Geller herself, who is originally from a Jewish background but describes mainstream liberal Jews as “lost souls” and “self-hating wretches”, was given a huge public platform by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News last year during the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. She has consistently been at the forefront of promoting extremely bigoted anti-Muslim propaganda; you can read a comprehensive list of examples via Media Matters for America here and here, and via The American Muslim here.

It turns out that Pamela Geller received an email in 2007 from a Norwegian contact who sounds disturbingly similar to Breivik. Geller approvingly published the email on her Atlas Shrugs blog on 24 June 2007 without naming the author; in response to a query from one of the commenters there, Geller confirmed that she was deliberately hiding the author’s identity so that he would not be investigated and prosecuted. After the recent massacre in Norway, Geller quietly edited her article in order to remove the email’s explicit references to weapons, ammunition and equipment; unfortunately for Geller, her actions have been noticed by multiple readers and the original unedited version of the article had already been cached elsewhere. (More details, including relevant URL links, can be found here).

Therefore, this has the following possible implications:

1. Pamela Geller had personally been in contact with Anders Breivik and even promoted his email on her own website, but she deliberately hid his identity in order to protect him (and did not report him to the authorities) despite being aware of Breivik’s extremely violent rhetoric and the fact that he was stockpiling weapons & ammunition;

2. Alternatively, Geller was not emailed by Breivik himself but there is currently another violent Norwegian out there with aims and attitudes which are disturbingly similar to those of Breivik, and whose identity Geller is deliberately hiding.

The original email to Geller

The original unedited version of the aforementioned email sent to Pamela Geller by the unnamed Norwegian is displayed below. (The screenshot highlights the incriminating remarks which Geller has recently removed). You can also see screenshots of both the original version and Geller’s recently edited version here. Readers will notice that the author of the email sounds strikingly similar to Anders Breivik.

Considering the implications, presumably this matter should be formally investigated by the FBI along with the relevant authorities in Norway.

Incidentally, it is also worth noting that Geller and Spencer’s website for SIOA has suddenly been completely wiped of all content, including all the articles. All that now remains is the homepage displaying the organisation’s name.

Geller’s public response to the terrorist attacks in Norway

Pamela Geller, who spoke at a rally in Norway in 2009 and has published a string of articles attacking Norwegian Muslims, has publicly responded to the recent massacre of children by echoing some of Anders Breivik’s rhetoric; she has derisively described the island camp as a “youth indoctrination centre” and a “Communist/Socialist playground” with a “pro-Islamic agenda”, and has claimed that the children killed would have grown up to become “future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims”. Geller even blames Muslims for Breivik’s terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, Geller has made disturbing remarks about the now-famous group photo of the children (taken a day before the tragedy) by pointedly adding the caption “Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian”, although she subsequently removed her comment from her website after it was widely publicised. And to make matters even worse, due to their connections to Breivik and the resulting backlash, Geller and Robert Spencer are currently soliciting financial donations to protect them from what they claim is a “liberal witch-hunt” against them.

Geller’s connections to the EDL

Pamela Geller also has connections to the English Defence League, the anti-Muslim organisation which was cited by Anders Breivik more than any other group in his manifesto. (Breivik’s own connections to the EDL were recently discussed on Pickled Politics here). Geller has been a vocal supporter of the EDL – in fact, she is on record as stating that she “shares the EDL’s goals” — and she has direct links to EDL financier Alan Lake, recently confirmed as the author of a Breivik-style “Final Solution” blueprint targeting Britain’s entire Muslim population and anyone perceived to be sympathetic towards them, including death threats against British PM David Cameron.

Alan Lake played a pivotal role in facilitating the EDL’s transatlantic alliance with Geller, and is affiliated with multiple extreme Far-Right groups and Christian fundamentalist organisations on an international scale in order to further the EDL’s agenda. Along with a number of other EDL members, Lake even personally attended a demonstration in New York against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” which Geller had organised in September 2010; EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) also tried to attend Geller’s rally, but the American authorities prevented him from doing so.

Jeanne Batalova examined the size, distribution, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics of immigrants from Eastern Asia, South Central Asia, South Eastern Asia, and Western Asia.

Using the most recent government data available, it was found that:

· Immigrants from Asia number more than 10.6 million, accounting for 27.7 percent of all foreign born currently residing in the United States. The largest groups of immigrants from this region are from the Philippines, India, China (including Hong Kong), Vietnam, and Korea.

