WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE

By Mantiq al-Tayr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

1. Today I just want to do a couple of things quickly. First of all, Skulz Fontaine has been sending me some great stuff and I've been a bit remiss in not sharing some of these with you. I like this one.

But of course the land theft continues, as does the killing – killing Palestinians being the Israeli national pass time. Plus it just seems that attacking, harrasing and shooting at Palestinians is as Israeli as assaulting the USS Liberty.

2. But I want to address something else as the main topic today. What some people like to call Islamophobia – I call it what it is – Anti-Muslim Bigotry – in the United States is getting out of hand. Our country is sick and we need to understand the source of this sickness and do something about it. One good place for you to go as you begin searching for the source is an article I've linked to before by Max Blumenthal. It is here. And here's another real interesting one. And you should read all about David Horowitz – who pays Robert Spencer something like 132k a year to write his bullshit. I strongly recommend you go to Loonwatch and do a search on David Horowitz. Oh hell, I'll do it for you.

And this brings me to:

3. But I also want to draw your attention to something else. Islamphobia is being actively supported by local, state and federal governments and law enforcement. Anti-Muslim hatemongers routinely train local, state and federal officials to hate Islam and Muslims and it looks like they get good money for it. I tell you, I am in the wrong business, but I digress.

It is very possible that these hate mongers have trained people in your community and your state and for sure some of them have been saying some real interesting bullshit to people in the federal government. I mean real wackos like Nonie Darwish and Walid Phares and Steve Coughlin.

I can hear you know, "Okay, Mantiq, prove this. How come you haven't provided one single link under this topic whereas you are always linking everything to everything else and we can't even finish your goddamn posts because we are running of all over hell's half acre reading your links?

Never, fear. Your link is here. It is to a new 80-page study of this phenomenon done by Thomas Cincotta of Political Research Associates. It is entitled:

Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants and the Threat to Rights and Security. It's a nice PDF file and you can download the whole thing for free.

Here is an excerpt from the preface to the report about how effectively your public officials are being trained:

"Kill them, including the children."

That's how to solve the threat of violent militant Muslims?

The above quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was how she understood the underlying theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010. Our investigator had turned around after Shoebat's speech and asked the woman seated one row back what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat.

The report focuses on three private training outfits and the loons who work for them. They are:

A. the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA)
B. Security Solutions International, LLC (SSI)
C. The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre)

I like how the CI Centre (where Walid Phares plies his trade) spells centre the British way. Makes them look cool.

And the report has a section on each of the following people who work for one of the three firms mentioned above:

Mark A. Gabriel – ICTOA guest speaker
David Gaubatz – SSI guest speaker
Walid Phares – CI Centre Faculty
Clare M. Lopez – CI Centre Faculty
Tawfik Hamid – CI Centre Faculty
Stephen Coughlin – CI Centre Faculty
Nonie Darwish – CI Centre Faculty
Detective Ebrahim Ashabi – SSI Expert
Walid Shoebat – ICTOA Guest Speaker

This report is a must read and it is free. Send it to your congressmen and your state representatives and demand that your state, local and federal governments stop funding these modern-day equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan.

4. There are five million decoy Muslims in the US. They are here to trick you and then to kill you.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drQETQ2iprU
(I bet Shas Party members won't get this.)

5. Shakira law spreads to MUST (Missouri University for Science and Technology)

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626Z2wmieUo

* Mantiq al-Tayr is a blogger who is attempting to wake up other American citizens to the true dangers and challenges which face their country and is devoted to justice for the Palestinian people. Truth is his objective, satire is his tool. He also enjoys reading the Qur'an from time to time. See his website.

By Paul J. Balles* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Cartoon by Steve Sack

"To generalize is to be an idiot." – William Blake

Xenophobia is a fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or foreign people. It includes hatred of persons belonging to a different race, or different ethnic or national origin.

The fear or hatred that makes up xenophobia involves a great deal of generalizing about "others".

Unfortunately, if you develop a mindset about large numbers of people based on the actions of a few, you can treat whole populations badly.

British historian Thomas Macaulay said: "In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes."

Generalizations involving xenophobia include thoughts like "immigrants are not as worthy as natives", and "women are not as capable as men".

There are those in America who consider Barak Obama unworthy of being its president because of his colour, because his father was not American by birth or because Obama's middle name is Hussain.

The mental degradation as part of this generalizing applies to any and all who don't belong to the tribe or group of the xenophobes.

Philosopher and author Eric Hoffer observed that "We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious."

Thus, by faulty reasoning, if there is one bad black, all blacks are bad; and if one Muslim has committed a crime, therefore all Muslims must be criminals.

