By Max Blumenthal

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, [...]]]> The following is cross-posted from Max Blumenthal’s blog.

By Max Blumenthal

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, the symposium was the occasion for the first public appearance in Europe by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last month. The arrival of Vargas Llosa, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, resulted in an overflow crowd filled with members of the Dutch media, the country’s political class, and the royal family.

Even with Vargas Llosa in the spotlight, the participants’ attention was focused on Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which is now the third leading party in the Netherlands. With his gathering influence, Wilders has essentially placed the Dutch coalition government in a stranglehold; the government meets with him every Wednesday to gauge his opinions and ask for his instructions. While Wilders dictates at will to the government, he remains independent of it, comfortably avoiding the consequences of policies he has helped to shape. It is the perfect position for a politician whose agenda is comprised exclusively of xenophobic populism, and typical strategy of the far-right in countries across the continent.

Wilders’ base lies in the mostly Catholic south, where ironically few people have ever encountered a Muslim. He has also generated support in the city of Groeningen, once a citadel of the communists. Seeking to expand his base, Wilders promised to hire scores of “animal cops” to investigate and prosecute the abuse of animals, a clever wedge strategy in the only country I know of that has a party dedicated exclusively to animal rights. Of course, Wilders could care less about our furry friends. His stated goal is to end immigration not just to Holland but to all of Europe; ban the Quran (free speech is only for the “Judeo-Christian” community), and severely limit the rights of Muslim citizens of Europe by, for instance, instituting what he called a “head rag tax” on Muslim women. Wilders’ international allies include the goosestepping neo-Nazis of the English Defense League, the far-right pogromist Pam Geller, the Belgian neo-fascist party Vlaams Belang, and a substantial portion of the US neocon elite. Over the course of just a few years, he has become perhaps the most influential Islamophobe in the world.

But does this make Wilders a fascist? Rob Riemen, the director of the Nexus Institute, thinks so. Riemen has just published a book entitled “De Eeuwige Terugkeer Van Het Fascisme,” or “The Eternal Return of Fascism” (I eagerly await its English translation), dedicated to highlighting the danger of Wilders’ eerily familiar brand of right-wing populism. In the book, Riemen urges readers to compare Wilders’ politics to the early incarnations of European fascism, not to the genocidal terminal stage fascism of late World War II. He calls the parallels between Wilders and the early fascists “one-and-one.” In an economic and civilizational crisis like the kind the Netherlands is facing, Riemen warns that reactionary figures like Wilders can easily seize power while centrist elements stand by politely and passively, refusing to call a spade a spade. Where Wilders’ ascendancy will lead is unknown, but if he is not stopped in his tracks, Riemen is certain the story will not end well. In the week after its publication, Riemen’s book flew off the shelves, selling 5000 copies while generating heated reactions from across the spectrum of debate.

Riemen told me that despite the public enthusiasm for his book, his characterization of Wilders has been attacked as “un-Dutch.” In Dutch culture, as in so many others, open confrontation is avoided at all cost. Political disagreement is welcomed only if it is expressed in a collegial manner, as though nothing more than reputations were at stake. So the Dutch cultural elite generally goes along to get along. The resistance Riemen has met since he called Wilders out seemed to have alarmed and frustrated him. Why was it so difficult for liberal elements in the Netherlands to recognize the clear resonances of fascism in Wilders’ political style? he wondered. And why did they seem more concerned with regulating the terms of debate than with forming a united front against the far-right? Once the symposium opened and I was able to see the Dutch elite in action, I began to understand Riemen’s indignation.

The symposium began with a speech by Vargas Llosa, a complex personality who has allied himself with center-right parties in Spain and elsewhere but whose politics remain fundamentally rooted in cultural liberalism. Vargas Llosa’s differences with leaders of the left, which he used to belong to, exploded over the issue of free trade. He is an ardent neo-liberal and reviles Latin populists like Hugo Chavez and Ollanta Humala who advocate protectionism and industrial nationalization.

Vargas Llosa decorated his speech with literary metaphors and natural imagery to describe the challenges of democracy, particularly in Europe. But the body of the address was devoted to the supposed threat Islamic extremism posed to Western civilization. Vargas Llosa singled out suicide bombing as the most dangerous phenomenon, pointing to the Madrid and London bombings by al-Qaida inspired operatives, while curiously not mentioning suicide attacks by secular groups like the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK, or the nationalistic suicide terror by Palestinian militants (Vargas Llosa declared in his speech that “Israel deserves to be treated like any other nation,” and has been harshly critical of the state in the past).

