@SarahPalinUSA, Finding Racist Extremism on the Right Is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Hey, ex-Gov. Palin, we’re starting to see a trend here.

We’ve talked before about the planned Cordoba House Islamic center in New York City (here, here and here), which Fox News and the shrieking right like to call the “Ground Zero Mosque” – even though it’s neither at Ground Zero nor a mosque – but it’s worth revisiting if only because it has proven to be a veritable bottomless pit of right-wing histrionics. It’s the gift that keeps giving, so to speak, if the gift you’re looking for happens to be Islamophobic lunacy.

And speaking of lunacy, few conservatives plumb the depths of crazy quite like one Pamela Geller, the wild-eyed banshee of right-wing Muslim-bashing. Ms. Geller, you may recall, believes that al Qaeda “is Islam” and once nearly swooned when a guest on Sean Hannity’s propaganda show said that moderate Islam “doesn’t exist.” Not surprisingly, she also has a big problem with Cordoba House:

The Ground Zero mosque is an offensive insult, it’s a stab in the eye. I have no problem with mosques across the city. But we’re talking about history, and Islamic history, of building triumphal mosques on the cherished sites of conquered lands.

“A stab in the eye”? That’s a little melodramatic, even for Pamela Geller.

But if you think Pam’s a bit, well, nuts when it comes to Islam generally and to the Cordoba House in particular, wait’ll you get a load of her partners in crime – John Joseph Jay and David Yerushalmi. These two are worse than the worst parody of right-wing hate and paranoia. But don’t take my word for it; here’s the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch on Mr. Jay:

Nobody on the far right, it seems, has been able to surpass Geller for anti-Obama epithets with a Muslim-bashing twist. She has called the president “a third worlder and a coward” who is anxious to “appease his Islamic overlords.” On another occasion, she wrote that Obama “wants jihad to win.” But now a founding board member of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) — a group founded by Geller, apparently to act as an umbrella for the SIOA [Stop the Islamization of America] she co-founded — is doing his best to be even more vitriolic than her. His rants, coupled with his apparently close relationship to Geller, cast new doubt on Geller’s already extremely doubtful claim to be a reasonable critic of Muslims and Islam generally.

According to the Daily Kos, AFDI board member John Joseph Jay recently has posted a series of truly vicious anti-Muslim rants — apparently without the benefit of a capital letter function on his computer. “if islam kills non-believers as a matter of religious doctrine, then why should muslims expect to be free of retribution in the name of those islam kills?” he wrote. “why should muslims get a free pass? if it is right for muslims to kill non-believers, then why is it no less right for the rest of us to kill muslims?”

In another screed, the Daily Kos said Jay wrote: “there are, friends, no ‘innocent’ muslims. they obey. and they obey the dictates of the koran on jihad. and, they obey the commands of local clerics. in this, they have no choice. because, friends, there is no ‘free will’ in islam, one obeys the dictates of allah.”

Um, what? Pamela Geller’s associate in the stop-the-mosque nonsense advocates genocide? And yet Ms. Geller is a regular guest on Fox News. Whoa.

But, it seems that Mr. Jay wouldn’t be satisfied with anti-Muslim genocide. Nope. He’s apparently looking for all-out revolution here at home:

Last month, Jay expanded on his advocacy of violence against Muslims to include people in positions of power. He commented on his blog about a magazine article regarding America’s “ruling class” as follows: “friends, if you wish to retain and preserve individual virtue, you are going to have to kill in order to do so. if we are to excise the ruling class, it will be with violence. they used violence to attain their privilege, they use it nakedly in the form of the s.i.e.u. [an apparent reference to the SEIU, the Service Employees International Union] and black panther thugs in elective politics to maintain it, they contemplate relocation camps to preserve it. … buy guns. buy ammo. be jealous of your liberties. and understand, you are going to have to kill folks, your uncles, your sons and daughters, to preserve those liberties.”

I’m going to have to kill members of my own family? That’s taking the old “Tree of Liberty” thing a bit too far, don’t you think?

And then there’s Ms. Geller’s lawyer, David Yerushalmi, who’s helped Geller’s “American Freedom Defense Initiative” organization place anti-mosque ads on New York’s public transportation system. Says Charles Johnson:

This is a good time for some background information on Pamela Geller’s associate David Yerushalmi, who is an advocate for criminalizing Islam itself and imposing 20-year sentences on practicing Muslims. Yes, really.

He’s not simply anti-Muslim, though; Yerushalmi also wrote a now-infamous article titled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion, Part II,” in which he advocated a return to a pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, and the restriction of voting rights to white male land-owners. Again … yes, really.

