Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass
/ March 11, 2016 / 4 Comments

McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers

Originally posted at The Electronic Intifada

The publisher McGraw-Hill Education is destroying all copies of a political science textbook after receiving complaints from hardline supporters of Israel that it features a series of “anti-Israel” maps.

An image published by Elder of Ziyon from the textbook Global Politics, as part of the anti-Palestinian blogger’s successful campaign to pressure McGraw-Hill over maps depicting land loss in Palestine.

Within a week of the initial outcry, McGraw-Hill began destroying all copies of the book, scrubbed the book from its website, promised to reimburse anyone who bought the book and apologized to the offended right-wing bigots behind the manufactured controversy.

According to the publisher’s summary, the book fosters “critical thinking and theory” about global events and “offers students a number of lenses through which to view the world around them.”

The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West Bank and a sliver of Gaza.

The caption reads, “A mix of diplomatic and military actions and expanded Jewish settlements since the founding of modern Israel has led to a gradual decline in Palestinian-held territory – which explains why the territory remains one of the central sticking points in the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The image is sourced to the Middle East Political Research Center.

Fear of maps

Such maps present an enormous threat to Zionist ideologues because they have the ability to cut through Israeli propaganda that portrays Palestinian anger and violence as rooted in religious intolerance and irrational hatred rather than a natural reaction to Israel’s colonial expansionism, land theft and ethnic cleansing, all of which continue today.

That is why any time an iteration of these maps breaks into the mainstream, Israel’s advocates rush to censor it.

Just last year, when MSNBC aired a similar series of maps to demonstrate the dramatic theft of Palestinian land since Israel’s foundation, pro-Israel groups pressured the cable news outlet to retract the segment.

MSNBC eventually capitulated, calling the maps “not factually accurate.”

The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.

Elder of Ziyon’s blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps, denying, against all available evidence, that Palestinians were ever forcibly expelled from their homes in pre-planned acts of dispossession.

Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.

TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting and supplyinganti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists and policy makers.

TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry and is headedby Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby group AIPAC.

Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.

Independent review?

The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately suspending sales of the textbook pending a review.

Elder of Ziyon celebrated and took credit for the outcome, noting that “the book is being or has been used in courses at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, University of Indianapolis, Western Illinois University, George Washington University School of Business and Marshall University.”

Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies of the book.

“The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards,” McGraw-Hill spokesperson Catherine Mathis told Inside Higher Ed, adding, “We have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment to anyone who returns the book.”

Inspired by anti-Muslim hate group leaders like Robert Spencer, Elder of Ziyon is dedicated to demonizing Palestinians and Muslims, and even argued that the paranoid manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik is “not all crazy sounding – it is scary how sane much of the document seems to be.”

“Some of [Breivik’s] political analysis is actually on target,” Elder of Ziyon stated after Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway, supposedly in an attempt to rescue Europe from what he viewed as the dark forces of Islam and Marxism.

Breivik drew inspiration for his violent ideology from the US Islamophobia industry of which Elder of Ziyon is a part.

Elder of Ziyon conceals his real identity, even when speaking in public.

The textbook’s authors – Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler – did not respond to requests for comment.

Asked who carried out the review of the book, Mathis told The Electronic Intifada that it “was conducted by independent academics who determined that the maps were not accurate.”

Mathis did not respond to a follow-up query seeking more details about who carried out the review and how they reached such a conclusion.

As for who pressured McGraw-Hill about the maps, Mathis would only say, “We heard about this from multiple sources.”

Given the highly politicized nature of all discussion related to Palestine in the United States, the definition of who is an “independent academic” would vary widely depending on the perspective of who is making the assessment. And if the “experts” are indeed independent, they should be willing to provide an explanation of how and why they deemed the maps to be inaccurate.

The only way that McGraw-Hill’s credibility can be assessed is with some transparency about the groups or “experts” who made this recommendation.

Otherwise, we are left to assume that McGraw-Hill is effectively burning books to placate the censorship demands of right-wing anti-Palestinian bigots.

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/ March 8, 2016 / Leave a comment

The US, Saudi Arabia, And The Destruction Of Libya By Western Forces

The aftermath of the regime change operation in Libya has become even more horrific, as the United States resumes bombing. The intelligence behind the latest decision to escalate military action in Libya is believed to be faulty again.

