Will someone tell Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, David Yerushalmi, and Gates of Vienna they might as well close up shop.  A new study reported by the NY Times‘ Scott Shane confirms what most of us knew all along.  The alleged phenomenon of Muslim-American terror is largely concocted from their fevered, belabored imagination:

A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

The report also notes that the number of American Muslims charged with terrorism since 9/11 has topped out at the whopping total of 193. Of all the thousands of such cases, only 193 were perpetrated by Muslims in the past 11 years! The anti-jihadis owe these American citizens an abject apology. But they won’t get one. Instead they’ll continue feeling the cold blast of hate. And anti-Muslim haters like Yerushalmi will continue their financially lucrative campaign of writing anti-Sharia laws for state governments, some of which don’t even have a substantial Muslim population living in their borders. If anything was a solution in search of a problem, this is it.

No doubt, Geller will be snooping into the study author’s background (Jewish) attempting to find bias or some other taint. Good luck to her. It won’t take much to satisfy her twisted mind that the study is part of the international conspiracy to downplay the Muslim menace.

This is a talk I delivered at the Confronting Islamophobia: I am My Brother’s Keeper conference on Saturday at St. Mark’s Cathedral here in Seattle.  I’m grateful to the organizing committee for inviting me to speak.  I’m delighted to report that the event was very well attended.  Last night, the St. Mark’s main sactuary was full with I estimate about 800 or more in attendance to hear Imam Faisal Rauf.  There were TV crews there last night and today.  The Seattle Times ran a front page story and both Steve Scher and Dave Ross interviewed Imam Rauf on radio.  Congratulations to the steering committee which did yeoman work planning a massive enterprise very successfully.

*  *  *

In conceiving this conference, the organizers knew in theory they were going to be addressing an important issue in American life.  But events since we first began organizing it have proven just how fortuitous our choice of topics has been. American Islamophobes like Rep. Peter King, and Pamela Geller and David Yerushalmi have turned up the heat and volume on this debate and placed into even starker relief the necessity of having a rational, tolerant discussion of the role of Islam and American Muslims in the life of this nation.

Here’s what we can’t do: we can’t score political points, we can’t try to win elections, we can’t single out our fellow citizens as terrorists merely because of their religious beliefs.  We can’t demonize all American Muslims for the beliefs of a handful of hating extremists among them.  Anyone who does this must be held up for the bigot he or she is. In the light of the American assassination of Osama bin Laden, this becomes an even more urgent task.  No matter how many times a president says that he isn’t seeking to tar an entire religion with a broad brush merely because of the acts of one adherent or one Islamist terror group, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have gotten the message.  In fact, yesterday a pilot on a Delta Airlines flight out of Memphis refused to take off until two imams were removed from the plane.  Apparently, their dress so spooked him that he must’ve believed he had Osama’s cousins flying with him.

Whatever we may’ve thought of the Bin Laden killing, Barack Obama now has an opportunity to head off the bigots in the Republican Party and Tea Party movement who will try to make hay from this.  Clearly, it’s going to be a tough election for Republicans.  A major issue of national security has practically been foreclosed to them.  When a Party becomes desperate it seeks the weakest link to attack.  Unfortunately, some in this country see American Muslims as this weak link. They will tar and feather them. 

Remember the smears against Obama during the presidential election, which still cause a majority of Republicans in this country to believe that he is Muslim?  Look to the political right to exploit fear of Islam and make hay in the 2012 elections.  It may be used in the presidential election and it may be used in other federal or state elections.  We must be alert to fight back against such bigotry.  That’s why it’s important for non-Muslims, specifically Jews because of our complicated, fraught relationship, to step up and say we will not stand for it.

I wanted to speak about a few specific events that have occurred here in Seattle and in other places that might instruct us about the problems we face as Jews and Muslims in overcoming our suspicions and conflict.

Naveed Haq

In 2006, a mentally-ill Pakistani-American named Naveed Haq forced his way into the Seattle Jewish federation building and proceeded to shoot at the staff killing one woman and seriously injuring five.  In his twisted mind, he equated Jews in Seattle with the acts of Israel committed in Lebanon during the 2006 war.  This was an act of hatred and violence unprecedented in Seattle’s Jewish community.  It shook many people to the core.  Thankfully, the strident ideologues in the community representing groups like Stand With Us, didn’t set the tone for the response.

But the best that can be said, is that the community’s response wasn’t worse than it might otherwise have been.  The first jury to hear the case couldn’t agree on a sentence and there was a mistrial.  The prosecution announced it was retrying the case.  It insisted on trying Haq for first degree murder despite his documented history of mental illness going back ten years.  The district attorney attempted to argue that this deranged individual knew right from wrong and rationally planned his acts of violence.  All this, despite the fact that he was a deeply confused, disoriented, alienated and sick man.

