SOME ANTI-MUSLIM IDEOLOGUES AND THE GOVERNMENT THAT LOVES THEM
(PRESENT AND PAST)
- The Clarion Fund/Project has produced a number of viciously anti-Muslim videos Among these are Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (28 million DVDs distributed in swing states during the 2008 presidential election), which makes a direct connection among Muslims, Palestinians, and Nazis; The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, which promotes a “discredited conspiracy theory” and spreads “scurrilous accusations against Islam and Muslims”; and Iranium—about Iran’s nuclear program and the need for military action against it—which “portrays a clash of civilizations [and] suggests that Muslims value death over life.”
Government Connections: Obsession was used at a U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service surveillance detection course. Among the featured interviewees in Obsession are former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former New York City Police Department (NYPD) Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly (along with such anti-Muslim ideologues as Steven Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel, and Daniel Pipes). The NYPD Ray Kelly’s appearance in The Third Jihad (2009), a rabidly Islamophobic propaganda film, and its showing to nearly 1,500 officers at NYPD training sessions led to widespread community outrage. (For many years, the NYPD conducted an extensive and discriminatory post-9/11 surveillance program that targeted Muslims, based on their religion, ethnicity, or native language.) National Security Advisor John Bolton was an interviewee in Iranium.
- Steven Emerson (Investigative Project on Terrorism; Counterterrorism & Security Education and Research Foundation/CTSERF) has claimed that Islam “sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.” A frequent mainstream media figure, he has a long history of making baseless, inflammatory anti-Muslim claims, such as his assertion on Fox News that Birmingham, England and other European cities were filled with “no-go zones” where non-Muslims and government officials don’t go.
Government Connections: Beginning with his 1998 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Emerson has demonized Muslims during frequent Congressional testimony and provided the government with “misinformation” in numerous trials of Muslim defendants. In 2007, he met with former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon to discuss Bannon’s proposed film, “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism [sic] in America.” On the Investigative Project on Terrorism website, Emerson prominently quotes John Bolton as saying, “If the IPT did not exist, our national security would have been eviscerated by now.”
- Brigitte Gabriel (ACT for America) maintains that a “practicing Muslim who believes in the teachings of the Quran cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States of America.” The Southern Poverty Law Center describes ACT as “the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in America.” A main ACT priority is to support state legislation against what the ACLU has described as the “mythical” threat to the U.S. legal system of “Sharia” (or “foreign law.” (Because Sharia “is overwhelmingly concerned with personal religious observance such as prayer and fasting, and not with national laws,” characterizing it as a threat to our courts or country “is the same thing as saying that all observant Muslims are a threat.”)
Government Connections: The initial guest on Gabriel’s cable television show was Representative Peter King, immediately before King, as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, launched in 2011 a series of hearings that focused on—and smeared—Muslims.” ACT gave an award in 2016 to Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director and current Secretary of State nominee, who has spoken at ACT conferences. ACT’s 2016 annual conference, held in a U.S. Capitol building auditorium, included “a legislative briefing” at which 10 legislators spoke, including Senator Ted Cruz. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has called Islam “a cancer,” is a member of ACT’s Board of Advisors. Gabriel visited the White House in 2017 and posted a photo of herself with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
- Frank Gaffney (Center for Security Policy), a leading anti-Muslim “disinformation expert,” is a “birther” and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense. Viewing mosques as “Trojan horses” that Muslims use to promote “sedition” and Islam as a totalitarian ideology, not a religion, Gaffney has worked with ACT to advance “anti-Sharia” (or anti-foreign) laws in many state legislatures.
Government Connections: Representative Peter King, who has maintained that “there are too many mosques in this country,” appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio program shortly before launching 2011 anti-Muslim congressional hearings. Gaffney provided debunked poll data used by the Trump administration to justify the “Muslim ban.” In 2015, the Center for Security Policy organized a series of “National Security Action Summits” that included Donald Trump and a number of current and past senators, congressional representatives, and governors. In the same year, the Center for Security Policy awarded Attorney General Jeff Sessions its “Keeper of the Flame” Award. Since 2013, Gaffney has had Mike Pompeo on his radio program more than two-dozen times. In 2016, Bolton helped overturn a ban on Gaffney at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) after he had maintained in 2011 that two CPAC board members were “supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here.” “Trump . . . cited research from the Center for Security Policy dozens of times in press releases and speeches during his presidential campaign.”
