Here's some of the more obnoxious pushers of hate and bigotry. Just like the rabid Zionists who poisoned wells in Palestine when they invaded that state, these modern thugs poison the wells of people's minds.

The Dirty Dozen: Who's who among America's leading Islamophobes

Bigots aren't born, and hate doesn't spring up on its own; as the song says, "You've got to be carefully taught." The following list includes some of the media's leading teachers of anti-Muslim bigotry, serving various roles in the Islamophobic movement. Some write the books that serve as intellectual fodder, others serve as promoters, others play the roles of provocateurs and rabble-rousers. Some ply their bigotry in the media's mainstream, others in the Internet's tributaries, while still others work talk radio's backwaters. Together with uncounted smaller players, they form a network that teaches Americans to see Islam in fearful terms and their Muslim neighbors as suspects.

Michelle Malkin calls Islam "the religion of perpetual outrage" on her two blogs, MichelleMalkin.com (8/1/06, 2/11/08) and Hot Air (2/9/08), though Malkin herself seems remarkably easy to outrage. When celebrity chef Rachael Ray was featured in a 2008 Dunkin' Donuts ad wearing a black-and-white paisley scarf that vaguely resembled an Arab keffiyeh, Malkin created such an uproar over what she imagined to be a "hate couture" symbol of "murderous Palestinian jihad" (MichelleMalkin.com, 5/28/08) that Dunkin' Donuts pulled the ad and issued an apology (Huffington Post, 5/28/08).

In her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in WWII and the War on Terror, Malkin argued that the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans was explained and justified by what she presented as evidence of subversion; she drew a present-day parallel to alleged subversion amongst Muslim and Arab populations in the U.S. today.The main thesis of the book was condemned as historically incorrect by the Historians' Committee for Fairness (8/31/04), which stated that Malkin's book was "contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission."

On her website (8/10/06) Malkin explained why by she no longer uses the term "Islamofascism":

I stopped using the terms "Islamic fascist" and "Islamofascism" a while ago...because they obscure rather than clarify. The views held by the Muslim jihadis who want to destroy us are not marginal views held only by a minority of "Islamic fascists."

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_malkin.html

If Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer serve the movement by providing intellectual arguments for its rank and file, Michael Savage serves as its angry rabble-rouser. And Savage's reach is remarkable: His radio show Savage Nation reaches a reported 8.25 million listeners per week (Talkers Magazine, Spring/08), the third most popular political talk radio show in the country (trailing only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity).

Savage is notorious for his relentlessly hateful language--he was fired from his MSNBC gig when he labeled a caller a "sodomite" and told him to "get AIDS and die" (FAIR Action Alert, 7/7/03)--and Muslims are often his target. "When I see a woman walking around with a burqa," Savage told his listeners on July 2, 2007, "I see a Nazi…a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children."

Savage sees a monolithic Islamic scheme to take over the U.S.--"We know you want to take over America. We know you wanna push your religion down everyone's throat," (Savage Nation, 7/2/07)--and imagines himself one of the few brave souls standing up against the onslaught (10/29/07): "I'm not gonna put my wife in a hijab. And I'm not gonna put my daughter in a burqa. And I'm not getting on my all-fours and braying to Mecca.... I don't wanna hear anymore about Islam. Take your religion and shove it up your behind."

Savage has even called (4/17/06) for killing a hundred million Muslims, saying that people are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, "Oh, there's a billion of them." I said, "So, kill 100 million of them, then there'll be 900 million of them." I mean, would you rather die--would you rather us die than them? I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_savage.html

David Horowitz is the Islamophobia movement's premier promoter. Through his "Islamofascism Awareness Week" (see Islamofascism Case Study), which brought leading Muslim-bashers to more than a hundred college campuses in October 2007, and via his website, FrontPage Magazine, which features the movement's leading writers and links to other anti-Muslim sites, Horowitz has made himself the chief publicist of the Islamophobic movement. (Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab writings at Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine have been exposed for inaccuracy by, among other outlets, the New Yorker magazine--4/14/08.)

