s” as in “defense”? Just saying, it doesn’t seem very, as George W. Bush would say, ‘Merican to spell it with a “c.”

Bill Turner

If you thought Captain America was leading this “defence league,” you’d be wrong, it’s a chap by the name of Bill Turner, who used to moonlight in the anti-Islam Twitterverse as “Jihadihunter.” Turner is the “national director” of this offshoot of the UK-based EDL. Turner titled his first press release introducing the organization, “The Crusade Begins.”

Phew, and here I was thinking it was going to be some sort of bigoted, Anders-Breivik-esque, Christian-identity hate group! Glad that’s cleared up!

Bill Turner and the USADL, like all the other extremist anti-Muslim leaders and organizations in the so-called “counter-jihad” claim to be acting in defense of “human rights”:

[USADL is] a human rights organization that was founded in the defense of our nation and to stand in unison with the EDL and other such organizations, to halt the spread of Sharia law.

Defenders of the nation, fighters for freedom, where else have we heard such claims? Oh right, the KKK.

The USADL’s goal is essentially missionary. They seek to “inform” the public about the “true” nature of Islam, to provide a,

“more realistic and less sanitized view of Islam…”

While the USADL’s mission statement gives the necessary caveat, much like the EDL claims to that it is not against “Muslims” and warns against assuming that all Muslims are guilty of committing acts of terrorism (aren’t they merciful!?), it goes on to say that,

“the Islamic book of worship calls for all Muslims to participate in Jihad, in one form or another.”

The ADL (not to be confused with the USADL) notes that Turner is “well known” on right-wing websites already for his conspiratorial rantings about the government,

USADL’s National Director is Bill Turner, who is known for his anti-government and conspiratorial writings, which have been published on a number of right-wing websites and disseminated through his Twitter handle, “JihadiHunter.”

While anti-Muslim bias has been a primary theme in his writings as well, Turner’s role in launching the USADL suggests that he is gearing up to advance a more conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda.

USADL’s website indicates that membership is open to all who “recognize the threat that Sharia Law poses to free people everywhere.” Although it is still too early to confirm the size and viability of the new organization, it already claims to have approximately 60 members.

I expect the USADL’s membership will increase as the usual suspects join its cause.

Already the nut jobs at the hate site BareNakedIslam are celebrating with all caps in the title, you can feel their adulation, FINALLY! USA DEFENCE LEAGUE. You will recall that BareNakedIslam is the same site that called for the murder of Muslim worshippers at mosques, so they will fit in nicely as “Crusader” drones in the USADL.

The USADL is just one more group for the SPLC to document and add to their list of the ever-growing anti-Muslim hate organizations proliferating around the country.

Some of the organizations that we have exposed in the past are on the SPLC’s list. They include AFDI, SIOA, ACT! for America and Veterans Defenders of America, amongst others.

My guess is there are even more anti-Muslim hate groups then reported:

SPLC reports growth of US hate groups

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published the Spring 2012 issue of its Intelligence Report, on “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2011″, which identifies a continued growth in the number of hate groups operating in the United States.

In “The ‘Patriot’ Movement Explodes” Mark Potok states: “The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years.” Potok writes:

The number of anti-Muslim groups tripled in 2011, jumping from 10 groups in 2010 to 30 last year. That rapid growth in Islamophobia, marked by the vilification of Muslims by opportunistic politicians and anti-Muslim activists, began in August 2010, when controversy over a planned Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan reached a fever pitch. Things got worse later in the year, when Oklahoma residents voted to amend the state constitution to forbid the use of Islamic Shariah law in state courts – a completely unnecessary change, given that the U.S. Constitution rules that out. The overheated atmosphere generated by these events also helped spur a 50% jump in the FBI’s count of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2010. Then, in March 2011, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims that seemed meant to demonize them. At the same time, there was a swelling of truly vicious propaganda like this remarkable Jan. 14, 2011, comment from columnist Debbie Schlussel: “They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won’t learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward.”

In connection with anti-gay groups Potok points out:

In another development, most of the religious right groups that started out opposing abortion but moved on to attacking LGBT people have recently begun to adopt anti-Muslim propaganda en masse. The gay-bashing Traditional Values Coalition, for instance, last year redesigned its website to emphasize a new section entitled “Islam vs. the Constitution,” published a report on Shariah law, and joined anti-Shariah conferences.