· While California, New York, and Texas are home to nearly half of all Asian immigrants in the United States, nearly or more than half of the immigrant population in Hawaii (78.2 percent), Alaska (51.6 percent), West Virginia (51.6 percent), Michigan (45.5), and Virginia (41.4) are from Asia.

· Immigrants from Asia are more likely than the overall foreign-born population to be proficient in English and be naturalized US citizens, and are more likely than both the foreign born and the native born to have a Bachelor’s degree.

· Asian immigrants accounted for about 58 percent of immigrant physicians and surgeons and for roughly 60 percent of immigrant registered nurses practicing in the United States.

· South Eastern Asians made up the largest proportion of the Asian-born population, followed by those from Eastern, South Central, and Western Asia.

What is with Asians and becoming doctors huh? And why are so many of them settling in Texas of all places?

What was worst was not the case itself, but how it came about. The unnamed cheerleader (‘HS’) was sexually assaulted by Rakheem Bolton, an athlete at her school. He pleaded guilty to the assault, but the charge of rape against him was dropped, so he was allowed back onto the basketball team (because being convicted of sexual assault isn’t a bar to representing a school it seems).

In a subsequent game, ‘HS’ refused to cheer her attacker when his name was mentioned, which prompted her expulsion from the cheerleading squad. The school deserves plenty of criticism for this, but so do the courts, especially given the way in which they dismissed her appeal by branding it “frivolous”. Whatever the merits of awarding ‘HS’ compensation, the anger of a sexual assault victim at being punished for failing to cheer her attacker is not some ‘frivolous’ gesture. The court said:

“As a cheerleader, HS served as a mouthpiece through which [the school district] could disseminate speech – namely, support for its athletic teams,” the appeals court decision says. “This act constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, HS was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.”

So the school wasn’t at fault for allowing a sex attacker to represent them, rather it was the victim for trying to rebuild her life by taking part in something which mattered to her? Disgraceful.

The iconic Scottish dish is been barred in the US for more than 20 years because its food safety department prohibits the use of sheep lungs in food products.

Haggis, much maligned, is at its best a very tasty dish, which I would heartily recommend.

According to a secret cable released by WikiLeaks, Ahmed Zia Massoud, a former Afghan vice president, visited the United Arab Emirates last year carrying $52 million in cash. Mr. Massoud has denied the report. Beyond the flow of money to Dubai, millions of dollars more are believed to be smuggled through border crossings, and American officials fear at least some of the money is being funneled to Afghan insurgents taking shelter in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

You’d think right-wingers in the US would be happy that someone is exposing their tax dollars being wasted, no? But that’s not even the big story….

The big story is that the New York Times has gone through the cables to expose this:

To a greater degree than previously known, diplomats are a big part of the sales force, according to hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks, which describe politicking and cajoling at the highest levels. It is not surprising that the United States helps American companies doing business abroad, given that each sale is worth thousands of jobs and that their foreign competitors do the same. But like the other WikiLeaks cables, these offer a remarkably detailed look at what had previously been only glimpsed — in this case, the sales war between American diplomats and their European counterparts.
…
The documents also suggest that demands for bribes, or at least payment to suspicious intermediaries who offer to serve as “agents,” still take place. Boeing says it is committed to avoiding any such corrupt practices.
…
King Abdullah II of Jordan, a longtime ally and recipient of billions of dollars in United States aid, told the ambassador in 2004 that “even though the latest Airbus offer was better than Boeing’s he intended to make a ‘political’ decision to have Royal Jordanian buy Boeing aircraft,” a State Department cable said, although the United States still had to help Boeing secure the deal.

It looks like the deals are quite cosy. Billion of dollars in ‘aid’ from the US government goes to dictators, who then use the money to buy expensive planes from US companies, with complete support and ‘perks’ from the US state department and senior diplomats.

That keeps the dictators in business and human rights abuses swept under the carpet, and keeps American jobs subsidised by the US taxpayer.

It also makes big corporations like Boeing and Airbus lots of money and keeps the diplomatic wheels greased.

The best defense of WikiLeaks so far comes from the Spanish paper El Pais itself, which has published this brilliant editorial.

No really – read the whole thing – it comprehensively destroys the naysayers, smear-merchants and useful-idiots who wanted to keep this all a secret.

A key paragraph:

Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don’t try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security.

But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face.