One of the federation victims even said to the press that the most important aspect of this case was not religious hatred or anti-Semitism, but rather the fact that it was so incredibly easy for such a disturbed individual to procure a gun. The prosecution refused to consider a sentence to a mental asylum.  All this in large part, because the Jewish communal leadership would not settle for anything less than prison and punishment.  Sadly, the Jews of Seattle lacked the capacity to understand that–despite the fact that Haq, in his delusional state, blamed American Jews for Lebanon’s suffering–he was a sick man, and not an Islamist radical.  For Seattle Jews, this was a hate crime, not a crime committed by someone who was mentally ill.  And this, I think, is the tragedy that is beyond the actual tragedy of the shootings.  American Jews had a chance to understand the difference between anti-Semitism and mental illness and they chose to see themselves as victims of a Muslim extremist, rather than a man who himself was a victim of his own demons.

Naveed Haq was not Osama bin Laden.  If anything, he was Arthur Bremer.  Men whose delusions and twisted imaginations combined all sorts of hatred and set them on a homicidal rampage.  Naveed Haq needed treatment, not punishment.  Besides, life in a mental asylum for violent felons wouldn’t have been a vacation.

Southern Poverty Law Center

When Brenda Bentz was considering which speakers to invite for this conference, she had no lack of Muslims with deep expertise on these subjects.  But we wanted non-Muslim experts on racial hatred to speak as well.  So Brenda invited Mark Potok, the chief researcher of the Southern Poverty Law Center to address us.  Both Brenda and I were impressed that SPLC had recently added to its national list of prominent hate groups several Islamophobic organizations like Pam Geller’s Stop the Islamization of America and the Jewish Task Force, a successor to the Jewish Defense League.  And Mark wanted to come.

It seemed that SPLC might be ready to branch out from its bread and butter reliance on white supremacist groups to include far-right anti-Muslim scapegoat groups as well.  However, Brenda and a number of us were disappointed when Potok and SPLC’s president informed us that because CAIR was a co-sponsor of the conference, SPLC couldn’t participate. Though I don’t know a whole lot about SPLC’s internal structure and politics, you can be sure that there are many liberal Jews among its major donors.  The group’s president, Richard Cohen, seems concerned among other things about preserving his six-figure paycheck by not rocking the boat in any substantial way.  Even liberal Jews get spooked by spurious charges that CAIR supports Hamas and Islamist terror.  It probably won’t even help much that CAIR publicly approved of the death of Osama bin Laden.  Some people are just too frightened to give up those fears.

Apparently, the campaign of demonization by the likes of Peter King and Frank Gaffney prevented even a group like SPLC from associating itself, in even the most distant way, with a mainstream Muslim entity like CAIR.  This is what hate, fear and ignorance does to us, folks.  It twists our judgment, prevents us from trusting our instincts.  It turns us away from alliances we should be making with like-minded individuals and groups to advance our respective goals. I don’t know whether my primary emotion should be anger or disappointment regarding SPLC.  Mostly I just feel sorry for their caution and ultimately cowardice.  Groups like this who refuse to address the most divisive issues of the day out of such fear, either are, or will shortly be irrelevant to the concerns of most Americans.  If we want to make a difference as a religious community or as NGOs, we have to take a stand, even if we risk alienating those sitting on the fence.

Mosque-Synagogue Twinning

Now, I want to tell you about another small local tragedy with which I was intimately involved.  The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding was founded by New York Rabbi Marc Schneier.  It organizes a mosque-synagogue Twinning project each year that is devoted to education around the issues of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  Several years ago, I spent months with my friend, Jeff Siddiqui, desperately searching for two such partners here in Seattle.  We had a very hard time of it, frankly.  This was just after the Haq shooting and memories may’ve been tender on both sides.

At my synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, our rabbi enthusiastically agreed to participate.  She delegated me to search for a local Muslim partner. With Jeff’s help I identified MAPS as our Muslim partner.  I had a wonderful meeting with several mosque members and we mapped out what I thought would be a warm, stimulating series of programs for both communities.  We’d go to MAPS and they would come to us.  We’d pray there and they would pray with us, much like Imam Rauf did so movingly here in Church yesterday night.  Our rabbi would address them and their imam would address us, each from our respective religious altars.

Then I reported back to the rabbi.  In the meantime, the Stand With Us members of the congregation had pressured her into backing off on her commitment.  She apologetically told me the time wasn’t quite right to do this.  She didn’t know how she could’ve possibly agreed to an imam speaking from the bima of the synagogue.  It just couldn’t be done, she told me.  She needed at most another month to bring the shul’s membership and leadership around.  She promised the idea for the program would not die and that she was committed to making it happen.

It never did.  And my relationship with this rabbi has never been the same nor will it likely ever be.

The issue of Muslim-Jewish relations is too important to allow our leaders to fumble their commitments to it.  There are other communal leaders who try to mollify both sides.  Two years ago, the rabbi at Temple De Hirsh Sinai sponsored a highly-partisan Jewish federation program at which representatives of Aipac and the Israeli consul general for the Pacific NW spoke about the dangers posed by Iran to the Middle East and the entire world.  They claimed it was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and that it supported terrorism, among other things.  The fact that Israel had nuclear weapons and engaged in wars against its neighbors was not considered relevant to the discussion.  After the program ended I asked the rabbi how he could allow his temple to a venue for such partisan propaganda. 

