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.”

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.

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.

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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.

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.)

The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board apologized for its July 25 column responding to Anders Breivik’s attack on Oslo’s government headquarters and a youth camp. The editorial board observed that their column “inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process.”

The Post’s initial response to the massacre was perceived by many as a criticism of Norway’s immigration laws and a defense of Breivik’s far-right views on multiculturalism. The July 25 column read:

Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right.

The Jerusalem Post column brought a torrent of negative publicity on the paper, leading the paper to apologize for it’s kneejerk response which had come dangerously close to defending the ideologies held by Anders Breivik. The column today read:

The editorial squarely condemned the attack, saying that “as Israelis, a people that is sadly all too familiar with the horrors of indiscriminate, murderous terrorism, our hearts go out with empathy to the Norwegian people.”

However, it also, inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process. [...]

[We] hope that the Norwegian government and people will accept the Post’s apology and forgive us for any offense or hurt caused by our editorial and columnists at this sensitive time.

The paper’s apology noted that the Islamophobic views expressed in Breivik’s manifesto ran eerily close to the “Nazis’ attitude toward Jews.”

Less than two weeks after the Norway massacre and the murder of 77 people, Islamophobe Robert Spencer appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” to talk about Islam. Spencer and his blog, “Jihad Watch,” were mentioned 162 times in Norway shooter Anders Breivik’s manifesto, but Robertson nevertheless found it fitting to welcome Spencer on his show to talk about the “cult” of Islam.

Robertson, completely disregarding the overwhelming evidence that Robert Spencer’s writings inspired Anders Breivik’s thinking about Islam, wondered why the U.S. media is so anti-American:

ROBERTSON: Tell me what it is about the media today that seems to be in favor of radical Islam. Why do they want to put down anybody who tells the truth about this cult.

SPENCER: Well I tell you, I think the unpleasant truth about it is the media being hard left is essentially anti-American and so anything that’s American, that’s western, that’s Christian, that’s Judeo-Christian, they hate. And so they see Islam and it’s non-western and non-Christian and they love it.

ROBERTSON: But how can they love murderers? These people are murderers. They kill American soldiers. They kill innocent civilians.

SPENCER: Well, you know, to be sure it’s not that they’re approving of that directly because they are propagating the propaganda line that Islam is a religion of peace, that it’s been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists. They constantly gloss over and sometimes outright deny that fact that Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to promote violence and incite peaceful Muslims to commit acts of violence. These things are matters of fact. It’s pretty obvious from what jihadists themselves say.

Watch it:

Spencer’s rationale for blaming Islam for all terrorism committed by Muslims is interesting because he doesn’t hold himself to the same standard. According to Spencer, if a Muslim terrorist justifies his violence with Quranic verses, then Islam as a religion should be held responsible for the killer’s actions.

But Spencer and his blog had numerous citations in Anders Breivik’s manifesto and, while Spencer has never explicitly advocated violence, Brevik clearly interpreted his writings as a call to action. While Robertson and the “700 Club” may offer a safe venue for Islamophobes to go unchallenged, Spencer is falling back on repeating his hate filled message while applying a ludicrous double-standard to himself and his allies. (HT: Right Wing Watch)

Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. and AEI fellow John Bolton has spent the past several weeks positioning for a presidential run. His candidacy, should he choose to run, will in all likelihood hinge on national security and challenging the Obama administration’s handling of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and U.S. – Israel relations. But while Bolton is making his presidential ambitions increasingly obvious, he has been quiet about his ties to right-wing, anti-Muslim bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

Spencer and Geller, who appear to have ideologically inspired Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and received 174 combined citations in his manifesto, have a long history with Bolton going back as far as 2005 when Geller endorsed George W. Bush’s nomination of Bolton as U.N. ambassador.

Since then, Bolton has sat for multiple interviews with Geller and even wrote the foreword for Spencer and Geller’s 2010 book “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.” Bolton heartily endorsed their book, writing:

This book carries forward the ongoing and increasingly widespread critique of Barack Obama as our first post-American president. What it recounts is disturbing, and its broader implications are more disturbing still. MostAmericans believe they elect a president who will vigorously represent their global interest, rather than electing a Platonic guardian who defends them only when they comport with his grander visions of a just world. Foreign leaders, whether friend or foe, expect the same. If, by contrast, Obama continues to behave as a post-American president, our adversaries will know exactly what to do.

Spencer and Geller, in a passage eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto, wrote:

Transformational issues facing this nation and the world at large—the world at war, creeping Sharia, the perversion of the rights of free men—hang in the balance during the Obama administration as never before. The stakes could not be higher. On foreign policy, Europe has lain down. The political elites have capitulated to Islamists and to multiculturalists. Europe is committing slow cultural and demographic suicide. It seems unclear that they could hold up their end even if America did the heavy lifting.

Most recently, Geller endorsed Bolton’s candidacy for president, writing:

I can think of no one more qualified for the office of the President. The depth and breadth of his knowledge and experience is the antidote to the sick, debilitated state of the country which Obama has inflicted upon us. We need extraordinary in the extraordinary times. We need gravitas.

Now that Geller and Spencer are widely understood to have inspired Breivik’s attack — The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement characterizing them as “promot[ing] a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the pretext of fighting radical Islam” and observed that Breivik was influenced by ideology “both in Europe and the United States, which views Islam as an existential threat to the world and sees leaders and governments as collaborators in allowing Islam to ‘infiltrate’ the West.” Bolton has yet to publicly denounce his blogger allies, but if he runs for president, he should explain whether he still endorses their views.