I bet most of 2011 is going to be dominated by WikiLeaks related controversies.

But is it? Greg Sargent writes:

The reason Obama’s attacks on the left smack of triangulation is that he persists on painting the left and the right with the same brush: He presents himself as the last reasonable man trapped between two sides blinded to reason by ideology. Hence his insistence yesterday that he won’t be held to any unreasonable “ideal.” But as irksom as this is, it isn’t really the same as positioning oneself ideologically by arguing that the left is wrong on policy substance, as Bill Clinton did.

Obama’s argument with the left, at bottom, is more a dispute over what’s achievable, and less an argument over what is desirable to achieve. Obama opposes extending the high end tax cuts, just as the left does. His disagreement with the left is over whether there’s another way to achieve the goals Obama and the left agree on: Extending the middle class cuts and extending unemployment benefits.

I suspect I’ll have to repeatedly point out to lefties in the UK for the next two years that Republicans control the lower house and can easily block legislation in the Senate. Well, not yet, from January they will, but the point still stands that Obama could not pass the ‘Bush tax cuts’ legislation without some Republican support.

That is the reality. And there is no point pretending that as President he can just be in a stand-off with the Republicans all the time, because real people would be hurt by not getting unemployment benefits. The problem, it seems to me, is that Democrats just don’t have the discipline or backbone to hit back at Republicans. That isn’t just an Obama problem – it’s a problem with many Democrats.

But what can you do? At this stage, all Obama can do is compromise, push bits through, get re-elected, and push more stuff through. Who said governing was easy? But he is not disagreeing with the left in order to triangulate – like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did. That was triangulation; this is pragmatism.

The news of President Obama’s admiration for Gandhi preceded his visit to India. How Gandhi has inspired his life, and how a portrait of his hangs in his Senate office. He told the Indian Parliament that he owes his own Presidency to Gandhi. So how closely does Obama follow in his mentor’s footsteps?

To sum up Gandhi’s ideologies, they included the rejection of all of the following: war and weaponry, capitalism, large-scale industries, and science and technology. On the eve before his departure President Obama assured an economically depressed U.S., “I’m going to be leaving tomorrow for India, and the primary purpose is to take a bunch of US companies and open up markets so that we can sell in Asia and some of the fastest-growing markets in the world.” And he did exactly that by striking some hard, billion dollars sales deals with India on the purchase of weapons, warfare systems and Boeing aircraft.

Though it might seem like Obama is contradicting Gandhi’s ideologies, he isn’t doing anything that Gandhi himself didn’t.

Funds for Gandhi’s campaigns came from India’s largest and wealthiest businesses, like the Birlas. He vehemently opposed science and technology, as “evil” and said mass transportation, like the railways spread diseases and encouraged communal violence by bringing diverse communities in contact. Still, he regularly used the railways for getting around. He advised the illiterate masses to reject modern medicine. Who knows how many followed his suggested home-remedy of wrapping small-pox patients in wet blankets! But during Gandhi’s famous fasts there was always a medical doctor in attendance making announcements on his declining blood-pressure. As for weapons and warfare, Gandhi had said of the 1878 Arms Act, imposed by the British, which banned Indian citizens from possessing weapons, “History will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want [this] Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the [Indian] middle-classes render voluntary help to the [British] government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear.” The help that Gandhi was asking of Indians was to volunteer to fight for the British in WWI. Upon his urging thousands of Indians fought for the British. There is a more detailed analysis of these conflicts in Gandhi’s ideologies in my book, which was also cited in this Guardian article.

My personal issue with this is that when I look at India’s political landscape from a historical perspective, I see Gandhi as the pre-cursor to the wily, opportunistic, politicians who infest Indian politics today. Their modus operandi is the same. They each have a public persona that is pious and professes to fight for the oppressed (whether it’s on basis of caste or religion or economics), which gets them a devoted voter-following that keeps them in power, no matter how corrupt they are. So we have the Laloo Prasads and Mayawatis, and prime ministers who sit in the mountains writing poetry while there is a carnage going on in Gujrat, and the people of India nod and say, “But our PM is a saint!”

And yet, coming back to President Obama and his mentor, there is one respect in which he surpasses Gandhi! His approach to politics, as of yet, has been refreshingly direct, transparent and earnest. He hasn’t demonstrated another Gandhian trait – one that his predecessors (Clinton and Bush) certainly have – and that is outright denial and defensiveness when confronted on ambiguous issues, and a refusal to be accountable for their own judgements.