Professor Maurice Moshe Eisenstein is a tenured associate professor of Political Science at Purdue University Calumet. He is under fire from student protesters for past and present remarks targeting various groups but particularly Muslims.

This is how a local paper described the events:

Nearly two dozen students demonstrated Wednesday outside Purdue University Calumet in protest of a political science professor who they say made racially prejudiced remarks verbally and on his Facebook page, particularly targeting Muslim students.

The student who organized the protests is one Christopher Ramirez. Ramirez believes that prof. Eisenstein purposefully posted inflammatory remarks aimed at Muslims on his Facebook page on the Muslim festival of Eid-Al Adha:

Christopher Ramirez, who organized the protest, pointed to associate professor of political science Maurice Eisenstein’s Facebook page, where he posted a picture and comment Sunday about 100 black Christians who were killed by radical Muslims. Ramirez said the picture and comment were posted on the first day of Eid, a traditional Muslim holiday.

Eisentstein for his part believes he is the victim of a conspiracy by Jew-haters:

They say I teach religion in class. I believe the person who started this is a faculty member, and I believe that many of these are her students. I am the only one who comes in every day with a kippah (a cap) on. I don’t know the answers to your questions. I made myself available. No one spoke to me. They are saying all of these bad things about me, but they wouldn’t talk to me.”

Maurice Eisenstein, who believes he is being targeted because he is an Orthodox Jew.

Actually, it would seem professor that the students are quite right to take umbrage at your Facebook postings. Viewing it today, we captured this screen shot of what we assume is the offending post that has riled up the student protesters:

It is quite condescending for a political science professor to coach his view of the sectarian violence in Nigeria in such black and white terms as “decide if you are with the radical or civilized people,” clearly he is generalizing about Islam and Muslims, and casting them in the “radical” and hence “uncivilized” camp. Students who saw this posting and read it in the context of the professor’s past statements can be excused for thinking he meant to tar all Muslims.

Yet, what we found even more egregious and definitely inexcusable is the link the professor posted just a few scrolls down on his Facebook page. It is a link to the hate site run by the fanatical queen bee of Islamophobia, Pamela Geller’s AtlasShrugs:

This is inexcusable. Pamela Geller is not only a radical anti-Muslim but a racist to boot, if you don’t believe us (there’s ample evidence to believe us), then maybe you will take the word of the ADL and the SPLC. Such a link cannot be a mere faux pas, it’s akin to linking to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website, and the administration at Purdue University Calumet should take a stronger stand than it has:

“Purdue Calumet by its nature as a public university welcomes and encourages the exchange of thoughtful and diverse views and opinions. Likewise, the university does not condone expressions that are considered offensive, intolerant or disrespectful.

“That stated, certain, recent unpleasant comments exchanged between Associate Professor of Political Science Maurice Eisenstein and others have been communicated on the Professor’s personal Facebook page. In no way do these comments reflect the university’s position and commitment to tolerance and respect with regard to the right of free expression by all individuals.

“Nonetheless, though Professor Eisenstein is a tenured faculty member, tenure has no bearing on the nature of free expression, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, that Purdue Calumet faculty members choose to exercise on their personal Facebook page. Neither are there Purdue Calumet policies and regulations that extend to personal Facebook pages.”

Such mealy mouthed pronouncements from the administration do nothing to help. Loonwatchers should let them know that they should review the professor’s treatment of his students, not only due to the protests but also the troubling links the professor maintains. Ask them if they would be okay with a professor linking to neo-Nazi websites? And then inform them of the disgusting, bigoted, racist, genocidal comments Geller has made, as well as her associations.

Here is the contact page for the University:

Contact

Purdue University Calumet
Office of University Relations
2200 169th Street
Hammond, IN 46323-2094

Phone:
219/989-2400
1-800 HI-PURDUE, x.2400
Locally within Indiana & Illinois

E-mail:
univrel@calumet.purdue.edu

Contact the professor as well:

219) 989-2688
Office: CLO 294
email: m_eisens@purduecal.edu

B.Sc. Purdue University,
M.A. Purdue University,
Ph.D. (1993) Purdue University

Video of the Student protest: