This is the second of a two-part report on the American Enterprise Institute’s growing involvement with Islamophobic ideologues. Part one is here.

As a sitting president in 2003, George W. Bush showered the American Enterprise Institute with praise at gala dinner and, more recently, Mitt Romney enlisted the über-hawkish former Bush administration diplomat — and AEI scholar — John Bolton as an adviser.

Lately, though, AEI’s influential and often respectable scholarship is becoming involved with a fringe undercurrent of right-wing anti-Muslim bigotry. This month, anti-Muslim AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali delivered a speech airing Norwegian anti-Muslm terrorist Anders Breivik’s grievance that censorship of his views drove him to violence (see part one of this report). Now, ThinkProgress has learned The David Horowitz Freedom Center, named for right-wing activist David Horowitz, is organizing a trip to Turkey featuring AEI’s Michael Rubin and Robert Spencer, an Islamophobic blogger featured in the Center For American Progress report “Fear, Inc..”

According to a flier for the trip [PDF], participants can pay $4,650 (not including airfare) to spend ten days in Turkey with Rubin, Spencer, and journalist Claire Berlinksi. The flier reads:

Where Turkey goes in the next decade may well determine the future of the Middle East and the future of Europe. [...] Today, in 2011, it stands athwart history once again, as Turkey decides whether or not to throw off the secularism that has been its hallmark since the 1920’s and return to the rule of Islamic law.

Rubin is widely considered a mainstream pundit. Before his work at AEI, Rubin served in government during the George W. Bush administration, both in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-ruled governing authority in occupied Iraq.

Rubin has long maintained relationships with Islamophobes. For five years, Rubin edited the Middle East Quarterly, a journal put out by Daniel Pipes‘ Middle East Forum. And Rubin appears to have contributed to Horowitz’s Frontpage web magazine several times between 2004 and 2006. Over the past year, he has appeared five times on far-right Islamophobe Frank Gaffney’s radio show.

As for Robert Spencer, his record of frequent rantings and collaborations with notorious Islamophobe Pamela Geller speaks for itself (Spencer and his blog were cited 162 times in Anders Breivik’s manifesto). Spencer has previously questioned the loyalty of a top C.I.A. counter-terror official due to his Muslim faith and once declared that “traditional Islam is not moderate or peaceful.”

AEI declined to comment on Rubin’s trip to Turkey with Spencer. But a public affairs official at AEI wrote seperately to ThinkProgress, “AEI does not take institutional positions on policy issues. When our scholars speak, they speak for themselves.”

When asked about the trip by ThinkProgress, Rubin said, “My lectures will discuss contemporary Turkish politics.” In a separate query, ThinkProgress asked Rubin if he felt comfortable participating in such a forum with someone who holds views like those of Robert Spencer. He responded:

I don’t know anyone with whom I do not have serious disagreements on one issue or another. I’ll defend my own writing and research. The best person to ask about Robert Spencer’s views would be Robert Spencer and the best person to talk about Claire Berlinski’s analysis would be Claire Berlinski.

Hirsi Ali’s remarks about Norwegian anti-Muslim terror attacks, Rubin’s jaunt to Turkey with Robert Spencer, and even Romney adviser John Bolton’s dalliances with Spencer and Geller, highlight AEI’s relationship with these extremist views and raises questions about whether bigoted anti-Muslim sentiment should hold even a tangential place in the Washington discourse.

This is part one of a two-part report on the American Enterprise Institute’s growing involvement with Islamophobic ideologues. Part two is here.

In a speech earlier this month, a scholar at an influential think tank and flagship of contemporary Washington conservatism, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), gave voice to one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.” While accepting a prize this month from the German multimedia company Axel Springer, Somali-born Dutch AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke on the “advocates of silence” — those she admonishes for purportedly stifling criticisms of radical Islamic extremism.

In the speech, flagged by the website Loonwatch, Hirsi Ali noted that she herself appeared in Breivik’s 1,500-word manifesto (Breivik reprinted a European right-wing article saying Hirsi Ali should win the Nobel Peace Prize). While she denounced Breivik’s views as an “abhorrant” form of “neo-fascism,” she then postulated that Breivik was driven to violence because his militant anti-multicultural views were not given a fair airing in the public discourse.

After speaking about how the “advocates of silence” repress discussion about radical Islamism, Hirsi Ali said:

Fourthly and finally, that one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.

Watch a clip of the speech:

Hirsi Ali’s exclamation that the “advocates of silence” stifle discourse so effectively that Breivik was driven last July to kill 77 people — 69 slaughtered at a summer youth camp — is contradicted even by her own speech. In closing, Hirsi Ali said, “The good news is that recently the leaders of established conservative parties in Europe have broken the pact of silence,” citing comments against multiculturalism by the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, Hirsi Ali has herself been a Dutch parliamentarian, a frequent contributor to mainstream U.S. and international publications, and author of a New York Times best-selling autobiography. Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders enjoys considerable success in Hirsi Ali’s own Netherlands. Views against multiculturalism don’t get censored, though some of the most bigoted ideologies are often driven to the margins in free societies.

Neither AEI nor Ayaan Hirsi Ali replied to requests for comments about her talk. But a public affairs official at AEI wrote to ThinkProgress, “AEI does not take institutional positions on policy issues. When our scholars speak, they speak for themselves.”

In her speech, Hirsi Ali said that “to speak out against radical Islamism is to be condemned as an Islamophobe.” But as detailed in the Center For American Progress’s report on Islamophobia, “Fear, Inc.,” the Islamophobe label applies not to those who rail against “radical Islam,” but rather against Islam as a whole. Not surprisingly, Hirsi Ali is herself in this latter category — yet another indication that Islamophobic views are not censored. In a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine, Hirsi Ali called for Islam to be “defeated.” The interviewer asked: “Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?” Hirsi Ali replied bluntly: “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.”

“Music torture,” as termed by its critics, is typically associated with heavy metal music. After Manual Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy following the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, U.S. troops bombarded the compound with hard rock music, including, reportedly, Van Halen’s Panama, until Noriega surrendered. And human rights groups, such as Reprieve and Amnesty International, have taken issue with the use of high volume rock music on detainees.

But a new film produced by Al Jazeera explores the use of music as an interrogation method at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib after the Associated Press reported in 2008 that music from Sesame Street, among other music, was forced on prisoners at high volume.

Al Jazeera’s documentary, “Songs of War,” follows award-winning musician Christopher Cerf as he investigates the military’s use of music as a psychological warfare weapon and the role played, in some cases, by his own music for Sesame Street.

Human Rights Project Director Professor Thomas Keenan explained to Al Jazeera:

Prisoners were forced to put on headphones. They were attached to chairs, headphones were attached to their heads, and they were left alone just with the music for very long periods of time. Sometimes hours, even days on end, listening to repeated loud music.

Cerf was shocked at the role played by music he composed to teach children to read and write, and went to explore the use of music as an interrogation tool. “In Guantanamo they actually used music to break prisoners,” he said. “So the idea that my music had a role in that is kind of outrageous. This is fascinating to me both because of the horror of music being perverted to serve evil purposes if you like, but I’m also interested in how that’s done. What is it about music that would make it work for that purpose?”

It’s unclear whether the military is still using music in this way, however. But Politico reports that a Pentagon spokesperson said yesterday that “music is used both in a positive way and as a disincentive,” but added it’s not a form of torture. “We don’t torture,” Capt. John Kirby said.

Watch the full documentary from Al Jazeera:

In a debate two weeks ago on U.S.-Israel policy with J Street president Jeremy Ben Ami, neoconservative don Bill Kristol surprised the audience when he said, “I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years” on Israel, and that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” Kristol continued that, “The difference” between Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney on issues relating to Iran and Israel “is not that great.”

To say the least, this was a startling admission from a guy who heads up an organization, the Emergency Committee for Israel, that exists solely to scare people about President Obama’s approach to Israel. It was also reminiscent of a previous episode in which ECI’s executive director, Noah Pollak, praised President Obama’s May 2011 speech on the Middle East, but then reversed himself when it became clear that the president’s reference to “the ’67 lines” provided an opportunity for attack.

Well, as before, it looks like Kristol is back on message. In a blog post at the website for his magazine the Weekly Standard, he asks, “Have pro-Israel liberals — at least some of the intelligent ones — finally had enough of President Obama’s incompetence and dithering with respect to Israel and the Middle East?”