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Conservative Think Tank Scholar Promotes Claim That Norway Terrorist Attacked Because He Was Censored

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.”

Security

Zuhdi Jasser Should Disavow Ties To Islamophobic Clarion Fund

The appointment of M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim-American activist who spends his time railing against Islamic extremism, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom sparked a controversy. MSNBC reported yesterday that a coalition of 64 Muslim groups voiced their opposition to Jasser’s appointment, by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), to the commission.

Muslim Advocates head Farhana Khera, former counsel with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, told MSNBC, “Sen. McConnell should rescind his appointment.”

Muslim-Americans and organizations are right to view with disdain Jasser’s ties to less-than-savory anti-Muslim bigots. The MSNBC article captured this nicely by describing Jasser as “a controversial figure who many American Muslims see as a shill for anti-Muslim bigots.” CAP’s “Fear, Inc.” named Jasser as someone “often tapped by the Islamophobe network as a validator of their views on Islam and Muslims in America.” Jasser could start to alleviate these concerns by disavowing an Islamophobic group he’s associated with.

Indeed, Jasser sits on the Clarion Fund‘s advisory board, a position he shares with outright Islamophobes like Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, among others.

Gaffney, one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes (and sometime conspiracy theorist, including noxious “bitherism”), among other egregious positions, contends that the problem is not Islamism (political Islam) or even radical, extremist Muslims, but the faith of Islam itself.

Clarion, under the guidance of Gaffney and his like-minded cohort, produces hawkish films such as 2006′s Obsession that lambast Islam as a faith, even as they proclaim to target only radicals. Jasser narrated another Clarion film called The Third Jihad. Jasser is featured prominently in the trailer:

Speaking to the The New Republic last year, Jasser had some limited criticisms of the film:

One part of it talked about Muslim population concerns, which I did not like. I disagreed with it. Obviously, I want the Muslim population to grow. My kids are Muslims. I want them to have Muslim kids. But you know, listen, you’re not going to agree with everything people write… I think if [viewers] hadn’t seen that there’s a Muslim that’s part of the solution, it would have been worse.

In January, the film came under attack in a New York Times editorial. The New York Police Department was criticized for showing it, and NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelley apologized for his appearence in the “inflammatory” film. But Jasser defended it in a New York Post op-ed and the National Review.

Less than two weeks after Jasser defended the film, Clarion Fund again invited controversy by uncritically posting in its newsletter reader comments that attempted to legitimate the views of Norwegian anti-Muslim mass killer Anders Breivik. After ThinkProgress reported on the comments, Clarion scrubbed the newsletter from its archives, but the organization failed to apologize and even refused to comment on or explain the incident.

Nonetheless, the newsletter confirmed that many accusations of anti-Muslim animus behind the Clarion Fund’s sleek, PR-friendly facade are well-founded. Coupled with the involvement by Gaffney — who has said practicing Islam is “sedition” — Clarion lurches beyond the pale of reasonable public discourse.

Jasser should begin to rehabilitate his image among American Muslims — even while maintaining his criticisms of the community and radical extremists — by disavowing the group.

Security

Meet New Anti-Obama Super PAC Donor Irving Moskowitz

Right-wing donor Irving Moskowitz

Karl Rove’s super PAC American Crossroads just got a new big-league donor. Bingo kingpin Irving Moskowitz gave $1 million to the group, according to a report by Paul Blumenthal at the Huffington Post.

Moskowitz generates his millions from a bingo enterprise in California. The catch is that the gambling license requires that Moskowitz only hand over 1 percent of gross receipts to the city so long as the rest of the profits go to the tax-exempt Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation (net holdings: $52 million). Through this foundation, Moskowitz gives to a bevy of less-than-savory causes — American Crossroads and its dishonest attacks are just the latest. Blumenthal notes that donations involving electoral politics are a relatively new thing for Moskowitz, but he’s got a long history of backing far-right-wing causes. Here are some of his greatest hits:

