The New Republic yesterday published a lengthy piece by Washington Times reporter Eli Lake highlighting how the “Republican foreign policy consensus has collapsed” and that the GOP contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination are, as the article’s title says, “all over the map.” Lake notes that there’s an internal strife within the GOP over whether Muslims pose a threat to America — with some neocons and conservatives like Grover Norquist embracing mainstream Islam and others, led by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, believing that, as Gaffney often says, the nation is close to instituting Sharia law.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is running for president and she is currently surging in polls. However, Bachmann isn’t exactly a foreign policy aficionado and she doesn’t talk too much about her views on international relations. Lake writes that when he started asking around about where she stands, he repeatedly was told to “talk to Frank Gaffney“:

Gaffney himself stressed that he had no formal relationship with Bachmann as an adviser. But he did say that he had contact with several of the GOP candidates. And, of Bachmann, he said this: “She is a friend and a person I admire. I hope she is getting the best counsel she can.” He added, “We are a resource she has tapped, I’m assuming among many others.” When I asked him whether Bachmann had been briefed on the Team B II Report, he replied, “We’ve spent hours, over several days with her. I think she’s got the bulk of what we would tell her in one of the more formal presentations.”

So it’s safe to assume that Bachmann is getting a regular dose of Gaffney’s crazy anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Gaffney’s Islamophobia is well-documented. Last year he released a report purporting to document the threat posed by Islamic law in the U.S. (no Muslims actually contributed to the report). Among the report’s wild accusations, one was that members of the Obama administration are part of the “Iran lobby.” Gaffney thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate the American conservative movement. Before her confirmation to the Supreme Court, Gaffney claimed Elana Kagan would impose Sharia law on America. He even accused Gen. David Petraeus of “submission” to Sharia and thinks the president is secretly Muslim.

But Gaffney’s baseless far-right views aren’t limited to his Islamophobia. In addition to flirting with birtherism, as late as 2009, he claimed to have evidence of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “collaborating on all kinds of things.” He has even said Iraq was complicit in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Gaffney also once said that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would lead to reinstating the draft (hasn’t so far) and he claimed the DADT repeal would force some “radical” LGBT “agenda” on the U.S. military.

More recently, Gaffney said Obama’s policy on Israel (which is basically the same as all of his predecessors) will “catalyze the next Middle East war.” He even said Obama might order a military attack on Israel.

This is Frank Gaffney, currently Michele Bachmann’s primary foreign policy adviser.

Former DHS Domestic Terrorism Analyst Daryl Johnson

The greatest threat of large-scale attacks come from individuals and small groups of extremists who subscribe to radical Islamic or far right-wing ideologies, said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START. [...]

Ackerman said nationally, law enforcement has been focused since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 on the threat of Islamic terrorism, even as the threat from domestic anti-government groups has been growing.

“Some people believe we have taken our eye off the ball when it comes to domestic right-wing extremists,” he said.

Sadly, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly isn’t taking these threats too seriously. Daryl Johnson, a former senior Department of Homeland Security domestic terror analyst, told the Southern Poverty Law Center last month that “there is just one person” at DHS who is focused on these issues. Why? Shortly after President Obama took office, DHS produced a report warning of the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and that domestic extremists were looking to recruit Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

However, the report was leaked and right-wing media figures and Republicans in Congress were outraged. “The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired,” Newt Gingrich said at the time. Michelle Malkin called it a “DHS hit job on conservatives.” Bowing to the right-wing hysteria, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually ordered the report withdrawn.

Johnson, who describes himself a Republican, said that after the controversy, DHS gutted his unit:

When the right-wing report was leaked and people politicized it, my management got scared and thought DHS would be scaled back. It created an environment where my analysts and I couldn’t get our work done. DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies. Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. [...] Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” eco-terrorists, the whole gamut.

