Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma [...]]]>
Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin may be tied to an allegedly large-scale Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government. (Abedin is otherwise known as the wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner.) Perhaps the funniest take comes from Juan Cole, who uses Bachmann’s own haphazard guilt-by-association methods to prove that she herself is a Brotherhood agent.
While the sheer nuttiness of Bachmann’s accusations has understandably prevented commentators from taking them seriously, we should at least recognize that they spring from a broader nexus of conspiratorial thinking about Muslims that has far wider currency on the right. As I’ve written elsewhere, there has been a mini-boomlet of these conspiracy theories since President Obama’s election, fueled by a set of common tropes: the omnipresence of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration among American Muslims, the “creeping” spread of sharia law through the American judicial system, and the aiding and abetting of these currents by the ambiguously-Muslim Obama himself.
Bachmann and her congressional allies were clearly working from this playbook. Allegations against Huma Abedin herself are not new; only last year, well-connected neoconservative political operative Eliana Benador suggested that Weiner may have secretly converted to Islam upon marrying her. (Benador justified this strange theory with reference to another trope of the literature — the alleged pervasive reliance of Muslims on taqiyya, i.e. religiously-sanctioned deception.)
Allegations of crypto-Muslim identity are also far from unique to Weiner; Center for Security Policy (CSP) chief Frank Gaffney, for instance, took to the Washington Times soon after Obama’s Cairo speech to suggest that “the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” Gaffney, not coincidently, was the main source for Bachmann’s original letter against Abedin — although, as Alex Seitz-Wald notes, he was dropped from Bachmann’s latest defense of her position. Yet Bachmann has a long history of relying on Gaffney’s half-baked theories; she and Rep. Trent Franks (another signatory of the Abedin letter) were two sponsors of the 2010 CSP report “Sharia: The Threat to America,” which advocated harsh McCarthyite prescriptions against Muslims to counter the alleged spread of sharia in America. (Still another signatory of the Abedin letter was Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, perhaps best known for 2008 comments in which he disparaged Barack and Michelle Obama as “uppity.”)
The mastermind of the broader anti-sharia movement is a Gaffney staffer, CSP counsel David Yerushalmi, who — prior to cloaking his intentions in rhetoric about sharia — advocated making “adherence to Islam,” in any form, “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.” Yerushalmi himself has recently published in support of anti-sharia legislation in National Review, the conservative flagship, at the invitation of Andy McCarthy, yet another Bachmann favorite, whose book The Grand Jihad is perhaps the leading text claiming an Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy against America. And so on.
All this is merely to say that if John McCain is sincerely concerned about Bachmann’s latest fulminations, he should recognize that they have much deeper roots than he might like to admit. This kind of zany Islamophobia has taken hold of a large portion of the right, and getting rid of it will require more than a few ad hoc interventions.
]]>Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely [...]]]>
Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.”
The anti-Muslim activists, who all play a prominent role in the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” play pivotal roles as misinformation experts and online activists, stirring up Islamophobic fears across the country.
The SPLC’s list of “new activists heading up the radical right” include:
As recently as in 2002, a prominent British newspaper listed him with Iraq invasion cheerleaders Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as one of the men “directing” then-President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 security doctrine.
Sometime between then and now, Gaffney seems to have snapped.
Geller has mingled comfortably with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists, defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and denied the existence of Serbian concentration camps. She has taken a strong pro-Israel stance to the point of being sharply critical of Jewish liberals.
Muslims aren’t the only group with whom he has a bone to pick. Yerushalmi, an Orthodox Jew, also rails against liberal Jews and the “progressive elites” he says they influence. He’s described blacks as “the most murderous of peoples” and reportedly once called for undocumented immigrants to be placed in “special criminal camps,” detained for three years, and then deported.
The prominent role given to Islamophobes in the SPLC’s list underscores the anti-Muslim sentiments which have emerged on right-wing media outlets, Washington think tanks like the Center for Security Policy and the “anti-Shariah” legislation which has swept across more than two-dozen states.
]]>But new evidence suggests that this was precisely the intention of at least some of the authors of the report. Alex Kane at Mondoweiss has more background on David Yerushalmi, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) general counsel who was one of the authors of the report and who was featured at Wednesday’s press conference in the Capitol marking its launch. (Richard Silverstein and Charles Johnson have previously looked into Yerushalmi’s unsavory record.)
What does Yerushalmi believe? Let’s take a closer look.
On Muslims:
– “It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”
–”The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.”
–”The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.”
–”No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.”
(From the website of Yerushalmi’s group, SANE. Yerushalmi has since made all its content password-protected, but these statements are available here.)
On African-Americans:
–”There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”
(Yerushalmi has since tried to scrub the article in which this statement appeared from the public record, but Charles Johnson provides a link to it.)
On Jews:
–”The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society. I will ignore the Leftist version of the Jewish problem… But the Jewish problem for conservatives is a different and quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate.”
–”Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all ‘progressives:’ a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a ‘historical’ march to the World State…”
–”…one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.”
(Once again Yerushalmi has attempted to remove all record of these statements from the Internet, but they have been preserved here.)
It strikes me that Pete Hoekstra et al may have some explaining to do as to why they’ve gotten in bed with this character.
]]>The central problem with the report is that the authors identify “sharia” with the most literalistic and brutal versions of sharia, and therefore fail to understand what the term might actually mean to the bulk of Muslims worldwide. (When Matt Duss asked Gaffney at Wednesday’s press conference to name any Muslims scholars or theologians who had been consulted in the writing of the report, Gaffney was unable to produce any names.) As a result their prescriptions would amount in practice to a criminalization of virtually any form of Islam.
Here are some of their policy recommendations (p. 143 of the report):
“…extend bands currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah.”
“Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.”
“Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.”
“Immigrations of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.”
I am not a scholar of Islam, but any competent one will tell you that sharia is a far broader term than the “Team B” authors seem to think it is – it basically refers to Islamic religious precepts in general, to the point of being virtually synonymous with Islamic religious practice. As a result any practicing Muslim, no matter how moderate or extreme, will consider himself or herself to be “sharia-compliant” according to their own understanding of what sharia requires. This does not, of course, mean that they will endorse the brutal hudud penalties that have become the most notorious symbols of sharia to non-Muslims, that they will seek to impose these precepts on others, or that they will seek to make them the law of the land. But to demand that a practicing Muslim to renounce sharia is tantamount to demanding that they renounce Islam itself.
This is precisely what the report’s recommendations demand, whether or not it’s what the authors intend. Any Muslim who “espouses” or “adheres to” sharia – that is, any practicing Muslim – will thereby be banned from government or military service, prohibited from immigrating to the country, and even opened to prosecution for sedition. The only Muslims immune from this witch-hunt are those “who are willing publicly to denounce shariah” – a surefire recipe for the creation of conversos and crypto-Muslims, but hardly one consistent with the First Amendment.
We might be charitable to the “Team B” authors and argue that they’re simply ignorant: not understanding what sharia actually means, they have identified it with its most extreme manifestations, and therefore wrongly believe that by asking Muslims to renounce sharia they are simply asking them to renounce radical Islam. A less charitable explanation would be that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are seeking to outlaw Islam itself.
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