In a typical fair and balanced panel, Fox News warned on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is set to “infiltrate” the United States amid dire warnings about “sleeper cells” in the Muslim suburbs of Detroit.

Host Megyn Kelly began a segment about Al Jazeera’s expansion into the American television market by raising questions about the network’s “real anti-American bias.” Contributor Lisa Daftari agreed, veering into blatant Islamophobic fear-mongering in the process:

DAFTARI: The point is they want to differentiate themselves from their sister network, but at the same time, it’s the same thing. They’re having the same type of coverage. They’re apparently expanding to eight cities, including Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, Michigan is a large ex-pat community of Muslim-Americans and sleeper cells have been detected. You can Google this, you can find out all this information. So if you’re trying to set yourself apart the Qatari petro-dollars are backing this, you’re still developing in this area where the sleeper cells have been detected. They’re going to have do do much more to prove to me that they’re different from their sister network.

Watch it:

Daftari was referring to the suburbs of Detroit — like Dearborn, MI and others — which have high populations of refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority nations like Lebanon. Dearborn has been the target of hate speech and protests against Muslims for years now. As for the specific “sleeper cells” she was referring to, in 2008 a former Dearborn resident was convicted of “providing material support” to Hezbollah — hardly the makings of a widespread support for terrorism.

Conservatives have been concerned about the purchase of former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV by Qatar-based Al Jazeera since the deal was announced in January. Fox’s points about the difference in coverage between Al Jazeera English — which currently airs in millions of homes in the United States — and Al Jazeera Arabic — the original channel, which was the chosen distributor of Osama bin Laden’s video messages — would be accurate if they weren’t so hyperbolic and fearful of the encroaching Muslim threat. Also, Fox News’ concern about the presence of Middle Eastern oil money in U.S. media does not extend to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s deals with Saudi Arabia.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will remain a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the 113th Congress — despite leading a widely discredited anti-Muslim witch hunt against government personnel last year.

According to the committee list released Friday, Bachmann will stay on the powerful committee despite calls from People for the American Way and others for Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) to remove her. Instead, Boehner in his statement making the announcement praised the lawmakers “charged sacred task of supporting that mission by ensuring the intelligence community has the resources and tools it needs to stay ahead of the evolving threats we face, and by conducting effective oversight of the administration.”

Dismay towards Bachmann’s continuing presence on the committee stems from her use of that position to lead a witch-hunt against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and other U.S. government personnel. In the letter sent to the State Department, Bachmann suggested that Abedin and others were allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to infiltrate the U.S. government and affect policy decisions. The charges were clearly false, based mostly on the conspiracy theories of noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney.

Bachmann’s actions split the Republican Party, with several prominent members — including former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton — signing onto her conspiracies. Many other Republicans — including Boehner himself — abandoned Bachmann to her quixotic pursuit of imaginary infiltration. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), then-Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and others joined President Obama and Clinton in condemning Bachmann’s scare tactics.

Joining Bachmann in being renamed to the committee are Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), who signed onto the original letter sent to State about Abedin. The clearly Islamophobic stances of these committee members makes their position on the committee, with its oversight of the National Security Agency and CIA’s activities, particularly troubling.

Bachmann in particular clearly learned nothing from her experience smearing Abedin. Not only did she stand by the content of her letter to State, as recently as December, but she also compared a letter from a Muslim advocacy group to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (HT: Faiz Shakir)

I’m hesitant to wade into a discussion on a book I haven’t yet read, but Jonathan Schanzer’s review of Nathan Lean’s “The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims” in today’s Wall Street Journal makes some pretty big claims about the term “Islamophobia” itself, so I’ll confine my comments to those.

“In reality,” Schanzer writes, “Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam”:

Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism — political Islam and its extremist offshoots — and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an “Islamophobe” is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist.

First, while Schanzer severely overstates it, the problem of conflation is real. I noted this in my critical review of scholar Deepa Kumar’s “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,” in which I wrote, “The problem with defining Islamophobia as broadly as Kumar does is that it threatens to divest the term of meaning”:

It is possible to condemn terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of religion, or to have serious concerns over the development of pluralistic democracy under Islamist-controlled governments, without being anti-Islam. What defines Islamophobia is the belief that terrorist violence is somehow inherent to Islam, or that democracy is incompatible with correct Islamic practice. In uncovering Islamophobia here, there, and everywhere, Kumar unfortunately gives form to the straw man arguments of actual Islamophobes, who often cry that they are being silenced for voicing any criticism of Muslims.

Having said that, Schanzer’s assertion about all of “those who deploy” the term is indefensibly broad. I doubt the Muslims of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, or Temecula, California, or South Arlington, Texas, or of the other American mosques that have endured bigoted attacks in recent years would agree with Schanzer’s blithe dismissal of Islamophobia as “simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam.”

Do some use accusations of Islamophobia to stifle legitimate criticism of Islam? Yes, certainly, just as some use accusations of anti-Semitism to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel (as we’ve seen in the recent smear campaign against Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel). But the fact that some use such accusations cynically and recklessly doesn’t mean that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism aren’t real existing problems.

As my co-authors and I noted in our 2011 report, “Fear, Inc,” the term Islamophobia shouldn’t be used lightly. We defined it as “an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.” We also showed that there is a well-funded network of scholars and activists committed to promoting this fear, hatred, and hostility. People can disagree on how serious or widespread a problem Islamophobia actually is in the U.S. (my own view is that it is now on the wane), but Schanzer’s argument that the whole thing is simply an invention of scheming Islamists and Arab governments is obvious nonsense.

A new campaign is seeking to raise money through the internet to push a message of tolerance to counter the slew of anti-Muslim ads that have been posted in public transit systems throughout the U.S.

The campaign, called Talk Back to Hate, is seeking to raise enough money to place advertisements in ten subway stations throughout the New York transit system — at a cost of $7,500. That sum would go towards booking the space, paying a graphic designer a small fee to produce a poster, and printing of the actual advertisement. Ideally, according to their fundraising page, they’ll be able to place ads in an additional ten locations with every $6,500 raised.

Masterminding the project is Akiva Freidlin, a New York City resident, who’s lifting the load of the project on his own. While he’s gotten some input from friends who work in online media, the concept, social media presence, and shooting and editing of the video promoting the initiative were completed by Freidlin.

“I started the project because, like many people I’ve spoken to, these ads feel like an attack on our most basic communal values,” Freidlin said in an interview with ThinkProgress. “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. After seeing the incredible strength and generosity that many New Yorkers displayed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy — the simple decency of people working tirelessly with Occupy Sandy and countless nonprofit and community groups — it seemed especially important to respond with a message that accurately represents the way we try to live our lives here.”

Watch the video Friedlin produced for the campaign here:

The timing of the campaign comes right as a new wave of Islamophobic advertisements are descending upon New York’s subways. Funded by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, the posters feature a picture of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, with a quote attributed to the Quran saying “Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” A similar design ran in the Washington, DC Metro system in October.

Last month, a woman, Erika Menendez, pushed a man onto a subway track who was then crushed by an oncoming train. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up,” Menendez said. She is being charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime.

Thousands of New Yorkers will view these ads everyday for a month at the 39 stations where space was purchased. This round of ads mark an escalation from the previous set posted last year that referred to Muslims as “savages.” Those posters — along with their counterparts in Washington, DC — were quickly matched by religious and other groups promoting the peaceful nature of Islam.

Alaska’s House Subcommittee Of The Select Committee on Legislative Ethics announced on Friday its ruling that a legislative aide for a Republican state representative “violated the Legislative Ethics Act” in her promotion of the anti-Islam group known as Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). The group, founded by noted Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, reportedly had an “operative” work inside a state office for “months.” The legislative aide, a woman named Karen Sawyer, gave David Heckert, the SIOA “operative,” significant access to state resources. Here’s a rundown as described by the Anchorage Daily News:

Sawyer let Heckert use her personal laptop and Internet card, and provided him a cellphone number under her family plan. She herself used state equipment to plan events for the group. She even gave Heckert her key to the Wasilla LIO so he could get in while she was out of town, the report said.

In 2011, Sawyer’s boss at the time, Alaskan state Rep. Carl Gatto (R), sponsored an “anti-Sharia” bill. Apparently, Sawyer’s preoccupation with Sharia became so intense that she reportedly said “my co-workers wonder if I’m getting obsessed with Sharia.” Indeed, she was obsessed. Beyond setting up events for the group, she also created a SIOA checking account and joined the group’s Alaska board. What’s more, the SIOA “operative” held a meeting at a state office.

While it may seem shocking that an anti-Islam group could gain such prominence inside a state office, it shouldn’t be. In 2011, CAP documented the troubling rise of anti-Islam groups like Stop Islamization of America.

Sawyer resigned shortly after the ruling was released. (HT: Alex Kane)

A bizarre chain email sent to district and school board officials in the Dallas area this October titled “IRVING ISD INDOCTRINATING ISLAM” inspired a recent investigation of “Islamic bias” in the district’s curriculum. Despite the outlandish claims, the district requested that an official from the organization that created the curriculum to respond. The results of a 72-page investigation done by the organization were not surprising: there’s a Christian bias in schools, not a Muslim one.

The official told the board that a bias toward Islam didn’t exist, even mentioning that “she hired a ‘very socially and fiscally conservative’ former social studies teacher who ‘watches Glenn Beck on a regular basis’ to seek out any Islamic bias in CSCOPE [the curriculum].” She “asked her to look for anything she would consider the least bit controversial.” The Dallas Morning News has the details of an investigation that mentioned “every religious reference in the CSCOPE curriculum, from kindergarten to high school”:

- Christianity got twice as much attention in the curriculum as any other religion. Islam was a distant second.

- The Red Crescent and Boston Tea Party reference mentioned in the email were nowhere in CSCOPE’s curriculum, although they may have been in the past.

- If there was any Islamic bias in CSCOPE it was “bias against radical Islam.”

This isn’t the first time Texas has debated the perceived presence of too much Islam in its school books. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education banned any books that “paint Islam in too favorable of a light.” The reasoning was head-scratching: “the resolution adopted Friday cites ‘politically-correct whitewashes of Islamic culture and stigmas on Christian civilization’ in current textbooks and warns that ‘more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the US public school textbook oligopoly.’” A Texas based civil liberties advocate said at the time that “the members who voted for this resolution were solely interested in playing on fear and bigotry in order to pit Christians against Muslims.”

It’s not difficult to find examples of the Tea Party’s Islamophobia problem: there was Tea Party Express Chairman Mark Williams who stated that the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” was meant for “worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god,” the Phoenix Tea Party leader who said that “anyone that is a Muslim is a threat to this country,” and Republican Florida Congressman Allen West, who said that “Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion.” But now, at least one member of the Tea Party, Muslim-American Will Coley, is fighting the anti-Islam sect of the group in Tennessee with some success.

Coley, a convert to Islam, noticed the shift toward Islamophobia a few years ago: “literally overnight I saw groups devoted to economics and constitutional limits turn into something else. Suddenly there were invites to see anti-Islam speakers. This crazy anti-Islam message was taking over.” Coley co-founded a group called Muslims4Liberty and has confronted anti-Islam activists head on. Illume Magazine documented Coley’s efforts:

“He also began doing outreach to local Tea Party groups. His original intention was to focus on educational basics about Muslim belief and practice, such as the Five Pillars and the Qur’an, as well as Muslim artwork.

The sudden announcement in the press of anti-sharia legislation in the Tennessee House and Senate changed everything.

“[We] changed the format of the Islam Awareness lectures at the library. Since sharia had become the issue, we decided to devote each week to covering a different area or aspect of sharia,” says Coley. “We invited two Tea Party groups. One cursed at me, called me names and said I was Muslim and therefore they had no interest in speaking to me or hearing anything my ‘lying mouth’ had to say. The other invited other Tea Party groups.”

The talks made an impact: during a later meeting of East Tennessee Tea Party groups, 12 out of 14 voted to “abandon attacking Islam as a tactic.”

Just last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a letter urging Republicans to move away from the Islamophobic stance that has taken hold of the party. The group pointed out that “mainstream Republican candidates have questioned our loyalty and even threatened to undermine the Constitution in efforts to exclude us from the political process, all without any pushback from party leaders.” CAIR recently detailed that nearly 86 percent of Muslim-Americans they polled voted for President Obama and only four percent voted for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. This discrepancy occurred despite the fact that nearly forty-two percent of those CAIR polled said they were independent voters.

Other Republicans like Coley have rejected anti-Islam extremism as well. Last week, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam told a group of Republicans that a Muslim-American adviser of his had “been incredibly unfairly maligned,” adding, “We believe in people having the freedom in our country to exercise their religion as long as it doesn’t violate the Constitution.” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made similar comments about critics of a Muslim-American judge he nominated, saying, “it’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”

On a conservative radio program over the weekend, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went on an anti-Muslim tirade, making accusations about Muslims that ranged from the offensive to the absurd. Within her long conversation with host Jan Markell and co-host Eric Barger, Bachmann suggested that Americans read Islamic study materials to learn about Muslims’ supposed plot to conquer Western civilization, comparing the tactic to reading Adolf Hitler’s infamous book, Mein Kampf.

During the interview, Bachmann said she had proof that there was creeping sharia law — or, Islamic law — infiltrating the United States. That proof? A letter signed by groups of Muslim-Americans asking the Department of Homeland Security to stop distributing anti-Muslim materials:

BACHMANN: That’s right. That’s why we need to know what their belief system is; we need to know what they truly believe. That’s why the most important thing a person could do in WWII was to read the book that the leader of Germany wrote.

BARGER: Mein Kampf.

BACHMANN: Because he laid out very clearly what his intention was, he wasn’t hiding it, the Islamist does the same thing. They do not hide it, they lay it out very clearly. But what we’ve never seen before is the United States aiding and abetting that goal.

Listen:

Bachmann’s Islamophobia has been an important part of her congressional repertoire. Most recently, Bachmann lost a lot of favor among her congressional colleagues when she led the witch hunt of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, with accusations that Abedin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

(HT: Right Wing Watch)