Justin's Political Corner
On a conservative radio program over the weekend, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went on an anti-Muslim tirade, making accusations about Muslims that ranged from the offensive to the absurd. Within her long conversation with host Jan Markell and co-host Eric Barger, Bachmann suggested that Americans read Islamic study materials to learn about Muslims’ supposed plot to conquer Western civilization, comparing the tactic to reading Adolf Hitler’s infamous book, Mein Kampf.
During the interview, Bachmann said she had proof that there was creeping sharia law — or, Islamic law — infiltrating the United States. That proof? A letter signed by groups of Muslim-Americans asking the Department of Homeland Security to stop distributing anti-Muslim materials:
BACHMANN: That’s right. That’s why we need to know what their belief system is; we need to know what they truly believe. That’s why the most important thing a person could do in WWII was to read the book that the leader of Germany wrote.
BARGER: Mein Kampf.
BACHMANN: Because he laid out very clearly what his intention was, he wasn’t hiding it, the Islamist does the same thing. They do not hide it, they lay it out very clearly. But what we’ve never seen before is the United States aiding and abetting that goal.
THE BIKE IS IMMACULATELY polished and gleaming in the late afternoon South Florida sun. A bald eagle in full squawk graces the gas tank, white stars checker the front fender, and a tattered red-and-white-stripe motif designed to evoke Old Glory covers the rest of the body. Any hint of grime or dust is purely aesthetic; 22 years in the military teach a man to clean up after his mess. The helmet sits right-side-up on the saddle and is adorned with two rows of jagged teeth and a bright red tongue, like the nose of an old Spitfire; two US Army logos; six bullet-hole decals; and, down at the bottom, the signature of its owner, who has just roared up: retired Lt. Colonel Allen B. West.
It’s mid-April and momentarily West, the Republican congressman from Florida’s 22nd District—an imaginatively carved Tetris piece stretching from West Palm Beach to the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale—will take the stage at the Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party in Wellington. He’ll call the tax on tanning salons enshrined in the Affordable Care Act “racist,” the president “an abject failure,” and, directing his assembled battalion’s attention to a small group of placard-bearing liberal protesters, ruminate on his sanity: “They say Allen West is the craziest person that ever set foot on the House floor! Let me tell you who’s the craziest person to truly ever set foot on the House floor. That’s President Barack Hussein Obama.”
SINCE THUMPING DEMOCRATIC REP. Ron Klein at the polls in 2010, West has taken dead aim at the lily-livered sissies he believes are running America into the ground—and the Islamic extremists he’s convinced are poised to seize control. He has suggested that Democratic leaders—whom he calls “chicken men“—”get the hell out of the United States of America”; considers drivers with Obama bumper stickers “a threat to the gene pool”; and says black Democrats are trying to keep his fellow African Americans “on the plantation”—and he’s the “modern-day Harriet Tubman” helping them to escape.
Of the 94 freshman congressmen who came to Washington in January 2011, none captured the id of the tea party movement—and the ire of the left—as perfectly as West, an Army veteran who retired in 2004 after firing his gun, Jack Bauer-style, past the head of an uncooperative Iraqi detainee. Reborn as a conservative icon, he is the torch carrier for a political culture and a region where, more than anyplace else in the country, radical Islam is the existential threat lurking around every corner.
LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY: Allen West does not regret a single Red-baiting, Obama-hating thing that he’s said during his career in political office. “I’m not like the president,” he snipes. We’re in the lobby of the Palm Beach Synagogue, a pastel-colored building squarely in the middle of an upscale, palm-tree-lined community, where a man’s affluence is measured by the height of his hedges.
West, wearing a green camouflage yarmulke and the same leather Rolling Thunder vest, has just held forth in the sanctuary for 45 minutes on debt and taxation and radical Islam, sprinkled, here and there, with token Westisms like “Katie, bar the door!” I was told by his staff we’d have a few minutes to chat after the event, but now he’ll have to keep it short because he needs to take a leak.
“My parents raised me very conservatively, and I think that’s what you have to understand,” he says when I ask about his upbringing. “That’s what you have to understand”—it’s a phrase West uses a lot, usually followed by a discourse on the Koran (he says every American should read it) or the Progressive Era.
He grew up in a middle-class household in Atlanta, the son of a World War II veteran. His parents, Herman and Elizabeth, were both Democrats, but with a conservative bent. They taught him to read the stock index in the Journal-Constitution and to scorn the thought of a handout. “The Democrat party was once upon a time a very conservative group,” he says. West is uncompromising, right down to his grammar. Every sentence is a proxy war in the larger struggle between patriots and the “people in this world that just have to have their butts kicked,” and as a consequence he never—never—gives the Democratic Party the dignity of an adjective.
By the time he was assigned to a base 20 miles north of Baghdad in 2003, Lt. Colonel West had command of 650 troops; he was tasked with making inroads with the locals. “There I’d be, an inner-city kid from Atlanta sitting on the floor like Lawrence of Arabia, with 30 Arab sheiks,” he later told the New York Times. That August, West received intelligence about a potential plot on his life. A week later, the convoy he was scheduled to be traveling in was ambushed. A few days after that, West arrested an Iraqi policeman, Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, who he believed had inside knowledge of the plot.
In testimony at an Army hearing that November, West would state that he had watched four of his subordinates beat the detainee, delivering blows to Hamoodi’s chest and legs. Finally, he stepped in. West took the detainee outside, pulled out his 9 mm, instructed Hamoodi to place his head in a barrel full of sand, and fired into the barrel. The detainee screamed, called for Allah, and started to talk. But the house Hamoodi suggested searching yielded no leads; he was released 45 days later and was never charged with a crime.
The high-profile case effectively ended West’s military career. He avoided a court-martial but was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and was banished to the rear in a noncombat role. West didn’t regret a thing: “If it’s about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I’d go through hell with a gasoline can.”
FORT LAUDERDALE, DECEMBER 30, 2008—for South Florida’s anti-Muslim activists, this was their Lexington and Concord. It came in the middle of the Israeli conflict in Gaza, and a group of Muslim, pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a protest across the street from a smaller band of Israel supporters. “It was the day that the jihad was uncovered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” says Tom Trento, founder of the United West, a group dedicated to exposing radical Islam in the United States and Europe. And it was also the day that West, who had just lost his first congressional race against Klein, solidified himself as a hero of the cause. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the video,” Trento says.
Trento is referring to the shaky footage he shot. In it, you can hear him muttering periodically that things aren’t looking good. After an imam leads the demonstrators in their evening prayers, some of the younger Muslim men cross the street to confront the counterprotesters. Trento was bracing for violence. “And then, out of the shadows, there comes Allen West,” he says. West joined forces with a handful of police officers and, like a modern-day Charles Martel, pushed back the Muslim demonstrators.
There’s Walid Phares, a leading scholar of “stealth jihad” and a onetime political adviser to a Lebanese Christian paramilitary group, who taught Trento at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (and currently advises Mitt Romney on foreign policy). Joe Kaufman, a friend of West’s who runs the anti-Islam group Americans Against Hate, lives in Broward County; Joyce Kaufman (no relation), a local conservative radio host, campaigned against the grocery chain Publix for including the Islamic New Year in its wall calendar and was—briefly—tapped by West to be his chief of staff. Citizens for National Security, based out of Boca, works to raise awareness of Islamic propaganda in school textbooks, among other places. (In 2011, West invited the group to Capitol Hill, where its leaders announced they had a list of 6,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood currently living in the United States but could not release it due to security concerns.) Reverend O’Neal Dozier, a black pastor who’s a GOP fixture, preaches out of a Pompano Beach church where West has spoken from the pulpit; Dozier’s claim to fame, at least as far as Islam is concerned, came in 2006, when he protested the construction of an Islamic center by handing out comic strips attacking the Muslim faith. The list goes on.
WEST DIDN’T JUST ride the tea party’s wave in 2010—in many respects, he is the movement’s political avatar. Three years ago, West’s second congressional campaign was catapulted forward at a tea party rally where he captured activists’ hearts with one of his trademark fiery (critics would say unhinged) speeches aligning their cause with that of the American Revolution. “As a great man said in December 1776: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls. When the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from his duties.’ If you’re here to shrink away from the duties, there’s a door—get out,” he told activists during his last campaign. “But if you’re here to stand up, to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.”
PATRICK ERIN MURPHY, the 29-year-old vice president of an environmental cleanup firm, would like nothing more than to make West a congressional has-been.
He “really just spews hatred,” the political novice who’s running against West says when we meet at his Palm Beach Gardens campaign headquarters in April. “He has no problem lying. He has no problem distorting the truth. There’s no place for that in our country.”
“And,” he adds, “the latest one about the progressive caucus being communists—you can’t say something like that and not expect consequences.” Palm Beach Democrats have adopted West’s jabs as a badge of honor, literally; volunteers at the opening of Murphy’s campaign office wrote “communist” on their name tags and addressed each other as “comrade.” “I never saw so many communists in the same room,” Murphy joked to supporters.
It will be a close race, though money won’t be an issue for West. One benefit of regularly accusing the opposition of high treason is that it opens up wallets across the country. He had $3.3 million on hand after the first quarter, an enormous sum for a House race. Murphy, meanwhile, has so far banked nearly $2 million—more than almost any other Democratic House challenger in the country.
I’d call Frank Gaffney an intellectual bomb-thrower—but, he’s not an intellectual. Instead, he treats politics and national security the way James Holmes treats movie-theater patrons: don’t worry about aiming, just shoot to kill. Fortunately for his victims, Gaffney mostly fires duds, such as the ones he’s been shooting lately at Huma Abedin, an aide to Hillary Clinton, whom Gaffney calls an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, is also married to former Representative Anthony Weiner (of Weinergate), who was one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress while in office, which (as Jon Stewart pointed out) makes Abedin deep-cover, indeed!