During the first panel, which I participated in, Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli professor of history and the daughter of famed author Amos Oz, boasted to crowd of Israel’s “vibrant democracy.” She was enthusiastically seconded by Mitchell Cohen, a former editor of Dissent who has devoted considerable energy to assailing anti-Zionist Jews, writing that “the dominant species of anti-Semitism encourages anti-Zionism.” I found it odd that neither expressed any concern over the almost endless stream of anti-democratic laws passing through the Knesset, or by the general authoritarian, anti-liberal trend in Israeli society. Oz-Salzberger went on to announce to a smattering of applause that “Geert Wilders and politicians like him are not welcomed by Israelis.”

Yet Wilders is one of Israel’s most frequent guests, having visited the country over 40 times in 20 years. In fact, he claims that his views on Islam and Arabs were forged while living on an Israeli moshav. “Nowhere did I have the special feeling of solidarity that I get when I land at Ben Gurion airport,” he once said. Wilders reportedly receives heavy support from Dutch financial backers of Israel, and has met with a range of Israeli officials. His closest allies lie within the extremist settler movement, prompting him to call for the forced transfer of Palestinians to Jordan. Members of the liberal Zionist intelligensia like Oz-Salzberger may not not want Wilders around, but who in Israel is listening to them? Israel’s mainstream leadership echoes Wilders’ crudest talking points on a regular basis, while the Zionist left clings to a dwindling handful of Knesset seats and watches passively — even resentfully — as a rag-tag band of leftist radicals fights for equality for all. Consider a recent statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is seen as a centrist within the Israeli political spectrum: “The origin of terrorism is within Islam,” Olmert declared this month.

The pro-Israel position of the new breed of European far-rightists has to be recognized as much more than a convenient political tactic. Of course, saying you “stand with Israel,” as Wilders so often does, is an easy way to insulate yourself from charges of anti-Semitism. But the extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideals. While some critics see Israel as a racist apartheid state, people like Wilders see Israel as a racist apartheid state — and they like it. They richly enjoy when Israel mows down Arab Muslims by the dozens and tells the world to go to hell; they admire Israel’s settler culture; and most of all, they yearn to live in a land like Israel that privileges its ethnic majority above all others to the point that it systematically humiliates and dispossesses the swarthy racial outclass. The endgame of the far-right is to make Europe less tolerant and more Israeli.

After the Italian philosopher Paolo Flores D’Arcais proclaimed that Italy was no longer a democratic country, citing PM Silvio Berlusconi’s control over 90 percent of the country’s media, the government’s deep seated corruption and the Prime Minister’s repeated attempts to impose onerous restrictions on journalistic freedom, Riemen asked me if the United States was a democracy given the the rapidly rising influence of corporations over the media and elections. After two panelists had described Israel as a vibrant democracy while another labeled Italy a non-democratic quasi-dictatorship, I decided that our definition of democracy was subjective at best. So I sidestepped the question and outlined a few of the greatest blows to American democracy, from the elimination of theFairness Doctrine to the Telecommunications Deregulation Act to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Later in the evening, D’Arcais would remark to me with amazement that he never knew American media was ever regulated in the first place.

During the 20 minutes or so when students of Tilburg University were able to question the panel, one student asked whether suicide terror was a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, apparently referring to Vargas Llosa’s address. I responded that it of course was not, citing the example of secular groups like the Tamil Tigers which brought the tactic into practice. I recommended the audience review the research of Robert Pape, the University of Chicago political scientist who demonstrated a clear connection between the American and Israeli occupation of Middle Eastern countries and the motivations of suicide bombers. Oz-Salzberger jumped in, proclaiming that occupation has little or nothing to do with the motives of suicide bombers. She did not marshal any evidence to support her point, possibly because our time was so limited. It would have been hard to do so, however, without supporting the fundamental argument of Wilders about Islam’s inherent violence — or the even sillier theory by the Israeli filmmaker/professional hasbarist Pierre Rehov that suicide bombers are motivated by sexual repression.

Next, the Dutch panel took the stage. The main attraction was Frits Bolkstein, the longtime leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy who employed Wilders as his parliamentary aide, providing him a stepping stone to his political career. He was a silver haired curmudgeon from aristocratic stock who reminded me instantly of the “paleocon” characters I’ve met while covering white nationalist conventions like American Renaissance.

