ThinkProgress filed this report from the “Preserving Freedom Conference” in Nashville, TN.

State representative Rick Womick (R-TN) has made no secret of his anti-Muslim views. A New York Times article from July described Womick on the statehouse floor, warning his constuents that Islamic law was the most urgent threat to their way of life. But in an interview on the sidelines of the “Preserving Freedom Conference” at the Cornerstone Church in Madison, TN, Womick went to new extremes to paint Muslim Americans as dangerous and seditious.

In the interview, which took place on Veterans Day, Womick told ThinkProgress that “I don’t trust one Muslim in our military” and “if they truly are a devout Muslims, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.” When asked if Muslims should be forced out of the military, Womick responded “Absolutely, yeah.” Read the exchange:

FANG: What about the thousands of Muslims that are still in the military that are veterans, that are translators, that are active personnel. Is there some sort of policy solution that you’re advocating? […]

WOMICK: Personally, I don’t trust one Muslim in our military because they’re commanded to lie to us through the term called Taqiyya. And if they truly are a devout Muslim, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.

CLIFTON: You believe they should be forced out?

WOMICK: Absolutely, yeah.

Watch it:

To see an extended version of our interview with Womick about Muslims in the military, click here.

When the New York City police department (NYPD) wanted to bring a terrorism expert on board in 2008 to teach about homegrown terror, it turned to Marc Sageman, a well-regarded terrorism expert who works at a right-leaning think tank. The gig, as reported that year by the Associated Press, paid Sageman well. The AP article aslo mentioned, in passing, a strange twist to Sageman’s work:

Dr. Sageman’s residency at the nation’s largest police department began in May and will last a year, with a private foundation paying his $180,000 salary.

This week, at the website NYPD Confidential, Leonard Levitt reported that it appears that the NYPD themselves set up a private foundation which then paid Sageman. Levitt reported that two of the three officers at the non-profit foundation, the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Foundation, are civilian city police officials. But, as a registered tax-exempt non-profit, the foundation raises money from private sources. Levitt tracked the contributions, though not their origins, and found that the foundation had raised nearly $300,000 in total. He wrote that “this seems to be the first time that the NYPD, a municipal agency, has, albeit under the cover of two civilian officials, formed its own private foundation to fund one of its programs”:

This raises troubling questions about the unnamed donor or donors. Do they get special treatment from the NYPD? Do they get special access to Commissioner Ray Kelly for having funded what appears to be one of his pet projects?

Through an investigation of publicly-available tax filings, ThinkProgress was able to ascertain where some –though not all — of the funding comes from. Five foundations gave a total of $112,000 to the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Foundation. They are large foundations with huge bankrolls, including one so-called “donor-advised fund,” where donors give to the charity and direct their money to certain grants. Many of the donors come from the ranks of New York’s financial industry. Among other things, some of the philanthropic giants have funded right-wing pro-Israel projects.

Here’s a quick run-down of the foundations, how much they gave, and little background on them:

THE GOTTESMAN FUND: David Gottesman, a manager of his family foundation, was an early Berkshire Hathaway investor, founded First Manhattan, and is reportedly worth $1.5 billion. The foundation gave $50,000 to the NYPD Conter-Terrorism Foundation. It also gave to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the Israel Project.

THE JEWISH COMMUNAL FUND: This foundation is a behemoth, a so-called “donor-advised” fund with more than a billion dollars in assets in 2007. “The grants that we make are on the recommendation of our donors,” foundation vice president Susan Dickman told ThinkProgress. “So one of our donors directed that donation and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about why.” She declined to name the donor that set aside $27,000 for the NYPD Counter-Terror Foundation in 2007. The Communal Fund gives to a host of hawkish Middle East causes.

THE HAMMERMAN AND FISCH FOUNDATION: Foundation trustee Stephen Hammerman, a former NYPD commissioner of legal affairs, also serves as the director and president of the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Foundation. The latter received $25,000 from the Hammerman and Fisch Foundation in 2009.

THE KOMANSKY FOUNDATION: Foundation president David Komansky, now with BlackRock, was a longtime executive and chairman of the board at Merrill Lynch. John Dadakis, the treasurer of the Komansky Foundation, also serves as a director and secretary of the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Foundation, which received $5,000 from the Komansky Foundation in 2009.

THE MARK AND ANLA CHENG KINGDON FUND: A foundation named for married hedge-funders — Mark Kingdon, the founder and president of Kingdon Capital, and Anla Cheng of Centenium Capital — gave $5,000 to the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Foundation in 2007. They also give to Daniel Pipes‘ Middle East Forum and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

These large foundations give to a variety of philanthropic causes. But, given the NYPD’s recent history of invasive practices against Muslim communities, that a few of them give to hawkish right-wing Middle East groups does raise some questions.