  • Islamophobia – Since 2002, the foundation has given $485,000 to the Center for Security Policy, a hawkish Washington think tank run by former Reagan administration official and conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney. As reported in CAP’s “Fear, Inc.,” Gaffney’s group pushes Islamophobia in the U.S., and Gaffney has proclaimed that practicing the Islamic faith is tantamount to “sedition.” Gaffney, who thinks President Obama is Muslim, also leads the advisory group of the Islamophobic group Clarion Fund, which produces documentaries that have been denounced as “inflammatory” and once published approving comments about Norwegian anti-Muslim mass-murderer Anders Breiviks views.
  • “Birthers” – Since 2006, Moskowitz’s foundation gave $200,000 to the Western Center for Journalism (WCJ), a non-profit founded by Joseph Farah. WCJ describes Farah as “the brains behind WND.com news website.” Formerly known as World Net Daily, WND is a hub for “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that President Obama’s publicly released birth certificate is a fake, and that Obama therefore is not a U.S. citizen nor eligible to be president. WND even hosts conferences on the issue and WND Books published Jerome Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” tome just after Obama’s long-form certificate was publicly released — though that hasn’t stopped WND’s conspiracy theories. WCJ’s blog, naturally, pushes the same, lame discredited theories.
  • Israeli settlements – By far, Moskowitz’s most generous philanthropic work — and other non-philanthropic funding — goes toward projects linked to Israel’s settlement enterprise in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, considered “illegitimate” by the U.S. government and international bodies. In addition to gifts of at least $1.985 million to projects in West Bank settlements like Kiryat Arba and Kedumim, Moskowitz’s and his wife’s foundations have donated more than $300,000 to the Hebron Fund, which supports some 800 ideological settlers living in the Palestinian West Bank city. Moskowitz also focuses on East Jerusalem, giving huge sums to developments there, including one million dollars in the late 1980s to purchase a defunct hotel and, as of the late 1990s, more than $2 million to support a religious pro-settlement group in East Jerusalem called Ateret Cohanim.
  • So far, the millionaire-backed American Crossroads took cash from an oil speculator to run an ad campaign absurdly accusing Obama of driving up gas prices. If the ad campaigns are, as with this case, linked to the donor’s pet causes, American Crossroads could be on its way to putting out some of the most vicious attack ads of the election season.

    Security

    After Report, Islamophobic Group Scrubs Quote Legitimizing Anti-Muslim Norwegian Mass Murderer

    Error message from the Clarion webpage for the Feb. 5, 2012, newsletter

    On Tuesday, ThinkProgress reported on the discovery by Demographics United that the Islamophobic filmmakers at the Clarion Fund sent an e-mail newsletter promoting a quote from a reader that attempted to legitimate the views of anti-Muslim Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

    In the 1,500-page manifesto he wrote before slaughtering 77 people, Breivik, who appeared in court this week, recommended a Clarion Film for “further study” about Islam. The reader in the newsletter, whom Clarion claimed was writing from Norway, both whitewashed Breivik’s worldview — falsely suggesting his opposition was only to “Islamist terrorism” rather than to the religion Islam in general — and seemed to claim that a new report from Norway’s security agencies vindicated the mass-killer’s views.

    As of yesterday, the comment by the “reader in Norway” no longer appeared on the Clarion site, www.radicalislam.org. The entire newsletter, which used to be available on the web by clicking on a link in the e-mail, now takes viewers to a Clarion page that reads: “The requested page could not be found” (pictured above right). Reached on his cellphone, Clarion official Alex Traiman declined to comment to repeated questions about the newsletter and its disappearance from the web.

    Here’s a screen shot of the relevant part of the newsletter, where the “reader from Norway” was quoted in a section called “U Report,” which solicits reader comments and explicitly reviews them before publication:

    The full now-scrubbed newsletter, as it was available on the web Tuesday, can be found at the Google cache for the webpage (for now; these tend to disappear after a while) or by downloading a PDF file of the page captured by ThinkProgress.

    Last month, the New York Times wrote a story about the Clarion Fund’s film “The Third Jihad” being shown at the registration area of an NYPD conference. Subsequently, and after some dissembling, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly apologized for his appearance in the film and labeled it “inflammatory.” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed the NYPD for showing the film. At that time that controversy broke, ThinkProgress released the most comprehensive list to date of donors to the Clarion Fund.

    Security

    Islamophobic Filmmakers Promote Comment Seeking To Legitimate Norway Terrorist’s Views

    The Clarion Fund, an organization which produces Islamophobic documentaries, came under renewed scrutiny last month when news broke that their film “The Third Jihad” was screened at an NYPD conference. Facing calls for his resignation, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, after some dissembling, admitted he was interviewed for the project and apologized for his role, calling the film “inflammatory.” Clarion, however, bragged about the attention.

    Now, Clarion appears to be throwing caution to the wind — along with any plausible defense that the group is not Islamophobic — by promoting a comment from a reader seeking to redeem the views of the anti-Muslim right-wing extremist who terrorized Norway this summer, killing 77, including 69 people at a youth camp. In an e-mail newsletter to supporters, Clarion Fund quoted the reader suggesting that a recent report that militant Islamic extremism posed the top threat to Norway redeemed the unheralded warnings of Anders Breivik, the anti-Muslim killer.

    The newsletter, published by the organization’s radicalislam.org website, promoted the comment from a “reader in Norway.” It read:

    What a hot current topic this is! Just today the news came out in Norway, “officially” and in spite of all the PC-ness of this government, that according to the national security forces, the threat of Islamist terrorism is the foremost threat against Norway. You probably remember the July 22 shootings. One of Breivik’s arguments was that the authorities were not taking this threat seriously because you musn’t offend a Muslim. Interesting development.

    Clarion’s willingness to promote and publish an e-mail sympathetic to Breivik seems a bizarre move for an organization under fire for Islamophobia, especially when the comment obfuscates the bigoted point Breivik was making about Islam at-large — the very same conflation between extremism and the whole faith the Clarion Fund has repeatedly been accused of making.

    Read more

    Security

    Pam Geller Linked Anti-Muslim Activist Calls For Mass Murder Of Congressmen, Muslims, Liberals And Journalists (Updated)

    Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, whose names appear along with John Jay's on AFDI's incorporation documents

    The anti-Muslim activist John Joseph Jay has issued a call for the mass murder of the leadership of both parties in Congress, the governors of seven states, and prominent academics, along with a demand to “burn all mosques. period.”

    Jay helped in the founding of anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller’s group American Freedom Defense Initiative. AFDI is the umbrella organization of the prominent Stop the Islamization Of America (SOIA). Jay’s signature can be seen below those of Geller and fellow arch anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer on AFDI’s incorporation document (PDF), as Charles Johnson at LGF pointed out. The P.O. Box listed for Jay is also the same as Geller’s.

    But while those organizations have stopped short of calls for violence, Jay crossed way over that line in a rambling post on his blog called “start the revolution,” which fantasizes about the painful medieval deaths of perceived enemies (screenshot here, cached version here):

    1.)take out the talking head media, and burn the new york times, the los angeles times and the washington post to the ground. draw and quarter the media, and shoot their remains from canons in the four directions of the prevailing winds.

    rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

    2.)take out all the incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress, and every self avowed socialist and communist in congress. give them all proper muslim burials at sea, just like osama bin laden.

    eliminate pensions for congressional service. rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

    3.)eliminate the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara. boil bill ayers, bernie dorhn and angela davis in canola oil, and feed their remains to the fishes.

    they are all physical cowards. they should fall into line pretty quickly. repeat every ten years as a prophylactic, on general principle.

    and,

    4.)now that the “arab spring” has brought enlightenment to the middle east, send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice.

    burn all the mosques. period.

    In a post script, he adds that he wants to “burn the editors and contributors” to the Daily Kos, throw “the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits… from which there is no escape,” and writes, “i’ll think of something suitable for hilary clinton.”

    In an update to the post, Jay responds to LGF’s Johnson “breathlessly announcing that i am advocating mass murder.” Jay makes no denial of advocating mass murder, and writes of Johnson’s charge, “even the blind hog finds an occasional acorn.”

    According to the organization’s website, Geller is the executive director of American Freedom Defense Initiative, which seems to be an umbrella organization for SIOA and other anti-Muslim groups. In a post on the American Thinker from the August of last year, Geller refers to, “my associate, the attorney John Jay.”

    When Jay got in trouble last summer for a separate blog post advocating the mass murder of Muslims and liberals, Robert Spencer wrote of “John Jay, a member of the SIOA Board.” Still, Spencer wrote that Jay is “not a founder or co-founder of SIOA. He has no role in the running of the organization.”

    As ThinkProgress reported, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik was influenced by American anti-Muslim activists. He cited Spencer and his blog 162 times, and Pam Geller and her blog 12 times. The two play are key players in a network of Islamophbia, explored our recent report, Fear Inc.