Re-escalation of military operations by Western forces in Libya comes amidst a new reportby the New York Times on the role Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton played in pushing President Barack Obama to support intervention in Libya when she was secretary of state.

As Dan Wright summarized for Shadowproof, “After a meeting with Westernized Libyan exiles in what appears to be an eerie parallel to the Ahmed Chalabi con, Clinton became convinced that Libya could become a thriving democracy if Gaddafi was overthrown. She then worked tirelessly to ensure the US jumped into the war, pushing back against then-Defense Secretary Gates, National Security Advisor Tom Dolan, and Vice President Joe Biden, who wanted to stay out of the conflict.”

This week on the “Unauthorized Disclosure” weekly podcast we are joined by journalist and author Vijay Prashad, who talks with us about Libya. Prashad recounts what led to the regime change operation and Hillary Clinton. Prashad also talks about Syria, the “suicidal death pact” the U.S. government has with the Saudi government, and the geopolitics between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which greatly influence developments in the Middle East.

The podcast episodes are available for download on iTunes. For a link to the episodes (and also to download them as well), go here. A page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

Below is a partial transcript of the interview with Vijay Prashad.

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/ March 2, 2016 / 1 Comment

Clinton Manipulates Language of ‘Intersectionality’ To Preserve Support From Minority Voters

The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of “intersectionality,” which enables the political class to head off threats to their power and protect the status quo. The results in the South Carolina Democratic primary are a clear example of this reality.

Clinton has suggested, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Her supporters have been led to believe this is a reasonable perspective to hold, and so, as Roqayah Chamseddine has argued, the answer to Sanders’ “economic populism” has been relatively easy—”divert attention to other issues” and mislead the “public in terms of how anti-capitalism converges with race, gender, and class.”

This week on the “Unauthorized Disclosure” weekly podcast we are joined by Vivek Chibber, a sociology professor at New York University and the author of “Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.”

During the interview, he analyzes how neoliberals and the Democratic Party wield identity politics to push citizens to vote against their self-interests. First, he offers a basic explanation of “post-colonial theory,” and then he talks about how the New Left popularized the political or intellectual thinking prevalent today. The interview pivots to Hillary Clinton and how her campaign deploys the language of radical left-wing politics in order to manage and lower the expectations of voters, especially minorities.

In a separate episode, hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola break down some of the many social issues raised by the campaigns of Clinton, Sanders, and Donald Trump. This episode includes talk about Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams confronting Clinton over her “super-predator” comment in 1996. We spend time on Washington Post Jonathan Capehart, who helped the Clinton campaign do damage control and even went so far as to defend what Clinton said about “super-predators” back in 1996. We also highlight recent developments with the closure of Guantanamo and Rasmea Odeh’s case.

Throughout March, as the election intensifies even more with primaries, we intend to post our interview and our discussion separately so we are not posting 90-minute episodes, which listeners cannot consume and appreciate in one sitting. By separating them, there will be more political discussion for our listeners to enjoy throughout the entire week.

The podcast episodes are available for download on iTunes. For a link to the episodes (and also to download them as well), go here and here. A page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

Below is a partial transcript of the interview with Vivek Chibber.

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/ February 28, 2016 / 1 Comment

When Hillary Clinton threw Arab and Muslim Americans under the bus

Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has been under intense scrutiny for accepting political contributions and speaking fees from an assortment of unsavory special interests, ranging from Wall Street firms and drug companies to weapons industry giants.

Clinton, in turn, has stood by her donors with energetic and at times bizarre rationalizations.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

Back in 2000, during a heated US Senate race in New York, Clinton came under attack for accepting political contributions from Muslim groups whose members were targets of a smear campaign generated by one of the Islamophobia industry’s most discredited operatives.

Without hesitation, Clinton condemned her Muslim supporters, returned their donations and refused to meet with Arab and Muslim Americans for the remainder of her campaign, all in the spirit of “wooing Jewish voters,” as The New York Times put it.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to The Electronic Intifada when asked if Clinton stands by her treatment of Arab and Muslim supporters during the 2000 campaign.

Today, Muslim voters say their top issue is Islamophobia and strongly favor Clinton over her opponent, Bernie Sanders, by 52 to 22 percent, according to polling conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

As Clinton slams Republicans for their anti-Muslim rhetoric, it is worth remembering her past willingness to throw Muslim and Arab Americans under the bus for political gain.

Read the rest here 

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/ February 23, 2016 / 1 Comment

Ta-Nehisi Coates sings of Zionism

In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a compelling case for reparations owed to Black Americans for racial injuries, particularly with respect to discriminatory housing policies, that continue to affect millions today.

Published at The Atlantic, his award-winning piece sparked an important national debate. It also helped propel him into the national spotlight as a MacArthur Foundation “genius” and a best-selling author read, among others, by President Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, there is a major flaw in his argument that exposes one of his most glaring political lapses. Coates presents German reparations to Israel as a successful and moral model, ignoring the horrors Israel inflicted and still inflicts on Palestinians and other people of the region using those funds.

To make matters worse, shortly after the publication of his piece, Coates promoted reparations at a live event with his Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, the former Israeli prison guard and Obama favorite.

If the objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of reparations, then emphasizing German compensation to Holocaust victims would be completely appropriate.

But Coates focuses on the totally separate issue of German “compensation” to the settler-colonial state of Israel, portraying it as a positive development that contributed to Israel’s civilian infrastructure and economic growth.

“Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a roadmap for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name,” Coates writes.

There are some gaping holes in this narrative.

First, it relies on a total conflation of Israel and Zionism, on the one hand, with Jews, on the other. And it accepts uncritically the ahistorical claim that Israel and Zionism were the victims of the Nazis, and therefore Israel was the appropriate address for “reparations,” the delivery of which could offer Germans absolution.

It also completely ignores the fact that while other Jews were resisting the Nazis, Zionists infamously made a deal with them, the notorious Transfer Agreement of 1933, to facilitate the transport of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which, as Joseph Massad points out, broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews.

But even if we set these fundamental questions aside, as a practical matter, from the standpoint of Israel’s victims, German reparations were not used to repair but to destroy. The billions Germany gave Israel were an enormous contribution to Israel’s military capacity, enabling its colonial expansion, land theft, military invasions and occupations and further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Despite people pointing out such concerns to Coates on social media and in person (I tried engaging him on the issue at one of his speaking events, to no avail), he continues to invoke Israel as a model.

Appearing on Democracy Now! earlier this month to discuss reparations, Coates again cited Israel, telling host Amy Goodman that reparations from Germany were “invested in Israel. They basically sold them goods that Israel then used to build themselves up.”

This is a shameful whitewash of Palestinian suffering that needs to be corrected.

Read the rest of my piece here

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/ February 10, 2016 / 1 Comment

Bernie Sanders and the question of Palestine

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

At a March 1988 news conference endorsing Jesse Jackson’s candidacy for president, Bernie Sanders blasted Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinian protesters as “an absolute disgrace.”

“The sight of Israeli soldiers breaking the arms and legs of Arabs is reprehensible. The idea of Israel closing down towns and sealing them off is unacceptable,” the then mayor of Burlington, Vermont, said to a gaggle of reporters.

Sanders was referring to the television images that shocked the world in those early months of the first intifada, of Israeli soldiers methodically breaking the limbs of Palestinian youths on the orders of then defense minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Sanders went so far as to suggest that the US use the “clout” that its billions in military aid to Israel and its neighbors gave it to force a change in behavior, “or else you begin to cut off arms.”

This was a bold appeal for any elected official in the United States both then and now.

Fast forward to August 2014 and the Vermont senator struck a very different tone, angrily shouting at his constituents as they challenged his defense of Israel’s killing rampage in the Gaza Strip that summer.

“You have a situation where Hamas is sending missiles into Israel … from populated areas,” Sanders said, deploying standard Israeli government talking points.

When a member of the audience called out a question on whether Palestinians “have a right to resist,” Sanders shouted back, “Shut up! You don’t have the microphone!” and threatened to call in the police.

“Are you going to arrest people?” the constituent shouted back.

Sanders quickly diverted the conversation to the brutality of ISIS or Islamic State.

A year later, Palestine solidarity activists were thrown out of a Sanders campaign rally in Boston and threatened with arrest for bringing a sign that said, “Will ya #FeelTheBern 4 Palestine?”

As Sanders, who is nominally an independent, surges in the Democratic primary campaign against establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, the issue of Palestine has been virtually absent from the debate.

In an attempt to halt the momentum of voters flocking to Sanders’ populist demands for economic equality, Clinton has employed neoconservative anti-Iran talking points that frame the Vermont senator as dangerous for Israel.