Unfortunately, this escalated into a heated discussion during which he affirmed that he was in favor of regime change in Iran. This same rabbi invited Prof. John Esposito, a colleague of Prof. Haddad’s, to speak a few days from now at his temple about the role and history of Islam in America.  There is a major disconnect among some Jews regarding relations with Muslims and Islam.  Like Rabbi Weiner, they seem to think they can compartmentalize Islam into good guys and bad.  That they can demonize bad Muslims in Iran while embracing good ones here at home. I am not arguing that the Iranian regime is worthy of anyone’s support.  But I am arguing that rhetoric which accuses the Iranian regime of being mass murderers and supports its violent overthrow, while ignoring the negative role that Israel often plays, is not conducive to constructive dialogue with any Muslim, whether Iranian or American.

Peter King Hearings

After 9/11, the Republican Party discovered there was gold in them thar’ hills of Islamophobia and Muslim-bashing.  It was joined in this by a group I call Jewish neocons, whose hatred of Islam is bound up with a devotion to a far-right brand of Israeli nationalism which embraces the settler movement.  That is how Peter King and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy created a match made in heaven.  With the new Republican majority in the House, King became chair of the Committee on Homeland Security.  Looking for an issue to call his own, and hailing from a state with a substantial Jewish population, he made common cause with Gaffney over the alleged issue of Sharia law and the alleged plot by Muslims to take over the U.S. government and replace it with one governed by Sharia.

King’s hearings were originally conceived very much in the mold of Gaffney’s histrionics which warn of the Muslim menace to American life as we know it.  But due to critical media coverage and criticism from fellow members of Congress, King presented a still offensive, but watered-down version in his hearings last month.

Anti-Sharia Movement

Gaffney is joined in his anti-sharia jihad by Jewish far-right figures like David Yerushalmi.  The latter, who is a devout Orthodox Jewish attorney and supporter of the settler movement in Israel, is Gaffney’s chief legal counsel.  Mother Jones has profiled the Yerushalmi-Gaffney national campaign to write anti-sharia sentiment into state law.  Such provisions have either passed, or are being seriously discussed in 11 states.  Yerushalmi is the author of such bills and paid handsome consulting fees no doubt for his “expertise,” and much sought after on the Tea Party circuit.

I’m pleased to tell you that the organized Jewish community is beginning to wake up to the perils of the anti-Sharia movement because it could hit Jews where they live.  Just as Muslims conform their religious lives to Sharia so observant Jews conform theirs to halacha.  Just as Sharia may be applied to normally civil functions like marriage, divorce and estate planning; so too Jews often use halacha in place of civil code in these important life milestones.  If state laws criminalize the application of Sharia to civil matters then there is no reason this wouldn’t happen to halacha as well.

I’m pleased to tell you that last month in St. Louis, the ACLU and Jewish Community Relations Council joined together to denounce publicly the effort to ban Sharia under Missouri state law.

I want to tell you something that may be a bit cynical.  In truth, I don’t think most observant Jews would normally care to make common cause with American Muslims on this issue.  But it’s the beauty of the American system that you must create political coalitions if you wish for your own communal, religious or ethnic interests to be addressed.  In our system, if you try to go it alone you won’t go far.  That encourages groups to look beyond their own narrow interests and consider the interests of other groups when they overlap yours.  It is this making of alliances, as opposed to confining oneself to a separatist ghetto, that makes this country great.

The Yerushalmis and Gaffneys favor an atomized America in which every individual or group is out for its own good and some mythical Judeo-Christian majority can impose its own will on the rest of us. That’s not my America and I know it’s not yours either. Yerushalmi’s views are so far to the right that Mother Jones, the Jewish Forward and I in my blog have called him different variations of the phrase “Jewish white supremacist.”  Hard to believe that there can be such a person or thing, given Jewish history in the last century.  But I’m sorry to say that there can be and is.

Yerushalmi didn’t take kindly to my critique of his political views.  He threatened to sue me for libel in Arizona, where he resides, making himself right at home with the anti-immigrant movement that presides in that state.  I, of course, had to scurry to find pro bono counsel to represent me in what I feared could be a long costly case.

But in a bit of providence, the Anti-Defamation League came out with a public statement denouncing Yerushalmi and likening his views to the white-supremacist New World Order.  I’m guessing that the anti-Muslim attorney decided that now might not be the right time to sue someone for calling him a white supremacist.  He withdrew his threat.

Yerushalmi also crusaded against the Khalil Gibran Academy in New York City and its Muslim principal, Debbie Almontaser, eventually getting her fired.  He sued her for libel too and she won at both the lower court and appeals court level.  She also won a substantial settlement from the City of New York for wrongful termination.

Ground Zero Mosque

Yerushalmi has also made common cause with Pamela Geller, author of the Atlas Shrugged blog, and the chief instigator of the campaign against what she branded the ‘Ground Zero mosque,’ an institution with which our keynote speaker, Imam Faisal Rauf, was intimately involved for some time. I watched the Jewish-led campaign against the mosque– conveniently timed during the 2010 Congressional election campaign–with horror. The arguments against it made no sense whatsoever.  They were clearly fueled by fear and ignorance.  They mixed up the tragedy perpetrated by Al Qaeda against this country on 9/11 with an entirely separate matter of building a Muslim house of worship.  In the minds of the hysterics, there was no difference between the two. This is a profoundly un-American attitude. 

