Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.”

The anti-Muslim activists, who all play a prominent role in the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” play pivotal roles as misinformation experts and online activists, stirring up Islamophobic fears across the country.

The SPLC’s list of “new activists heading up the radical right” include:

Frank Gaffney: Gaffney, the president and founder the Center for Security Policy, has argued that “Shariah-adherent Muslms” are engaged in “civilization jihad” by infiltrating “government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the military, penal institutions, media think tanks, political entities, academic institutions. And they are very aggressively targeting non-Muslim religious communities in the name of ecumenicalism.” The SPLC observes that:

As recently as in 2002, a prominent British newspaper listed him with Iraq invasion cheerleaders Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as one of the men “directing” then-President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 security doctrine.

Sometime between then and now, Gaffney seems to have snapped.

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A class taught by the military to officers at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, came under fire when a report on Wired’s Danger Room blog last week exposed it for teaching soldiers to engage in a “total war” on Islam and taking a war on Islam “to the civilian population wherever necessary.” The full set of course materials, hundreds of documents and slide shows obtained by ThinkProgress, reveal just how deep Islamophobia ran through the military instruction. The material contained dozens of citations to the work of some of America’s best known anti-Muslim bigots.

Not all of the material in the course, however, was anti-Muslim. Materials from reputable sources such as the Brookings Institution and RAND corporation also appeared among the readings, and only some of the presenters to the class used blatantly Islamophobic material. (The public affairs officer of the Joint Forces Staff College didn’t respond to repeated inquiries by press time.)

But the “Islamophobia network,” discussed in the Center for American Progress’ “Fear, Inc.” report, played a prominent role in many of the 266 documents acquired by ThinkProgress. Islamophobic “misinformation experts” — as they’re defined in “Fear, Inc.” — cited in Army teaching materials included:

Robert Spencer – 34 mentions across 8 documents (his blog, JihadWatch.org, was cited 11 times across 7 documents)

Spencer is the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America and the director of JihadWatch.org. He has argued that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. Spencer is prominent pseudo-intellectual in the “counter jihad” blogging community who argues that Islam is inherently violent. He says “It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

Steven Emerson – 16 mentions across 4 documents

Emerson is the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and a former journalist at U.S. News & World Report and CNN. His greatest notoriety came from prematurely declaring that Oklahoma City bombing was committed by Muslims. The actual culprit was right-wing anti-government militant Timothy McVeigh. Emerson tells his followers that “Nearly all of the Islamic organizations in the United States that define themselves as religiously or culturally Muslim in character have, today, been totally captured or dominated by radical fundamentalist elements.”

Center for Security Policy (CSP) – 60 mentions across 3 documents

CSP is led by notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney and produced the report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” which has served as the blueprint for “anti-Shariah” legislation across the country.

David Yerushalmi – 9 mentions across 3 documents

Yerushalmi is general counsel for CSP, a co-author of “Shariah: The Threat to America” and the founder of Society of Americans for National Existence. The Anti-Defamation League concluded that he has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

Daniel Pipes – 50 mentions across 10 documents (his organization, Middle East Forum, was cited 39 times across 10 documents)

Pipes, the director of Middle East Forum, is increasingly strident about the supposed threat posed by Islam and Muslims in America. He argues, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

Finally, right-wing news publications were frequently cited in the training materials acquired by ThinkProgress. The Washington Times was cited 76 times across 16 documents; The National Review 130 times across 6 documents and Fox News 130 times across six documents.

Instructors’ reliance on far-right thinktanks and experts adds to the increasingly disturbing portrait of counter-terrorism instruction at the Joint Forces Staff College, potraying the West as at war with Islam and Muslims. The sheer frequency of citations in the course materials raises questions that hopefully will be answered by an investigation launched at the behest of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who admirably said the questionable course material was “totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound.”

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.

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.

Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney finds himself increasingly isolated from the mainstream Republican party. Last year, Gaffney was barred from CPAC after accusing Suhail Kahn, who directed Muslim outreach efforts for the Bush White House, and anti-tax activist Grover Norquist of being moles for the Muslim Brotherhood. And last month, Edward Meese, a former Reagan administration Attorney General and Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, slammed Gaffney and his allies for disparaging Muslim Americans “solely because of their religion or their background when there’s no basis for it.”