It marks one of the few moments in which Israel has been mentioned at all during the Democratic primary campaign – a striking contrast to the Republican race, which has been dominated by anti-Muslim fanaticism wrapped in chauvinistic support for Israeli violence.

Though Clinton remains the favorite to secure the Democratic nomination, Sanders is no longer considered such a long shot.

Many of Sanders’ supporters will be hoping that his huge victory in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary will give him the momentum he needs to challenge Clinton in states where polls give her a strong lead.

It is therefore worth examining his record on Palestine and the Israelis, how his views have shifted and what we might expect from him as he attempts to broaden his appeal.

A review of Sanders’ record suggests that the changes in his views are rooted in political expediency rather than ideological commitment. Read More

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/ February 7, 2016 / 1 Comment

The Establishment’s Escalating Pressure on Women to Support Hillary Clinton

There is a sexist double standard, establishment columnists insist. Hillary Clinton can never yell about political revolution because she is a woman. Madeleine Albright wields one of her favorite lines and declares there is a “special place in hell” for women who do not help elect Clinton. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem suggests so many women at colleges and universities support Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton because they want to get with boys.

All of the above barely addresses the absurd identity politics, which increasingly dominates conversation about the 2016 presidential election.

What masquerades as a defense of women grows more and more offensive to women with legitimate reasons for not supporting Clinton.

On this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, we spend the hour with writer and guest host Roqayah Chamseddine talking about the madness in the 2016 presidential election. From “Bernie Bros” to how Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her supporters are increasingly using her identity to disrupt meaningful debate about her record, Chamseddine critiques the narrow concept of feminism that underpins conversation.

Host Rania Khalek leads a discussion of Clinton’s foreign policy and calls attention to key questions about Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy. We also talk about “electability” and what it means to be “realistic” when voting.

The podcast is available for download on iTunes. For a link to the episode (and also to download it as well), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

Below are some highlights from our discussion with Roqayah Chamseddine.

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/ January 17, 2016 / 1 Comment

In War Games, Navy SEALs Normalize Treating U.S. Citizens as Enemy

United States Navy SEALs planned war games in the state of Washington for mid-January, where they would encroach upon residential areas, state parks, national parks, etc, without the consent of the public. The war games treat citizens as pawns because SEALs were trained to react to citizens as potential terrorists.

One of the most alarming aspects of the war games, which were reported on by Truthout journalist Dahr Jamail, is how it normalizes the idea that U.S. citizens can be enemies. The war games suggest a future where many more military exercises run roughshod over public spaces and soldiers simulate how citizens could pose a danger to them.

Now, the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure,” returns for a third season. Our guest this week is Jamail, who talks about documents he obtained from a source within the Navy. He describes how the Navy circumvented the process so the public would not be able to object to plans. It excluded clandestine trainings from regulations requiring environmental impact statements. “Peace parks” in Washington would be violated by the military. Jamail also talks about some of his other extensive reporting on climate disruption, including the melting of the Arctic.

In the discussion portion, hosts Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek recap the past few weeks of 2016 and talk about Guantanamo, Obama’s State of the Union speech, and U.S. government raids and deportations against refugees from Central America.

The podcast is available for download on iTunes. For a link to the episode (and also to download it as well), go here.

Below is a partial transcript of the interview with Dahr Jamail.

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/ December 30, 2015 / 2 Comments

Year-End Episode of ‘Unauthorized Disclosure’: A Look Back at 2015

All throughout the year, we have enjoyed producing weekly episodes of our podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” Each guest has brought incredible insight to issues and topics, which we believe deserve widespread discussion and are often under addressed in the establishment media. But this is our final episode of 2015.

Roqayah Chamseddine, a writer and someone who currently works at “The Empire Files” with Abby Martin, joins the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast as a guest co-host (again).

For the first half of the hour-long episode, we talk about the GOP debate, which happened last week because it perfectly encapsulates a lot of what was wrong with this year. We shift to discussion about ISIS and Islamophobia. (In fact, some of our discussion may sound like what Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders said during the Saturday night debate when asked about the bigotry Donald Trump and other GOP candidates are fueling.)

We spend some time talking about the issue of climate change and how once again we’re horrified that what needs to be done is not being done by the U.S. government and other world powers. The statistics for how bad things will get continue to be stunning. Plus, our media and politicians spend very little time giving climate change the attention it truly merits.

The podcast is available for download on iTunes. For a link to the episode (and also to download it as well), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

If you enjoy the podcast, help us keep the show going by donating to support the next season of “Unauthorized Disclosure.”