One the hallmarks of America’s greatness is our tolerance toward religions.  Our Founding Fathers wisely chose not to create a national religion and this in turn enabled America to become a powerful engine of democracy, which could incorporate hundreds of ethnic groups and their respective religions into a single whole.  In diversity there is strength.  Alternatively, you’ll remember that slogan on our dollar bills: e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

But contrary to Yerushalmi and Geller, I don’t believe we become one by denying our difference, by papering them over or by forcing those who are different to conform to some artificial notion of what is properly American.  We gain the strength to be united by coming together over our shared interests and by respecting our differences.  That’s the beauty of America.

The opponents of the Park51 mosque lost sight of an American trademark: religious freedom.  In this country, you can worship your God and your religion as you please.  You can build a house of worship where you want and how you want as long as you obey zoning codes. America doesn’t police religions as other countries do.  We don’t tell people where they can build a church, synagogue or mosque.  We don’t interfere in their religious teachings.  We don’t demonize them because their religion is different from ours. The movement led by Pam Geller, David Yerushalmi and Frank Gaffney which seeks to criminalize being a Muslim is profoundly offensive to American values.  I’m proud to say this as an American and as a Jew.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld: CUNY's pro-Israel 'enforcer'

New York City’s incendiary Jewish politics just heated up to the boiling point again.  Those who’ve read this blog for a while, will recall a nasty bunch called Stop the Madrassa which disseminated vile smears of Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran Academy, which was to be the first Arab-language public school in New York.  This is my own progressive version of David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks: the two main leaders of the anti-Arab group were Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a right-wing Republican operative with the Pataki political machine and David Yerushalmi, the guy whose views are so right-wing that Mother Jones, the Forward, and I have all called him various versions of a Jewish white supremacist.

Well, Wiesenfeld has just struck again.  He’s a CUNY trustee, no doubt appointed to the job during George Pataki’s governorship (gee, aren’t ya glad he’s not there to kick around any more?).  If you look at his picture, he looks more like Tony Soprano in a suit than a college trustee.

When the political hatchet man discovered that John Jay College planned to bestow an honorary doctorate on one of America’s greatest living playwrights, he broke out the poison and single-handedly torpedoed the degree ceremony.  After the lies and vitriol he spilled about Kushner, only 7 of the 9 needed trustees would support the motion and Kushner’s degree was killed.

As a result, CUNY now looks like a political battlefield and stifler of free speech, instead of one of the biggest and best urban university systems in the nation.  Students and faculty are rightfully enraged.  Never before in CUNY’s history has an individual campus’ honorary degree candidate been axed.

Here are some of the things Wieselfeld dredged up.  Note, he was too lazy even to read a book like Wrestling With Zion, which Kushner co-edited.  Instead, he used the sleazy research tactic of ferreting out information from a second-hand source.  Imagine, this is a trustee of New York City’s higher education authority and he can’t even portray someone’s ideas accurately:

Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, objected to John Jay College’s submission of Mr. Kushner for an honorary degree. Mr. Wiesenfeld described viewpoints and comments, which he ascribed to Mr. Kushner, that he had found on the Web site of Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and critic of Israel.

Mr. Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki and former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, said that Mr. Kushner had tied the founding of Israel to a policy of ethnic cleansing, criticized the Israel Defense Forces and supported a boycott of Israel.

“I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.”

Kushner, in his defense, notes that even many Israeli historians call the Nakba a clear case of “ethnic cleansing.”  And last I checked there was nothing unpatriotic about criticizing the IDF and I can’t believe that CUNY has regulations prohibiting the awarding of honorary degrees to playwrights who criticize Israel’s army.  Oh, and among Kushner’s other sins is that he’s on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.  Imagine that: making common cause with Israel’s delegitimzers!  I’ve got news for Wiesenfeld–the only person delegitimzing Israel is him.  Who can think of Israel as entirely legitimate when it has hatchet men like the Big Guy doing its bidding?

Here is an excerpt from Kushner’s message to the CUNY board in which he explains his views on the subject:

I won’t enter into arguments about Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people since 1948, about the security fence or the conduct of the IDF, except to say that my feelings and opinions – my outrage, my grief, my terror, my moments of despair – regarding the ongoing horror in the middle east, the brunt of which has been born by the Palestinian people, but which has also cost Israelis dearly and which endangers their existence, are shared by many Jews, in Israel, in the US and around the world. My despair is kept in check by my ongoing belief in, and commitment to a negotiated conclusion to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis…

Kushner also says that he does not support a boycott of Israel.  So there you have it.  You have a CUNY trustee who’s a flagrant liar, Islamophobe, and left-baiter.

Here is a partial list of the esteemed playwright’s honors:

“Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture…

How many such honors does Wiesenfeld have?  The NY Daily News gave him the Knucklehead of the Year Award.  But I gather that’s not the kind the Big Guy would prefer us to be linked to.