Gandhi was obsessive about sexual abstinence. It was not just a personal goal – but one he championed as a global one. He had rules for married couples in his ashram. They were not to even sleep together in the same room unless they wanted to conceive a child. He insanely experimented with food, to weed out the ones that stimulated the libido. However, he also liked to sleep naked with underage girls in his ashram, apparently as a means to control the libido. One of these girls was his great-niece. When a reporter once asked him, if that was Freudian, that he was doing the very things he was professing not to, this great learned man, a practising barrister, said he knew nothing of Freud!

On reflection, it might be a strategy. To a lot of angry independents, Obama has to show that he has learnt the lesson they wanted to send to Washington. If he sounds like he doesn’t care, then they’ll continue staying angry. So he deliberately looks like he’s been “shellacked” and says he will listen to and work with the Republicans going forward.

It’s worth noting he didn’t make any concession on policy. Of course, trying to pass any more major legislation is out of the window until 2012 – the Republican dominated House of Representatives will reject him and they’ll stall him in the Senate (and he no longer has the magic number of 60 to bypass them).

One of my frustrations with the left in the UK and USA is that they completely ignore how much legislation Obama has already pushed, and keep chiding him for not delivering more without looking at the electoral math. Is he meant to conjure environmental legislation out of thin air when almost all Republicans are now climate-change deniers?

Sure he made mistakes, but he’s also delivered a lot. See: whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com.

The trick now is this. He has to force Republicans to take the bait and make policy decisions. That would not only expose they have no plan, other than to scream ‘no’ at whatever Obama says, but also lead to infighting.

He has to get the Republicans to share some of the blame for the 2012 election too, and get independent voters to think: ‘well, we gave Republicans a chance in 2010 and they were just as bad as Bush!’. Which is why, if Obama doesn’t sound like he’s taking on board the Republican win, he won’t win back those voters.

I’m not the biggest fan of this line of thinking. Obama has tried to look bipartisan all the way through (meanwhile pushing some highly partisan legislation) and he lost control of the message. On the other hand, his personal approval rating has remained higher than Reagan or Clinton were at this stage. So maybe it works.

No doubt this will enrage many liberals. But the proof will be in the pudding. I’m betting that while Obama talks compromise and bipartisanship on a national level – behind the scenes he will make lots of small decisions that will push his agenda forward anyway. I’ll be happy with that.

These people stop at nothing in order to silence anyone who exposes their projects (the Iraq war) as one massive scandal.

Readers are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the previous PP article about Beck if they have not done so already. One of the best ways to further understand the various problems with Beck’s worldview and behaviour is to view footage from both his Fox News show and his various radio shows. Some of the following videos are very disturbing indeed.

1. Glenn Beck’s racist diatribe about Indians

He begins by attacking Indian doctors, and follows it with a lengthy bigotry-and-stereotype-riddled sneering rant about India itself, at one point even describing the River Ganges (sacred to hundreds of millions of Hindus) as a name that “sounds like a disease”.

Beck’s remarks may be placed into further context by the fact that he has unashamedly promoted viciously racist books by two Nazi-sympathising authors, one of whom (Elizabeth Dilling) not only attended Nazi party meetings in Germany along with speaking at rallies by Nazi groups in the US, but also described non-white, non-Christian people as “savages” along with calling Hinduism and Islam “debasing and degrading”. Beck himself has explicitly described Dilling as one of his ideological predecessors, ie. “people who were doing what we’re doing now”.

2. A compilation of Glenn Beck’s demagoguery

Numerous examples, including Beck’s remarks about his hatred of the victims of 9/11 along with his own desire to kill many people:

3. The impact of Glenn Beck’s extremely violent rhetoric

Beck previously used one of his radio shows to list the numerous people he’d like to “kill with a shovel” and “line up and shoot in the head”; full audio clip via Media Matters for America here. His continuing use of inflammatory rhetoric and deliberately violent imagery has dangerous real-world consequences in terms of the impact on Beck’s followers and the targets of his rage, as can be seen in the video below:

4. Glenn Beck’s rage attack at female radio caller over healthcare

This has become a notorious clip of one of Beck’s radio shows when a female caller was discussing healthcare and Beck starts hysterically screaming with rage at her. He suddenly goes completely berserk at around the 3-minute mark, and his reaction is far beyond what could be termed a simple (albeit heated) difference of opinion. You can listen to the full audio clip here.

5. Glenn Beck describes the historical slavery of African-Americans as “starting with seemingly innocent ideas”; see video via Media Matters for America here.

The horrific statement above speaks for itself. Beck’s claim that the transatlantic slave trade and the associated institution of slavery in America were comprised of essentially harmless small-scale free-enterprise activities until they were “ruined by excessive government regulation” is also a gross distortion of history, on multiple fronts.

6. Glenn Beck’s fanatical hostility towards President Obama; see videos here and here.

On other occasions, Beck has even repeatedly compared Obama to Satan. You’ll be able to see the sheer scale of his hatred for Obama by the end of the first video in particular (the full version of the incident involved, along with an intelligent analysis of the dangers associated with Beck’s persistent use of such violent imagery and threats, can be viewed here). The second video includes Beck’s bizarre allegation that Obama’s presidency is essentially motivated by a desire for “racial reparations”. Beck has also recently claimed that Obama “may be the worst of all” “evil presidents”.

7. Glenn Beck encourages states like Texas to secede from the United States; see video here.

He made these remarks just a few months after Obama’s election. The last time there was secession, it triggered the American Civil War, resulting in 600,000 American deaths. This was the largest number of American fatalities in any conflict the US has ever been involved with in its entire history, and in percentage-terms it’s the equivalent of 6 million modern-day Americans being killed.

Tip of the iceberg

To describe Beck’s behaviour and opinions as disturbing would be a considerable understatement. Furthermore, the persistent undertone of violence in Beck’s rhetoric also has potentially dangerous consequences; not least because of the widespread access to guns in the US and the type of Americans who may be inspired to act on Beck’s inflammatory assertions, especially his visceral hatred of liberal, progressive people. There have even been instances when people opposed to Barack Obama have actually attended the president’s public appearances whilst “symbolically” wearing assault rifles.

Beck has also been increasingly pushing his propaganda via multiple websites and books as well as his established Fox News slot and radio show. His direct involvement in American politics is further reinforced by the fact that he has begun holding mass rallies involving an audience of (depending on the source) an estimated 87,000 to several hundred thousand people, as per his recent rally in Washington which Sarah Palin also attended.

Unfortunately, the video clips provided above are by no means isolated incidents where Beck is concerned. Readers can access more than 2000 further examples of fully-authenticated footage via Media Matters for America.

This article follows directly from the PP article yesterday focusing on Newt Gingrich. Readers are therefore advised to read that part first before continuing below.

Fox News anchor & Tea Party icon Glenn Beck, who has described himself as a “borderline schizophrenic”, increasingly reminds me of Ron Perlman’s “right-wing media icon” demagogue in the 1995 film The Last Supper. Anyone who has seen that movie will understand exactly what I mean. And like his fictional counterpart, Beck has even started holding huge rallies with exactly the type of audience Perlman’s character was shown as being such a dangerous influence on. Life disturbingly imitating art, 15 years later.

A selection of examples focusing on Glenn Beck, Fox News and the Tea Party

· Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly has stated that Glenn Beck is the leader of the Tea Party movement. Beck has repeatedly declared that his aim is to oppose progressivism, which he calls a “cancer” in American society. Beck has also repeatedly claimed that there is currently a vast, secular, liberal, progressive conspiracy underway to seize control of America and destroy the republic in its present form by manipulating the democratic system and subverting the Constitution.

· As previously discussed on PP, an in-depth investigation by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has revealed the huge scale of the Right-wing billionaire Koch brothers’ involvement in bankrolling & manipulating the Tea Party movement from the very start, with the deliberate intention of furthering their own agenda (also summarised by the New York Times). The Koch brothers have direct links to both Fox News and the Republican Party. Not only have the Koch brothers been doing everything they can to destroy Obama’s presidency, but one of their main aims is to destroy progressivism itself.

· Glenn Beck has an extensive history of extremely violent rhetoric. He has also openly stated that he is going to spend the rest of his life hunting down and “exposing” progressives. Furthermore, he has repeatedly made bizarre comments about his opponents potentially “shooting him in the head”, along with suggesting that the Obama Administration plans to kill 10% of the American population and is deliberately pushing the US towards a civil war.