A special name – Islamophobia – applies to xenophobia involving Muslims; and Islamophobia has been growing alarmingly in America recently.

A knife-wielding lunatic attacked a Muslim taxi driver in New York City. Why? The driver admitted to a drunk lunatic that he (the taxi driver) was a Muslim.

The attacker reasoned from the specific (an attack attributed to Muslims on 9/11) to the general (all Muslims were responsible).

A mosque under construction in Tennessee suffered an arson attack. Why? Comments by Islamophobes like Newt Gingrich have incited a general hatred of Muslims.

Newt Gingrich, once the speaker of the US House of Representatives, would naturally have others attaching greater credence to what he says.

How many people has Gingrich fed anti-Muslim thinking with his inflammatory public remarks about Islam? The false generalization: if one Muslim is bad, all Muslims must be bad.

Florida Pastor Terry Jones planned to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11. Why? He generalized from Muslims alleged to have been responsible for 9/11 to all of Islam.

Documentary film-maker Michael Moore pointed out: "Blaming a whole group for the actions of just one of that group is anti-American. Timothy McVeigh was Catholic. Should Oklahoma City prohibit the building of a Catholic Church near the site of the former federal building that McVeigh blew up?"

Protesters have been assailing the building of an Islamic cultural centre – including a mosque – near Ground Zero in New York. The protestors disregard the fact that before Ground Zero became Ground Zero, it had two mosques.

The problem: general and increasing Islamophobia. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 49 per cent of all Americans say they have generally unfavourable opinions of Islam. A larger percentage opposes the cultural centre.

Poet Ezra Pound wrote: "Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it." In other words, if the money isn't in the bank the cheque is worthless.

Applied to the generalizations about Islam, if they don't fit Muslims generally, they are worthless expressions of xenophobia and the ignorant fear called Islamophobia.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

It's not what you think

By Justin Raimondo* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Illustration by J.D. Crowe

One would think that after nine years at least some of the anger, the horror and shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have dissipated: but no. A glimpse at the headlines, a few days before the somber anniversary, disabuses us of this hopeful notion: a crazed pastor out in the boonies somewhere is burning Korans, and the commander of our forces in Afghanistan feels compelled to respond, as does the President. The proposal to build a Muslim community center blocks from "ground zero" - modeled on Jewish community centers ubiquitous in New York - is met with furious opposition, and the "anti-Islamization" movement spearheaded by bigots takes off, with mosques all over the country under attack. Physical attacks on Muslims, or people perceived as Muslim, escalate: a New York City cabbie is assaulted by a crazed Islamophobe, and people who have lived in this country for the whole of their lives are afraid.

What's going on? Andrew Sullivan, writing on his popular blog, writes he is "at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project." After all, Imam Feisel Rauf, the Muslim cleric who wants to build Cordoba House, is a moderate who has condemned Islamic extremism: Rauf was sent by the Bush administration overseas to act as an ambassador of good will to Muslim countries. So where is the ferocity coming from?

To find the answer to this question, we just have to follow the money, and thankfully Ken Vogel and Giovanni Russonello over at Politico have done just that. After detailing the money coming into the Cordoba House project from mainstream donors like the Rockefellers, they write:

"There's also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between [David] Horowitz's Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch - the website run by Spencer "dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world" - and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.

"Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz's Freedom Center, Politico has confirmed that the lion's share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.

"A onetime trustee of the ...Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network ...

"The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center's IRS filings."

Laura Rozen follows up on her Politico blog, detailing the trail of donations from 2008 990 filings for Chernick's charitable foundation, the Fairbrook Foundation, listing all the familiar suspects - CAMERA, Horowitz, MEMRI, Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, the Israeli nationalist "Stand With Us" campus project - and a few less familiar, such as the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, dedicated to thwarting our stated policy of no more settlements where it counts: in East Jerusalem.

Millions pour into the coffers of these groups, all of which are dedicated to one overriding principle, one goal: advancing Israel's national interests in the US. The serpentine convolutions of the Chernick connection, linking one front group to another, encircle the political and temperamental spectrum, ranging from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles (over $900k) to the many hundreds of thousands given to hardline neoconservative outfits like the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, not to mention Pajamas Media ($7 million, in collusion with venture capitalist James "extensively experienced in multimillion-dollar technology transfer and license agreements " Koshland) and a mass campaign to distribute DVDs of the virulently anti-Muslim film "Obsession."

The aim of all this giving is to create and sustain an obsessive hatred of Muslims, all Muslims, and garner support for Israel. The fulminations of Newt Gingrich and the flaxwn-haired harpies of Fox News, who rail against the "ground zero mosque" seem, on the surface, to make no sense. Are they really saying that they want the US to declare war on the billion-plus Muslims who inhabit the planet earth? This, after all, is precisely what Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said: that all the world's Muslims must unite under al-Qaeda's bloody banner because the West, in alliance with Israel, is out to destroy Islam, and it is therefore the duty of the faithful to wage jihad against the US.