    Update

    Geller and Spencer strongly condemned Jay’s call to violence and disavowed any connection to him, telling ThinkProgress that he was never on their board, though he did help with the founding of the organization. ThinkProgress originally reported he was a board member, as Spencer had written in a blog post last year. See this update for their full responses.

    Security

    Swedish Terrorist Suspects Were Reportedly Influenced By Anders Breivik

    Anders Behring Breivik

    Two Swedish men arrested for the attempted murder of two South Asian men reportedly gained inspiration for their attacks from Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Brevik.

    The Local — a Swedish English language news website — reports that four days after Breivik’s attacks in Oslo and Utøya, a South Asian man sleeping on a bench in Västerås, a city in central Sweden, was attacked and seriously injured. In a second attack, two days later, a Sri Lankan man was stabbed while delivering newspapers.

    Police reports obtained by the Dagens Nyheter daily and translated by the Local, say that one of the defendants sent the other attacker the following text message shortly after Breivik’s massacre on July 22:

    A Norwegian ‘Nazi’ has killed like, around 84! From the left who, like, cheered on Islam. HAHAHA!! WHITE POWER!

    The accused attacker reportedly screamed “Go home” and drew a swastika on the Sri Lankan man’s bag after stabbing him.

    While the two suspects may have been motivated by a broader white supremacist ideology, Breivik appears to have served as an inspiration for them in their decision to attack South Asians. The text message indicates that they shared the same anger with left wing politics, and its supposed embrace of Muslim immigrants.

    Both Sweden and Norway have growing white supremacist movements, but U.S. Islamophobes and European white supremacists appear to have found common ground in stoking fears about Muslim immigration into Europe. Indeed, Anders Breivik cited U.S. “counterjihad” bloggers, such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, numerous times in his manifesto.

    While European white supremacists have been implicated in hate crimes against numerous ethnic and religious minorities, the growing uptick in European Islamophobia is shedding new light on the overlapping ideologies of anti-Muslim advocates and white supremacists.

    For more information on Breivik and his manifesto’s references to American Islamophobes, see the Guardian’s visualization of his citations and the Center for American Progress’ new report, Fear Inc.

    Security

    FBI Library And Online Training Resources Stocked With Islamophobic Material

    Spencer Ackerman’s reports on Islamophobic training sessions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have sent the Bureau into damage control mode. On Thursday, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for the offensive training materials, which Ackerman has published over the past week.

    The FBI has promised a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials,” but Ackerman, in an article published today, reveals that the work of well-known Islamophobes permeates the FBI’s training culture and the internal reference resources available to FBI agents.

    Ackerman reports that the mandatory online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), included the following description of Sunni Muslims:

    Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.

    An examination of the FBI’s library in Quantico, which is not open to the public, revealed that the Bureau stocks a wide range of resources on Islam but includes a number of books by well known anti-Islam authors Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.

    Pipes and Spencer are featured prominently in the Center for American Progress’ new report, “Fear, Inc.,” which outlines the small but influential group of individuals and institutions who help promote anti-Muslim hatred in the U.S.

    Spencer, who claims that “Islam is not a religion of peace” and has suggested that President Obama may be a Muslim, gained notoriety after it was revealed that Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik’s manifesto included 162 references to Spencer and his blog Jihad Watch.

    Pipes famously observed that “all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” He also plays a key role in the Islamophobia echo chamber by repeating the falsehood that Obama is a former Muslim who “practiced Islam.”

    The combination of Islamophobic presentation and the FBI’s apparent endorsement of noted anti-Muslim “experts” like Spencer and Pipes raises serious questions about the FBI’s counterterrorism training and the Bureau’s understanding of Muslim Americans.

    Earlier this month, the Seattle Times reported on a disastrous presentation by an FBI agent at a community outreach workshop. The failed presentation offers insights into how federal law enforcement officers’ training has seriously hampered their ability to engage with Muslim communities.

    Security

    John Bolton Embraces His Pamela Geller And Robert Spencer Problem

    The manifesto of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik, who attacked targets in Norway in July killing nearly 100 people, contained numerous citations to Islamophobic bloggers and other so-called experts on Islamic terrorism here in the United States. The references included “counterjihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who received a combined 174 citations from Breivik (Geller and Spencer also feature prominently in CAP’s latest report on the Islamophobia network in the U.S., “Fear, Inc.“).