“Everything went wrong when the government became impressed in the 90’s with the idea of the ‘good stranger,’” Bolkstein declared. “If the previous governments had tightened their immigration laws, there would not have been a Mr. Wilders.”

The only member of the panel to mount a significant challenge to Bolkstein was the Tilburg University professor Paul Frissen, who argued that the rule of law and basic standards of democracy protects “the right to be fundamentalist.” The other panelists either gave Bolkstein’s xenophobia a pass or attempted to surpass his resentment of Muslims. After Bolkstein lightly criticized Wilders’ call for banning the Quran, remarking that “what he says about Islam is nonsense” because it contradicts the freedom of religion, AB Klink, a former Dutch senator and ex-Minister of Health, chimed in.”It’s not nonsense because Islam is so different in its cultural values than ours,” Klink claimed.

Then, when Bolkstein called for shutting down Islamic schools, Frissen reminded him that state-supported Christian schools in the Dutch Bible belt teach theocratic concepts as well. Meindert Fennema, the political biographer of Wilders, entered the debate to demand that all religious schools be closed. “I’m against all forms of religious teaching!” he proudly exclaimed, sending gales of applause through the audience. “How can you call yourself a liberal?” Frissen asked with a tone of exasperation. Fennema ignored him.

During question time, a young freelance writer from India named Natasha Ginwala asked Bolkstein to answer for the “ghost of neo-colonialism,” which “the African people never voted for.” She mentioned the exploitative deals forced on developing countries by transnational oil companies, possibly alluding to Bolkstein’s role as a manager at Royal Dutch Shell in authoritarian countries like El Salvador, Indonesia, and Honduras during the 1970’s (I’m sure nothing unseemly happened during Bolstein’s tenure in these places). Bolkstein’s responded bluntly, “If these countries try to be self-sufficient it just doesn’t work!”

After the symposium, I talked to Ginwala and a group of her friends, who were mostly immigrant students. They were appalled by the ignorance of the Dutch panelists. “None of them knew the first thing about Islam,” an Arab student remarked. “They couldn’t even pretend to understand what Muslims actually believe.” Ginwala added, “How can Bolkstein tell me my country can’t be self-sufficient? I come from India. It’s one of the most diversified economies on the planet.”

I was not in Amsterdam long enough to do any formal reporting. However, I did notice that all of the immigrants I spoke to were closely and nervously following the rise of the right. At the airport, while waiting to board my flight, I talked to a 20-something security guard named Muhammad who seemed almost as bored as I was. Muhammad had spent his whole life in Amsterdam, but his parents were from Cairo, Egypt. He told me he wanted to take his girlfriend on a trip to New York City and Miami someday. When I brought up the topic of Wilders, he scoffed at his perception of Muslims. “Most of us aren’t even religious,” Muhammad said. “When I hear him talking about Muslims wanting to take over, I just laugh. I’m like, is this guy serious?”

But he did not underestimate Wilders’ appeal. “Everything he does and everything he says, it seems like it’s carefully planned. He obviously knows what he’s doing. And they let him get away with it,” Muhammad remarked. “Look, I’m just a citizen, I’m nobody, but if I say something about Christians or Jews that the government doesn’t like, I’ll be punished. But when Wilders, who is a public official, says all the things he says about Muslims, nothing happens to him. Instead, more and more people are voting for him.”

Max Blumenthal is an independent journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. You can follow his work on his blog or on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal.

There’s a joke that’s been developing over the past several years that you know someone is running for president when they start regularly bringing up the U.S.-Israel alliance. Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry embodies the joke. Way back in 2009, Perry, during a campaign [...]]]> Reposted by arrangement with Think Progress

There’s a joke that’s been developing over the past several years that you know someone is running for president when they start regularly bringing up the U.S.-Israel alliance. Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry embodies the joke. Way back in 2009, Perry, during a campaign to hold his governor’s seat but amid early hints of a presidential run, took a trip to Washington and talked Israel with the Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb. His fealty to the Jewish state was nothing short of religious devotion: “My faith requires me to support Israel,” he said.