The Israelis, having long ago declared war on all the other nations of the region, want us in their camp, and that is precisely what occurred with stunning speed before the smoke cleared from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. "We're all Israelis now!" exulted Martin "Palestinians are subhuman" Peretz, over at The New Republic. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is today the Prime Minister of Israel, told an audience at Bar Ilan University "We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," according to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv. The attack, he averred, "swung American public opinion in our favor" - and now that he and his fellow extremists are in power in Tel Aviv, they are making sure public opinion stays in their favor.

The craziness that ensued in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had to be sustained if Israel was to take full advantage of the moment - a moment their intelligence operatives anticipated, according to Fox News, in a four-part series by their topnotch journalist Carl Cameron, which started out as follows:

"Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.

"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.'"

Fox News has never retracted a word of this story, although they did - after pressure from the Israel lobby - delete it from their web site. It was never mentioned again, at least in "respectable" quarters, and, to be sure, it was never forgotten, thanks to the Internet, where Carl Cameron will be exposing the Israeli connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks unto eternity.

Cameron's noting that "more than sixty" Israelis had been arrested immediately after 9/11, along with and under the same legal rubric as thousands of Arabs, had also been noted here in this space, before the Fox News broadcasts. Why, I asked in a column, was the US government rounding up Israelis, of all people - unless there was some kind of Israeli connection to the attacks? The answer came in Cameron's reporting, and subsequent stories in the "mainstream" media: the Israelis, whose intelligence services had been very active on our soil in the months leading up to 9/11, had been following the hijackers, shadowing their every move, without telling us - almost as if they were protecting them rather than trying to stop them.

What happened on September 11, 2001, has changed the shape of history, and certainly determined the utterly disastrous course of US foreign policy since that day. We have launched a war of retribution against the entire Muslim world, a vast campaign of bombings, drone attacks, occupation, and terror unleashed on the peoples of the Middle East, from Iraq to Pakistan. This is precisely why the Israelis didn't tell us what Mohammed Atta and his co-conspirators were up to, although - if we take Fox News seriously, and I realize there are plenty who don't - there is no doubt that they had it in their power to stop the whole operation before the hijackers had a chance to strike. All they had to do was tell us - and they didn't. This is the "intelligence failure" - not the lack of centralized information, not the competition between the CIA and the FBI - that made the 9/11 terrorist attacks possible: the perfidy of our Israeli "ally."

The Israelis didn't dive-bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with commandeered airliners: Atta and his gang did. Yet they could have prevented it - but why should they have? After all, the attacks have swung public opinion in their favor, as Netanyahu boasted - surely a foreseeable development.

Today, nine years after the event, the Israel lobby is using the anniversary of the attacks to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria to a fever pitch, and they have plenty of bucks to do it. These people - who, as Juan Cole points out, represent a minuscule fraction of the pro-Israel population in the US, and stand out like a couple of sore thumbs from the overwhelmingly liberal Jewish community - mean business, and there's only one way to fight them. It's time to play hardball - just like they do.

I was warned, before raising the possibility of an Israeli connection to 9/11, that I was touching a live wire, that my career - such as it is - would be destroyed, and that I would be banished to the hinterlands, where various obsessives trade conspiracy theories and argue over whether it's the Bilderbergers or the Illuminati who control the world.

It hasn't happened, but I wouldn't care if it did. As Ayn Rand once said: I'm not brave enough to be a coward - I see the consequences too clearly. We see the consequences of 9/11 all around us, in the hate-wrinkled face of the Koran-burning preacher, in the shrill shrieking of Pamela Geller whose anti-Muslim rallies in the vanished shadow of the Trade Towers are as ugly as she is: we see it in the faces of Pakistani refugees, huddled in disease-infested camps, as they flee the US invasion of death-dealing drones.

Think about it: the leadership of a nation that betrayed us, that watched, impassively - or, perhaps, gleefully - as Islamist terrorists wreaked deadly havoc on our two biggest cities, has a vast and well-funded propaganda network in this country dedicated to stoking hatred of Muslims. And they are certainly doing a very good job of it.

How do they get away with it?

So, you want to know the "meaning" of 9/11? It is, as Martin Luther King put it, this:

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I'm taking my show on the road this autumn, to campuses around the country, talking about some of the ideas expressed in Wednesday's column on "Anti-Interventionism: The Left-wing Tradition." My talk is entitled "Why Has the Left Sold Out the Antiwar Movement?" - which is sure to provoke a controversy, or at least that's the hope.

