The Great Islamophobic Crusade
Max Blumenthal is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute and author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (Nation Books).? This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country.
With it has gone an?outburst?of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even?overwhelmingly approved?a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have?bought into?a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith.?And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll?revealed?that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.
Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it's the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.? It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.
Little of recent American Islamophobia (with a strong emphasis on the "phobia") is sheer happenstance.? Years before Tea Party shock troops massed for angry protests outside the proposed site of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, representatives of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-American establishment launched a campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism that would prove a seedbed for everything to come. That campaign quickly -- and perhaps predictably -- morphed into a series of crusades against mosques and Islamic schools which, in turn, attracted an assortment of shady but exceptionally energetic militants into the network's ranks.
Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade, conservative elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network's apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate. One philanthropist in particular has provided the beneficence to propel the campaign ahead. He is a little-known Los Angeles-area software security entrepreneur named Aubrey Chernick, who operates out of a security consulting firm blandly named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination. A former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has served as a think tank for the American Israel Policy Action Committee (AIPAC), a frontline lobbying group for Israel, Chernick is said to be worth $750 million.
Chernick's fortune is puny compared to that of the billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.
Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.
Birth of a Network
The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush's prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton's attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Peters, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Peters conceived a plan to "take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions," as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.
In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernoff had served as a trustee, Peters produced a documentary film that he called Columbia Unbecoming.? It was filled with claims from Jewish students at Columbia University claiming they had endured intimidation and insults from Arab professors.? The film portrayed that New York City school's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures as a hothouse of anti-Semitism.
In their complaints, the students focused on one figure in particular: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor of Middle East studies.? He was known for his passionate advocacy of the formation of a binational state between Israel and Palestine, as well as for his strident criticism of what he termed "the racist character of Israel." The film identified him as "one of the most dangerous intellectuals on campus," while he was featured as a crucial villain in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book by the (Chernick-funded) neoconservative activist David Horowitz.? As Massad was seeking tenure at the time, he was especially vulnerable to this sort of wholesale assault.
When the controversy over Massad's views intensified, Congressman Anthony Weiner, a liberal New York Democrat who once described himself as a representative of "the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] wing of the Democratic Party," demanded that Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar, fire the professor. Bollinger responded by issuing uncharacteristically defensive statements about the "limited" nature of academic freedom.
In the end, however, none of the charges stuck. Indeed, the testimonies in the David Project film were eventually either discredited or never corroborated. In 2009, Massad earned tenure after winning Columbia's prestigious Lionel Trilling Award for excellence in scholarship.
Having demonstrated its ability to intimidate faculty members and even powerful university administrators, however, Kramer claimed a moral victory in the name of his project, boasting to the press that "this is a turning point." While the David Project subsequently fostered chapters on campuses nationwide, its director set out on a different path -- initially, into the streets of Boston in 2004 to oppose the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
For nearly 15 years, the Islamic Society of Boston had sought to build the center in the heart of Roxbury, the city's largest black neighborhood, to serve its sizable Muslim population. With endorsements from Mayor Thomas Menino and leading Massachusetts lawmakers, the mosque's construction seemed like a fait accompli -- until, that is, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Boston Herald and his local Fox News affiliate snapped into action.? Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby also chimed in with a series of reports claiming the center's plans were evidence of a Saudi Arabian plot to bolster the influence of radical Islam in the United States, and possibly even to train underground terror cells.
It was at this point that the David Project entered the fray, convening elements of the local pro-Israel community in the Boston area to seek strategies to torpedo the project. According to emails obtained by the Islamic Society's lawyers in a lawsuit against the David Project, the organizers settled on a campaign of years of nuisance lawsuits, along with accusations that the center had received foreign funding from "the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia or… the Moslem Brotherhood."
In response, a grassroots coalition of liberal Jews initiated inter-faith efforts aimed at ending a controversy that had essentially been manufactured out of thin air and was corroding relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Peters would not, however, relent. "We are more concerned now than we have ever been about a Saudi influence of local mosques," he announced at a suburban Boston synagogue in 2007.
After paying out millions of dollars in legal bills and enduring countless smears, the Islamic Society of Boston completed the construction of its community center in 2008. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, nothing came of the David Project's dark warnings. As Boston-area National Public Radio reporter Philip Martin reflected in September 2010, "The horror stories that preceded [the center's] development seem shrill and histrionic in retrospect."
Copyright 2010 CBS. All rights reserved. Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country.