On Friday, Perry dropped two op-eds — well, actually, he dropped the same op-ed twice, in the Wall Street Journal and Israel’s Jerusalem Post — attacking President Obama’s robust support for the Jewish state as insufficiently pro-Israel. That the piece’s themes are picked straight from neoconservative talking points and appear in neocon op-ed pages and that neocons love it is no surprise: Perry’s reportedly been getting foreign policy advice from the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” and arch-neocon Doug Feith, whose book featured a Mideast map that did not distinguish between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

But Perry, unlike some of the evangelical Christian figures he appeared beside at the Response rally, seemed to be open, in a Time magazine interview this week at least, to the idea of negotiations toward a two-state solution.

Perry’s Israel op-ed, though, hit a note that’s become a neocon calling card: cherry-picking information to make a case. In its opening paragraph, and perhaps most head-scratch-inducing moment, Perry wrote:

Historian T.R. Fehrenbach once observed that my home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of “civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies.”

Journalist Max Blumenthal picked up on the Fehrenbach reference, and noted its strangeness because of the historian’s work, including writing “an authoritative book on the ethnic cleansing of the Comanche Indians by the Anglo settlers of Texas.” Blumenthal pulled Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans” from his shelf and checked out Perry’s reference. The full quote, which Perry cherry-picked, reads:

The Texan’s attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.

Blumenthal thinks the Texas-Israel comparison is still valid, but with almost the opposite meaning that Perry’s cherry-picked quote conveyed:

Fehrenbach would have agreed with Perry that Texas shared values with Israel. But unlike Perry, he thought that those values were all the wrong ones: hatred of the other, a reliance on violence to seize land, and a legacy of ethnic cleansing. According to Fehrenbach, what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1947 and ‘48 — and continues to do — is analogous to the Texans’ treatment of the Comanches and Mexicans during the 19th century.

With neoconservatives making apologia for evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, perhaps Perry was keenly aware of the full Fehrenbach quote and changed it for a wider audience while trying to establish closeness to the neoconservative movement.

Moments of imperial and economic decline — according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans now believe this country to be “in [...]]]> The Great Islamophobic Crusade
Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers, Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and Republican Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade
By Max Blumenthal

Moments of imperial and economic decline — according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans now believe this country to be “in a state of decline” — can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate.  Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the United States.  It’s not so surprising, really.  Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, fear has been injected into this “homeland” like a drug and a penumbra of official secrecy has settled over the land in a way that makes the secrecy of the Cold War years (when this country faced a superpower, not a ragtag set of jihadis, guerrillas, and terrorists) seem like an era of sunshine.

In an atmosphere of swirling fears and hysteria amid declining living conditions, “explanations” that at other times might have remained confined to tiny crews of conspiracy-mongers can suddenly gain a patina of plausibility and so traction.  No wonder then that, as hard times hit, as the financial system seemed on the verge of collapse, as unemployment soared and a massive wave of home foreclosures swept into view, increasing numbers of Americans became prey to any wacky explanation for our troubles, none more so than the idea that Islam was somehow responsible, that mosques and Islamic centers meant for a sliver of a minority here were capable of imposing anything, no less a way of life on this country, or that Sharia law (of all things) might somehow worm its way into state legal systems, or that YouTube was a hotbed of terrorism worthy of suppression, or… well, you name it.

Max Blumenthal, author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, has done the necessary legwork to take us deep into one of those crews of conspiracy-mongers who, at another time, just about no one would have paid much attention to, but in twenty-first-century America have gained a remarkable audience.  They are a chilling barometer of the changing weather in America.  Tom

The Great Islamophobic Crusade
Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers, Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and Republican Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade
By Max Blumenthal

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.

Copyright 2010 Max Blumenthal

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 billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.

Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.

Birth of a Network

The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush’s prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Peters, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Peters conceived a plan to “take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions,” as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.

In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernoff had served as a trustee, Peters produced a documentary film that he calledColumbia 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 reportsclaiming the center’s plans were evidence of a Saudi Arabian plot to bolster the influence of radical Islam in the United States, and possibly even to train underground terror cells.

It was at this point that the David Project entered the fray, convening elements of the local pro-Israel community in the Boston area to seek strategies to torpedo the project. According to emails obtained by the Islamic Society’s lawyers in a lawsuit against the David Project, the organizers settled on a campaign of years of nuisance lawsuits, along with accusations that the center had received foreign funding from “the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia or… the Moslem Brotherhood.”