The libertarian student movement, organizing nationally under the leadership of Young Americans for Liberty, is the most exciting - and important - development since the birth of contemporary libertarianism itself. Murray Rothbard, who founded the modern libertarian movement in his living room (and, back then, believe me, it was just big enough to fit in his modest-sized living room), would be thrilled if he were alive today. That's because they're hard core, and hard workers, busy building a burgeoning organization dedicated to ending the Fed and ending the wars the Fed makes possible. Who would've thought?! That's one reason I'm taking this tour, but another is to engage in dialogue with the left: to wake them up to the fact that a united antiwar movement, organized around the single issue of US military intervention overseas, is a moral imperative.

If you're interested in booking me at your campus, write wendy@antiwar.com, or call the Antiwar.com office, at: 510-217-8665.

* Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI, 2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

By Grant Smith* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffer M.J. Rosenberg told the Israel lobby to "pull the plug" on activities fanning the "anti-Muslim explosion that has seized this country over the past month." The former insider charges organizations such as AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and assorted neocon outfits with having "set the stage" for hysteria by demonizing Muslims in the name of "advancing their Middle East Agenda." This strategy has been decades in the making.

Many in the mainstream media play roles assigned by the lobby long ago. Glenn Beck consulted missile-defense-advocate-turned-expert-on-Islam Frank Gaffney to answer key questions about the planned Islamic center. "Who are the people behind this?" "Where are they getting the funding?" These are valid questions that can also be asked of AIPAC. Files from a newly declassified investigation into pro-Israel lobbying in the U.S. released by the National Archives and Records Administration on July 23, 2010, reveal some very unsettling answers.

Does the "Ground Zero Mosque" have a budding "father of the atomic bomb" backing it, or an aspiring proliferator such as A.Q. Khan? AIPAC certainly does. According to Israel and the Bomb author Avner Cohen, in 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion secretly designated Democratic Party fundraiser Abraham Feinberg to be the key "benedictor" for organizing and raising private American donor funding for the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons program - in direct opposition to the sitting U.S. president's nuclear non-proliferation drive. In 1960 Feinberg began a series of payments [.pdfs] to AIPAC, then only recently renamed [.pdf] from the American Zionist Council for Public Affairs, the lobbying division of the American Zionist Council (AZC). In return, the AZC helpfully ran U.S. publicity [.pdf] promoting Dimona as a peaceful research facility rather than a nuclear weapons production site.

AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen penned an article called "No Bombs Possible" in his AZC-subsidized [.pdf] Nov. 2, 1961, Near East Report newsletter to Congress and activists. Kenen wrote, "Meanwhile, many asked whether the Israel reactor could really produce sufficient plutonium, a nuclear weapon component, to construct a bomb. Science editor William L. Laurence of the New York Times deflated these reports, on Dec. 25, when he wrote that 'the plutonium produced in a small nuclear reactor of 24,000 thermal kilowatts is very minute indeed ... and 'completely useless for bomb material.' The basic facts, if fully understood, would make it clear why only great industrial nations, particularly the United States and Soviet Russia, can be full-fledged members of the 'atomic club.'"

AIPAC and Feinberg's well-financed Dimona PR deception, boosted by overseas funding, was a complete success in fooling the American public. Today mainstream news pundits advance theories that the "Ground Zero" mosque could be all "mobbed up" with crime family or wise guy funding through unknown and murky international hawalas. It's an effective strategy, because such ties are usually hard to verify.

Thanks to the passage of time, AIPAC's own ties are not.

Mob accountant Meyer Lansky's associate Aaron Weisberg was a Las Vegas investor who testified reluctantly in the tax-evasion case of notorious mobster Joseph "Doc" Stacher. Beginning in 1955, Weisberg provided many rounds of AIPAC startup funding at $500 a throw straight [.pdfs] from the Sands Casino, which he partially owned. According to E. Parry Thomas, who helped clean up Las Vegas by forcing all shadowy backers to stand before casino licensing boards, "Aaron Weisberg had 20 [percent] and he probably owned only half of it [the Sands] because he was Meyer Lansky's man. This went on everyplace."

But Weisberg was small potatoes next to John Factor (a.k.a. Iakov Faktorowicz) known to friends and enemies alike as "Jake the Barber." Factor shaved English investors of an estimated $8 million through stock frauds. In the U.S. he colluded with Al Capone to fake his own kidnapping in order to frame and take down a rival. Like Weisberg, Jake the Barber became a "straw buyer" for a Chicago criminal ring's purchase of the Stardust Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Factor's infamy was well known by the time AIPAC eagerly swept up [.pdf] the Barber's $1,000 investment late in 1959. It may have been a winning bet. Just before his immanent extradition from the U.S., Factor received a rushed, mysterious presidential pardon on Dec. 24, 1962, from John F. Kennedy.

Today, pundit Lanny Davis demands "transparency" from the "Ground Zero" mosque's leader, Imam Rauf. Davis noted that he "has refused to repudiate Hamas as a terrorist organization." But what of the AIPAC's shadowy arms-smuggling donor and the ties of its founder?

When three trucks containing 80 tons of highly explosive WWII surplus cyclonite blocks along with a cache of 5,200 U.S. Navy combat knives were seized in New York by police in 1948, it quickly became apparent it was a clandestine illegal shipment bound for Jewish fighters in Palestine. The size, scale, and front companies of the Haganah smuggling network [.pdf], organized in direct violation of U.S. arms embargoes and the War Assets Administration, are only slowly emerging into the history books. Zimel Resnick bailed his captured business associate out of jail after this key front company operative running 199 tons of explosives was caught. Running with arms smugglers apparently paid off. By 1956, AIPAC began locking and loading [.pdf] Resnick contributions twice the size of Weisberg's quarterly contributions from the Sands.

And what of AIPAC's founder?

A recently declassified 1970 file [.pdf] held by the Department of Justice's National Security Division and reluctantly released under Freedom of Information Act appeals about the foreign agent activities Isaiah L. Kenen reveals he may have been an "insider source" for information about the Jewish Defense League. This intel was stove-piped directly to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, and the attorney general. The redacted documents are unclear about whether the JDL's activities targeting the Soviet Union were considered at the time to be those of an ally, target, or dangerous nuisance. The value of AIPAC's role as an FBI source on the JDL seems to have been short-lived, even during the Cold War. By the mid-1980s, as the Jonathan Pollard spy affair was breaking, AIPAC itself was moved back from the "asset" to "liability" column as a domestic espionage target, while a Department of Energy study concluded, "For more than a decade, the Jewish Defense League (JDL) has been one of the most active terrorist groups in the United States. ... Since 1968, JDL operations have killed 7 persons and wounded at least 22."

There is no record that Isaiah Kenen ever repudiated the JDL.

Thanks to the long-term PR efforts of AIPAC, its executive committee organizations, and captured departments of U.S. government agencies, Muslims are fast becoming one of the most reviled, targeted, and disenfranchised groups in America. Hard-liners in the Israel lobby want to replace the Soviet Union with another fearsome enemy the U.S. and Israel can appear to "ally against." That's why all Americans should review the Israel lobby's own troubling past before clambering aboard its freshly painted anti-Islamic bandwagons.

Many important questions about AIPAC remain to be answered.

The U.S. Department of Justice still has no response to public concerns about why the lobbying division of an organization it secretly ordered to register [.pdf] as a foreign agent in 1962 has been allowed to continue engaging in illegal activities in concert with a foreign government. The IRS is at long last beginning to question the false claims of Israeli "charity" fronts principally set up (like their Haganah network forebears) to launder tax-deductible donations into West Bank settlement building and other illegal endeavors. The IRS would do well to review the tax status of the core enabling organization still engaging in precisely the kinds of activities one might expect from such mezzanine-level funding.

* Grant F. Smith is the author of the Spy Trade: How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy. He is a frequent contributor to Radio France Internationale and Voice of America's Foro Interamericano. Smith has also appeared on BBC News, CNN, and C-SPAN. He is currently director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.

Source: Antiwar.com

Illustration by Khalil Bendib

By David Rosen* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The building of a Muslim community center in an abandoned building two blocks from the site of New York's former World Trade Center has become the latest controversy in America's long fought religious wars. The construction of the center, often referred to as a mosque, has become the latest rallying issue for the Christian right, Tea Party proponents and Republican operatives in their war to impose moralistic and corporatist values on America.

It is too early to know how the Muslim center issue will be resolved, but it is clear that the rantings of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman (of the Anti-Defamation League) and others have played an important role pushing a local issue into the center-stage of national politics. Since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, Muslims in general and American Muslims in particular have been the targets of an undeclared religious war promoted by Christian fundamentalists and self-serving Republicans. For some among these religious zealots, Islam is a threat to their belief that the U.S. is a white Protestant nation. Over the last four centuries, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and many others have been targets of religious persecution, often the victims of imprisonments, hangings, lynchings and other acts of violence.

Rightwing ranters might well not know the history of religious intolerance in America, but they are surely aware that they are fueling a deep-seated rage among a certain scary segment of the Christian populous. This round in the ongoing religious culture wars has yet to explode into the ugly violence that took place in the aftermath of 9/11, and one can only hope that the current controversy will not lead to attacks on Muslims.