Below are some highlights from the year-end episode:

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/ December 18, 2015 / 3 Comments

Donald Trump, anti-Muslim hysteria and the hypocrites who enabled his rise

Crossposted from The Electronic Intifada

Last week’s proposal by Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump to ban Muslims from entering the United States elicited condemnation from across the political spectrum.

Yet his proposal comes after nearly 15 years of anti-Muslim demonization propelled by many of the same figures now distancing themselves from Trump’s opportunistic Muslim-baiting.

It has been truly stunning to watch people who have directly contributed to anti-Muslim prejudice express shock as the hate spirals out of control.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the former Israeli prison guard and national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, tweeted that he was “astonished” by the volume of Twitter users in his timeline under the impression that every Muslim is a terrorist.

Goldberg should try reading his own shoddy reporting for a clue about where people in his timeline got such an idea.

Notorious for depicting Muslims as uniquely prone to irrational violence, particularly against Jews and Israel, the former fan of the far-right politician Meir Kahane has made a habit of collectively blaming Muslims for failing to rein in extremists.

Of course, Goldberg, who presents himself as the voice of American Jews, has never made a similar demand of his own community — though if he ever did, things might get awkward, since he is one of the extremists.

On top of being a proven liar who helped push the US into invading Iraq, Goldberg is a returning foreign fighter who was radicalized as a teenager at a Zionist summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains.

In the 1990s he left the United States to join the Israeli military. He served as a prison guard at Ketziot, an Israeli army prison camp in the Naqab (Negev) desert where thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languished during the first intifada.

In his book Prisoners, Goldberg admits that after watching a fellow prison guard beat a Palestinian prisoner unconscious for saying something the guard didn’t like, Goldberg lied to help cover it up.

He also confessed to beating Palestinians himself, though he claims his victims deserved it, writing, “I never hit a Palestinian who wasn’t already hitting me.”

When he wasn’t dishing out beatings to his colonial subjects, Goldberg tortured them in an arbitary manner; he once sent a Palestinian man to solitary confinement because the man refused to recognize Israel as a legitimate state.

Much of Goldberg’s anti-Muslim animus is tied to legitimizing Israel as an exclusivist state.

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris earlier this year, Goldberg argued that the Jews of Europe may need to escape to Israel lest they be persecuted by a potentially looming alliance between Europe’s Islamophobic far-right and Muslim extremists.

Given the intense marginalization and disenfranchisement of Muslims across Europe, the notion that Islamists will soon be embraced by the anti-Muslim far-right is ludicrous, to say the least.

More recently, in a piece titled “The paranoid, supremacist roots of the stabbing intifada,” Goldberg attributes the ongoing Palestinian revolt against Israel’s colonial violence to “the unwillingness of many Muslim Palestinians to accept the notion that Jews are a people who are indigenous to the land Palestinians believe to be exclusively their own.”

So according to Goldberg, Muslims who refuse to recognize that he — a white Jewish guy from Long Island, New York — is indigenous to the Middle East, are intolerant extremists. However, Goldberg, an active cheerleader of US aggression who believes he’s biblically entitled to dispossess Palestinians so he can have a spare state, is apparently more rational, objective and civilized than Trump and the backwards people on his Twitter timeline who inexplicably believe all Muslims are terrorists.

Mainstreaming Islamophobia

One of the most disingenuous condemnations of Trump’s proposal came from the Anti-Defamation League, a hardline pro-Israel lobbying outfit that bills itself as a civil rights organization devoted to combatting anti-Semitism.

“Trump’s plan to bar people from entry to the United States based on their religion is unacceptable,” declared Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s national director.

The ADL’s purported opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry is hard to take seriously for a number of reasons, first and foremost being its energetic support for Israel’s religiously discriminatory immigration policy and the right-wing Trump-like leaders that enforce it.

While Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, denounced Trump’s comments, the fact remains that religious tests and blanket bans are standard operating procedure in Israel.

In past decades the ADL has infiltrated and spied on Arab American activists and illegally gathered intelligence on Palestine solidarity and anti-apartheid groups, some of which was passed on to Israeli government officials as well as the white supremacist regime in South Africa.

In more recent years, the ADL has played a crucial role in mainstreaming Islamophobia, often throwing its weight behind smear campaigns spearheaded by a cadre of well-funded Islamophobes who for more than a decade have pumped out disinformation about Muslims and Islam, from which far-right Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik drew inspiration.