Andrew Cuomo, you’ve got a problem.  If Wiesenfeld was Pataki’s appointee I’d say you have some sway over him since you’re now the governor.  Better get that dog to heel before he rips somebody else’s guts out.

Read Kushner’s letter to the CUNY board.  I find it both shocking and disgusting that Dr. Benno Schmidt, a former president of Yale, is the chair of CUNY’s board of trustees and thus bears at least partial responsibility for this fiasco.  Is this the way you did things when you were in New Haven, Prof. Schmidt?

Related articles

• CUNY trustees dishonor academic freedom in Tony Kushner snub (muzzlewatch.com)

David Yerushalmi

I’m referring to an eye-opening expose in Mother Jones about the inspiration the Jewish extremist is offering for the anti-Muslim legal initiatives that are sweeping the south after the victory of one such campaign in Oklahoma a few months ago.  Now Tennessee stands ready to draw the line at Muslim infidels thrusting their scimitars into the private parts of Christian maidens.  The legislature there is considering a bill which would ban the use of foreign legal systems like Sharia in the adjudication of any legal matters within the state.  So far, I haven’t seen any Tennesseans clamoring to apply Sharia to the laws governing horse-racing at Churchill Downs.  But that doesn’t deter Yerushalmi, who has projects like this cooking in several other southern Tea Party strongholds.

One of the most delicious phrases used to describe the Jewish anti-jihadi is “white supremacist,” to which I say: if the shoe fits…I’ve also called him a Jewish fascist.  But white supremacist will do just as well.

As Murphy notes, this is a guy who endorses the principle that “Caucasians” are superior to blacks and that Jewish liberals are a cancer in the U.S. body politic.  The nearest Jewish “intellectual” antecedent I can determine would be Meir Kahane.  But Yerushalmi’s views are far more radical than Kahane’s.  The only difference is that Kahane embraced violence as a tool in his campaign against Arabs and anti-Semites.  The latter-day Jewish Islamophobe, an attorney, is far too slick for that.  He merely suggests that all non-citizen Muslims in the country be deported and many of the rest thrown in concentration camps.  In Yerushalmi-world, any Muslim who espoused Sharia would earn him or herself a 20 year stay in the federal pen.  Why would you need violence when you can throw the entire weight of the federal government into criminalizing merely being a Muslim?

I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Yerushalmi, a fedora-totin’, tzitis-wearing ultra-Orthodox Jew, was an avid supporter of the settler movement, the Israeli equivalent of the Tea Party with Uzis.

David Yerushalmi is the nasty, sleazy side of the more refined Muslim-bashing proposed by Rep. Peter King, who plans on quizzing Muslim-Americans about their nasty un-American habits in Congressional hearings soon.  The former is Roy Cohn, to King’s Joe McCarthy.  Can you imagine white Christian Congress members summoning American Jews to defend their Americanism in public hearings?  It’s preposterous, nauseating.

And just think, if Mike Huckabee gets the Republican nomination, we’ll have a settler-loving presidential candidate espousing such a foul, racist agenda.

Norman Finkelstein coined the phrase the “Holocaust industry” in his book of the same name, to describe the nexus of Jewish groups, lawyers, politicians, and communal leaders who enrich their power and pocketbook by trumpeting the anti-Semitism threat and causing anxiety and paranoia among world Jewry as a result.  As a result of Finkelstein’s acute analysis, he’s earned outrage and scorn from those in the Jewish community who he has skewered.

For the past decade or more, since the 1990s demise of the Communist “menace” and its accompanying gravy train, neocons have turned to terror as their new bogeyman.  A new Terror Industry has sprung up and it is populated with the usual retired generals (William Boykin), former government officials (Bolton, Gaffney), corporate opportunists (Aubrey Chernick), ideologues and intellectual heavy-lifters (Pipes, Horowitz, Podhoretz, Peretz, Kristol).  Just as the Jefferson’s tree of liberty needed to be fed with the blood of tyrants, so the Terror apparatus needs to be fed with new political fodder.

Such is the effort led by Jewish pro-Israel neocons to turn anti-jihadism into the Terror Industry’s new mantra.

There at the creation was Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy.  You’ll recall that Gaffney was a middle-ranking member of Ronald Reagans’ Defense Department.  As early as 1990, Christopher Hitchens, before he became a parody of himself, wrote in his book, How Neo-Conservatives Perish,  about Gaffney’s prescience in grasping at the need for a new source of political power to replace the decline of Communism.  Since then, he’s become one of the go-to guys for all things hawkish, neocon and pro-Israel among policy wonks.

Today, Matt Duss wrote about a report on alleged American Muslim terror threats which was, I’m embarrassed to say, actually endorsed by three members of Congress.  Among them were Her Looniness Michelle Bachman and Peter Hoekstra, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee.  If you want a sense of what the national security agenda of a new Republican House majority would be read the report, Sharia: The Threat To America.