Sadly, like the attacks the followed 9/11, rightwing ranters like Palin and Gingrich will act "shocked" by the violence if it occurs and will claim innocence as to their roles fomenting it. With a knowing sneer, they will wash their hands of the blood they have caused and seek out other innocent victims.

In an excellent article on Tomdispatch, Stephen Salisbury details the current Manhattan Muslim center controversy and the spreading anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up around the country over the opening of new local mosques. As Salisbury opines, "The angry 'debate' over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen." [tomdispatch.com, August 11, 2010]

Salisbury discusses the ongoing protests against mosques also taking place in New York's Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as in California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wisconsin. He connects these controversies to the headline-grabbing opportunist comments by Palin (in true Palin-speak, "peaceful Muslims" need to "refudiate" the center) and Gingrich (who calls on Saudi Arabia to open churches and synagogues).

He also draws attention to the pernicious role played by Rick Lazio, New York State Republican gubernatorial candidate, who assails the center as subverting the right of New Yorkers "to feel safe and be safe." Because New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Attorney General (and likely Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Andrew Cuomo have come out in support of the Muslim center, it will like be a major issue in the November election.

Most importantly, Salisbury provides an invaluable overview of the anti-Muslim campaign that arose in the wake of 9/11, reminding readers just how alarmingly vicious good-old Christian love can be.

Part of the "glitch-in-the-Matrix feel" that Salisbury notes is the absence of a recognition that the current Muslin center controversy is part of a long history of religious intolerance in American.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, in a spontaneous and unscripted statement blurted out the unspoken truth that guided the U.S.'s initial military counter-attack campaign in Afghanistan: "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism." While Bush's admission was later repudiated and disappeared from the public discourse, it define the unstated goal of the ultra-reactionary Christians who were his core-constituency and knew full well what he meant.

At the heart of Bush's crusade agenda was an invocation of the "shock and awe" tradition that defined religious wars since the grand crusades of the Middle Ages and an acknowledgement that they needed to be applied in Afghanistan. The grand crusades waged by the Roman Church were against Muslims and Jews to capture and hold ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, and to defeat Orthodox or Eastern Christianity. Many perished. Similar, crusaders were waged against Christian heretics, including early Protestants, and done so in the name of their absolutist god.

This tradition was brought over to the New World with the Pilgrims and other early British settlers. The worst and most sustained form of religious war in America has been waged against the Native people. For all the annual whitewashing that takes place at Thanksgiving Day parades, early Puritans fought the Pequot Indians in Eastern Connecticut until 1637 when the General Courts of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Colony launched a war of extermination against them. (Native people found that the Pilgrims stunk, literally; Europeans rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and seldom were naked, believing it immoral.) The white Christian race and religious crusade against Native North American people persisted for centuries.

Pilgrims also imposed religious intolerance on themselves. Early Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers were aligned with the Church of England and looked badly upon those who contested their orthodoxy. Those challenging Calvinist dogma were subject to banishment, whipping, branding, ear-lobbing and even hanging. Early leaders like Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished. Early Quaker settles in Plymouth were also banished and four were hung publicly.

Over the subsequent centuries, Americans have witnessed repeated bouts of religious intolerance. Not surprisingly, these episodes were often accompanied by the same shrill rhetoric we find shouted today by those opposing the Muslim center.

The Know Nothing movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became the American Party that flourished during the late-'40s and early-'50s. It got its name when members where asked the party's positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. It felt that Catholics, as followers of the Pope, were not loyal Americans and were going to take over the country. It had strong support in the North that witnessed large-scale Irish immigration after 1848. The American Party captured the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 and, in 1856, backed Millard Fillmore for president, who secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast.

The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 and, during Reconstruction, began a systematic campaign against freed African Americans. However, by the '80s, it had lost its way as a racialist organization. It was revitalized in the wake of the Atlanta trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who had been falsely charged and convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white Christian girl, in 1913. In 1915, after the Georgia governor commuted his sentence, Frank was forcibly removed from the state penitentiary where he was being held by a mob of white Christians and lynched. Subsequently, many of those who participated in Frank's murder came together to re-launch the Klan.

In the late-'10s, the Klan aligned with nativists, eugenicists and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) to not only promote temperance but racialist and anti-immigrant policies. As WWI hysteria mounted, ASL's New York representative, William Anderson, equated being pro-German with being anti-American: German beer, saloons and breweries were the unnamed enemy. He had a deep antipathy toward Catholics, accusing the Church of mounting an "assault on law and order," of opposing Prohibition because it was promoted by Protestants and accusing it of engaging in "efforts to destroy [the Prohibition] victory and bring back the saloons." Anti-Catholic antipathy contributed to the defeat of the country's first Catholic nominee, Al Smith's, in the 1928 presidential election.