Here’s a lengthy article at Talk To Action on the bizarre views and causes of David Yerushalmi: Anti-Semitic White-Supremacist Orthodox Jew Tries To Ban Islam In US.

Yerushalmi has deleted as much evidence of the “On Race” article as he could; he removed it from the Internet Archive and the Google cache, and put his entire website behind a registration wall. But here’s a PDF that contains the full article, and it’s as ugly and twisted a piece of racism as anything I’ve ever seen. Yerushalmi opens by calling Islam “an evil religion,” and “blacks … the most murderous of peoples.”

A quote:

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society - the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?

Well, at least Yerushalmi only wants to criminalize the practice of Islam, as opposed to actively killing practitioners of the faith. But really. These are the folks supposedly respectable Pamela Geller hangs out with.

More to the point, this is the true nature of the opposition to Cordoba House. They’re not people who worry about the feelings of 9/11 victims and their families. They’re not people who are themselves pained by the idea that an Islamic center would be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero, nor are they people who really believe Ground Zero is sacred ground. They’re just haters, plain and simple. They hate Muslims, and, if Mr. Jay and Mr. Yerushalmi are any indication, they democracy and they hate African Americans too.

But there’s no racism on the right, eh, Ms. Palin?

The Dangerous Nature Of Sarah Palin’s Lies & Hateful Rhetoric: NY City “Mosque” Controversy

At this moment there are 2,884 comments and a majority of them are like the ones shown in the screenshot.

Our good friends over at Palinsgate has shared a post with us. I'll give you some rather than cross-post the whole thing, and request that you pop over to their site for the rest:

This is the post Sarah Palin made:

An Intolerable Mistake on Hallowed Ground

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg responded to my comments about the planned mosque at Ground Zero by suggesting that a decision not to allow the building of a mosque at that sacred place would somehow violate American principles of tolerance and openness.

No one is disputing that America stands for – and should stand for – religious tolerance. It is a foundation of our republic. This is not an issue of religious tolerance but of common moral sense. To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks. Just days after 9/11, the spiritual leader of the organization that wants to build the mosque, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, suggested that blame be placed on the innocents when he stated that the “United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened” and that “in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.” Rauf refuses to recognize that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of our ally, Israel, and refuses to provide information about the sources of funding for the $100 million mosque. Rauf also plays a key role in a group behind the flotilla designed to provoke Israel in its justifiable blockade of Gaza. These are just a few of the points Americans are realizing as New York considers the proposed mosque just a stone’s throw away from 9/11’s sacred ground.

I agree with the sister of one of the 9/11 victims (and a New York resident) who said: “This is a place which is 600 feet from where almost 3,000 people were torn to pieces by Islamic extremists. I think that it is incredibly insensitive and audacious really for them to build a mosque, not only on that site, but to do it specifically so that they could be in proximity to where that atrocity happened.”

Many Americans, myself included, feel it would be an intolerable and tragic mistake to allow such a project sponsored by such an individual to go forward on such hallowed ground. This is nothing close to “religious intolerance,” it’s just common decency.

- Sarah Palin

First of all, lets dispel some of the misinformation. Cordoba House is NOT, I repeat NOT "at Ground Zero" as Sarah and her ghostwriter would have you believe. [...]

Now lets address this "building a mosque" claim.

This is not a building being erected, but a renovation of a building that is already in place. This building will be named "Cordoba House" and will include many many more things than just a prayer center, which by the way is already in place and being used regularly [...]

Now just for a bit of a refresher, lets revisit the 1st Amendment to the Constitution shall we? You know that pesky document that Sarah Palin keeps demanding we stick to when she feels she has another rant coming on?

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law "respecting an establishment of religion", impeding the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.

Seems to me that Sarah Palin and those opposed to this Community Center are trying to impede the free exercise of religion by demanding that this place not be allowed to go forward, and they are also interfering with the right to peaceably assemble by demanding that this community center be moved to a different location simply because they dislike the specific religious beliefs of those who are going to be using the prayer center. [...]

There is so much involved in this subject that we could go on for days discussing it, but the main thrust of this post is supposed to be about getting the facts out there, and showing the dangerous attitude of the people who are supporting the misinformation that Sarah Palin and those like her are distributing in the name of politics or personal bigotry.

How are people reacting to her facebook note? Good question, and I have some answers. It isn't pretty. Not pretty at all and it shows how she stirs anger and is quite happy to do it as we've seen from the many incidents where she has sought to divide people in this country. [...]