Since Congress reached an agreement to extend the debt ceiling, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been on a campaign to prevent any further cuts in military spending, specifically signaling out the so-called trigger mechanism that would reduce security spending by an additional $500 billion should the super committee fail to reach a deal to cut more than $1 trillion in federal spending. Panetta called the trigger “draconian” and “devastating” and said that it will “hollow out” the military. When asked for specifics though, Panetta said the biggest risk he can think of is reducing — not eliminating — the U.S. military presence in Latin America and Africa. In other words, hardly a “devastating” scenario.

CAP’s Larry Korb wrote this week in the New York Times that Panetta has laid out some “excellent proposals for reducing the defense budget” but he “grossly exaggerates” in his fearmongering about what the trigger would do to the military. And yesterday the Defense Secretary played the “last card” in his fear campaign, the National Journal reports:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been steadily escalating his warnings about the impact of the deep cuts facing the Pentagon if the congressional super committee fails to reach a deal. On Thursday, he played the last – and strongest — card in his deck, arguing that the hundreds of billions of dollars of mandatory cuts would directly imperil U.S. national security. [...]

“In effect, it invites aggression,” Panetta said during the new conference, just his second since taking office in July. [...]

Panetta said those cuts would leave the military “a hollow force” which “retains its shell but lacks a core.”

“It’s a ship without sailors. It’s a brigade without bullets. It’s an air wing without enough trained pilots,” Panetta said. “It’s a paper tiger.”

This just simply is not true. As Korb noted previously, cutting military spending by $1 trillion over the next decade — a figure that incorporates the trigger cuts — would “in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 level for the next decade.” And by Panetta’s own standard, how would reducing the U.S. military presence in Latin America and Africa invite aggression?

On the issue of defense spending, “Panetta has really gone off the deep end,” writes Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal, “His public statements sound like those of a Democrat too insecure to talk sensibly about the future of the US military and national security policy.”

When Rachel Abrams, a board member at a right-wing pro-Israel group and wife of top Bush administration Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, called for Palestinian militants and their children to be made into “food for sharks,” something of a controversy erupted. The defense that Abrams was “clearly speaking about the terrorists” fell apart when she subsequently made the same call about this reporter and wrote that Palestinians of nearly any political stripe are terrorists.

The furor eventually extended all the way to the Washington Post after the neoconservative Post blogger Jennifer Rubin retweeted Abrams’ post. The Post’s ombudsman Patrick Pexton, deluged with complaints, wrote that he was “disappointed” with Rubin’s retweet, adding that it “did damage to The Post and the credibility that keeps it afloat.” The Post’s opinion page editor Fred Hiatt said that Pexton “is entitled to his views,” and refused to comment further on the ombudsman’s post.

Pexton is indeed “entitled to his views.” And, it seems, one of them might be that there exists at the Washington Post a double standard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a purported e-mail exchange with a reader, who posted the correspondence on an internet message board, Pexton wrote that he thought that if Rubin had retweeted a call to kill Israelis — instead of Palestinians — she would likely be fired from her job. The reader, who went by the name Joe Emersberger, wrote: “Simple question: if the rant had been directed against Israelis, do you think Rubin would have been fired by the Post?” Pexton, in the apparent exchange, wrote back:

Off the record, I think it’s quite possible. But the ombudsman does not hire or fire people here. I only comment.

Asked to confirm the authenticity of the e-mail correspondence, the Washington Post’s public relations department referred ThinkProgress to Pexton, who “operates independently.” Pexton didn’t deny the authenticity of the email and replied only by saying: “My blog post published Monday represents my full comments on this matter.” He hasn’t responded to a follow-up e-mail. Emersberger did not reply to an inquiry by press time. Pexton declared his comments “off the record,” but that confidence was broken by the apparent reader and the e-mails were made public.

Rubin, a Mideast hawk, cut her teeth at Pajamas Media and the neoconservative flagship Commentary — where Abrams’ brother, John Podhoretz, is the editor. This year, she went to Israel and the West Bank (also considering the latter part of Israel) on the dime of the Emergency Committee for Israel, where Abrams sits on the board. Rubin has a history of making errors and misrepresenting reported facts to fit her story. If this wasn’t enough to make the Post question the decision to hire her, perhaps one should not be so surprised that she can retweet calls for mass killings and keep her job — that is, as long as the comment is about killing Palestinians.