According to it, the new Muslim bogeyman is Shariah, about which the authors in their Times op-ed say:

Today, the United States faces a similarly insidious ideological threat:Shariah, the authoritarian doctrine that animates the Islamists and their jihadism…

Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates…

The other side of the divide is dominated by “Islamists,” who are Muslim supremacists. Like erstwhile proponents of communism and Nazism, these supremacists – some terrorists, others employing stealthier means – seek to impose a global theocratic and authoritarian regime, called a caliphate. On this side of the divide, Shariah is a compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to wage jihad to install and to which the rest of the world is required to submit.

For these ideologues, Shariah is not a private matter. They see the West as an infidel enemy to be conquered, not a culture and civilization to be embraced or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of government like ours to coexist peacefully with the end-state they seek.

…we need to come to grips with Shariah. Whether pursued through violent jihad or the stealthier techniques the Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” or dawa (the call to Islam), Shariah rejects fundamental premises of constitutional governance and American society…

Here’s the money quote:

Shariah adherents – including a network of Muslim Brotherhood-connected organizations operating in the United States – are seriously pursuing civilization jihad in this country. Their agenda is about power, not faith…

…The endgame of Islamist ideology is the same whether pursued by terrorists or nonviolent activists: to extort American society into Sharia compliance.

The Sharia Report was sponsored by Gaffney’s CSP, and written by three former Cold Warriors turned anti-jihadis, among them James Woolsey and the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy.  In the Washington Times where he celebrated the release of the report he had the temerity to say that among the Muslims Pres. Obama invites to the White House for Iftar dinners might be members of Al Qaeda.  He’s also notorious for claiming that Pres. Obama “might” still be a Muslim.  He also claims that the current administration has “communicated submission” to America’s enemies.

Duss in his post, has identified an old familiar Jewish extremist face peeking out of the CSP woodwork, its general counsel, David Yerushalmi (ne Beychok).  When last seen in this blog, he had been banished by, of all people, Daniel Pipes for embarrassing the group, Stop the Madrassa (where he also was general counsel), with his ultra-extremist beliefs.  That group was the catalyst for the anti-Muslim backlash that led New York’s mayor and schools chancellor to demand the resignation of Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of the Muslim charter school, the Khalil Gibran Academy.  She has successfully sued the city under an EEOC suit.

Though trained as a lawyer, Yerushalmi earns his living from the Terror Industry and its new anti-jihadi adjunct.  He has reportedly become Frank Gaffney’s “rabbi” when it comes to the study of Islamism and jihadism.  But where has Yerushalmi learned about Islam?  Does he have a graduate degree, even from as slanted a source as Bernard Lewis?  No.  Did he study Islam with any noted scholars (even non-Muslim)?  Doubtful.  What Yerushalmi has are some half-baked notions he’s either read in a book or developed out of his own paranoiac imagination about the Muslim menace.

Among Yerushalmi’s more wacky views: American Muslims should be confined to concentration camps for the threat they pose of overthrowing the government.  This is a quotation from his website:

The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation.

He and his anti-jihadi Gauleiter, Dave Gaubatz, orchestrated a “sting” against D.C. area local mosques by posing as worshippers and seeking to “out” the imams for their alleged support of jihad and terror.  You’ll recall this is the same Gaubatz whose son posed as an intern while working at CAIR and stole internal organizational documents which dad was hoping would prove CAIR’s commitment to a Sharia overthrow of the U.S. government.  Daddy G. just accepted a legal ruling that he must return the documents which his son had stolen.

Returning to the other Dave (Yerushalmi), giving the vote to African-Americans was a foolish idea.  He calls this “raw” or “liberal democracy” and he’s agin’ it.  Doesn’t think much of Abe Lincoln, either.  Says the Founding Fathers opposed democracy as well.  He may be one of the few Jewish white supremacists around.  He calls Bill O’Reilly a “secular progressive” and of Sean Hannity, he says he ”participates in the destruction of America’s national existence.”

He’s apparently learned a lesson or two about keeping his outlandish views under wraps because his website, SANEWorks (Society of Americans for National Existence), used to be publicly accessible and now is only available to those who pony up the $2,000 subscription fee.

At the press conference which featured the announcement of report, Matt questioned Gaffney about the origin of the notions of Islam found in it.  The former secured a damaging admission from the anti-jihadi wonk:

Noting some of the report’s broad and controversial claims about Islamic law, such as that all Muslims are duty-bound to wage jihad against unbelievers, I asked Gaffney how many actual Muslims or Islamic scholars he and his group had consulted with in writing the report. He could not name any, though he noted that he had consulted with various Muslims “over the years.”

So there you have it. A report on the threat posed by Islamic law to the United States, one of whose leaders admits to having started studying Islam only three years ago, whose authors admit consulting with no actual Muslims, produced by a think tank that has previously claimed that key members of the Obama administration are part of the Iran Lobby.

In short, this is all nonsense.  But it is very dangerous nonsense.  It is nonsense that could easily lead us into war with Iran. And that would be for starters.  These ghoulish hatemongers propose a holy war against 1.4-billion people.  They would have our country in a perpetual state of conflict, a latter-day anti-Muslim Sparta.  As for me, I prefer to be Athens any day.

