The mainstream media is beginning to call out the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and its blog ThinkProgress for their anti-Semitic rhetoric, particularly in their over-the-top attacks on defenders of Israel and critics of Islamist ideology.
The Washington-based CAP seeks to increase the influence of “progressive ideas” in the Democratic Party’s policies, and to assist in the election of progressive congressional candidates. Time Magazine described CAP as the most influential outside group in the Obama Administration. Run by Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, and funded by some “progressive” billionaires, the growing influence of the shadowy organization on the Democratic Party has troubled even the mainstream media.
“It is difficult to overstate the influence in Obamaland of CAP,” Time wrote. It is even more difficult to overstate its influence on the media, which relies on talking points created by the Center and its blog, ThinkProgress. And that makes the CAP’s descent into scapegoating all the more disturbing.
Attention to the anti-Israel writings of the ThinkProgress bloggers was first described by Josh Block, a former spokesman for the Clinton administration and a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
CAP blogger Zaid Jilani tweeted: “Israel Firsters fighting each other over whose position on the Middle East conflict is more unreasonable,” and, “... Obama is still beloved by Israel-firsters and getting lots of their $$.” Ali Gharib, national security reporter for ThinkProgress, wrote that Senator “... Mark Kirk (RAIPAC) should care about *anyone* other than Israel.”
In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, wrote, “Invoking the term ‘Israel firsters’ and claiming that Jews are war-mongers is precisely the embodiment of new anti-Semitism. The ADL also reacted to the “Israel Firsters” comment, which it said was “playing into the old anti- Semitic notion that Jews are more loyal to some foreign entity than to their own country.”
Steinberg said, “And Gharib’s inference that Senator Kirk is controlled by AIPAC because he supports tough Iran sanctions is equally absurd and sadly reminiscent of campaigns that allege that Jews control American foreign policy. Gharib’s statement also should be publicly condemned by CAP.”
In a telephone conversation with the Jerusalem Post, University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf, who has authored books on anti-Semitism, said the phrase “Israel firsters” is “dangerous.” The notion of “Israel firsters” “delegitimizes support for Israel” and stokes the “dual-loyalty” charge against American Jews, he said.
Another CAP blogger, Eli Clifton, ThinkProgress’ National Security reporter, cast doubt on the accuracy of a Quinnipiac University poll that referred to the existence of Iran’s “nuclear program.” Clifton also wrote that AIPAC “is now using the same escalating measures against Iran that were used before the invasion of Iraq” and, in any case, that the danger posed by that program is exaggerated for political purposes.
The Simon Wiesethal Center asked if Clifton was guilty of being an “Iranian Firster” by virtue of a reflexive, automatic defense of the mad mullahs’ regime? The ADL expressed “strong disagreements” with the way CAP addressed issues relating to Israel, American-Israeli relations and US policy in the Middle East. “Most of their blogs come from a perspective of blaming Israel for the lack of progress in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.”
CAP’s director of Middle East Progress, Matt Duss, in a ThinkProgress posting compared Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza to racial discrimination. “Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” Duss wrote.
Ben Smith of Politico said: comparing Israeli efforts to defend its citizens against repeated jihadist terror attacks to “segregation in the American South” or apartheid in South Africa is a favorite line of anti-Semitic attack by Islamists in their campaign to de-legitimize the Jewish state. Duss is serving as the Islamists’ useful idiot in repeating the outlandish charge.
Critics argue that singling out Israel as a racist endeavor meets the criteria of the European Union’s working definition of anti- Semitism. Jennifer Rubin, a prominent Washington Post blogger, termed the ThinkProgress bloggers’ language “not merely anti-Israel, they are anti-Semitic.”
Jason Isaacson, the AJC’s director of government and international affairs, told The Jerusalem Post that “think tanks are entitled to their political viewpoints – but they’re not free to slander with impunity. References to Israeli ‘apartheid’ or ‘Israel-firsters’ are so false and hateful they reveal an ugly bias no serious policy center can countenance.” The ADL wrote that it had “raised our concerns directly with CAP about the preponderance of articles critical of Israel.”
CAP also carried on a vendetta against a broader circle of Jewish groups with which they disagreed, such as the non-partisan Simon Wiesenthal Center. One of its ThinkProgress bloggers, Ben Armbruster, called the Center a “far-right” organization which purports to promote tolerance, [but] basically called Obama a Nazi for saying that Israel should return to the pre-1967 borders.”
