Anti-Muslim

Next time Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Erick Stakelbeck talks about religious liberty, just remember that he doesn’t seem to extend that freedom to Muslims. During a conference call with the group Tea Party Unity, Stakelbeck attacked the Obama administration for having “literally” intervened in cases to defend the construction of mosques.

Stakelbeck said he is outraged that the Obama administration is trying to stop residents from blocking the construction of mosques because how dare the Justice Department defend the First Amendment!

He was also livid that Muslims may want to build “a $5 million mega-mosque,” just as we are sure he is angry that a Southern Baptist congregation in Dallas constructed a $130 million megachurch.

But then again, what do you expect from a sports reporter-turned-terrorism “expert” who has championed anti-Muslim activists like “mosque buster” Gavin Boby?

Caller: How is it we can get these facilities, because I’m not going to call it a church or a religion, how can we get them shut down?

Stakelbeck: Well look under this administration, good luck, because I’m just working on a chapter in my new book about how this administration when locals, in places like Murfreesboro, Tennessee, when local residents are up in arms about a mosque being built, the Obama Department of Justice literally intervenes, files amicus briefs in support of the mosque, we’ve seen this time and time again. Here’s a statistic for you, folks, in the year 2001 there were 1,200 mosques in America; now, just twelve years later after 9/11, that number has doubled to over 2,000 mosques, that’s a 74 percent increase since 9/11 alone, that is astounding and it is not a coincidence. Under the Obama administration the floodgates are open even more; they are literally intervening in these mosque cases around the country, in small towns with very small Muslim populations. I’m sorry, if you have a 200-strong Muslim population, why do you need a $5 million mega-mosque? And where is the money coming from? Look no further than Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. So getting mosques shut down in this era, in the age of Obama? Good luck. What you’re going to see is more mosques built.

Stakelbeck told another caller that “there is a concerted effort by Islamists to infiltrate the very heartland of American society,” particularly the Bible Belt.

Just to be clear, Muslims represent just 1% of the population of Tennessee and less than 0.5% in other Bible Belt states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Arkansas.

But maybe they’re all just hiding in national parks….

Caller: We are seeing so much Saudi in middle Tennessee, I mean they have the best health care in the Saudi embassy, we have classes at the university, so we are just seeing a major, major influx of Saudi nationals here in middle Tennessee.

Stakelbeck: Folks, it’s not a coincidence. Middle Tennessee is the buckle of the Bible Belt. This is not just in New York City, Boston, Chicago, LA, traditional gateway cities for immigrants, anymore; there is a concerted effort by Islamists to infiltrate the very heartland of American society. I write about this in my book “The Terrorist Next Door,” I call it “Southern Inhospitality,” and that’s what we’re seeing, and you’re seeing it in a major way in that Nashville area where you have tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in Murfreesboro and Shelbyville.

Disgraced ex-FBI agent John Guandolo returned to TruNews with Rick Wiles to discuss the Boston marathon bombing, which he said should motivate every American to point out and expose the people in their communities who are working for Al Qaeda.

Guandolo warns that Islamic radicals are operating in “every locale across the United States” and must be named and shamed, much like the Ohio professor whom Guandolo falsely accused of backing terrorism. If not, Guandolo claimed, such extremists will infiltrate school boards and the sheriff’s departments and cause America to go over the “tipping point” beyond which we become a nation controlled by Al Qaeda.

He also agreed that Wiles was headed in the right direction after the talk show host claimed that Obama is seeking to impose Sharia law on the US.

Wiles: American Christians are being demonized, the NRA is being demonized, the Tea Party is being demonized, red blooded American citizens are being demonized and at the same time we have people inside the US government who are embracing Islam inside this country. They are being placed in positions of power to dominate the American people.

Guandolo: Yep. So the question is for your viewers, are you going to sit by to you and I chat about this or what are you going to do?

Wiles: This is the problem. What are you going to do? We just had an election and the people just re-elected the Saudi plant.

Guandolo: I bring that up because that’s the question I get the most: what can we do? I’ve had people say, ‘I can’t do anything, I can go every four years and vote but I can’t do anything,’ and I just say: you have a local school board, you have a county sheriff, you have local elected officials, you have state representatives, and every one of them ought to know that this exists because the Brotherhood has organizations in every locale across the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, where they are out there and they are working very diligently not just at the national level but at the state and local level.

Wiles: But John isn’t there a tipping point where this infiltration becomes so deep and pervasive that there’s a tipping point and suddenly the balance of power is in their favor?

Guandolo: I believe there is and I believe we’re pretty close to it right now.

Wiles: We may have already gone over; I think we’re already into it.

Guandolo: We may have, I actually won’t argue that point. I think that the big unknown or the big variable in this whole equation is the American people; the American people when they energize and come around that corner, when they hit their tipping point and decide to engage and identify the Muslim Brotherhood leaders in their cities, in their towns, in their neighborhoods and they point and they say ‘that guy, that gal, they’re working on the same side as Al Qaeda.’ You should not discern between a Muslim Brother and Al Qaeda, it’s just a different bowl of vanilla ice cream.

Would you want somebody who swears their allegiance to Osama bin Laden and the idea of Al Qaeda, would you want them advising your school board? It doesn’t matter what they’re advising them on. I hear people say, what’s he advising them on? At some point you have to inject sanity in the discussion and so if somebody is advising your school board and they’re a Muslim Brother, they are hostile, they should be treated like they’re from Al Qaeda. You don’t have to say everybody has to be tied to Al Qaeda, this is where we’re missing it, oh these two guys in Boston we can’t find any ties to Al Qaeda, well I can: they are dedicated to Islamic ideology of Sharia and imposing Islamic law.

Wiles: That describes Barack Obama.

Guandolo: That could be, you may be right on that. When it comes to what’s happening here and across the country I think that Americans at their local level have got to get engaged and the Muslim Brotherhood is counting on the fact that we will not.

There is a rumor taking off on the right, which has been embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck and Pamela Geller, that the Saudi student questioned over the Boston marathon attack is being deported. The rumor is, unsurprisingly, “one hundred percent false.”

But even though multiple news outlets, including the conservative Daily Caller, have debunked the story, the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America has decided to go ahead and run with it. The group sent out an email at 4:47 this afternoon repeating the rumor and warning that “something fishy is going on.”

The email also cites a debunked New York Post story (which has even been recanted by the Post) that identified two men who were supposedly potential suspects.

Act! For America had plenty of time to go keep up with this new information and hold back on sending their members an email about the two now-discredited stories. But accuracy has never been their strong point.

End Times fanatic Rick Wiles of TruNews on Friday hosted notorious anti-Muslim activist Steven Emerson to discuss how the Muslim Brotherhood is coming to power in the US and around the globe. Emerson alleged that members of Congress, specifically Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) are “in the pocket” of Islamist groups which are using “stealth jihad.”

Emerson: They’re using what I call legal insurgency, it is stealth jihad. What they are doing is legal—

Wiles: I agree, that’s what I’m saying, it’s a mental thing, they are changing the mindset of the American people, it is jihad.

Emerson: They are trying to change the mindset and they’ve already made inroads in Congress, they’ve got certain Senators in Congress like Keith Ellison, Sen. Dick Durbin and others who are in their pocket. I know this, I can prove it.

He also claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood has “penetrated virtually all institutions in the United States, wittingly or unwittingly,” including the federal government, news media, entertainment industry, book publishers and academia, as they back the group’s “ultra-fascist ideology.”

Like fellow anti-Muslim firebrand Kamal Saleem, who has maintained that he discussed plots with professors on how to recruit their students into terrorism, Emerson added that professors teach from a “radical Islamist” perspective.

Emerson: The Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated virtually all institutions in the United States, wittingly or unwittingly: the White House; the Department of Justice; Hollywood; the media; the State Department; the publishing industry.

Wiles: Why carryout terrorist acts if you can just quietly take over the country?

Emerson: That’s exactly what they said.

Wiles: And they are succeeding.

Emerson: Yes they are. They are succeeding—they’ve already been able to succeed in cutting these Faustian deals with the media where the ultra-fascist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is totally consistent with the ultra-left-wing ideology of the media and it’s reflected on campuses in academia and student groups, it’s reflected in books and it’s also reflected in policies by the U.S. government.

…

Emerson: What are they teaching in academia today? Who are the professors? What are the student groups promoting? It’s a radical Islamist view of the United States and Israel, it contrives to present western civilizational values as morally equivalent to radical Islamic fundamentalist values, nothing could be further from the truth.

Sean Hannity last night was clearly upset that Rep. Keith Ellison exposed him for what he is — a partisan hack — and he is now launching attacks on the congressman by recycling statements Ellison made in the 1990s about the Nation of Islam, a group that the congressman later vociferously denounced. He even wondered if “we have somebody then in Congress that is the equivalent of one side of what the Klan is?”

Hannity has attacked Ellison over his faith in the past, arguing that Ellison’s use of Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran during his symbolic swearing-in ceremony “will embolden Islamic extremists” and is no different from a congressman using “Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which is the Nazi bible.”

While the use of inflammatory language and false claims is nothing new for Sean Hannity, we decided to use the segment as an opportunity to highlight the five Islamophobic smears regularly found on Fox News.

1. Obama is a Secret Muslim:

Fox News host Eric Bolling claimed that Obama “answers to the Quran first and to the Constitution second” and Hannity himself alleged that Obama “went to a Muslim school.” Regular contributors like Charles Krauthammer and Donald Trump have also floated the claim that Obama was raised as a Muslim and back in 2007, Fox News ran with the discredited story that Obama was a student an Islamic “madrassa” in Indonesia.

2. Park 51 Will be used for Terrorism:

Dick Morris, who just recently was booted from the network following his hilariously bad election predictions, said that the Park 51 Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero is planning to “train the same kind of terrorists” that attacked the U.S. on 9/11, warning the building will be a “command center for terrorism.” Bolling alleged that Park 51 is being built to represent “the people who flew planes” into the Twin Towers and Bill O’Reilly warned the project is housing “condos for Al Qaeda.”

3. Al Jazeera Conspiracies:

Fox News contributor Lisa Daftari warned that Al Jazeera’s acquisition of Current TV will activate terrorist “sleeper cells” in Detroit and regular Fox guest Michelle Malkin called the channel “a cheerleader for terror” and “a Trojan Horse for terror TV.”

4. Sharia law a-comin’:

Regular Fox News viewers may be under the impression that President Obama, public schools and NASA seek to impose Sharia law. The network also recently hired Herman Cain as a contributor, who insisted that Muslims should be prohibited from serving in high levels of government and that localities have a right to ban mosques because Muslims seek to introduce Sharia law, warnings Hannity readily endorsed.

5. ‘All Terrorists are Muslims’:

Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends claimed that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims” and Bill O’Reilly has implied that all Muslims were responsible for 9/11. Fox News regularly hosts anti-Muslim guests such as Brigitte Gabriel, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. In fact, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and contributor John Bolton prematurely blamed the far-right terrorist attack in Norway on government offices and a left-wing party youth summit on Muslims.

Apparently, President Obama and John Brennan aren’t the only secret Muslim agents in the administration.

Yesterday, Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth America interviewed Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly about Chuck Hagel, who is set to be confirmed as secretary of defense later today. Adding to the other ridiculous, last-ditch efforts to sink Hagel’s nomination, Eliason asked Schlafly about wild allegations “that Mr. Hagel has become or has been a part of Islam, he’s Islamic.” Rather than specifically address Eliason’s question, Schlafly said that since Obama “gives a pass to Islam” in “his attack on religion,” Americans “have to be on guard on that all the time.”

The two then went on to praise Hagel-critic Jerome Corsi of WorldNetDaily, who must be taking a break from his usual endeavors of exposing Obama’s foreign birthplace, secret Muslim faith and gay past.

Eliason: Phyllis, there have been those that allege that Mr. Hagel has become or has been a part of Islam, he’s Islamic. What substance is on this thing?

Schlafly: Hagel is the most dangerous appointee for secretary of defense we’ve ever had, he’s got so many things wrong with him. He’s for getting rid of our nuclear weapons, he’s for downplaying our anti-missile defense and he’s even for signing onto the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would give some more foreign people the opportunity to make decisions about our policies. Whereas we know the whole world is better off if we have military superiority. Well, when we talk about Obama and his attack on religion he gives a pass to Islam. So, we have to be on guard on that all the time.

Eliason: Well our good friend Jerry Corsi from over at WND had an interesting statement here, of course he refers to Mr. Hagel: ‘A former Nobel Peace Prize nominee warns that Senate confirmation of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense would send a message to Iran of weakened U.S. resolve, making it less likely America’s military might would in any way deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions.’

Schlafly: Well Jerry Corsi is very reliable and I would take his words very seriously, that’s absolutely true. I think it so dangerous to have Hagel as secretary of defense, who is trying to implement all of the pacifist ideas that Obama has.

She also agreed with a caller who claimed that officials like Hagel need to identify President Obama as “the enemy” of America.

Later, Schlafly compared the American policy of Cold War deterrence to the current policy for “dealing with the Islam,” while noting that “the Muslims are different” than the Soviets as “they seem to like to commit suicide.”

Schlafly’s classification of all Muslims as terrorists was part of a bizarre argument that criticized Hagel for supposedly seeking to do away with America’s nuclear arsenal that she claims we need to scare terrorists who also are not at all afraid of our nuclear weapons.