In response, a grassroots coalition of liberal Jews initiated inter-faith efforts aimed at ending a controversy that had essentially been manufactured out of thin air and was corroding relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Peters would not, however, relent. “We are more concerned now than we have ever been about a Saudi influence of local mosques,” he announced at a suburban Boston synagogue in 2007.

After paying out millions of dollars in legal bills and enduring countless smears, the Islamic Society of Boston completed the construction of its community center in 2008. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, nothing came of the David Project’s dark warnings. As Boston-area National Public Radio reporter Philip Martin reflected in September 2010, “The horror stories that preceded [the center’s] development seem shrill and histrionic in retrospect.”

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 witheverything 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 callfor 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, includingThe 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 theiropposition 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” meetingwith 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 calledObsession 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, the Daily Beast, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Independent Film Channel, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute and author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (Nation Books).

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, the symposium was [...]]]> The following is cross-posted from Max Blumenthal’s blog.

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, the symposium was the occasion for the first public appearance in Europe by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last month. The arrival of Vargas Llosa, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, resulted in an overflow crowd filled with members of the Dutch media, the country’s political class, and the royal family.

Even with Vargas Llosa in the spotlight, the participants’ attention was focused on Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which is now the third leading party in the Netherlands. With his gathering influence, Wilders has essentially placed the Dutch coalition government in a stranglehold; the government meets with him every Wednesday to gauge his opinions and ask for his instructions. While Wilders dictates at will to the government, he remains independent of it, comfortably avoiding the consequences of policies he has helped to shape. It is the perfect position for a politician whose agenda is comprised exclusively of xenophobic populism, and typical strategy of the far-right in countries across the continent.

Wilders’ base lies in the mostly Catholic south, where ironically few people have ever encountered a Muslim. He has also generated support in the city of Groeningen, once a citadel of the communists. Seeking to expand his base, Wilders promised to hire scores of “animal cops” to investigate and prosecute the abuse of animals, a clever wedge strategy in the only country I know of that has a party dedicated exclusively to animal rights. Of course, Wilders could care less about our furry friends. His stated goal is to end immigration not just to Holland but to all of Europe; ban the Quran (free speech is only for the “Judeo-Christian” community), and severely limit the rights of Muslim citizens of Europe by, for instance, instituting what he called a “head rag tax” on Muslim women. Wilders’ international allies include the goosestepping neo-Nazis of the English Defense League, the far-right pogromist Pam Geller, the Belgian neo-fascist party Vlaams Belang, and a substantial portion of the US neocon elite. Over the course of just a few years, he has become perhaps the most influential Islamophobe in the world.

But does this make Wilders a fascist? Rob Riemen, the director of the Nexus Institute, thinks so. Riemen has just published a book entitled “De Eeuwige Terugkeer Van Het Fascisme,” or “The Eternal Return of Fascism” (I eagerly await its English translation), dedicated to highlighting the danger of Wilders’ eerily familiar brand of right-wing populism. In the book, Riemen urges readers to compare Wilders’ politics to the early incarnations of European fascism, not to the genocidal terminal stage fascism of late World War II. He calls the parallels between Wilders and the early fascists “one-and-one.” In an economic and civilizational crisis like the kind the Netherlands is facing, Riemen warns that reactionary figures like Wilders can easily seize power while centrist elements stand by politely and passively, refusing to call a spade a spade. Where Wilders’ ascendancy will lead is unknown, but if he is not stopped in his tracks, Riemen is certain the story will not end well. In the week after its publication, Riemen’s book flew off the shelves, selling 5000 copies while generating heated reactions from across the spectrum of debate.

Riemen told me that despite the public enthusiasm for his book, his characterization of Wilders has been attacked as “un-Dutch.” In Dutch culture, as in so many others, open confrontation is avoided at all cost. Political disagreement is welcomed only if it is expressed in a collegial manner, as though nothing more than reputations were at stake. So the Dutch cultural elite generally goes along to get along. The resistance Riemen has met since he called Wilders out seemed to have alarmed and frustrated him. Why was it so difficult for liberal elements in the Netherlands to recognize the clear resonances of fascism in Wilders’ political style? he wondered. And why did they seem more concerned with regulating the terms of debate than with forming a united front against the far-right? Once the symposium opened and I was able to see the Dutch elite in action, I began to understand Riemen’s indignation.

