Prominent Islamophobes Identified As
‘Heading Up The Radical Right'
30 May 2012By Eli Clifton
Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown
enormous growth in the past two years, leading the
Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious
Islamophobes on their list of "30 new activists
heading up the radical right." The SPLC finds that
"[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up
by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes,
has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when
reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%."
The anti-Muslim activists, who all play a prominent
role in the Center for American Progress' report,
"Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In
America," play pivotal roles as misinformation experts
and online activists, stirring up Islamophobic fears
across the country.
The SPLC's list of "new activists heading up the
radical right" include:
¦Frank Gaffney: Gaffney, the president and founder the
Center for Security Policy, has argued that
"Shariah-adherent Muslms" are engaged in "civilization
jihad" by infiltrating "government, law enforcement,
intelligence agencies, the military, penal
institutions, media think tanks, political entities,
academic institutions. And they are very aggressively
targeting non-Muslim religious communities in the name
of ecumenicalism." The SPLC observes that:
As recently as in 2002, a prominent British newspaper
listed him with Iraq invasion cheerleaders Paul
Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as one of
the men "directing" then-President George W. Bush's
post 9/11 security doctrine.
Sometime between then and now, Gaffney seems to have
snapped.
¦Pamela Geller: Geller, who runs the prominent
anti-Muslim blog AtlasShrugs and co-founded of Stop
Islamization of America, has suggested that President
Obama is the "love child" of Malcolm X, accused Obama
of being "involved with a crack whore in his youth"
and asserted that "that Islam is the most antisemitic,
genocidal ideology in the world." In 2007, she
attended a conference hosted by Vlaams Belang, a
Flemish nationalist party in Belgium whose party
platform includes seeking amnesty for those who
collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The
SPLC writes:
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.
¦David Yerushalmi: Yerushalmi, founder of the Society
of Americans for National Existence (SANE), practices,
what he calls, "lawfare" by writing and pushing anti-Shariah
bills in state legislatures and filings lawsuits
against alleged enemies of America's "Judeo-Christian"
heritage.The SPLC reports:
Muslims aren't the only group with whom he has a bone
to pick. Yerushalmi, an Orthodox Jew, also rails
against liberal Jews and the "progressive elites" he
says they influence. He's described blacks as "the
most murderous of peoples" and reportedly once called
for undocumented immigrants to be placed in "special
criminal camps," detained for three years, and then
deported.
The prominent role given to Islamophobes in the
SPLC's list underscores the anti-Muslim sentiments
which have emerged on right-wing media outlets,
Washington think tanks like the Center for Security
Policy and the "anti-Shariah" legislation which has
swept across more than two-dozen states.
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