Many other episodes of religious intolerance have taken place since the '20s. However, John Kennedy's 1960 presidential victory marked the moment in American history when anti-Catholic appeals in national election were no longer acceptable. Similarly, the growing acceptance among Christian evangelicals of the notion of the "last days" has lead to a weird embrace of Jews and Israel and may have contributed to a moderation in anti-Semitism.

In the days before 9/11, most informed people accepted Islam as a variant within the Abrahamic tradition. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, even this claim came under suspicion. Earlier this summer, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee, claimed that Islam is a "cult" that did not deserve First Amendment protection: "You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call it... ." Challenged by a diverse assortment of Tennesseans, including traditional conservatives, Ramsey has backed off this assertion.

If truth be told, the Manhattan Muslim center is both a real issue and a fictitious spectacle. It is real in the sense that its being built at the designated site on Park Place will be a victory for religious tolerance. America is undergoing a profound economic and cultural realignment. Traditional white society is giving way to a truly multi-cultural America; conventional Protestantism is giving way a significant increase in the Catholic populous (mostly Hispanics) and growing Muslim, Hindu and Sekh communities.

The Muslim center story, like that of Michelle Obama's holiday in Spain, is a false issue, a spectacle promoting social deception. Since Obama's victory, the Republican right has implemented a very effective wrecking-ball strategy, attempting to destroy every issue considered. Its guiding principle is simple: Obama and the Democrats can do no right. To realize this goal, it did anything and everything in its power to make sure as little as possible got through Congress, got honestly assessed in the media and got to help ordinary Americans. Sadly, the Christian Republican right is succeeding and the Obama leadership remains clueless.

A century-and-a-half ago white Protestants came to accept Irish immigrants as white. While hard to imagine today, early Irish immigrants, those who came to America in the wake of the 1848 famine, were seen by many traditional Protestants as "niggers," not really different from African Americans. Faced with the inevitabilities of post-Civil War modernization, old-world Protestants changed. And with it, racism changed.

The challenge that faces today's Anglo-American Protestant descendents, those who see Muslims as "niggers," is whether then can change and accept America as a multi-cultural society.

* David Rosen is the author of "Sex Scandals America: Politics & the Ritual of Public Shaming" (Key, 2009); he can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.a

By Dr. Alan Sabrosky *

The incident at Ft. Hood was a genuine tragedy. I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner, there or somewhere else. It is going to take time for the details to be sorted out.

Generalizing from a single incident is always dangerous, no matter how compelling it seems. Sometimes an isolated tragedy is just that, an outpouring of individual dementia rather than a wide-ranging political statement.

But that generalization is already happening, with people across the political spectrum musing about assorted conspiracies. There is the instant and renewed Ziobabble demeaning Muslims generally and Arabs in particular, all false but popular in America today. And there are dire warnings about Mossad "false flag" operations, no matter how unlikely a candidate the shooter was for such a role.

Precedents

So let's look at this issue from a broader perspective while assorted conspiracy theorists have another day in the sun. This is certainly the first incident involving an American Muslim (I am discounting the so-called "Black Muslim" sect), but in the 1960s and 1970s the US generally faced eruptions of black violence, with cities burning in the "long hot summers" and troops deployed to combat it.

Nor was the US military immune. Many units in combat in Vietnam encountered extensive racial divisions and violence, almost all of it initiated by "black power" militants. Several warships had mutinies from the same sources. US bases around the world were littered with similar racially motivated tensions and incidents for years. There were many specific reasons, but generally it was because many black Americans felt the government they served was not serving them.

To their great credit, that simply has not been the experience of American Muslims in US society or in the US armed forces. Certainly, few American Muslims in or out of uniform give even a small fraction of the political allegiance to their countries of origin, that so many American Jews give to Israel as dual Israeli-US citizens or under the false and hypocritical rubric of "dual loyalty." The allegiance of the American Muslim community has been steadfast.

But their frustration with events must be great. They have been the victims of widespread and carefully contrived anti-Muslim sentiment before and after the events of 9/11, whatever their origin. And they have been tested severely by the actions of a US Government in thrall to Israel, in whose interest it has killed, wounded or dispossessed literally millions of people to date in Iraq and Afghanistan, with comparable plans for Iran in play from the same people who brought us those wars and 9/11 besides.

At some point and in some place, someone was going to lash out. At Ft. Hood, whether alone or not, incited or not, affected by an impending deployment or interviews with returning veterans (or both), someone did.

Portents

It must be terribly difficult for American Muslims, especially those of Palestinian heritage, to serve a US Government that is an indictable accessory of Israel, a country whose abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are well known and copiously documented everywhere except in the US.

