By Max Blumenthal
Monday, December 20, 2010
...Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade,
elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network's
apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate...
Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers,
Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and
Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade
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 Israeli Public Affairs 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 [Jewish]
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 Jacobs, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many
outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations
professionals, Jacobs 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 Chernick had served as a trustee, Jacobs 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. Jacobs 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."
The Network Expands
This second failed campaign was, in the end, more about movement
building than success, no less national security. The local crusade
established an effective blueprint for generating hysteria against the
establishment of Islamic centers and mosques across the country, while
galvanizing a cast of characters who would form an anti-Muslim network
which would gain attention and success in the years to come.
In 2007, these figures coalesced into a proto-movement that launched a
new crusade, this time targeting the Khalil Gibran International
Academy, a secular Arabic-English elementary school in Brooklyn, New
York. Calling their ad hoc pressure group, Stop the Madrassah --
madrassah being simply the Arab word for "school" -- the coalition's
activists included an array of previously unknown zealots who made no
attempt to disguise their extreme views when it came to Islam as a
religion, as well as Muslims in America. Their stated goal was to
challenge the school's establishment on the basis of its violation of
the church-state separation in the U.S. Constitution. The true aim of
the coalition, however, was transparent: to pressure the city's
leadership to adopt an antagonistic posture towards the local Muslim
community.
The activists zeroed in on the school's principal, Debbie Almontaser,
a veteran educator of Yemeni descent, and baselessly branded her "a
jihadist" as well as a 9/11 denier. They also accused her of -- as
Pamela Geller, a far-right blogger just then gaining prominence put
it, "whitewash[ing] the genocide against the Jews." Daniel Pipes, a
neoconservative academic previously active in the campaigns against
Joseph Massad and the Boston Islamic center (and whose pro-Likud think
tank, Middle East Forum, has received $150,000 from Chernick) claimed
the school should not go ahead because "Arabic-language instruction is
inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage." As the
campaign reached a fever pitch, Almontaser reported that members of
the coalition were actually stalking her wherever she went.
Given what Columbia Journalism School professor and former New York
Times reporter Samuel Freedman called "her clear, public record of
interfaith activism and outreach," including work with the New York
Police Department and the Anti-Defamation League after the September
11th attacks, the assault on Almontaser seemed little short of bizarre
-- until her assailants discovered a photograph of a T-shirt produced
by AWAAM, a local Arab feminist organization, that read "Intifada
NYC." As it turned out, AWAAM sometimes shared office space with a
Yemeni-American association on which Almontaser served as a board
member. Though the connection seemed like a stretch, it promoted the
line of attack the Stop the Madrassah coalition had been seeking.
Having found a way to wedge the emotional issue of the Israel-
Palestine conflict into a previously New York-centered campaign, the
school's opponents next gained a platform at the Murdoch-owned New
York Post, where reporters Chuck Bennett and Jana Winter claimed her T-
shirt was "apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big
Apple." While Almontaser attempted to explain to the Post's reporters
that she rejected terrorism, the Anti-Defamation League chimed in on
cue. ADL spokesman Oren Segal told the Post: "The T-shirt is a
reflection of a movement that increasingly lauds violence against
Israelis instead of rejecting it. That is disturbing."
Before any Qassam rockets could be launched from Almontaser's school,
her former ally New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg caved to the growing
pressure and threatened to shut down the school, prompting her to
resign. A Jewish principal who spoke no Arabic replaced Almontaser,
who later filed a lawsuit against the city for breaching her free
speech rights. In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
ruled that New York's Department of Education had "succumbed to the
very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel" by
firing Almontaser and urged it pay her $300,000 in damages. The
commission also concluded that the Post had quoted her misleadingly.
Though it failed to stop the establishment of the Khalil Gibran
Academy, the burgeoning anti-Muslim movement succeeded in forcing city
leaders to bend to its will, and having learned just how to do that,
then moved on in search of more high-profile targets. As the New York
Times reported at the time, "The fight against the school... was only
an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle."
"It's a battle that has really just begun," Pipes told the Times.
From Scam to Publicity Coup
Pipes couldn't have been more on the mark. In late 2009, the
Islamophobes sprang into action again when the Cordoba Initiative, a
non-profit Muslim group headed by Feisal Abdul Rauf, an exceedingly
moderate Sufi Muslim imam who regularly traveled abroad representing
the United States at the behest of the State Department, announced
that it was going to build a community center in downtown New York
City. With the help of investors, Rauf's Cordoba Initiative purchased
space two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. The space was to
contain a prayer area as part of a large community center that would
be open to everyone in the neighborhood.
None of these facts mattered to Pamela Geller. Thanks to constant
prodding at her blog, Atlas Shrugged, Geller made Cordoba's
construction plans a national issue, provoking fervent calls from
conservatives to protect the "hallowed ground" of 9/11 from creeping
Sharia. (That the "mosque" would have been out of sight of Ground Zero
and that the neighborhood was, in fact, filled with everything from
strip clubs to fast-food joints didn't matter.) Geller's activism
against Cordoba House earned the 52-year-old full-time blogger the
attention she apparently craved, including a long profile in the New
York Times and frequent cable news spots, especially, of course, on
Fox News.
Mainstream reporters tended to focus on Geller's bizarre stunts. She
posted a video of herself splashing around in a string bikini on a
Fort Lauderdale beach, for instance, while ranting about "left-tards"
and "Nazi Hezbollah." Her call for boycotting Campbell's Soup because
the company offered halal -- approved under Islamic law (as kosher
food is under Jewish law) -- versions of its products got her much
attention, as did her promotion of a screed claiming that President
Barack Obama was the illegitimate lovechild of Malcolm X.
Geller had never earned a living as a journalist. She supported
herself with millions of dollars in a divorce settlement and life
insurance money from her ex-husband. He died in 2008, a year after
being indicted for an alleged $1.3 million scam he was accused of
running out of a car dealership he co-owned with Geller. Independently
wealthy and with time on her hands, Geller proved able indeed when it
came to exploiting her strange media stardom to incite the already
organized political network of Islamophobes to intensify their
crusade.
She also benefited from close alliances with leading Islamophobes from
Europe. Among Geller's allies was Andrew Gravers, a Danish activist
who formed the group Stop the Islamicization of Europe, and gave it
the unusually blunt motto: "Racism is the lowest form of human
stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense." Gravers'
group inspired Geller's own U.S.-based outfit, Stop the Islamicization
of America, which she formed with her friend Robert Spencer, a pseudo-
scholar whose bestselling books, including The Truth About Muhammad,
Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion, prompted former
advisor to President Richard Nixon and Muslim activist Robert Crane to
call him, "the principal leader… in the new academic field of Muslim
bashing." (According to the website Politico, almost $1 million in
donations from Chernick has been steered to Spencer's Jihad Watch
group through David Horowitz's Freedom Center.)
Perfect sources for Republican political figures in search of the next
hot-button cause, their rhetoric found its way into the talking points
of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin as they propelled the crusade against
Cordoba House into the national spotlight. Gingrich soon compared the
community center to a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Memorial Museum,
while Palin called it "a stab in the heart" of "the Heartland."
Meanwhile, Tea Party candidates like Republican Ilario Pantano, an
Iraq war veteran who killed two unarmed Iraqi civilians, shooting them
60 times -- he even stopped to reload -- made their opposition to
Cordoba House the centerpiece of midterm congressional campaigns
conducted hundreds of miles from Ground Zero.
Geller's campaign against "the mosque at Ground Zero" gained an
unexpected assist and a veneer of legitimacy from established Jewish
leaders like Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman.
"Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are
irrational," he remarked to the New York Times. Comparing the bereaved
family members of 9-11 victims to Holocaust survivors, Foxman
insisted, "Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would
categorize as irrational or bigoted."
Soon enough, David Harris, director of the (Chernick-funded) American
Jewish Committee, was demanding that Cordoba's leaders be compelled to
reveal their "true attitudes" about Palestinian militant groups before
construction on the center was initiated. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, another major Jewish group,
insisted it would be "insensitive" for Cordoba to build near "a
cemetery," though his organization had recently been granted
permission from the municipality of Jerusalem to build a "museum of
tolerance" to be called The Center for Human Dignity directly on top
of the Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim graveyard that contained thousands
of gravesites dating back 1,200 years.
Inspiration from Israel
It was evident from the involvement of figures like Gravers that the
Islamophobic network in the United States represented a trans-Atlantic
expansion of simmering resentment in Europe. There, the far-right was
storming to victories in parliamentary elections across the continent
in part by appealing to the simmering anti-Muslim sentiments of voters
in rural and working-class communities. The extent of the
collaboration between European and American Islamophobes has only
continued to grow with Geller, Spencer, and even Gingrich standing
beside Europe's most prominent anti-Muslim figure, Dutch
parliamentarian Geert Wilders, at a rally against Cordoba House. In
the meantime, Geller was issuing statements of support for the English
Defense League, a band of unreconstructed neo-Nazis and former members
of the whites-only British National Party who intimidate Muslims in
the streets of cities like Birmingham and London.
In addition, the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic crusade has stretched
into Israel, a country that has come to symbolize the network's fight
against the Muslim menace. As Geller told the New York Times' Alan
Feuer, Israel is "a very good guide because, like I said, in the war
between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized
man."