So as is obvious there is a lot of hate, misinformation and dangerous attitudes among Sarah's followers. The anger displayed toward individuals who have a different belief system than they do is plainly evident and exceptionally frightening. To believe that Muslims are all bad, or that this Community center is some kind of dangerous place or disrespectful slap in the face to those who died is a joke, but sadly one that is becoming more and more popular with a select group of citizens.

How sad that this is what so many feel, when they themselves are likely to cry foul if someone tried to trample on their right to free religious expression.

"What better place to teach tolerance than near the site where hate tried to kill it?"

That comment stands out for me.

Sarah Palin could have taken this opportunity and used it to show herself to be a true Christian, and instead she went down the opposite path. She could have shown herself to be supportive of the Constitution like she professes herself to be, but again that is not the path she wanted to take.

I am not surprised by the behavior she displays and encourages in people, but I am saddened by it. I have been paying close attention to her for what feels like an eternity but in reality is has only been a few years. In those few years, I have watched her lash out, encourage rage and anger in her supporters, lie, deliberately misrepresent, and bilk people out of money, and all of it to feed her own ego, and to become a celebutaunt on the national stage.

She is a dangerous person and one who should not be ignored, as she will do everything in her power to continue to encourage dangerous behavior from as many people as she can. That is what she does and it is who she is. Sadly she has conned a lot of good decent people into believing her, but I am always hopeful that people will finally remove the blinders from their eyes and simply look at the facts which show how shallow, egotistical, and narcissistic her behavior is. [...]

If they are going to continue to claim that this "Mosque is being built at Ground Zero", which we have now proven to be two separate and distinct lies, (it is a building that is being renovated & it is not at Ground Zero) then you have to ask yourself, what else are they willing to lie about? The answer to that is ..whatever they want to lie about in order to scare people and use that fear to bring in support both emotional and financial.
They certainly aren't going to tell people that this center is housing much more than a prayer room (which is already being used) because that would seem much more reasonable and not so frightening to people who are already leery of those who are "different".

What is so frightening and damaging to the community about restaurants, bookstores, swimming pools, art exhibitions and worship groups? Nothing about those things are frightening at all to reasonable people so that is why they aren't mentioned, and that is why this is being labeled a Mosque instead of a Community Center.

I had been trying to write a conclusion to this piece and had rewritten it several times when I noticed someone had linked to this article by Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic who wrote a wonderful piece titled "Why Sarah Palin Endangers American National Security (and Israel's, as Well)" [...]

I agree with his conclusion as it was what I was trying to put into word. She is more than just simple-minded, she is willing to take on any cause if she thinks it will keep her in the news, and she doesn't care about what the issue is, nor does she care to understand the issue. For Sarah it has always been about making noise and riling up her supporters in whatever way she can.

There is no doubt that there are people in the world who want to do harm to others and they will always find a reason to do so in their own warped minds, but we should not be playing into their hands and into their deliberately misinformed viewpoints by ensuring that their supporters are seeing us act out in the ways that these terrorists claim we will and do. Sarah Palin and those who blindly follow her are dangerous to this country for the simple reason that they seek to divide us, which weakens us in many different ways, on many different fronts.

We will never completely eradicate terrorism. There will always be those who seek power through intimidation and fear, but we can fight it, and we only lose to them if we allow ourselves to change who we are and what we do out of fear and intimidation.

There is much more. Patrick is very thorough. He has video, photos, quotes I left out. Please go take a look.

"Refudiating" Sarah Palin

Cross-posted at The Political Carnival. To see my entire post, please go here.


Palingates has a series of tweets you absolutely must read, but I'll give you a few samples

It all started with the Refudiator herself, Former Half-Gov Illiterata McLackBrain. She decided today would be a swell day to get on the Twitter Machine and confirm her utter stupidity.

Let's take a peek at her first in a run of doltish tweets:

Interestingly, even Illiterata realized how Bush-like she sounded and deleted the original tweet. But not before Little Green Footballs grabbed that screen shot.

And we thought Boy Georgie was a moron.

Nonetheless, McLackBrain couldn't suppress her urge to come up with what she must have thought was the ultimate comeback:



"Got to" drop my jaw upon reading how Illiterata just compared herself to one of the most mindless men alive, one of the most intelligent, and ... ... Shakespeare forgodsake!

And finally, one more excerpt, but again, you'll miss out on all the fun if you don't follow the Palingates link to the whole run.

To see the rest of this post, including Twitter responses from Keith Olbermann, go here.