- The Gatestone Institute is an international think tank that spreads various false and fear mongering stories promoting its belief that Muslims are an “existential threat” to Europe and the United States. It promotes such virulently anti-Muslim figures as Steven Emerson, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Dutch extremist Geerts Wilders, along with numerous adamantly pro-Israel neoconservatives. The Gatestone founder and president is Nina Rosenwald, who has been termed “the sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate,” because of her funding of anti-Muslim ideologues through the Abstraction Fund and (previously) the William Rosenwald Family Fund (identified by the Center for American Progress as one of the leading funders of the “Islamophobia network in America”).
Government Connections: John Bolton has been chair of the Gatestone Institute since 2013. He has received at least $310,000 for his work with it. He spoke at a Gatestone “Briefing Council Event” as recently as October 2017.
- Pamela Geller (American Freedom Defense Initiative/AFDI, Stop Islamization Of America/SIOA, and Stop Islamization Of Nations/SION) has been described as “the queen of Muslim-bashers.” She has spearheaded—and been the public face of—campaigns in cities and towns across the country that involved posting vile anti-Muslim messages at train stations and on buses. Geller is birther and a fan of various conspiracy theories who described Obama as “beholden to his ‘Islamic overlords.’” She has numerous connections to white nationalism, including far-right European groups. She has enthusiastically supported such anti-Muslim hatemongers as Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim leader “who has repeatedly compared the Quran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
Government Connections: Steve Bannon has had Geller on his Breitbart radio show seven times and has lauded her as “one of the great American patriots.” Geller has interviewed John Bolton several times on her internet blog and internet radio show. He endorsed and wrote the forward for the 2010 book she co-authored with Robert Spencer, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, which an article in The Nation described as “a series of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and sweeping anti-Muslim statements.” Bolton was a speaker in 2010 and 2011 at rallies organized by Geller and Spencer in opposition to the building in lower Manhattan of the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque.
- David Horowitz (David Horowitz Freedom Center): DHFC projects include FrontPage Magazine, a major online purveyor of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Horowitz as “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement’” He has called Black Lives Matter the “most vicious racist movement this country has seen since the Ku Klux Klan at its heyday.”
Government Connections: Horowitz is long-time mentor to Jeff Sessions and White House advisor Stephen Miller (author of Trump’s Muslim immigration bans). Horowitz has described Miller as “my conduit to Sessions.” At his Senate confirmation hearing, Sessions, who has attended and spoken at Freedom Center events, defended Horowitz as “brilliant.” In 2011, John Bolton was the recipient of the Patrick Henry Award for Unwavering Defense of Liberty from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, where he was introduced by Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum.
- Daniel Pipes (Middle East Forum) believes that “militant Islam” is “infiltrating America” and “has endorsed the internment of ethnic Japanese in American prison camps in World War II and held that up as a model for dealing with Muslims today.” He alleged that President Obama “enforced Islamic law”—part of his larger thesis about the “threat” to the “West” of “lawful Islam.” MEF is an intermediary organization that also funds other anti-Muslim hate groups.
Government Connections: In 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Pipes to the board of the United States Institute for Peace—a nomination that received support from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other groups. As a result of strong opposition to Pipes by Muslim and Arab American, civil rights, and interfaith leaders and several Senate Judiciary Committee members, President Bush had to resort to a recess appointment. John Bolton has been part of a Middle East Forum Q&A with David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes.
- Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch; co-founder Stop the Islamization of America, American Freedom Defense Initiative) is a self-taught, self-styled “expert” on Islam, who has claimed that it “is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” With Geller, he was banned in 2013 from entering Great Britain to speak at a rally of the anti-Muslim English Defense League, on the grounds that their presence “is not conducive to the public good.”
Government Connections: Spencer’s books were, for a time, recommended by the FBI for training recruits. He has led seminars for various agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. John Bolton blurbed and wrote the forward for The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, the 2010 book that Spencer co-authored with Pamela Geller, which charges “Barack Hussein Obama” with “the implementation of a soft sharia: the quiet and piecemeal implementation of Islamic laws that subjugate non-Muslims.”
- David Yerushalmi (American Freedom Law Center; Society of Americans for National Existence/SANE), lawyer for Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim ideologues, is a white supremacist who has said that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic” and has supported legislation making “adherence to Sharia” (something done by all observant Muslims) a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. He also called in 2007 for deporting all Muslim non-citizens and banning Muslim immigration.
Government Connections: Yerushalmi developed the legislative template for campaigns against the mythical threat of “Sharia law.”
This handout updates and significantly expands an earlier document we had completed as part of the Network Against Islamophobia (NAI) curriculum.