But Gaffney, who has said “it is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization,” doesn’t hold much credibility with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

As part of a September 2010 Senate Homeland Security committee hearing, “Nine Years After 9/11: Confronting The Terrorist Threat To The Homeland,” the FBI issued written responses to questions posed by committee members. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) issued the following question to the FBI (see page 123-123 in the PDF):

LIEBERMAN: What is your perspective on the Center for Security Policy’s recent report entitled “Shariah: The Threat To America”?

FBI: The FBI believes the report underestimates the United States Government’s (USG) level of knowledge and understanding of the activities taking place in the United States and overstates the threat posed by those activities. The report also fails to note that some of the threats were disrupted by the USG and are no longer viable, and it makes unsubstantiated assertions regarding limitations on our ability to respond to ongoing threats. Among other reasons, this may be because the report relies on outdated information.

David Yerushalmi, a coauthor of the report and CSP’s general counsel, is the author of the model “anti-Sharia” legislation introduced in over twenty states. As the “anti-Sharia” movement spreads across the country, members of communities facing the Islamophobia campaigns led by Yerushalmi and Gaffney — both of whom are discussed in the Center for American Progress’s report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network” — should note that the FBI largely disregarded their report as making “unsubstantiated assertions” and relying “on outdated information.”

Last summer, anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney launched a smear campaign against Muslim GOP candidate David Ramadan who was running for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. Ramadan won the race but he and his defenders faced an onslaught of accusations that Ramadan’s candidacy was a form of “stealth Jihad.” Gaffney held a press conference with the McCarthyesque topic of “explor[ing] what is known – and as yet unknown – about Mr. Ramadan’s character and caliber.”

The fear-mongering against Ramadan grew so vociferous that Edwin Meese, former Reagan administration Attorney General and Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, became a target of Geller and Gaffney’s campaign after he endorsed Ramadan. Geller wrote:

James Lafferty, SIOA board member and VAST [Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force] chairman, just advised me that Ed Meese bought into stealth jihadist David Ramadan’s ruse. That’s just what this country needs, more Muslim Brotherhood plants in the legislature.

And Gaffney, Geller, and Islamophobic blogger Robert Spencer — all of whom are featured in the Center for American Progress’s report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network” — issued a letter to Meese, demanding he withdraw his endorsement.

Yesterday, Meese explained to NewsMax TV why he chose to endorse Ramadan and how the hate campaign against Muslims goes against American values. Meese says he supported Ramadan because he’s a “fine man” who “thought very much in terms of political lines the same way I do.” Watch it:

Gaffney, Geller, Spencer and others’ attacks on Ramadan didn’t deter Meese because he saw them as a “fringe group” accusing Ramadan of “…not being totally an American or being an Islamist or somehow not being worthy of running for office.” The attacks strengthened Meese’s conviction in helping Ramadan’s candidacy. “I felt that this was an unfair attack and persisted in my support of him because of that,” said Meese.

Meese says his exposure to the “fringe group” that attacked Ramadan concerns him because “I think it’s always serious when any American is disparaged [...] solely because of their religion or their background when there’s no basis for it.”

It’s heartening to see conservatives begin to speak out against the forces of intolerance within their camp; hopefully, Meese will find more allies than opponents among fellow Republicans.

Newt Gingrich’s statement that he would only support Muslim presidential candidates if they “would commit in public to give up Sharia” was met by harsh comments from both Muslim American organizations and academic experts on Islamic law. “Newt Gingrich’s vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat,” said Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Legislative Director Corey Sayolor.

But Gingrich’s anti-Muslim crusade found an ally with noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, leaped on Gingrich’s anti-Shariah comments yesterday in a column for National Review Online and on his radio show, Secure Freedom Radio. His column reads:

Newt is absolutely right in making such a distinction [between a "moderate person who worships Allah" or "a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us]. The danger we currently face from the so-called Muslim world arises not from the fact that people are Muslim, but from the extent to which they adhere to the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine of sharia.

Speaking on his radio show yesterday, Gaffney took a similar line:

With his successive warnings about sharia…Newt Gingrich has, in my judgement, rendered a real public service. We must know who are enemies are and we must defeat, not accommodate, those who in the name of Sharia are obliged to wage Jihad against us. And we must keep America Sharia free.

But Gaffney’s concerns about religious and personal freedoms rarely extend to Muslim Americans. Last year, he said:

A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.

Newt Gingrich makes no secret of his hostility toward Muslims but Frank Gaffney’s defacto endorsement — he also picked up an endorsement from anti-Muslim activist and Gaffney ally Pamela Geller — might not be helpful as Gingrich attempts to appeal to moderate voters and chip away at Mitt Romney’s momentum in the primaries. Gaffney is a noted member of the Islamophobic far-right and his organization, the Center for Security Policy, was highlighted as a major nexus for the anti-Sharia initiatives sweeping the country in the Center for American Progress’s report, Fear, Inc.

Frank Gaffney, a former official in the Reagan administration, has distinguished himself as a leading voice for the tight-knit anti-Muslim movement among conservatives. Although Gaffney has placed us among David Petraeus and Barack Obama in his pantheon of Islam-influenced individuals, he has taken the time to sit down and chat with us on multiple occasions.

We were hoping to speak again with Gaffney at the “Preserving Freedom Conference” in Nashville, Tennessee, a gathering of other opponents of Islam, last Friday. Initially, Gaffney agreed to speak to us and said he would grant an interview after his book signing.

As we waited, several security personnel hovered around. When he finished signing the last book, Gaffney promptly stood up, and walked out of the conference, refusing to make eye-contact with us. Five security guards, all wearing bullet-proof vests under their suits, quickly surrounded Gaffney and physically blocked us from approaching him. We followed him into the parking lot to ask if had forgotten about us, but Gaffney refused to acknowledge our presence. Instead, one of the conference’s burly security men moved to ensure we couldn’t come within several yards of the neoconservative activist. After a few minutes of confusion, we turned on our camera to try to record what was going on. And just before he got into his car, Gaffney responded, “I gotta go”:

FANG: Uh, Undersecretary Gaffney, you said you’d give us a few comments after the event?

CLIFTON: Undersecretary, you have two minutes?

GAFFNEY: I gotta go.

FANG: Any reason you have five security guards protecting you here? We’ve interviewed you in the past!

Watch it:

Gaffney’s retreat from ThinkProgress seemed bizarre, but similar hostility was evident throughout the conference. Lou Ann Zelnick, a failed congressional candidate and activist involved in protesting the construction of a mosque in nearby Murfreesboro, yelled at us without provocation.

Later in the evening, towards the end of the conference, we encountered three additional security guards. The new guards, who paced near us at times, had handguns displayed in their holsters.

The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney and “lawfare” expert Andrew McCarthy offered their response to the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.“, in a 10-minute segment on Gaffney’s radio show this week.

Gaffney and McCarthy, who both are mentioned in CAP’s report as part of the influential “Islamophobia network,” make a series of unfounded allegations against CAP and the report.

McCarthy, the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has made no secret of his dislike for Muslims and progressives. His eagerness to create a grand-conspiracy between the two was on full display during the interview.

But Gaffney and McCarthy take a turn into uncharted, and wildly unsubstantiated, territory when they float the theory that the CAP report was, as Frank Gaffney declares, a product of “a red-green axis between George Soros’ friends and beneficiaries on the radical left like the Center for American Progress and the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood most notably.”

Listen here (Gaffney’s theory of a “red-green axis” starts at 3:45):

Gaffney, and his allies like Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, have been desperate to paint Fear, Inc. and CAP as a radical institution aligned with violent Islamists. But their attempts to make their fantasies a reality has resulted in some bizarre attempts at guilt-by-association.

Gaffney, McCarthy, and most critics of the report — Islamophobe Pamela Geller said the authors should “choke on their own vomit” — are eager to discredit CAP and the report’s authors using factually baseless attack and wildly speculative conspiracy theories. McCarthy responded to Gaffney’s “red-green axis” theory that, “the evidence [that radical Islamists and the Center for American Progress] cooperate is so strong, that the real question that the interesting quesiton is ‘why this happened’ not ‘whether it happened.’

Conveniently, neither McCarthy nor Gaffney provide any actual evidence of this bizarre theory. But the report does show plenty of evidence of their hostility toward American Muslims. In 2009, Gaffney announced there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims but may actually be one himself” and, after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) banned Gaffney for making baseless accusations against board members, he declared that the Muslim Brotherhood had “infiltrated” CPAC.

While Gaffney might be finding fewer friendly audiences for his anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, he and his friends still have a home on AM radio, every weeknight.