We must say no to the Terror Industry and their anti-Muslim ideologues.  If they are ascendant in the national political debate, it means the destruction of everything many of us hold dear about this country.  And we’ll say Dick Cheney was a piker by comparison.

The Republican Party has gone from controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress to trolling through the cesspools of hate and bigotry.  I’m guessing they may be a minority party for many years to come if they continue with the types of bizarre attacks they’ve dreamed up in the past few days.

In the first attack, the Republican National Committee tweeted about a doctored video in which Adolph Hitler praises Nancy Pelosi for her efforts on behalf of health care reform.  The video was featured by a far-right site, Moonbattery and retweeted by the RNC.  Not only were Democrats royally pissed, Jewish groups were none to happy either.  This was the best the Republicans could muster by way of apology or explanation:

NRCC spokesman John Randall says they have pulled down the Tweet and offered a mea culpa:”We saw the video this morning and thought, like other parodies, that it was funny,” Randall just told me. “In 20-20 hindsight, we realized it was in poor taste and pulled it down… I don’t want anyone to think we’re comparing Democrats to Nazis and to Hitler.”

Republicans comparing Democrats to Nazis?  Heaven forfend.  Why would such a thought even cross anyone’s mind?  I’m waiting for Abe Foxman’s denunciation of the utter inanity of this RNC gem.  My guess is we might have to wait a long time.  Abe is quick on the trigger when liberals or Democrats err.  But when it’s conservatives abusing the Holocaust?  Not so much.

Jeff Siddiqui sends me a remarkable story about four Republican Congressmembers who, with great fanfare and in their best Joe McCarthy imitation, announced to their colleagues they would make “public a national security threat on Capitol Hill.”  Was it an al Qaeda sleeper cell in DC?  Not quite.  Apparently, someone dug up a Council on American-Islamic Relations memo which summarized their national program, including efforts to recruit young Muslims to work as interns and staffers on the Hill. Here’s the smoking gun proving Muslim perfidy:

We will impact local Congressional districts with each member influencing at least two legislators through strong grassroots responses.  We will focus on influencing Congressmen with responsibility for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim community.  For example, Congressmen on the judiciary, intelligence and homeland security committees.  We will develop national initiatives such as lobby day and placing Muslim interns in Congressional offices.

This is something, by the way, that Aipac does with great success.  Not only does it help place young Jews in such positions, members of Congress are often eager to have them.  This nexus helps cement bonds between Aipac and Congress and vastly aids in their lobbying efforts.  So let’s ask a simple question: why when Aipac does something is it as American as apple pie, but when CAIR does it it’s a national security threat?

An added shocker to this story is that one of the four Republicans, Sue Myrick (NC), has written the forward to a new book by Dave Gaubatz, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America.  When I first read Gaubatz’s name it immediately rang a bell.  He’s the “investigator” who “infiltrated” mosques in the D.C. area claiming to have uncovered militant Islamist cells which threaten America’s welfare.  He perpetrated this outrage together with another shady Jewish anti-jihadist, David Yerushalmi (ne Beychok), who I’ve written about extensively here.  Together they run an outfit called SANE Works for US, which claims (along with Daniel Pipes and other militant Islamophobes) that American Muslims are orchestrating a sharia state for America.  Here’s one particular Yerushalmi proclamation:

WHEREAS Islam requires all Muslims to actively and passively support the replacement of America’s constitutional republic with a political system based upon Shari’a.

Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People.

HEREFORE, IT IS RESOLVED THAT: It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Shari’a.

The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation.

Further, they argue that this justifies holding American Muslims in concentration camps as a threat to national security.  Interestingly, the Sane Works site has gone from being public and accessible to members-only.  One wonders what Yerushalmi and Graubatz have to hide.  I’d say they’re trying to erase their tracks and any public record of their racism, not just against Muslims, but all “non-white” groups (except Jews, of course).

Really, this is with whom the Republican Islamophobes have gotten themselves into bed.  And I say for shame.  What do you have to say about that, Abe Foxman?  Oh, that’s right, you’re only concerned about violations of the Jewish civil rights.  Muslims and Armenians, not so much.

I know. It sounds too preposterous to be true. But read on.

Earlier today, Fadi of Kabobfest linked in a comment here to a Muslim Link post by Tariq Nelson about David Yerushalmi’s “infiltration” of a Virginia mosque for the purposes of unmasking its alleged jihadi agenda. Since I know Yerushalmi based on his strident Israeli nationalist views I was having a hard time crediting Nelson’s claims that he espoused “white supremacist” views.

But Larry Cohler Esses has set me straight and proven that a Jew can indeed by a white supremacist as proven by this Yerushalmi essay in Conservative Voice:

While our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses, democracy has seeped up through the cracks and corroded everything we once deemed sacred about our political order. Prior to the Civil War, the electorate, essentially white Christian men, had access to local government. It was here, where men shared an intimacy born of family ties, shared religious beliefs, and common cultural signposts, that representative government was meant to touch our daily lives. With the social and cultural revolution which followed the emancipation, man’s relationship to political order was radically nationalized and democratized. Today, there is simply no basis to resist “democracy” and the “open society”.

Note Yerushalmi’s distinction between national and local government. White men were supposed to enjoy democracy only in New England style town meetings with their neighbors, while the affairs of state were to be handled by national leaders free from the messy pressures of the unwashed “masses.” And you’ll notice who Yerushalmi blames for the deterioration in our body politic, Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. That’s right, letting the darkies get the vote was the worst thing those “white Christian men” ever let happen to the Republic.

Fadi also turned me on to some eye-popping Yerushalmi legislative proposals regarding the Arab-American “menace:”

WHEREAS Islam requires all Muslims to actively and passively support the replacement of America’s constitutional republic with a political system based upon Shari’a.

Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People.

HEREFORE, IT IS RESOLVED THAT: It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Shari’a.

The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation.

If you spend any time at a Yerushalmi site you feel like you’ve traveled through the Looking Glass where every notion about this country you ever cherished becomes reviled and every notion you ever detested about this country is lauded. It is definitely “through a glass, darkly.”

I’ve wondered whether Yerushalmi’s background as a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant could figure in this. [UPDATE: Yerushalmi is NOT an immigrant but born in the U.S. His ancestors were born in the Ukraine. My errror was due to the misunderstanding of a comment my informant made about Yerushalmi's background.] Observers of the Israeli political scene note that many Russian immigrants entering politics are either outright anti-democratic or so far right as to be virtually anti-democratic. Avigdor Lieberman is one example and Natan Sharansky is not far behind. Something in the Communist system has so warped these people’s minds toward democracy that they view it as a debased system, a trick designed to harm their interests. Of course, Russia is also known for its right-wing racialist politics and neo-Nazi activism. Witness Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

David Yerushalmi replied to the charges leveled against him here and in Larry Cohler Esses’ article in Jewish Week. He doesn’t deny that he opposes democracy in Israel and the U.S. But he clarifies his meaning:

…Your “journalists” lead the story with the statement that I oppose “democracy” in the US and Israel, without any hint of an explanation of what that means in context.

…There is a clear distinction between raw or radical democracy and what we in the US adopted at our founding: a constitutional republic based on federalism…The founding fathers themselves of course opposed “democracy” in its simple form and created a wonderfully elaborate system to shield government from mass democracy (you of course are aware that neither the president, the judiciary, or even senators were elected by the direct vote under our Constitution [note the 17th Amendment]).

He expands on his rejection of “raw democracy” in another passage:

Mr. Yerushalmi criticizes…raw or radical democracy where all men and all ideas and all cultures are deemed equal and given equal voice. That is of course the agenda of the Left (and often blindly supported by “conservatives”) which attempts at every turn to destroy national sovereignty with a One World Government.

There you have it. David Yerushalmi doesn’t believe in the 17th amendment and prefers returning to the Constitution circa 1789. You see, we’ve allowed too many of the unwashed masses like former slaves and Arab-Americans to enter into our democratic processes. Even we Jews have infected the body politic with our leftist notions. They shouldn’t vote for U.S. senators nor even for president. Best to return to that time in history when Blacks equalled 3/5 of a white person and Southern whites got to increase their voting power by subsuming that 3/5 into their own voting bloc.

To be fair, we should allow David Yerushalmi to reply to my own attack on him. Note the honeyed tones of pseudo graciousness which are applied to those who call him out for what he is:

Dear Mr. Silverstein:

I find it interesting that you would attack me so viciously without first reaching out to dialogue since you have done so with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

To label someone a Supremacist or racist is fine as long as the facts would support it. Rather than just take quotes out of context, I would have thought that a man so devoted to peace and dialogue would have at least extended to me the courtesy to inquire of me whether your understanding of my views was in fact correct.

Then, you could have said that indeed went right to the source and have determined that Yerushalmi is x, y, z. That you drew conclusions of this sort without any such effort speaks volumes, does it not?

All the best,

David Yerushalmi

Keep in mind this guy thinks I’m a member of the extreme left, a traitor to all he holds dear, and dangerous for the Brave New World he’s planning. Keep in mind that he has a plan for what he’d do for people like me (and probably you) and it probably involves incarceration at places like Guantanamo and a little electric current running under the fingertips. Why he thinks I would find it useful to dialogue with him is beyond me. But he’s welcome to participate here as long as he can keep a civil tongue in his mouth.

One point that Yerushalmi raises that is valid is his discussion of Israeli democracy. He is right in the limited sense that there is an outright contradiction in the way Israel currently balances its commitments to democracy and being a Jewish state. To Yerushalmi’s way of thinking there is no possible way to bridge the divide and Israel must shed democracy in order to hold true to its real mission as a state of the Jewish people. This would include eliminating (by expulsion or perhaps more extreme measures) those Arab citizens who could not accept Israeli supremacism and Arab subjugation.

A racist Jewish state like the one Yerushalmi envisions precludes the possibility that Israel could be a state that guarantees equality to ALL its citizens while protecting the religious and political rights of all as well. My vision would be a different Israel than the current system which Yerushalmi correctly notes discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens. It might be a system closer to our own with a constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens and specifying what those rights are and how they are to be protected. And it would be a BETTER Israel both for its Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants.