Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) smacked down Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) attempt to link Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Islamic extremists based in the American Muslim community with no evidence, an allegation that emerged as part of a theme among House Republicans on Sunday morning.

The exchange between Feinstein and King took place on Fox News Sunday, when host Chris Wallace asked whether he agreed with the idea that “political correctness be damned, we have to do more effective surveillance inside the Muslim community.” King tried to link “Muslim communities” to the attack, a claim which Feinstein demolished:

KING: Listen, the threat is coming from within the Muslim community in these cases. In New York. that’s why Commissioner Kelly has 1,000 police officers out in the community. Unfortunately, he gets smeared by the New York Times and the Associated Press, but the fact is we’ve stopped 16 plots in New York because we know that al-Qaeda is shifting its tactics…If you know a certain threat is coming from a certain community, that’s where you have to look.

WALLACE: Senator Feinstein, your reaction to this?

FEINSTEIN: That’s exactly where they will look. I don’t think all of this is very helpful. I think the important thing is to get the facts. Let the investigation proceed. The FBI has very good interrogators. They know what they are doing. I believe that they will put a case together that will be very strong. With respect to whether we are doing enough in the Muslim community, I think we should take a look at that, but I don’t think we need to go and develop some real disdain and hatred on television about it.

Watch it:

As Feinstein implies, King’s speculation about the Muslim community playing some role in the Boston bombing is entirely unconnected to the available facts. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) has written that “I am not aware of any evidence so far that the Boston suspect is part of any organized group, let alone al Qaeda, the Taliban, or one of their affiliates.” Nor does there exist any evidence that Tamerlan or Dzhokhar were radicalized as a consequence of contact with person or persons in the American Muslim community.

While King suggested that stepped-up NYPD surveillance of Muslims should be a model for the nation, the program terrified the Muslim community while failing to produce a single actionable lead or investigation.

King was not the only House Republican to speculate without evidence about a connection between the Tsarnaevs and jihadists. On CNN’s State of the Union, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) speculated that Tamerlan was trained by al-Qaeda during a 2012 visit to Chechnya, once again lacking any direct evidence for the charge. Though Islamist terrorist groups are often quick to take responsibility for attacks, the Caucusus Emirate, the main Islamist terrorist group in the region, denied any connection to the bombers and said “we are not fighting against the United States of America.”

Monk Wirathu

Wirathu is a 45-year old monk, dressing in traditional saffron-colored robes, living in a monastery in Mandalay where he produces DVDs and pieces for social media spreading his bigotry. The monk first rose to prominence in 2001 during a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment and was originally sentenced to 25 years in jail for incitement to violence before being released in Myanmar’s general amnesty granted to political prisoners in 2012.

Since his release, Wirathu has been a key leader in the “969″ movement, a highly nationalist group so named for the nine attributes of the Buddha, his Sixfold Path, and the nine attributes of monkhood. What has followed has been a campaign of harassment towards Myanmar’s Muslim population, including boycotting Muslim-owned businesses and urging Buddhists to only patron Buddhist establishments which more and more frequently display the 969 symbol.

Tensions have reached a breaking point, however, including destroying mosques and inciting mob violence against Muslims. In March, a string of clashes between Buddhists and Muslims left at least 40 dead and 12,000 Muslims displaced from their homes. A Reuters report on the riots that lead to the bloodshed said that the riots and the killing that followed “took place in plain view of police, with no intervention by the local or central government.” Graffiti seen in the aftermath called for “Muslim extermination.”

Wirathu recently spoke to the Guardian, proving he isn’t shy about voicing his opinions towards Muslims and their supposed role in causing the violence in the country. Much like biases against Jewish and other minority faiths in communities around the world, Wirathu’s views are full of unsubstantiated rumors and outright fear-mongering:

Wirathu says part of his concern with Islam is that Buddhist women have been converted by force and then killed for failing to follow Islamic rules. He also believes the halal way of killing cattle “allows familiarity with blood and could escalate to the level where it threatens world peace”. [...]

A minority population that makes up just 5% of the nation’s total, Wirathu says Burma’s Muslims are being financed by Middle Eastern forces: “The local Muslims are crude and savage because the extremists are pulling the strings, providing them with financial, military and technical power,” he said.

Wirathu also places the blame for any violence firmly at the feet of the Muslim community, claiming that any acts his followers have carried out was merely a response to Muslim attacks. In interviews, he refers to Muslims as “Bengalis,” a reference to the widespread belief in Myanmar that members of the ethnic minority Rohingya population are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The Burmese government does little to stop discrimination towards the Rohingya, a people stripped of Burmese citizenship under a 1982 citizenship law.

Mistreatment of minority Muslims is currently taking place in majority Buddhist country Sri Lanka as well. Groups there — that call themselves names like the Buddhist Strength Force and Sinhala Echo — have stirred up anti-Muslim sentiment but have not produced the same death toll that the preaching of Wirathu has — yet.