Gaffney, of course, is the extreme-right-wing chief of something called the Center for Security Policy. As RightWeb and SourceWatch report, Gaffney is involved in, connected to, or cited by anti-Muslim crazies who oppose mosque-building, generated volumes of conspiracy theories, and he was even cited by the Norwegian terrorist who killed scores of campers in 2011. How far right? For years I’ve watched Gaffney’s Islamophobic and ultrahawkish antics, including a long-running battle he’s had with Grover Norquist, the taxophobic head of Americans for Tax Reform. Years ago, while writing a profile of Norquist for The Nation, I watched Gaffney denounce some of Norquist’s conservative allies for (gasp!) wanting to cut waste, fraud and abuse out of the Defense Department budget. Never! Shrieked Gaffney. More to the point, Gaffney blistered Norquist for his ties to (gasp!) Muslims, including the fact that Grover married a Palestinian Muslim. Gaffney’s constant refrain is expressed most neatly by a report published by CSP called: “Shariah: The Threat to America.”
But his latest broadside against Huma Abedin, by all accounts an accomplished, middle-of-the-road public official, may take the cake—in this case, the nut cake. Gaffney found willing accomplices in Representative Michele Bachmann and a coterie of fellow ultraright members of the House of Representatives, and their absurd diatribe against Abedin led John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to denounce Bachmann et al.
Does this have any lasting political meaning? Well, since large numbers of Republican-leaning voters consider Barack Obama to be a Muslim, and since even some Democrats in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia agree, the answer might be: Yes. Unless Gaffney and his ilk are once and for all exposed as kooks.
Joining Bachmann’s errant jihad were four other less-than-stellar members of the House: Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland.
Censure and/or expel Michele Bachmann from Congress!
Link to Bachmann’s challenger, Jim Graves: jimgraves.com
Republican candidate and tea party darling Ted Cruz made an appearance at a campaign forum last night, and took the opportunity to advance some of the far-right’s favorite baseless conspiracy theories — including a claim that American law is in danger of being replaced by Islamic law:
“In response to questions from attendees, Cruz said he hoped to see U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder impeached and opposed the law that prohibits tax-exempt churches from endorsing candidates from the pulpit.
When asked about whether he viewed “Sharia Law” as a problem in the United States, Cruz said “Sharia law is an enormous problem.”
It’s not. It’s not even a small problem. Although it is common for politicians on the far right of America’s political spectrum to claim that courts are slowly replacing American law with Islamic law, these claims have no basis in reality. Few American courts have ever even mentioned Sharia or Islamic law, and those that have generally only do so in contracts or similar cases where a party before the court agreed to be bound by Sharia law.
Cruz and Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are locked in a runoff election to be the Republican nominee to replace outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).
The 10th Circuit Court Of Appeals struck down Oklahoma’s ban on Sharia law today, declaring that the Sooner State’s move violated the United States Constitution.In November 2010, Oklahoma voters approved a ballot initiative to prevent Sharia law from being used in the state, something that even the measure’s defenders could not identify ever happening. (To learn more about what Sharia law actually is, read this brief primer.) Following Oklahoma’s lead, Sharia hysteria soon made its way to other states – including Arizona, Louisiana, and Tennessee – orchestrated by a small group of anti-Muslims misinformation experts we profiled in a report entitled Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.
Before the Oklahoma law could take effect, however, a federal judge issued an injunctionblocking the measure while courts considered its constitutionality. The 10th Circuit, which includes one George W. Bush appointee, a Carter appointee, and an Obama appointee, heard oral arguments in September 2011.
Today, the 10th Circuit unanimously affirmed the lower court’s permanent injunction. In a 37-page decision, the three-judge panel agreed that Oklahoma’s Sharia ban violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and was therefore unconstitutional. On page 32, the 10th Circuit identified the heart of the matter, that Oklahoma’s move had no basis in reality but simply singled out Muslims for discrimination.
Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve. Indeed, they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma. See Awad, 754 F. Supp. 2d at 1308; Aplt. App. Vol. 1 at 67-68.
Given the lack of evidence of any concrete problem, any harm Appellants seek to remedy with the proposed amendment is speculative at best and cannot support a compelling interest.15 “To sacrifice First Amendment protections for so speculative a gain is not warranted … .” Columbia Broad. Sys., Inc. v. Democratic Nat’l Co., 412 U.S. 94, 127 (1973).
The 10th Circuit is the highest court to date to strike down an anti-Sharia law. It is not yet clear if Oklahoma will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
Today’s decision is a seminal moment in the ongoing battle against Islamophobia. As anti-Muslim individuals continue to push Sharia hysteria in other states, many legislators may think twice before passing a law deemed unconstitutional by the 10th Circuit.
H/T: Scott Keyes at ThinkProgress Justice