The symposium began with a speech by Vargas Llosa, a complex personality who has allied himself with center-right parties in Spain and elsewhere but whose politics remain fundamentally rooted in cultural liberalism. Vargas Llosa’s differences with leaders of the left, which he used to belong to, exploded over the issue of free trade. He is an ardent neo-liberal and reviles Latin populists like Hugo Chavez and Ollanta Humala who advocate protectionism and industrial nationalization.

Vargas Llosa decorated his speech with literary metaphors and natural imagery to describe the challenges of democracy, particularly in Europe. But the body of the address was devoted to the supposed threat Islamic extremism posed to Western civilization. Vargas Llosa singled out suicide bombing as the most dangerous phenomenon, pointing to the Madrid and London bombings by al-Qaida inspired operatives, while curiously not mentioning suicide attacks by secular groups like the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK, or the nationalistic suicide terror by Palestinian militants (Vargas Llosa declared in his speech that “Israel deserves to be treated like any other nation,” and has been harshly critical of the state in the past).

During the first panel, which I participated in, Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli professor of history and the daughter of famed author Amos Oz, boasted to crowd of Israel’s “vibrant democracy.” She was enthusiastically seconded by Mitchell Cohen, a former editor of Dissent who has devoted considerable energy to assailing anti-Zionist Jews, writing that “the dominant species of anti-Semitism encourages anti-Zionism.” I found it odd that neither expressed any concern over the almost endless stream of anti-democratic laws passing through the Knesset, or by the general authoritarian, anti-liberal trend in Israeli society. Oz-Salzberger went on to announce to a smattering of applause that “Geert Wilders and politicians like him are not welcomed by Israelis.”

Yet Wilders is one of Israel’s most frequent guests, having visited the country over 40 times in 20 years. In fact, he claims that his views on Islam and Arabs were forged while living on an Israeli moshav. “Nowhere did I have the special feeling of solidarity that I get when I land at Ben Gurion airport,” he once said. Wilders reportedly receives heavy support from Dutch financial backers of Israel, and has met with a range of Israeli officials. His closest allies lie within the extremist settler movement, prompting him to call for the forced transfer of Palestinians to Jordan. Members of the liberal Zionist intelligensia like Oz-Salzberger may not not want Wilders around, but who in Israel is listening to them? Israel’s mainstream leadership echoes Wilders’ crudest talking points on a regular basis, while the Zionist left clings to a dwindling handful of Knesset seats and watches passively — even resentfully — as a rag-tag band of leftist radicals fights for equality for all. Consider a recent statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is seen as a centrist within the Israeli political spectrum: “The origin of terrorism is within Islam,” Olmert declared this month.

The pro-Israel position of the new breed of European far-rightists has to be recognized as much more than a convenient political tactic. Of course, saying you “stand with Israel,” as Wilders so often does, is an easy way to insulate yourself from charges of anti-Semitism. But the extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideals. While some critics see Israel as a racist apartheid state, people like Wilders see Israel as a racist apartheid state — and they like it. They richly enjoy when Israel mows down Arab Muslims by the dozens and tells the world to go to hell; they admire Israel’s settler culture; and most of all, they yearn to live in a land like Israel that privileges its ethnic majority above all others to the point that it systematically humiliates and dispossesses the swarthy racial outclass. The endgame of the far-right is to make Europe less tolerant and more Israeli.

After the Italian philosopher Paolo Flores D’Arcais proclaimed that Italy was no longer a democratic country, citing PM Silvio Berlusconi’s control over 90 percent of the country’s media, the government’s deep seated corruption and the Prime Minister’s repeated attempts to impose onerous restrictions on journalistic freedom, Riemen asked me if the United States was a democracy given the the rapidly rising influence of corporations over the media and elections. After two panelists had described Israel as a vibrant democracy while another labeled Italy a non-democratic quasi-dictatorship, I decided that our definition of democracy was subjective at best. So I sidestepped the question and outlined a few of the greatest blows to American democracy, from the elimination of theFairness Doctrine to the Telecommunications Deregulation Act to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Later in the evening, D’Arcais would remark to me with amazement that he never knew American media was ever regulated in the first place.