Schlafly: I want to point out one difference between dealing with the Communists and dealing with the Islam. When the Communists in Russia were in charge we had a policy called mutually assured destruction which we called MAD and it was that they knew that if they dropped a bomb on New York City we’d hit back and wipe them out and that was supposed to deter them from doing any bad attack. But the Muslims are different; they seem to like to commit suicide. I don’t think they are going to be deterred by that type of an attitude and we have to make sure that we have the weapons that are enough to scare them that they never attack in the first place.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is to be honored by a far-right group whose leader has a history of comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler and attacking gays and lesbians.

Abbot is to receive an honor from two local affiliates of the U.S. Pastor’s Council, the Texas Pastor Council and the Houston Area Pastor Council. It’s unclear to what extent the groups are “groups”: all three share a website and are led by a single man, extremist pastor Dave Welch.

The groups are also planning to honor Paul Pressler, who helped lead the “conservative resurgence” within the Southern Baptist Convention. Former Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, who now works for Baylor University, is delivering the keynote address.

The Texas Freedom Network first noticed the event and highlighted Welch’s extreme rhetoric.

For example, Welch has:

• Argued that Obama is creating a “Fourth Reich.”

• Likened pastors who vouch for Obama’s Christian faith to Nazis and asserted that “Obama’s anti-Christian, anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-constitutional and anti-American policies” prove he only seeks to “use the church in the same way as a previous leader on a different continent,” Hitler. 

• Claimed the judge who ruled that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unconstitutional is a treasonous “domestic enemy.”

• Referred to gays and lesbians as “forces of spiritual darkness” and a “morally depraved special interest group.”

• Said the election of openly gay Houston mayor Annise Parker, whom he called a “sodomite,” is a sign of a “cancer of the soul among the people” and that “we let our position on the wall be breached by the enemy.”

• Told the Daily Show that he wouldn’t support any Muslim candidate for Speaker of the Texas State House because he has “deep concerns about the loyalty of Muslims to the Constitution.”

But working with radicals like Welch is just part of the game for Texas Republicans, who continue to compete with each other to see who can be farthest to the right.

Glenn Beck isn’t the only one promoting an unhinged conspiracy theory about John Brennan, President Obama’s pick to lead the CIA. A number of Religious Right and anti-Muslim activists are also wondering if Brennan is a secret agent of the Saudi government.

The source of the smear against Brennan is former FBI agent John Guandolo, who has made a career out of warning about the alleged implementation of Sharia law in the U.S. and asserting that Muslims “do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.” For Guandolo, making completely unsubstantiated accusations is nothing new:

In 2011, he asserted that a Muslim college professor in Ohio was working with terrorists even though the same professor played a key role in counterterrorism efforts and the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other members of the intelligence community all called Guandolo’s claim unfounded.

But his accusation about Brennan has been quickly picked up by former congressman Fred Grandy of the Center for Security Policy and Sandy Rios of the American Family Association, who seemed to accept it with little scrutiny. Grandy and Rios also were some of the first people to allege that Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin — among other U.S. government officials — are Muslim Brotherhood agents.

Grandy: The influence of Islam as a religion among top intelligence authorities in this country is not limited to John Brennan. Whether or not that influenced his political determinations probably has more to do not so much with Islam but to what degree has been cooped by Saudi authorities. It seems to me that you can practice Islam but still be an American citizen and loyal to the Constitution if you’re an officer in the CIA, but what we don’t know whether or not that conversion might have been instigated by Saudi authorities who then used it to perhaps remold his thinking vis-à-vis the Saudis, the Qataris and others who are allies of the United States but the principal funders and underwriters of terrorism around the world.

Rios: Well I think the proof is in the pudding. When he redefines jihad to mean something that it doesn’t mean, to water it down; when he rewrites the training manuals for our law enforcement, for those that would protect the United States; it’s all very, very frightening and suspicious to me. And wasn’t it John Brennan who calls Jerusalem, ‘Quds’?

Grandy: He has referred to Jerusalem as Al-Quds which of course is the Muslim name for it.

AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer also floated Guandolo’s accusation against Brennan.

Fischer: How in the world can this guy [Obama] be up nine points in national defense? He wants a guy to be the director of the CIA who may be a Muslim covert. There’s a highly-placed source, I can’t verify this because it’s only come from one source but John Brennan who President Obama wants to be his CIA director, there’s a well-placed source that says everybody understands in the intelligence community that he converted to Islam when he was on an overseas assignment. He’s allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate his administration.

So, is Guandolo a reliable source of information?

If you believe Guandolo’s story, the former agent was pushed out of the FBI as part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot and is now informing Americans about how the group has successfully infiltrated the U.S. government.

But the news reports beg to differ, reporting that Guandolo stepped down after it was discovered that he had a sexual relationship with the star witness in the corruption case against former Rep. William Jefferson.