But more than a promoter, Horowitz is also a key participant. He appears in his own venues as well as in other right-wing arenas, such as the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard and Fox News Channel.

In one Fox appearance (5/9/08), he linked Muslim student associations on college campuses across the U.S. to the "terrorist Jihad against the West":

No doubt the students are part of the "between 150 million and 750 million Muslims" Horowitz claims "support a holy war against Christians, Jews and other Muslims" (Columbia Spectator, 10/15/07).

During a speech at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Horowitz accused students wearing green in support of the schools' Muslim Student Association of supporting Hamas, and students wearing Arab Keffiyehs of honoring Yassir Arafat and terrorism (Santa Barbara Independent, 5/15/08).

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_horowitz.html

Glenn Beck claims he doesn't hate Islam, just its "evil" extremists, but during his eponymous CNN Headline News show and the Glenn Beck Program--the third highest-rated national radio talk show among adults ages 25 to 54 (CNN.com)--he has repeatedly associated Islam with Nazism. He drew a parallel between Mein Kampf and "jihad" because, he said, both mean "my struggle" (Glenn Beck, 11/17/06), and he has warned (Glenn Beck, 7/12/06) of "World War III and the impending apocalypse," declaring that "whether you like it or not, this is a religious war. Radical Muslims want to wipe everybody else off the face of the earth."

Beck had made earlier allusions to putting Muslims in concentration camps, predicting in 2006 (Glenn Beck, 9/5/06): "In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West."

Beck has asked Muslim guests to distinguish themselves from Islamic terrorists. "I mean, you're reasonable," he said to Sharida McKenzie, organizer of a Muslim Peace March (Glenn Beck, 10/4/07). "How do we know the difference between you and those that are trying to kill us?"

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_beck.html

According to the American Muslim and former Nixon advisor Robert Crane (TheAmericanMuslim.org, 10/20/07), Robert Spencer is "the principal leader…in the new academic field of Islam-bashing."

Spencer is the author of several books attacking Islam, including the New York Times bestsellers The Truth About Muhammad, Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion (Regnery, 2006) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Regnery, 2005). He is the publisher of the "notoriously Islamophobic website" Jihad Watch (Guardian, 2/7/06), a subsidiary of the David Horowitz Freedom Center; a columnist for right-wing outlets like Human Events and WorldNetDaily; and a recurring guest on Glenn Beck's CNN Headline News show, as well as several Fox News shows.

Though his scholarship has been questioned by Islamic scholars (e.g. Crane, TheAmericanMuslim.org, 10/20/07; Louay M. Safi, Media Monitors Network, 12/29/05; Khaleel Mohammed, FrontPage Magazine, 4/18/05), Spencer serves as an intellectual force in the movement, specializing in one-sided interpretations of the Quran. He has written (cited in Crane, TheAmericanMuslim.org, 10/20/07) of Osama bin Laden's use of quotes from the Quran:

Of course, the devil can quote scripture for his own purpose, but Osama's use of these and other passages in his messages is consistent (as we shall see) with traditional understanding of the Quran. When modern-day Jews and Christians read their Bibles, they simply don't interpret the passages cited as exhorting them to violent actions against unbelievers. This is due to the influence of centuries of interpretative traditions that have moved them away from literalism regarding these passages. But in Islam, there is no comparable interpretative tradition.

Yet Islam does in fact have an interpretive tradition, which Spencer seems bent on ignoring. His New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam has been faulted (Crane, AmericanMuslim.org, 10/20/07) for promoting a Puffin English-language version of the Quran that contains no explanatory commentary as superior to versions which include "many thousands of footnotes evaluating 14 centuries of interpretative tradition" and "the wealth of classical Islamic scholarship on both the inner and outer meaning of the Quran and on the hadith that reflect this wisdom."

According to Crane, "Spencer's readers are carefully steered away from all contact with the Islamic interpretative tradition, which equals or exceeds that of any other religion, because any scholarly knowledge about Islam would expose all his extremist interpretations to ridicule."