EDL members regularly wave Israeli flags at their rallies, while
Wilders claims to have formed his views about Muslims during the time
he worked on an Israeli cooperative farm in the 1980s. He has, he
says, visited the country more than 40 times since to meet with
rightist political allies like Aryeh Eldad, a member of the Israeli
Knesset and leader of the far right Hatikvah faction of the National
Union Party. He has called for forcibly "transferring" the
Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied West Bank to Jordan and
Egypt. On December 5th, for example, Wilders traveled to Israel for a
"friendly" meeting with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, then
declared at a press conference that Israel should annex the West Bank
and set up a Palestinian state in Jordan.
In the apocalyptic clash of civilizations the global anti-Muslim
network has sought to incite, tiny armed Jewish settlements like
Yitzar, located on the hills above the occupied Palestinian city of
Nablus, represent front-line fortresses. Inside Yitzar's state-funded
yeshiva, a rabbi named Yitzhak Shapira has instructed students in what
rules must be applied when considering killing non-Jews. Shapira
summarized his opinions in a widely publicized book, Torat HaMelech,
or The King's Torah. Claiming that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by
nature," Shapira cited rabbinical texts to declare that gentiles could
be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "There is
justification," the rabbi proclaimed, "for killing babies if it is
clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they
may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."
In 2006, the rabbi was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his
supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years
later, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he signed a
rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally
assaulted two Arab youths on the country's Holocaust Remembrance Day.
That same year, Shapira was arrested as a suspect in helping
orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus.
Though he was not charged, his name came up again in connection with
another act of terror when, in January 2010, the Israeli police raided
his settlement seeking vandals who had set fire to a nearby mosque.
One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant, Jack Teitel, has
confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the
kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell with a mail bomb.
What does all this have to do with Islamophobic campaigns in the
United States? A great deal, actually. Through New York-based tax-
exempt non-profits like the Central Fund of Israel and Ateret Cohenim,
for instance, the omnipresent Aubrey Chernick has sent tens of
thousands of dollars to support the Yitzar settlement, as well as to
the messianic settlers dedicated to "Judaizing" East Jerusalem. The
settlement movement's leading online news magazine, Arutz Sheva, has
featured Geller as a columnist. A friend of Geller's, Beth Gilinsky,
a right-wing activist with a group called the Coalition to Honor
Ground Zero and the founder of the Jewish Action Alliance (apparently
run out of a Manhattan real estate office), organized a large rally in
New York City in April 2010 to protest the Obama administration's call
for a settlement freeze.
Among Chernick's major funding recipients is a supposedly "apolitical"
group called Aish Hatorah that claims to educate Jews about their
heritage. Based in New York and active in the fever swamps of northern
West Bank settlements near Yitzar, Aish Hatorah shares an address and
staff with a shadowy foreign non-profit called the Clarion Fund.
During the 2008 U.S. election campaign, the Clarion Fund distributed
28 million DVDs of a propaganda film called Obsession as newspaper
inserts to residents of swing states around the country.
The film featured a who's who of anti-Muslim activists, including
Walid Shoebat, a self-proclaimed "former PLO terrorist." Among
Shoebat's more striking statements: "A secular dogma like Nazism is
less dangerous than is Islamofascism today." At a Christian gathering
in 2007, this "former Islamic terrorist" told the crowd that Islam was
a "satanic cult" and that he had been born again as an evangelical
Christian. In 2008, however, the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning
newspaper, exposed him as a fraud, whose claims to terrorism were
fictional.
Islamophobic groups registered only a minimal impact during the 2008
election campaign. Two years later, however, after the Republicans
regained control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections,
the network appears to have reached critical mass. Of course, the
deciding factor in the election was the economy, and in two years,
Americans will likely vote their pocketbooks again. But that the
construction of a single Islamic community center or the imaginary
threat of Sharia law were issues at all reflected the influence of a
small band of locally oriented activists, and suggested that when a
certain presidential candidate who has already been demonized as a
crypto-Muslim runs for reelection, the country's most vocal
Islamophobes could once again find a national platform amid the
frenzied atmosphere of the campaign.
By now, the Islamophobic crusade has gone beyond the right-wing pro-
Israel activists, cyber-bigots, and ambitious hucksters who conceived
it. It now belongs to leading Republican presidential candidates, top-
rated cable news hosts, and crowds of Tea Party activists. As the
fervor spreads, the crusaders are basking in the glory of what they
accomplished. "I didn't choose this moment," Geller mused to the New
York Times, "this moment chose me."
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared
in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
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