Guandolo, “who is married and who unsuccessfully solicited a $75,000 donation for an anti-terrorism group from a wealthy witness in the Jefferson case with whom he was having an affair,” resigned from the FBI in 2008 “after superiors found a list he wrote of his sexual conquests with agents and a confidential source.”

But a total lack of credibility has never stopped someone from being treated as an “expert” in right-wing circles, and Guandolo’s influence is further proof that conservatives will believe just about anything to advance their anti-Muslim and anti-Obama paranoia.

For decades, the Right has attempted to discredit Hillary Clinton with attacks ranging from the disturbing (killing people) to the bizarre (killing cats). But after serving four years as Secretary of State, Clinton is leaving office with sky-high approval ratings. Before she steps down on Friday, we decided to look back on some of the most extreme and befuddling accusations she has faced from the far-right during her term as the nation’s top diplomat.

1. Clinton Engineered Benghazi Cover-Up

While the official report on the U.S. mission in Benghazi found multiple security and management breakdowns that Clinton had already taken responsibility for, many on the right claimed that she actually was behind a massive cover-up. Several Republican politicians and conservative commentators said that the Obama administration withheld military assistance while watching a live feed of the attack. The State Department’s Accountability Review Board report debunked the right-wing conspiracy theories, but that didn’t stop Fox News and conservative talk show hosts from reporting them as fact and arguing that the administration used the attack in Benghazi to pass blasphemy laws protecting Islam.

As the Right’s claims about Benghazi continued to unravel, they shifted to baselessly asserting that the administration manufactured the Petraeus affair in order to preserve the alleged cover-up and that Clinton faked a concussion and blood clot to get out of testifying about the incident. When she did testify, she faced redundant and ill-informed questions from Republicans like Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who skipped a classified briefing on the incident, and Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who admitted he had no proof to back up his claim that the Benghazi mission was used to send arms to Syrian rebels.

2. Clinton Supports the Muslim Brotherhood

Latching onto rumors that emerged on the far-right fringe, Rep. Michele Bachmann sought to spark a McCarthyite investigation that accused Clinton’s deputy chief of staff of acting as a Muslim Brotherhood spy. Bachmann insisted that “there has been deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood,” and along with a handful of Republican colleagues, made allegations that Clinton aide Huma Abedin was working on behalf of the group.

Of course, Bachmann couldn’t substantiate her claims and literally ran away from a reporter when asked about them. Even Republican leaders criticized Bachmann for starting the witch hunt. But her unfounded claims took off in the conservative media, which was more than happy to paint Clinton and Obama as secret Islamist sympathizers, and eventually caused trouble overseas .

3. Clinton Loves Sharia

Anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists claim that her supposed Muslim Brotherhood sympathies have turned her into a covert advocate of Sharia law. Bachmann said that Clinton was working “to take away the free speech rights of the American people” and “our right of free speech and expression, religious practice, freedom of assembly, freedom of the printing press” in order to “empower the Islamists.”

Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy claimed that Clinton had accepted “submission to the stealthy Islamist effort to enforce in this country the supremacist doctrine known as shariah” and the Family Research Council’s Jerry Boykin said the administration had shown “support for the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our government.” Rick Joyner, the televangelist who has worked closely with Gaffney and Boykin, was left wondering why Clinton was “advocating” Sharia:

4. LGBT Rights Advocacy Will Destroy America

While the Right’s Benghazi, Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia law claims didn’t hold water, they at least got one thing right: Clinton acted as a champion for LGBT equality while leading the State Department. The Religious Right fumed at her work on behalf of gay rights and exploded in anger following a speech in Geneva in which she defended the rights of LGBT people and called for the decriminalization of LGBT status.

Liberty University’s Mat Staver warned that Clinton was backing a “radical sexual anarchist agenda” while Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention said that Clinton’s support of “sexual paganization” would bring about God’s judgment on America. Pat Robertson reacted to Clinton’s speech by warning that God may destroy the U.S.

5. Clinton Opposes Religious Freedom

All of the conspiracy theories and accusations seem to come together in an attempt to smear Clinton as an enemy of religious freedom. Conservatives argued that she was using both gay rights and Sharia law to undercut Christianity and religious freedoms. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins maintained that Clinton was trying to subvert the freedom of religion by using the term “freedom of worship,” even though the Obama administration frequently uses the phrase “freedom of religion” and President Bush talked about the “freedom of worship” without receiving a similar outcry from social conservatives.

At the Values Voters Summit, phony “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem even warned that Clinton was planning to “shut down” churches and synagogues this month. Since Clinton serves just one more day at the job, she better speed up with her diabolical plans!