“Sad to say, we were right on this one. History has shown that,” Johnson said, referring to the murder of abortion provider George Tiller and neo-Nazi James von Brunn who killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

When news broke on Friday of what appeared to be a terror attack in Norway, right-wing pundits in the U.S. were quick to point the finger at Islamic extremism, with some even publicly doubting that the killings could be motivated by right-wing views. Then when we finally learned that the terrorist was Anders Breivik, a blue-eyed, blond Norwegian apparently motivated by anti-Muslim nationalist views, the Islamophobes and alarmists on the right began contorting themselves to express support for his cause while dismissing his tactics.

Many of these pundits, walking back their early accusations of Islamic terror, fell back on the notion that “jihadists” were still a threat no matter whether or not the Norwegian attacker was one.

“It’s one of the first instances since Oklahoma City when terrorism on this scale was not Islamic,” said a former Bush administration official on Fox News. (At the time, conservatives also tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Islamic terrorists.)

“There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West,” wrote Washington Post neoconservative blogger Jennifer Rubin from an American perspective.

But according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, the Europeans — part of Jennifer Rubin’s “West,” to be sure — actually faced a minimal threat from Muslim extremist terror. Here’s a chart highlighting Europol’s numbers from 2009 and 2010:

So out of 543 failed, foiled or successfully carried out terror plots in Europe in 2009 and 2010, only five — less than one percent — were related to Islamic extremism. (HT: Dan Gardner)

ThinkProgress intern Sarah Bufkin contributed to this post.

Former State Dept. Official Christian Whiton

Today on Fox News, former Bush administration State Department official Christian Whiton acknowledged that the case in Norway “wasn’t Islamic terrorism,” but he quickly downplayed terrorist acts committed by those such as Breivik, saying it’s the first of its kind since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Whiton then attacked the Norwegians for not being serious about terrorism and claimed that European countries are susceptible to terrorism because they’re “neutral in the war on terror”:

WHITON: This wasn’t Islamic terrorism. It’s one of the first instances since Oklahoma City when terrorism on this scale was not Islamic. But steps you can take to defend your people and your government and your society against Islamic terrorism would also come in handy against lone wolfs as this is turning out to be. It just looks like the Norwegians didn’t happen to take them, nor did they approach terrorism in what frankly, was a serious manner I’d say.

GREGG JARRETT: Islamic terrorism is a problem in the Scandanavian countries. Were they just sort of turning a blind eye to it? [...]

WHITON: You know the problem in a lot of European counties is they think by being neutral in the war on terror as if any civilized society can be, that they won’t face the threats that we face. But that’s just not true, we do know al Qaeda and Islamic terrorist movements are targeting Scandanavian countries just like the rest of us.

Watch it:

Of course Whiton is wrong that the Oslo attack is the first act of terrorism since 1995 that didn’t involve Islamic extremists. Various nationalist and political terror groups have committed violent terrorist acts around the world since then, for instance the Real Irish Republican Army bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland in 1998.

CNN contributor Erick Erickson had a similar bait and switch today on his Red State blog. He acknowledged that he was “wrong” to blame the Oslo attacks on al-Qaeda affiliated groups, but then defended his position saying that Christians aren’t as violent as Muslims:

First, those of us on the right who point out the now fairly common ties between terrorists and Islam do so largely because the secular left has become willfully naive. The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam. Read Andy McCarthy if you suffer on the delusion that it is not mainstream.

With Christians, it is rather rare to see a self-described Christian engage in heinous terrorist acts. In fact, in as much as there is an Arab Street filled with muslims more often than not cheering on the latest terrorist act of radical Islamists, you will be very hard pressed to find a Christian who does not condemn the act regardless of the faith of the person doing the killing.

Erickson then asked, “why is the left so gleeful that the Norwegian is a ‘conservative Christian’?” No one is “gleeful” that Breivik is right wing or a “Christian fundamentalist.” Responding to terrorism requires dealing in facts and dispelling speculation based on pre-conceived ideology.