With it has gone an?outburst?of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even?overwhelmingly approved?a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have?bought into?a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith.?And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll?revealed?that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.
Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it's the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.? It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.
Little of recent American Islamophobia (with a strong emphasis on the "phobia") is sheer happenstance.? Years before Tea Party shock troops massed for angry protests outside the proposed site of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, representatives of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-American establishment launched a campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism that would prove a seedbed for everything to come. That campaign quickly -- and perhaps predictably -- morphed into a series of crusades against mosques and Islamic schools which, in turn, attracted an assortment of shady but exceptionally energetic militants into the network's ranks.
Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade, conservative elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network's apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate. One philanthropist in particular has provided the beneficence to propel the campaign ahead. He is a little-known Los Angeles-area software security entrepreneur named Aubrey Chernick, who operates out of a security consulting firm blandly named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination. A former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has served as a think tank for the American Israel Policy Action Committee (AIPAC), a frontline lobbying group for Israel, Chernick is said to be worth $750 million.
Chernick's fortune is puny compared to that of the billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.
Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.
Birth of a Network
The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush's prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton's attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Peters, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Peters conceived a plan to "take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions," as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.
In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernoff had served as a trustee, Peters produced a documentary film that he called Columbia Unbecoming.? It was filled with claims from Jewish students at Columbia University claiming they had endured intimidation and insults from Arab professors.? The film portrayed that New York City school's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures as a hothouse of anti-Semitism.
In their complaints, the students focused on one figure in particular: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor of Middle East studies.? He was known for his passionate advocacy of the formation of a binational state between Israel and Palestine, as well as for his strident criticism of what he termed "the racist character of Israel." The film identified him as "one of the most dangerous intellectuals on campus," while he was featured as a crucial villain in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book by the (Chernick-funded) neoconservative activist David Horowitz.? As Massad was seeking tenure at the time, he was especially vulnerable to this sort of wholesale assault.
When the controversy over Massad's views intensified, Congressman Anthony Weiner, a liberal New York Democrat who once described himself as a representative of "the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] wing of the Democratic Party," demanded that Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar, fire the professor. Bollinger responded by issuing uncharacteristically defensive statements about the "limited" nature of academic freedom.
In the end, however, none of the charges stuck. Indeed, the testimonies in the David Project film were eventually either discredited or never corroborated. In 2009, Massad earned tenure after winning Columbia's prestigious Lionel Trilling Award for excellence in scholarship.
Having demonstrated its ability to intimidate faculty members and even powerful university administrators, however, Kramer claimed a moral victory in the name of his project, boasting to the press that "this is a turning point." While the David Project subsequently fostered chapters on campuses nationwide, its director set out on a different path -- initially, into the streets of Boston in 2004 to oppose the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
For nearly 15 years, the Islamic Society of Boston had sought to build the center in the heart of Roxbury, the city's largest black neighborhood, to serve its sizable Muslim population. With endorsements from Mayor Thomas Menino and leading Massachusetts lawmakers, the mosque's construction seemed like a fait accompli -- until, that is, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Boston Herald and his local Fox News affiliate snapped into action.? Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby also chimed in with a series of reports claiming the center's plans were evidence of a Saudi Arabian plot to bolster the influence of radical Islam in the United States, and possibly even to train underground terror cells.
It was at this point that the David Project entered the fray, convening elements of the local pro-Israel community in the Boston area to seek strategies to torpedo the project. According to emails obtained by the Islamic Society's lawyers in a lawsuit against the David Project, the organizers settled on a campaign of years of nuisance lawsuits, along with accusations that the center had received foreign funding from "the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia or… the Moslem Brotherhood."
In response, a grassroots coalition of liberal Jews initiated inter-faith efforts aimed at ending a controversy that had essentially been manufactured out of thin air and was corroding relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Peters would not, however, relent. "We are more concerned now than we have ever been about a Saudi influence of local mosques," he announced at a suburban Boston synagogue in 2007.
After paying out millions of dollars in legal bills and enduring countless smears, the Islamic Society of Boston completed the construction of its community center in 2008. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, nothing came of the David Project's dark warnings. As Boston-area National Public Radio reporter Philip Martin reflected in September 2010, "The horror stories that preceded [the center's] development seem shrill and histrionic in retrospect."
- no previous page
- next
1/3
Would Jesus have said anything remotely like that? No way. When Christians go fundamentalist, they read their New Testament and see Jesus' teachings of peace and forgiveness. And Christian terrorism is rare, in spite of millions of Christians being very poor or seemingly disenfranchised in various places.