During the 20 minutes or so when students of Tilburg University were able to question the panel, one student asked whether suicide terror was a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, apparently referring to Vargas Llosa’s address. I responded that it of course was not, citing the example of secular groups like the Tamil Tigers which brought the tactic into practice. I recommended the audience review the research of Robert Pape, the University of Chicago political scientist who demonstrated a clear connection between the American and Israeli occupation of Middle Eastern countries and the motivations of suicide bombers. Oz-Salzberger jumped in, proclaiming that occupation has little or nothing to do with the motives of suicide bombers. She did not marshal any evidence to support her point, possibly because our time was so limited. It would have been hard to do so, however, without supporting the fundamental argument of Wilders about Islam’s inherent violence — or the even sillier theory by the Israeli filmmaker/professional hasbarist Pierre Rehov that suicide bombers are motivated by sexual repression.

Next, the Dutch panel took the stage. The main attraction was Frits Bolkstein, the longtime leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy who employed Wilders as his parliamentary aide, providing him a stepping stone to his political career. He was a silver haired curmudgeon from aristocratic stock who reminded me instantly of the “paleocon” characters I’ve met while covering white nationalist conventions like American Renaissance.

“Everything went wrong when the government became impressed in the 90’s with the idea of the ‘good stranger,’” Bolkstein declared. “If the previous governments had tightened their immigration laws, there would not have been a Mr. Wilders.”

The only member of the panel to mount a significant challenge to Bolkstein was the Tilburg University professor Paul Frissen, who argued that the rule of law and basic standards of democracy protects “the right to be fundamentalist.” The other panelists either gave Bolkstein’s xenophobia a pass or attempted to surpass his resentment of Muslims. After Bolkstein lightly criticized Wilders’ call for banning the Quran, remarking that “what he says about Islam is nonsense” because it contradicts the freedom of religion, AB Klink, a former Dutch senator and ex-Minister of Health, chimed in.”It’s not nonsense because Islam is so different in its cultural values than ours,” Klink claimed.

Then, when Bolkstein called for shutting down Islamic schools, Frissen reminded him that state-supported Christian schools in the Dutch Bible belt teach theocratic concepts as well. Meindert Fennema, the political biographer of Wilders, entered the debate to demand that all religious schools be closed. “I’m against all forms of religious teaching!” he proudly exclaimed, sending gales of applause through the audience. “How can you call yourself a liberal?” Frissen asked with a tone of exasperation. Fennema ignored him.

During question time, a young freelance writer from India named Natasha Ginwala asked Bolkstein to answer for the “ghost of neo-colonialism,” which “the African people never voted for.” She mentioned the exploitative deals forced on developing countries by transnational oil companies, possibly alluding to Bolkstein’s role as a manager at Royal Dutch Shell in authoritarian countries like El Salvador, Indonesia, and Honduras during the 1970’s (I’m sure nothing unseemly happened during Bolstein’s tenure in these places). Bolkstein’s responded bluntly, “If these countries try to be self-sufficient it just doesn’t work!”

After the symposium, I talked to Ginwala and a group of her friends, who were mostly immigrant students. They were appalled by the ignorance of the Dutch panelists. “None of them knew the first thing about Islam,” an Arab student remarked. “They couldn’t even pretend to understand what Muslims actually believe.” Ginwala added, “How can Bolkstein tell me my country can’t be self-sufficient? I come from India. It’s one of the most diversified economies on the planet.”

I was not in Amsterdam long enough to do any formal reporting. However, I did notice that all of the immigrants I spoke to were closely and nervously following the rise of the right. At the airport, while waiting to board my flight, I talked to a 20-something security guard named Muhammad who seemed almost as bored as I was. Muhammad had spent his whole life in Amsterdam, but his parents were from Cairo, Egypt. He told me he wanted to take his girlfriend on a trip to New York City and Miami someday. When I brought up the topic of Wilders, he scoffed at his perception of Muslims. “Most of us aren’t even religious,” Muhammad said. “When I hear him talking about Muslims wanting to take over, I just laugh. I’m like, is this guy serious?”

But he did not underestimate Wilders’ appeal. “Everything he does and everything he says, it seems like it’s carefully planned. He obviously knows what he’s doing. And they let him get away with it,” Muhammad remarked. “Look, I’m just a citizen, I’m nobody, but if I say something about Christians or Jews that the government doesn’t like, I’ll be punished. But when Wilders, who is a public official, says all the things he says about Muslims, nothing happens to him. Instead, more and more people are voting for him.”

Max Blumenthal is an independent journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. You can follow his work on his blog or on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal.