Anti-Muslim Bigot and Fanatic Explains Islam to the FBI and the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force Anti-Muslim Bigot and Fanatic Explains Islam to the FBI and the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force
The Council on American Islamic Relations is making noise about the fact that an extremist, right-wing anti-Muslim rabble rouser was "invited to offer training to state and federal law enforcement officers." It sounds like something that might have happened under the administration of President Bush, but no—this happened on Obama's watch. Robert Spencer, co-founder of the group Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), is the culprit. According to CAIR, Spencer was called in recently to pontificate to the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force. (The JTTFs are law enforcement and intelligence coalitions that began Washington. Soon every jurisdiction wanted the federal dough for a JTTF, and after 9/11 the number of JTTFs exploded.) "Our nation's law enforcement personnel should not receive training from the head of a hate group that seeks to demonize Islam and to prevent American Muslims from exercising their rights as citizens," said CAIR national communications director Ibrahim Hooper. "Robert Spencer is the same individual who claims in his new book that President Obama is waging 'war on America.' " He noted that Spencer recently co-authored the book, "The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America," that sounds a "wake-up call for Americans to stop the Obama administration from limiting our hard-won freedoms, silencing our democratic voices, and irreparably harming America for generations to come." According to Loonwatch, the SIOA is so extreme that it seems almost satirical. Like a Tea Party phalanx of radical anti-Muslim bigots, the SIOA says that its goal is educate Americans "about about the threat that Islamic doctrine and those who support it present to our freedoms, and the future of our democracy and country." Its organizers call themselves "scholar warriors/ideological warriors in the cause of American freedom and Constitutional government," as well as in "the defense of…our society of liberty, knowledge, and human decency." Spencer's co-founder, Pamela Geller, is a piece of work, too. Notes CAIR: Geller has posted images on her blog that include a fake photograph of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a Nazi uniform, another fake image of President Obama urinating on an American flag and drawings purporting to depict Islam's Prophet Muhammad as a pig. In a June 25 blog entry, Geller posted a video claiming that Muslims engage in bestiality. This needs repudiation—or, as Sarah Palin would say, refudiation—from the Justice Department, and quick.
Jul 26, 2010 / Blog / Bob Dreyfuss
Race, Lies and Videotape: Lessons From the Shirley Sherrod Saga Race, Lies and Videotape: Lessons From the Shirley Sherrod Saga
In the wake of Andrew Breitbart's Shirley Sherrod hoax, all too many liberals are ready to proclaim that racism is over, caving to the Tea Party's politics of resentment.
Jul 26, 2010 / The Notion / Richard Kim
Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington
All the strangeness of our American world in one article.
Jul 26, 2010 / Tom Engelhardt
Daniel Schorr and the Art of Making the Right Enemies Daniel Schorr and the Art of Making the Right Enemies
Broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr, like Tom Paine, knew how to get on the wrong side of presidents.
Jul 26, 2010 / Blog / John Nichols
It’s Time to Fix the Estate Tax It’s Time to Fix the Estate Tax
It's been said that only death and taxes are certain. But the "death tax" is anything but certain right now. Costing the Treasury billions, Congress has allowed the estat...
Jul 26, 2010 / Blog / Katrina vanden Heuvel
Finding Racial Inspiration in the Shirley Sherrod Story Finding Racial Inspiration in the Shirley Sherrod Story
The Sunday morning pundits have renewed my frustration with our national reaction to the vilification of Shirley Sherrod. It seems we are insisting on focusing exclusively on the p...
Jul 25, 2010 / The Notion / Melissa Harris-Perry
Zealots and Fake Journalism: The Shirley Sherrod Case Zealots and Fake Journalism: The Shirley Sherrod Case
The Sherrod controversy "was a ginned-up, fabricated story,” The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel explains on The Today Show. “And this country can’t afford...
Jul 23, 2010 / Nation in the News / Press Room
Not-so-Slacker Friday Not-so-Slacker Friday
Charlie Rangel, "Top Secret America" and a new addition to Altercation.
Jul 23, 2010 / Blog / Eric Alterman
National Confrontation on Race National Confrontation on Race
At the end of a long painful week, Shirley Sherrod's been offered a new job with the USDA's Office of Civil Rights and Community Outreach. She's still considering, though, and who can blame her? In an interview on Good Morning America Sherrod said Thursday that she wasn't ready to accept Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's job offer. She said she wanted to hear more from the Secretary and his boss. She wants to know that the President is "fully behind" her." "I would hope that he is..." she said. "I would love to talk to him." And that's where we're at. Yesterday in our studio, Harry Belafonte noted that we don't have a national conversation about race, we have a confrontation. People from different races still don't know one another. As he put it, in an interview with ColorLines: "The person from whom you're thinking of taking life, or land, have you heard their story, have you sung their song?" While the race- like the red-baiting by the Right- is the most obvious crime in the Sherrod story, the question of who believes whom and why, comes next. It may even be a bigger problem -- after all, it's only because of misplaced trust -- that the baiting works. Tom Vilsack, in his apology to Sherrod Wednesday, said he didn't think before calling for resignation. But that's not quite true. He did think. And he chose to believe the baiters first. That's the first problem. Why did they, not she, win his first gut-level confidence? Melissa Harris-Lacewell pointed out on MSNBC Wednesday night, had Vilsack known Sherrod's history better -- he'd have known that her father was shot in the back by a white farmer when she was 17; that she had history with the civil rights movement. That her husband worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and he'd have known of her involvement with a lawsuit, recently settled, representing black farmers, long dispossessed as part of the post-Reconstruction backlash against emancipated blacks. If he'd understood those things, if they'd resonated -- he'd have known they made her a perfect target. If he'd known that -- and felt it -- there's a chance that even at the gut-level, he'd have heard an echo of past, similar fabrications -- not a fact. Indeed, if the entire USDA heard and felt that history, they'd not have dragged their mostly-white feet so long in getting black farmers justice. Eric Holder was right. We're still a nation of cowards on the issue of race. But here's another opportunity to grapple with it. We don't need a debate over whether we're post-racial -- clearly that's settled. As is the matter of whether the Fox News Channel is a journalistic project. What we need now is what Sherrod's asking for from the president -- time to talk. We need true conversation, that starts with learning one another's histories. Not the whitewashed sort that Texas and Arizona textbooks want to teach, but our real histories - and why they matter. It's not just a question for the President. It's for all of us. Do we as a nation have Sherrod's back?
Jul 23, 2010 / The Notion / Laura Flanders
Stop Coddling the McCarthyite Smear Machine Stop Coddling the McCarthyite Smear Machine
The right-wing smear machine that nearly cost an exemplary Agriculture Department official her job should be denounced for what it is: a high-tech, low-rent McCarthyism with no pur...
Jul 23, 2010 / Robert L. Borosage