Who's On First?: Haters, Conspiracists and the Conspiracists Who Hate Them
With unemployment in the United States at a 26 year high of 9.8% and the UK not far behind, a sector of the economy in both nations is booming—extremism. Conspiracy theories and hate have flooded the mainstream from the fringe, so duck and cover.
Last week was quite busy for two of the world’s most odious Islamophobes. In Britain right-wing Dutch Parliamentarian hatemonger and filmmaker Geert Wilders, made a semi-triumphant return to London, after a previous ban was lifted. There he addressed an audience near Parliament, after being physically blocked by protesters from appearing at his planned venue.
Wilders who is speaking in Philadelphia this week, has called Muslims and the Koran an extreme threat to society. At a recent Florida lecture he allegedly said Europe was on "the verge of collapsing" due to Muslims. He also smears "Islam is not a religion...Islam is a totalitarian ideology." Comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf, he reportedly told an audience: "The Koran is a book that calls for hatred, violence, murder, terrorism, war and submission" and urged a forced assimilation contract, a ban on new mosques and a closure of Muslim schools. The radical Muslim counter protestors didn’t score any points for tolerance either, waving signs saying “Islam Will Dominate the World” and calling for Wilder’s death.
Another raving Islamaphobe making news this month is San Francisco Bay Area hate radio yapper Michael Savage. Despite his ban to the UK being lifted, his invitation to debate at Cambridge University was rescinded. Savage has proposed “an outright ban on Muslim immigration” and a moratorium on “mosque construction.” His interfaith olive branch to Muslims is “take your religion and shove it up your behind” because "I’m sick of you." Savage implored his radio audience to stay out of restaurants that hired undocumented workers due to a possible H1N1 al Qaeda plot. His boycott call relates to infected unhygienic Latino restaurant workers possibly becoming biological weapons. After all he says they put their hands down their pants at work without subsequently washing their hands.
On the other side of the pond in America, the continued mainstreaming of wacky conspiracies was also underway. Orange County, California birther conspiracist, lawyer-dentist Orly Taitz made the news, yet again. She has floated a theory popular among some militia groups that the government has set up concentration camps for dissidents, a “FEMA Gulag”, and even suggested another tale concocted by a drug addict that President Obama possibly killed a gay lover. But it is her full throttled pursuit of the contention that President Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to serve as President that cost her twenty grand and a good portion of what’s left of her tattered legal reputation. She points to an “authentic” Kenyan birth certificate as proof. Let’s not forget that the there were birth announcements in the two main Honolulu papers for President Obama and the state of Hawaii (led by a Republican McCain supporter) has affirmed the validity of a computer generated one.
Taitz, who has filed no less than five cases in federal courts in California, Texas, and Georgia to pursue her cause, found out the hard way that the requirements of the federal bench are a bit more rigorous than cyberspace or talk radio. As Judge Clay Land explained: “Although the First Amendment may allow Plaintiff's counsel to make these wild accusations on her blog or in her press conferences, the federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes and not as a platform for political rhetoric that is disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action.”
That lesson may have been missed during her intensive studies at Taft Law School, a non bar accredited correspondence institution. In imposing his twenty thousand dollar fine the “corrupt” (Orly’s words not mine, your Honor) Bush appointed federal district court judge called Taitz’s actions “breathtaking in its arrogance and borders on delusional” in a scathing 43 page order. Her other court actions probably didn’t help matters:
a) she called the judge a “traitor” in open court,
b) she accused him of being improperly politically and economically aligned with Obama for allegedly owning Microsoft and Comcast stock
c) she filed an affadavit alleging that the judge conferred with Attorney General Holder at a Columbus, Georgia coffee shop on July 16 despite press reports and photos of him in California.
Even her own client fired her and packed her bags for service in Iraq.
In her California case another client no longer seeking her counsel is Orange County Pastor and 2008 Vice Presidential candidate Wiley Drake. He’s that nice preacher who told Alan Colmes’ radio audience that he prays for the death of the “usurper that is in the White House…B. Hussein Obama.” Before you point fingers at the good pastor for being a racist let me remind you that he was the Vice Presidential partner (in California only) to yet, another Taitz birther client- Alan Keyes.