CAP blogger Eli Clifton joined Media Matters Senior Foreign Policy Fellow MJ Rosenberg in using Twitter to promote an article accusing the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance of pushing “Western groupthink that has for centuries justified wars and countless atrocities against the Arab world . . . [that’s] representative of the way many Americans feel toward Muslims and Arabs — that they are all terrorists.”
The Simon Wiesethal Center responded to the attacks by a statement that unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly difficult in this country to take a position sympathetic to the Jewish state and in favor of the continuation of America’s historic strong alliance with Israel without being called “an Israel Firster” and charged with “dual loyalties.”
The Center continued: let’s admit to the terrible sins that we are indeed concerned about the future of Israel, about U.S. security interests in the Middle East, and about the threat posed to regional and even global peace by Iran’s nuclear program which, according to the International Atomic Energy Commission and other authorities, may be within six to nine months of putting an nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime committed to annihilating Israel.
When it comes to the charges of being “Israel Firsters” and having “dual loyalty,” we not only plead innocent but also counter-charge that these sponsored bloggers are guilty of dangerous political libels resonating with historic and toxic anti-Jewish prejudices.
Lastly, about President Obama, Ben Armbruster’s charge that we “basically called . . . [him] a Nazi” —is a low blow that should disqualify Armbruster from participating in future civil discourse. About calling him “a Nazi,” we condemned that odious label when it was applied to former President George W. Bush by extreme leftists, the same way we have condemned its application to President Obama by the rightist lunatic fringe.
Fear, Inc
CAP on August 26, 2011 issued a report titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” This is a 132-page document that Faiz Shakir, Vice President at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of ThinkProgress.org., and his co-authors purport to expose a sinister network of American "Islamophobes" actively working to divide Americans against one another through misinformation. They are funded by a "flood of cash" in order to manufacture conspiracy theories about Islam, spread hate and bigotry against all Muslim-Americans, and inspire violence toward them, all for financial and political gain.
Fear Inc claims that five men, three of whom are Jews (while a fourth is employed by a Jew – as the report notes — and receives underwriting from two more Jews), have made Islam the most negatively viewed religion in America.
But is the 49 percent negative rating for Islam really attributable to a handful of terrorism experts who managed to convince a fourth of the country to change its view of Islam? Or is it attributable to years of terrorism, war, blood curdling incitements from assorted imams and thousands of dead Americans?
Ed Lasky at American Thinker and Daniel Greenfield in his own article point out that the report is buoyed by an undercurrent of anti-Semitism, stoking "the view that rich Jews operate behind the scenes and use their wealth to control the media and government policy." If Americans view Islam badly, it can only be because a handful of Jewish experts financed by other rich Jews brainwashed them into it.
In “Fear Inc.”, Muslims appear only as victims and Jews appear over and over again as villains, out to make them look bad. There is no acknowledgment that Jews, Christian Arabs and Greeks, whom Shakir’s report also targets, are persecuted minorities in the Muslim world.
CAP’s Fear, Inc. report also went after what it called “validators” of Islamophobia such as former Muslim Nonie Darwish, who has discussed openly her personal experience as a woman living under the yoke of misogynist sharia-based laws in Egypt for years before coming to the United States. Likewise, it condemned Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim and physician, whom the CAP report smeared as a “Muslim validator for Islamophobia propaganda.” Jasser has spoken out about the need for the Muslim community to look inward and reject the loud voices of the Islamist ideologues who would impose their rigid beliefs against freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and human dignity.
The report also castigated a Christian woman and founder of ACT! for America, Brigitte Gabriel. CAP accused Ms. Gabriel of engaging in “crude bigotry” and charged that she “validates the Islamophobia network’s manufactured fears and hate campaign directed against Muslims.”
The truth is that Ms. Gabriel experienced firsthand the Muslim persecution of the Christian minority in Lebanon where she grew up. She has called for “enlightened, educated and westernized Muslims in the community to begin a dialogue to discuss the possibility of reform in Islam just as Christianity and Judaism have been reformed.” CAP, on the other hand, denies that there is any such need for reform.
The report begins with a description of Anders Behring Breivik's assault: in July, 2011 Breivik bombed a government building in Oslo and proceeded to murder many dozens of teens at a nearby youth camp.
Breivik left behind a 1500-page manifesto which, as the authors of the report point out ad infinitum, cites the names and work of some of their so-called "Islamophobes." They concluded that based on Breivik's sheer number of citations and references to the writings of these individuals, it is clear that he read and relied on the hateful, anti-Muslim ideology of a number of men and women detailed in this report.