This Islamophobia network, as the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress labeled it, is funded in large part by wealthy pro-Israel donors and has generated a nationwide freakout about an alleged jihadist threat posed by deceptive US Muslims.

In 2006, the ADL’s foundation gave $2,500 to the virulently anti-Muslim Middle East Forum headed by Daniel Pipes, a prominent ringleader of the Islamophobia network.

The following year, the ADL, then headed by Abraham Foxman, aligned itself with Pipes and the similarly bigoted Frank Gaffney in their anti-Muslim campaign to fire Debbie Almontaser from her position as principal of New York City’s Khalil Gibran International Academy.

In his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, Trump cited a debunked poll issued by Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a Washington, DC based think tank that, according to the ADL’s own findings, “has pioneered the anti-Sharia hysteria by publishing materials regarding the threat of an Islamic takeover of the US.”

In 2010, the ADL sided with anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencerin opposing the construction of a Muslim community center, dubbed “the ground zero mosque,” near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

In the days prior to Trump’s announcement, right-wing media outlets — including the New York Post, Daily Caller, and Breitbart — tried (and failed) to connect the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim group based out of Jamaica, Queens, to the Muslim couple who gunned down 14 people in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on 2 December.

To push their theory, right-wing outlets relied on smears advanced by none other than the ADL, which tried in 2010 to portray ICNA as an extremist group due to its criticism of Israel.

By repeatedly siding with anti-Muslim fanatics, the ADL has granted an aura of credibility to the very bigots it has then turned around and condemned.

Meanwhile, as anti-Muslim attacks skyrocket to unprecedented levels, the ADL refuses to engage with the largest Muslim advocacy organization in the country, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, because of CAIR’s outspoken criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights.

Bipartisan hate

Donald Trump is “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “doesn’t represent my party,” asserted Republican presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham in response to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims.

But even as the South Carolina senator, who has scarcely seen a Muslim country he didn’t want to bomb, spoke out against Trump’s bigotry, he continued to spew his own.

Addressing a Jewish audience on Sunday, Graham promised that if elected president he would launch a US military ground invasion and occupation of Iraq and Syria to defeat Islamic State.

“There’s no way to defend freedom without fighting against evil, and there’s never been a bigger evil since World War II than radical Islam,” Graham told the crowd.

While Republicans have been more explicit in their rhetoric, they aren’t alone in pushing anti-Muslim hate.

Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of California said last week that “anywhere between 5 and 20 percent” of Muslims “have a desire for a caliphate” and are prepared “to institute that in any way possible,” including through violence and terrorism.

Faced with intense criticism for her wild assertion, Sanchez, who sits on the homeland security committee in the House of Representatives, refused to apologize or back down. Instead she sourced her claim to a book by Maajid Nawaz and Sam Harris titled Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue.

In it, Harris and Nawaz speculate about what they believe to be the percentage of Islamists worldwide but they say nothing about the desire for a caliphate that Sanchez was referring to.

Nawaz and Harris are notorious for trafficking in the kind of propaganda that provides a theoretical backbone to a more sophisticated style of Islamophobia that appeals to liberals.

Harris, a neuroscientist with a pathological obsession with Islam, has made a career out of preaching anti-Muslim venom under the guise of liberal atheism.

As for Nawaz, a self-styled ex-Islamist and rising star in the Islamophobia industry, he runs the Quilliam Foundation, an influential London-based counter-extremism think tank that receives significant funding from neoconservatives in the US.

Under Nawaz’s guidance, Quilliam helped shape the UK’s counter-radicalization program, Prevent, which brands Muslim schoolchildren and workers in the public sector as potential terrorists for expressing support for Palestine, growing a beard or criticizing the UK’s foreign policy.

That’s why it is strange to see Nawaz, of all people, feigning concern about Trump’s proposal.

Islamophobia is about more than just reactionary hate and bigotry; it’s necessary for legitimizing US aggression in the Middle East. That’s why weapons companies that profit from endless war are among its key funders.

In other words, meaningful opposition to Islamophobia demands principled rejection of the bipartisan US war machine that profits from it.

Trump is an opportunistic demagogue exploiting the very real economic anxieties of white working class Americans with a politics of bigotry. But many of the people loudly condemning him helped set the stage for his rise. We shouldn’t let them off the hook.

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