Keyes shares much in common with our nation’s first African-American president. Like President Obama, Alan Keyes has a graduate degree from Harvard, and not just a vocational degree like a JD, but a real PhD! Like, our Commander-in-Chief he too, dreamed of the day that America would finally elect an African-American president with an embarrassing preacher friend—except he wanted it to be—Alan Keyes. Like the President, he ran for the nation’s highest office against the frontrunner in his party. Unlike the President, however, who amassed 52.92% of the vote in the 2008 elections, Keyes came in 7th with only 0.04%. Still, it was a resounding victory over another presidential conspiracist Cynthia McKinney, who accused Bush of prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and similarly sought his removal from office.
Keyes, along with “anti-illegal immigration” advocate Tom Trancredo, Islamophobes Ann Coulter and Michael Savage, is a columnist for the ultra-conservative conspiracy oriented World Net Daily (WND), whose publisher frequently focuses on Muslims, the Obama eligibility issue, and the alleged body count of dead people connected to the Clintons. Among their other listed columnists is Obama conspiracist Jerome Corsi. He’s the author of two best-selling conspiracy books, the swift boating “Unfit for Command,” with co-author John O’Neill, targeting John Kerry in 2004 and 2008’s “Obama Nation.”
Last week, WND published an Acorn style hit piece on an embattled self proclaimed “civil rights” group, the Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR) called Muslim Mafia. The book is based on an undercover intern’s “research” as well as disturbing material that became public about CAIR during last year’s Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial, where CAIR was named as an unindicted coconspirator and a Texas state chapter cofounder was found guilty and sentenced to decades in prison.
Ironically, one of the main charges that Congressional supporters of the book trotted out in a Capitol Hill presser is the organization’s alleged use of its interns to gather information from congressional assignments, not exactly an unusual beltway occurrence. Owing to other unresolved questions about CAIR, however, the FBI broke off formal ties with the group last year.
Additionally, despite CAIR’s careful branding of itself as a mainstream group it has featured its own collection of incredibly bizarre and disturbing speakers at major functions over the last decade without ever repudiating them:
1. Neo-Nazi William Baker who held a high level position with the Holocaust Museum shooter’s old employer- an anti-Semitic publishing and political empire founded by uber-bigot Willis Carto,
2. Abdel Malik Ali, a homophobic and anti-Semitic suicide bomb proponent who contends the Shepard Hate Crime Act is a Jewish plot, seeks the dismantling of the United States into an Islamic state, and who also contends Zionist Jews, the Federal government and the Saudi Royal Family orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, and
3. Yvonne Ridley, a British Muslim convert, now with Iranian PressTV, who effusively praised the Taliban, called al Qaeda terrorist Zarkawi “brother” and complimented Abu Hamza al Masri , a cleric notorious for his celebrations of the 9/11 attacks, which she allegedly suggests could have been allowed to happen by the Bush administration as a cover.
4. Imam Musa, an anti-Semitic cleric who wants an Islamic state in the U.S., says US did 9/11, shared a stage with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad in 2002 by a Hezbolah flag,
For those of us who seek to eradicate both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and who believe in President Obama's vision for peace in the Middle East, the mainstreaming of intolerance is not only sad, but unacceptable. It's time for the adults to stand up and reject the extremes of all stripes, particuarly when it gets a foothold in the mainstream. Let’s just say on this last one, like Wilders and some of his counter-protesters, nobody exactly enters this dance looking above reproach, like Ceaser’s wife.
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Why not grab the crazies from both ends of the spectrum and put them into the same place to work it out?
Isn't that how the USA got started...
One thing most hate groups do is try and lump other people or groups together and make sweeping negative generalizations about them. It's usually borne out of irrational fears based on lies about those people or groups. Sometimes the fear is justified but most of the time it's not. We need to be careful not to lump so many people and groups into the same bucket because we then are falling into the same trap that hate-mongers are in. Make sense?
Here's where anger should be directed. Then the article would be worth a hill of beans.
Ben Bernanke
Timothy Geithner.
Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase,
Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs,
James Gorman from Morgan Stanley,
Richard Fuld from Lehman Brothers
John Thain
Robert Rubin (who's represented Citigroup)
; Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group
Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Investment Group.
Sadly...hi
I never really understood the crusades..
The crusades were about looting rich Muslim cities. That's a drastically simplified description, but for all that, it's fairly accurate..
Our politicians are ignoring the constitution and the state is committing crimes. Our politicians are supposed to protect us, whereas they appear to be abusing us to suit their objectives and wants.
People are right to be angry about this.
The name-calling in this article is clearly designed to say "hey, the extremists on the left and right are wrong...bu
No politician, other than perhaps Ron Paul, seems able to have a common-sense and understandable conversation on the role of government.
Ron Paul...the new Lyndon LaRouche..
Our government policies have been extreme -- witness the Middle Eastern wars and the fraudulent bank bailouts. I am less afraid of the average American citizen than the multinational corporate control of our government and the lack of transparency.
extremist or not,
get REAL ANGRY about all the wrongs, folks.
that's how all worthy changes start.
calling every angry person an extremest is suspect in itself.
nothing wrong about being angry about the wrongs done.
being nice about injustices should be condemned
as it is an act of aiding and abetting the injustice.
I though that no crisis should be wasted. They aren't.
Okay, I basically agree with everything said in this article except its use of "Islamopho
I have heard several muslims (from different levels of faith) claim that the Koran gives the answers on every possible questions you can have ob how to live your life, and that Islam has the laws for a perfect society. That alone points towards being a totalitarian ideology, not just a religion. If the statements are true of course.
So how many Christians have you heard make the same claim for the Bible? Because they ALWAYS do, the "serious" "Bible thumpers." When I lived in Mississippi, I heard the claim made, that the Bible contains everything you need to know, on a nearly daily basis. (MS being in the Bible "belt" - )
The title of the article caught my eye, so I read it. Yeah, there are some wacky people out there. The problem, though, is that we only seem to care when it is someone we disagree with, or representing an ideology we disagree with. Islamophobe? I’ve heard things like that from some of the New Athiests. Where’s the outrage? Birther? Truther? Is there any difference? Yet we only get upset when one person says such things, but not others, leaving me to believe that it all boils down to ‘I don’t like that person because he/she is on that side of the aisle.’
Upset when one person says such things (repeatedly) as the President isn't a citizen, why yes I am.
I'm also upset when these nuts get media time nearly a year after an election when the winner got a record number of votes.
One should be cautious in taking the dismissive tone displayed in this article; if we are indeed headed for a unprecedented failure of government due to already-failed economic policy, extremist movements will thrive and grow even as our arrogant bureaucrats and pundits dismiss them as ineffective fringe players.
At that point in time it will be too late to rethink the absurd strategy of tweaking the status quo system slowly so as to lessen the harm to those people who really matter to the government; at that point in time the best the average citizen will be able to hope for is that the flavor of extremism that trumps all others will be of the sort that ultimately takes us forward, and not back into a repressive, wholly feudalistic system.
This is the fatal flaw in conservatism. Eventually the leader beomes imcompetent or misplaced in the time and he is leading a people who question not either his motives or his means. This is a path to fascism because the circumstances will amplify his wrong choices and the bickering of statesman will seem silly to the decisiveness of a single man or woman. Of course he is right. But rememember right up until August 31,1939 Adolph Hitler was seen not only as the savior of Germany but as a masterful politician by the rest of the world. Who could fight with the beast? Who can make war with him? Joseph Stalin, the man of steel. If he had died that day by an assasins bullet he would have gone down in history as one of Germany's most revered figures. Instead he became arguably histroy's most evil man..
Surely there’s the makings of a tele-visual talent completion in here somewhere.
In which contestants attempt to devise and deliver the most extreme concoction of conspiratorial claptrap conceivable. Perhaps possibly entitled, “ I’ve got the X-factor”.
(missing from my chromosomes).
Conspiracists will always be mostly on the fring.
What you should be worried about is the literally millions of recently unemployed people that won't need conspiracy theories to justify their observation that their government has failed them.
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