    ThinkProgress’ Eli Clifton subsequently noted that former Bush administration official and prominent war hawk John Bolton — who is currently considering a run for president — has a “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer problem.” Indeed, Bolton has deep connections to Geller. He even wrote the foreward to Geller and Spencer’s 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. The book contains language eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto.

    Bolton kept quiet about his links to Geller and Spencer after Breivik’s attack. But now, it appears he’s fully embracing them. Geller announced today that Bolton will be speaking at her “9/11 Freedom Rally: Stand Against Ground Zero Mosque”:

    Honor our war dead on September 11th at West Broadway and Park Place at our 911 Freedom Rally. Stand for freedom. Join us, Robert Spencer and me at West Broadway and Park Place and protest this cultural obscenity at our 911 Freedom Rally. Remember last year?

    Speakers include U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton

    ThinkProgress asked Bolton staffer Christine Samuelian if the former U.N. ambassador is concerned about continuing to associate with Geller and Spencer given their influence on Breivik. Samuelian confirmed that Bolton is not attending the upcoming anti-mosque event in person and will instead send a recorded video, but she has yet to respond as to whether Bolton has any concerns about Geller and Spencer. (HT: Justin Elliott)

    Security

    State Department Grants $200K To Discredited Neocon-Aligned Middle East Media Watchdog

    On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East media watchdog closely aligned with U.S. neoconservatives and Israel’s hawkish security establishment and rightist Likud Party. The grant was awarded “to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.” The announcement continues:

    This grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into ten languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets.

    Finding examples of anti-Semitism is already a robust MEMRI project and one wonders why exactly they needed the cash: According to publicly available tax filings, MEMRI had nearly $5 million in revenue in 2007 and more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2008.

    What’s more troubling, MEMRI has faced accusations of mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources to portray regional media and attitudes in an overly-negative fashion. One of the most common issues has been with MEMRI’s mistranslations which appear to show anti-Semitism on thin evidence. In 2007, CNN correspondent Atika Shubert checked MEMRI’s translations of a Palestinian children’s program against those provided by the cable news channel’s own interpreters:

    Media watchdog MEMRI translates one caller as saying – quote - ‘We will annihilate the Jews.’ But, according to several Arabic speakers used by CNN, the caller actually says ‘The Jews are killing us.’ MEMRI told us it stood by its translation.

    In other instances, MEMRI has been accused of twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic. In 2006, Rima Barakat, a Palestinian- and Muslim-American activist and one-time Republican candidate for the Colorado state assembly, wrote in the Rocky Mountain News:

    Halim Barakat (no relation), a professor at Georgetown University, published an article in Al-Hayat Daily of London titled “The wild beast that Zionism created: Self-destruction.” By the time MEMRI “translated” it, the title was distorted to “Jews have lost their humanity.” Barakat objected, “Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic.” It seems obvious that MEMRI is adamant on stigmatizing anyone who criticizes Israel and/or Zionism as being anti Jewish.

    In a 2002 article, then-Middle East editor of the British Guardian newspaper Brian Whitaker criticized MEMRI for inaccuracies that reflected an agenda:

    As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

    All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

    The organization was founded as a U.S. tax-exempt non-profit in 1998 by now-Hudson Institute Mideast policy chief Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American, and current MEMRI president, Israeli Yigal Carmon, a 20-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (where he spent five years running Israel’s occupation of the West Bank) and top adviser to two Likud governments. An early archived version of the “about page” of MEMRI’s website lists five staff members, three of whom (including Carmon) have backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. The same page lists one of MEMRI’s missions as “emphasiz(ing) the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel” — though the line has since disappeared from the website.

    In addition to providing journalists and the public with translations, the media watchdog has attracted the attention of burgeoning (and closely linked) European and American anti-Muslim movements. MEMRI was cited 16 times in the so-called manifesto of anti-Muslim right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, showing up even more when MEMRITV was included.

    MEMRI’s board of directors and board of advisers read as a veritable who’s who of right-wing supporters of Israel — including many neoconservative figues and their close allies — such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Steve Emerson, Norman Podhoretz and Alan Dershowitz. (HT: Jim Lobe and Philip Weiss.)

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