More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed in the country’s brutal and protracted civil war. But one leading conservative voice on the Middle East, writing in National Review on Friday, has a novel view of America’s role in stopping the conflict: we should prolong it. Specifically, we should prolong it by providing support to the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad who launched the war by gunning down non-violent protesters in the streets for months.

Daniel Pipes’ basic argument is that the influx of jihadis into rebel ranks means that the United States shouldn’t want either side to win definitively. Since it looks like Assad is losing, we should help him out until a bloody stalemate returns — a suggestion he proposes “as a humanitarian”:

I am changing my policy recommendation from neutrality to something that causes me, as a humanitarian and decades-long foe of the Assad dynasty, to pause before writing: Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar Assad.

Here is my logic for this reluctant suggestion: Evil forces pose less danger to us when they make war on each other. This (1) keeps them focused locally and (2) prevents either one from emerging victorious (and thereby posing a yet-greater danger). Western powers should guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong the conflict.

Pipes’ “humanitarian” suggestion comes on the heels of a Human Rights Watch report that documents a systematic pattern of Assad’s forces using unguided dumb bombs on civilian population centers. After disputed reports that the Islamic extremist al-Nusra Front rebels had “merged” with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the mainstream Free Syrian Army distanced itself from jihadism, saying “We don’t support the ideology of al-Nusra. … There has never been and there will never be a decision at the command level to coordinate with al-Nusra.”

Recognizing that his idea is a recipe for the extended slaughter of civilians, Pipes proposes a policy of “pressuring the rebels’ suppliers (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) and the Syrian government’s supporters (Russia, China) to condition aid on abiding by the rules of war.” However, Pipes himself admits that “manipulating the rebel forces via remote control has little chance of success,” a point which presumably goes double for the Assad government.

Pipes also compares his “stalemate” policy to America’s involvement in World War II, saying that “keeping German troops tied down on the Eastern Front was critical to an Allied victory.” While it has been argued that the U.S. and Britain delayed the invasion of Europe to keep pressure on the Soviet Union to weaken it in the aftermath of an eventual Allied victory, Pipes doesn’t make this point, and even if he had, it wouldn’t make much sense in the Syria context. Moreover, as a cursory survey of knowledge of World War II history would admit, the Allies ultimately supported the Soviets in an attempt to totally defeat the Nazis. Pipes’ favored policy would be more like supporting Stalin until it looked like he was going to win, and then extending Lend-Lease to Hitler so the war would keep going.

The repugnant incoherence of Pipes’ argument can perhaps be explained by his background. Pipes is one of the five leading “experts” identified in a Center for American Progress report as critical to national Islamophobia industry. He regularly engages in “alarmist rhetoric about the creeping Sharia threat posed by radical Islam,” including insinuations that President Obama practiced Islam as a child.

In 2003, President Bush nominated Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute for Peace.

A grassroots campaign aimed at countering hateful anti-Muslim ads in New York’s subway system has gone live, placing posters in ten locations across New York City.

Called Talk Back to Hate, the campaign first launched its crowdfunding appeal in January in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, seeking to raise the money necessary to post advertisements in major subway stations from among the citizens of New York.

“I started the project because, like many people I’ve spoken to, these ads feel like an attack on our most basic communal values,” Akiva Freidlin, the creator of the project, said in an interview with ThinkProgress at the time. “They’re doubly offensive, for both attempting to demonize and intimidate individual members of a particular religious group, and trying to exploit the city’s grief and anger.”

Talk Back to Hate’s poster message was chosen from various suggestions submitted by contributors to the campaign. The image depicts a pair of arms wrapped around the Big Apple that is New York and the winning words “Hatred is easy. It is love that requires true strength.” The poster also features the names of those who donated to make the poster a reality. The ad is currently running at some of the New York subway’s most-trafficked stops, including Times Square and Rockefeller Center, as well as eight other locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Fundraising for a second round of ads is already on-going.

A digital version of the ad posted on the Talk Back to Hate website cycles through messages submitted by the campaign’s contributors. In a press release sent out by the campaign, Friedlin highlighted the several of those messages from New York City residents who donated to the project:

Campaign donor Omar Gaya is an American Muslim who moved to NYC about 2 years ago from California to work at a bio-pharmaceutical company. He calls TalkBackToHate.org “the voice of a formerly ‘silent’ majority.”

“We must raise our voices,” Gaya notes, “or else we risk letting the hatred of a few well-resourced individuals dominate the discourse and hijack the values of freedom and tolerance that we hold dear.”

Jessica Nepomiachi, a public policy & community outreach consultant, said that she gave in appreciation for the complexity and diversity of New York. “The NYC transit system carries millions of people a day through one of the most diverse cities in the world,” Nepomiachi says. “Our transit system should be a place of pride, a place to encourage thoughtful and peaceful dialogue, not hatred.”


The spark that launched the campaign was a series of Islamophobic subway ads funded by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative that ran in New York City and Washington, DC last year. Much as in the case of the ads that inspired Talk Back to Hate, the original series of ads from Geller — which referred to Muslims as “savages” — were likewise countered by various religious and civil groups.