In their place, I could not do so, despite a decade of service in the US Marines and a lifelong commitment to supporting the US on campuses and in public forums when it was not popular at all to do so.

But my country is more important than my government, and the American people are more important to me than a relative handful of elected and appointed officials whose words and actions violate both the letter and the spirit of their oaths.

A US Government hostage to a lobby serving the interests of a foreign country has lost all legitimacy. It is in violation not only of the Constitution, but also of the tenets of the Declaration of Independence, which is the distillation of the spirit of the land, and specifies the ends for which government is instituted.

This is the stuff of tragedy and death, and if America does not alter the way it does its business in the world, what we have experienced at Ft. Hood may well be only a portent and not an isolated event. No one likes or tolerates indefinitely a government indifferent to the fate of their families overseas, and manipulated by a foreign country that is the agent of their misery.

None of this excuses Hasan's act. Over 50 people are dead or wounded because of him, and I do not and would never condone that. I also do not and would never condone 60,000 Americans killed or wounded so far because of the 9/11 tragedy and our ongoing wars fabricated by the Zionists in Israel's interest. What Hasan did was murder, pure and simple. What the neo-cons and their allies have done and are doing is treason, pure and simple. Both are crimes, and both should be punished.

Sometimes tragedy can be a catalyst for change. What happened at Ft. Hood may open a long overdue debate that will be such a catalyst for American policy in the Middle East, transforming Obama's excellent words at Cairo into equally admirable actions that have so far been woefully absent.

Let us make it so.

*Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net

Source: Intifada-Palestine

By Paul J. Balles

Paul J.Balles considers the chronic mindset of Americans which, thanks to the racial prejudices of Hollywood, vilifies Arabs and Muslims as "'rag heads', jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and womanizing sheikhs".

Many people in America have their minds set against Arabs and Muslims. That's not simply because of the identification of Arab hijackers in the 9/11 attacks. Arabs have been vilified by Hollywood for more than half a century.

As Lee Bailey noted in The National (Abu Dhabi, 16 October 2008), "Jack Shaheen, a Lebanese-American academic, has published two books documenting the representation of Muslims and Arabs in American film. One, Reel Bad Arabs, dealt with the period before 11 September, and the second, Guilty, considered films made after the attacks."

Bailey added, "...Of approximately 1,000 films that depicted Muslims and Arabs before 2001, [Shaheen] estimated that only 65 portrayed them in a positive or even-handed manner..." In other words, Americans have been brainwashed by anti-Arab propaganda for decades. More than 9/10ths of Hollywood's productions involving Arabs have made them ugly in the minds of viewers.

On 11 October 2008, James Zogby was reported as saying,

"We are disturbed by the degree to which 'Arab' has become the metaphorical mud to sling against your opponent. This week, for example, the Republican Jewish Coalition released a document in which they use the term pro-Arab as a pejorative accusation. For his part, Rush Limbaugh has joined in by declaring that Obama is in fact an Arab American. Then, on Friday, after a supporter called Senator Barack Obama 'an Arab', Senator John McCain came to the defence of his political opponent by saying, 'No, ma'am. He's a decent family man and citizen...' From this we are left to infer that an Arab man is less than a decent family man."

Zogby's right. It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw McCain remove the mike from the woman. However, Zogby missed my next thought: if McCain was the honourable maverick he claims to be, he would have said to the woman: "He doesn't have an Arab heritage but so what if he had?"

But then McCain was brought up on more than half a century of Hollywood's vilification of Arabs, so the images of "rag heads", jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and womanizing sheikhs has been implanted as deep in his mind as in 250 million or more other mentally programmed Americans. Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood's verdict on Arabs after 9/11 should be required reading in the schools.

Another place where mindsets hold sway can be seen in two-party election campaigns like those going on in the US currently. Anyone following the commentators from either political party responding to moderators' questions must observe just how intractable party members are.

The malady, previously diagnosed as a case of "My mind is made up - don't confuse me with the facts", continues to affect our thinking. If someone like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez doesn't bow down to his northern lords and masters and is unafraid to criticize the US government, he becomes the object of continuing disdain and mind-setting propaganda campaigns.

A moderator, like Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews of MSNBC, can ask a question about either McCain or Obama, and the answers can make a viewer wonder if there's anything that could make the supporter respond more objectively. In American politics, there's no such thing as objectivity. It's either "my way or no way!"

Impenetrable American mindsets inform American designation of terrorist organizations. To the blind supporters of Israel at all costs, Hamas isn't comprehended as Palestinians helping other Palestinians and resisting occupation. To resist is tantamount to terrorizing. Americans never see the occupiers who terrorized millions of Palestinians as Israeli terrorists. Clear the mind!

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.