By selectively ignoring inconvenient Islamic texts and commentaries, Spencer concludes that Islam is innately extremist and violent, and

Unfortunately, however, jihad as warfare against non-believers in order to institute "Sharia" worldwide is not propaganda or ignorance, or a heretical doctrine held by a tiny minority of extremists. Instead, it is a constant element of mainstream Islamic theology. (Jihad Watch, 3/3/07).

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_spencer.html

The founder of the Middle East Forum think tank, Pipes has been introduced by the national media as a "scholar" of Islam (e.g., CBS Sunday Morning, 9/10/06; Fox News Special Report, 11/26/02) and a "noted Middle East expert" (CNN Moneyline, 5/8/03) who was "years ahead of the curve in identifying the threat of radical Islam" (CBS Sunday Morning, 9/10/06).

However, Pipes' "expertise" has included erroneously linking the Oklahoma City bombing to Islamic groups (USA Today, 4/20/95), as well as warning (National Review, 11/19/90): "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene.... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

A defender of racial profiling of Arab-Americans (CNN American Morning, 11/18/02), Pipes has also warned (American Jewish Congress, 10/21/01) that "the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims" entail "true dangers" for American Jews. As one of the leaders of the "Stop the Madrassa" campaign against a secular Brooklyn-based Arabic language school (see Case Study), he himself has admitted (New York Times.com, 4/28/2008) to misleading the public by using the word "madrassa" to get attention.

His columns are featured in the New York Sun, New York Post and National Review, and have also been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Time. Pipes has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC and PBS, as well as on NPR. Appointed by Bush (2003) as the director of the U.S. Institute of Peace, he has a growing reach on college campuses through his Campus Watch initiative, which encourages students in McCarthyite fashion to monitor their professors' political views and report deviations from the conservative ideology Pipes espouses.

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_pipes.html

Debbie Schlussel may tout herself to her fan club as the "greatest sexy, blonde and beautiful commentator," but her Islamophobic rhetoric is as ugly as the rest.

Schlussel jumped to the erroneous conclusion (Debbie Does Politics, 4/16/07) that a "Paki" was responsible for the Virginia Tech shooting. (She remarked that "even if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students.") When Sen. Barack Obama's campaign team prevented two Muslim women from sitting behind him during a speech (see Islamophobia Election piece, p. n), Schlussel asserted (Debbie Does Politics, 6/19/08) that they were "Muslim Terror Front-Group Activists" (One of them faced this accusation because she held a position at the University of Michigan-Dearborn Muslim Students Association.)

Claiming a "unique expertise on radical Islam/Islamic terrorism" (DebbieSchlussel), Schlussel presents America as being in "the war of our lives with Islam," and depicts the American Muslim community as a dangerous fifth column. She has asserted (FrontPage Magazine, 2/10/05) that "Fox's 24...actually tells the truth about Islamic terrorists":

A resident of the Detroit area, which has large Muslim and Arab populations, she wrote immediately after the September 11 attacks (9/17/01): "Don't blame federal agents for Tuesday's lapse in national security. Blame my neighbors--the Arab-American and Muslim leaders who've actively blocked the fight against terrorism for years."

Schlussel (DebbieSchlussel, 11/13/07) has raised national security concerns about Muslims being employed in certain fields, and having access to public resources that would allow them to teach their own children Arabic:

As long as we continue to hire Muslims to be translators and analysts, as long as we continue to give money to Arabic and Muslim schools to teach their kids Arabic instead of non-Muslim, non-Arab Americans, as long as the FBI (and ICE) continues to turn down Sephardic Jews and Maronite Lebanese Christians who speak Arabic and who've applied for jobs in favor of extremist Muslims...the result we will get is...spies, spies and more spies.

http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_schlussel.html

Schlussel, Pipes, Horowitz, Steyn and Savage are just a small part of this terrorist gang of media thugs.

What could be their motivation to turn America, a mostly Christian nation, against Islam?

Submitted by Greg Bacon on Fri, 2008-10-17 17:17

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