For instance, they claim that Breivik cited Director of Jihad Watch Robert Spencer 162 times. In fact, "Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto had pasted in hundreds of documents, one of which was an independently assembled collection of quotes from Spencer, Tony Blair and others on Islam." In other words, most of those 162 "citations" came from a document Breivik didn't write, but had inserted into his own.
The authors of the report know that they can't blame the "Islamophobes" directly for the deadly attacks, so they attempt to pin the murders on them in some vague way for having created "a negative world view" of Islam, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended.
The report conveniently doesn't mention that their so called "Islamophobes" have not sanctioned or justified violence. It overlooks the glaringly obvious fact that it is the Islamic supremacists themselves, not their critics, who have created this world view. But it suits the authors' agenda to ignore the Islamists' many pronouncements that they are at war with the West, and to shoot the messengers instead.
Spencer pointed out that the report showed Breivik's incoherent ideology. He cited many, many people. He cited Obama approvingly. He cited the New York Times. He cited Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, etc. He said he thought that his ilk should make common cause with the jihadists." The report purposefully neglects to mention this, because to do so would prove Spencer's correct.
A chapter on funding is designed to leave readers shocked that non-profit organizations receive funds from donors. Daniel Greenfield notes that "the Center for American Progress' campaign for donor transparency, however, stops at its own doors. While its own budget is many times that of the organizations targeted in the report — the CAP's policy is to keep the identities of its own donors secret." It is estimated to receive at least $25 million per year in funding from a variety of sources, including individuals, foundations, and corporations, but no funders are listed on its website or in its Annual Report.
"Fear, Inc." does acknowledge support in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations, the most prominent of the numerous foundations belonging to the international billionaire financier George Soros. CAP is part of the administrative core of Soros's network of non-profit activist groups organized to mobilize resources to advance progressive agendas, elect progressive candidates, and steer the Democratic Party ever-further towards the Left.
The report's methodology consists almost entirely of its authors painting their targets as sinister, conspiratorial bigots rather than addressing the substance of their arguments. The report is packed with ugly terminology designed 1) to demonize these falsely labeled "Islamophobes" as a "small band of radical ideologues" and "misinformation experts" who are intentionally "mischaracterizing Islam," "peddling hate and fear of Muslims," and "raving" of the "overhyped dangers" of Sharia, and 2) to dismiss their work, which is described repeatedly as "sinister," "hateful," "purposively deceptive," "bigoted," "racist," and the like.
The report makes frequent use of the label "anti-Muslim." As Robert Spencer, one of those attacked in the report, puts it: The term "anti-Muslim" is immediate evidence of the manipulative, propagandistic nature of this report: my work, and the work of the other scholars and activists demonized in "Fear, Inc.," has never been against Muslims in the aggregate or any people as such, but rather against an ideology that denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people.
In addition to "anti-Muslim," the report makes many dozens of references to Islamophobia, which it defines as "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."
But in fact, the very concept of Islamophobia is manufactured propaganda used by the Muslim Brotherhood and their leftist support network to demonize and silence critics of Islamic fundamentalism. Claire Berlinski explains how the term did not simply emerge ex nihilo. It was invented, deliberately, by a Muslim Brotherhood front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), which is based in Northern Virginia…
Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the IIIT, describes the strategy behind the word's invention. He was present when the term "Islamophobia"was created. The Islamists decided to emulate the homosexual activists who used the term "homophobia" to silence critics. He said the group meeting at IIIT saw "Islamophobia" as a way to "beat up their critics."
The authors of CAP’s Fear, Inc. report did not seriously address the substance of the legitimate concerns raised by any of the critics of Islamism and sharia law. The authors packed the report with adjectives like “sinister,” “hateful,” “purposively deceptive,” “bigoted,” and “racist” to dismiss what the critics actually said in full context about the Islamist ideology and political-legal system.
The authors furthermore characterizes the anti-jihadists' assertions as "misleading," "inaccurate," and "perverse" "fear-mongering" – without detailing how the supposed "Islamophobes" are wrong. Islam is "the only religion in the world that has a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates violence against unbelievers and mandates that Muslims must wage war in order to establish the hegemony of the Islamic social order all over the world."
After the Fear, Inc. report was issued, ThinkProgress‘ blogger pack circled like wolves to fend off legitimate criticisms of the report. In an unrelenting campaign, they attempted to paint all critics of Islamic ideology and sharia law as bigoted, hate-mongering “Islamophobes.”
Further reading:
Glenn Beck: The controversial Fighter against Hatred towards Jews and Israel
Is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times a closet anti-Semite?
Does the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement have an Anti-Semitic Dimension?