It seems like a lot of the Bible's violence-advocating passages occur in the Old Testament; I think the New Testament is supposed to supplement (and override, when there are conflicting instructions) the Old Testament. Unfortunately, Christians sometimes get violent inspiration from both the Old and New Testaments, and they then give that precedence over Jesus' teachings.
There has historically been a lot of violence done for the sake of Christianity. But it's questionable whether this was encouraged by the religion or was a wrongful corruption of early Christians' intent. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence for arguments about this.
Defenders of Islam blame misguided followers for the terrorism. But why are their scriptures written in a dangerous manner that makes Muslims more likely to be wrongly guided into violence? If Islam were a good religion, it would be more capable of handling the faults of its fallible human followers.
Defenders of Islam also like to point to the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, etc as proof that Christianity is just as bad. But what passages in the New Testament directly encouraged those violent events? None that I'm aware of. Would Jesus have approved of the Crusades or Spanish Inquisition? No way. Crusaders and Inquisitors had to ignore the teachings of Jesus to do their deeds.
It's true that the Christian Bible also should be more capable of handling the faults of its fallible human followers, and it should have somehow discouraged the Crusades or Spanish Inquisition. But at least it does not encourage holy wars explicitly, like Islam seems to.
Islam is dangerous in a way that no other major religion is.
Realistically, not everyone is going to accept Islam by free choice. So Islam requires a tremendous amount of violent holy war to subjugate the billions of people who will not willingly convert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Islam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Islamism
This is a serious issue and more light should be shed upon it. Thank you again.
Who is Max Blumenthal? He is an extreme anti-Israel activist. How do I know this? Look at how proud is about supporting a boycott of Israeli humus (!!!) in the cafeteria at Princeton University:
http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/12/a-bds-debate-at-princeton-with-j-street-jvp-and-me-this-wednesday/
How do I know that he is intellectually dishonest? For instance: he tries to paint a whole spectrum of pro-Israel groups with the same brush. Consider the following statement:
"New York, NY, September 7, 2010 ? Concerned with a disturbing rise in discrimination against Muslims trying to legally build or expand their houses of worship -- mosques-- across the United States, interfaith and religious leaders have formed a coalition to assist those Muslim communities confronting opposition."
Where does this come from? From the ADL website, since, after all, "Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, Director of Interfaith Affairs for ADL, will coordinate the coalition's operations. He will receive complaints about mosque discrimination from ICOM members, ADL's regional offices, the media, and other credible sources. ADL experts will investigate each complaint and produce a report that will be shared with ICOM members. The coalition, which will operate by consensus, will discuss appropriate action to be taken."
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/CvlRt_32/5843_32.htm
Whoops - those horrible Islamophic pro-Israel guys at the ADL are working together with Islamic groups to fight discrimination against Moslem institutions in America. Doesn't sound like a very effective or dispilined "cabal"!
How do I know he writes like a hack? Just go through his article and look for the inflammatory language, the inuendoes, the attempts to confuse readers by throwing in sound-bite references to complicated tangential issues (such as the site of the old Moslem cemetery in Jerusalem - which, apparently, Moslem authorities had already approved as a site for building and development back in the days of the British Mandate. http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=168899 )
Well, that's about all I have time for right now.
The Center for Economic and Social Justice, a religiously pluralistic thinktank, has developed a multi-phased strategy supported by moderate Muslims, Jews and Christians for addressing the main conflict that is at the root of Jewish and Muslim conflict, that is, the continuing zero-sum game between Jews and Palestinians competing to control the piece of God's earth that the three Abraham faiths call "the Holy Land." Appropriately enough, the new approach is called "The Abraham Federation," as described at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-nk.html.
Amin Gamayel, a former president of Lebanon, told me several years ago that a similar (but less complete) religiously pluralistic vision was what Lebanon's founders had hoped to establish.
It's time for moderates to unite by offering an alternative more reasonable and just for all Jews and Palestinians than the inherently more conflictive two-state compromise strategy offered by leaders of the West. Those who like this new vision should send this link to President Obama. He has the power to back the this new strategy as a way to win the War of Ideas against religious extremists in the US and around the world.
There's your compromise. All is One. Everyone happy?
I get sick and tired of blowhards that pompousely spew out bigotted views without providing verification for the reader to check for its truthfulness.
Have a nice day.