· Beck has an extensive history of racially-inflammatory rhetoric, including his unashamed promotion of a viciously racist and anti-Semitic book written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling, whom Beck has openly described as being one of his ideological predecessors, ie. “people who were doing what we’re doing now”. Dilling was a Nazi-sympathising American author and activist who described “un-Christianized” “colored people” as “savages,” called Hinduism and Islam “debasing and degrading”, claimed that the world’s Jewish population were to blame for everything negative afflicting mankind, described “racial inter-mixing” as a “communist plot”, praised Hitler’s leadership, and attended Nazi party meetings in Germany during the late 1930s along with speaking at rallies organised by US-based Nazi groups after the start of World War 2.

· Beck has promoted a book by Eustace Mullins which supports conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the American financial system. Mullins was an anti-Semite and a white supremacist who claimed that the very existence of Jews was “an affront to nature”, and also blamed them for 9/11. Furthermore, Mullins wrote a book called “Adolph Hitler: An Appreciation”, in which he compared Hitler to Christ and claimed that both were victims of Jews.

· An on-air rant during his show on Fox News when Beck openly described Obama’s America as being like “the damn Planet of the Apes”, while a picture of Obama was displayed on the video monitor next to him.

· Beck has an extensive history of fundamentalist Christian religious rhetoric. He literally believes that he is fighting on the side of God against Satan, and has repeatedly suggested that liberal, progressive people are “enemies of God”. Beck has also repeatedly opposed “social justice”, claiming that the concept is a “perversion” of Christianity. Furthermore, Beck has claimed that Obama’s interpretation of Christianity is “not something that most Christians recognize”. Ironically, in reality Beck is actually a Mormon, not an Evangelical Christian — in fact, the more extreme elements of the latter group don’t even regard Mormons as Christians at all.

· Beck has been involved in the formation and promotion of the “Black Robe Regiment”, a conservative religious group which Beck claims is composed of “thousands of clergy” and is aimed at increasing the involvement of religion at the core of American society. More details here. The Black Robe Regiment has direct links to senior Republican politician & potential 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In reality, not only does the US Constitution explicitly emphasise the need for the separation of Church and State, but Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli – signed directly by the Founding Father & 2nd US president John Adams in 1797, and unanimously approved by Congress – explicitly states that “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”.

· The explicitly political aspects of Glenn Beck’s recent rally in Washington, despite his claims to the contrary. There is also a considerable amount of information about Fox News’s own “unofficial corporate sponsorship” of both Beck’s recent rally and previous Tea Party rallies. Beck himself has openly claimed that the Tea Party is, in part, “trying to make sure that our [American] children aren’t sold as slaves to China”.

· Beck has made false allegations about Imam Rauf’s wife Daisy Khan, claiming that she said “all Americans hate Muslims”; and in yet another disgusting example of ascribing collective guilt, Beck explicitly blames the Sufis involved in Park51/Cordoba House for the nearly 3000 deaths that occurred on 9/11, and does not differentiate between them and Al-Qaeda. He has also repeatedly attacked Imam Rauf, claiming that “there is something very, very wrong with him”. Furthermore, Beck himself was at the forefront of Fox News’s repeated insinuations about sinister figures allegedly financing the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, with Beck emphasising the need to “follow the money”…..until the investigation by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show revealed that the trail led back directly to Fox News.

· Since President Obama was elected, Fox personalities have expressed hostility towards — and in some cases promoted the actual repeal of — numerous legal and constitutional advancements implemented in America during the 20th century, including progressive developments such as sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The latter was instrumental in outlawing major forms of discrimination against African-Americans along with ending racial segregation.

· Several polls conducted in August 2010 revealed that approximately 1/4 to 1/5 of the American population now believes that Obama is secretly a Muslim, with 60% of the people involved confirming that their opinion is based on the media; according to an earlier poll in March 2010, 57% of Republicans believe that Obama is a Muslim, 45% believe he was not actually born in the US, and 38% believe he is duplicating many of the actions of Hitler. The Right-wing media in America has been heavily involved in promoting these lies.

· In recent months, the level of complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination in the American workplace has even exceeded the period immediately after 9/11; unfortunately this doesn’t surprise me at all, given the recent “Quran-burning” debacle and most of all the manufactured controversy of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”. Fox News in particular has been at the forefront of whipping up hysteria about the latter. You can read a detailed and thoroughly-researched overview of the specific timeline for the American “conservative Right’s” anti-Muslim bigotry from December 2009 to September 2010 here.

Regarding the escalating behaviour of America’s “conservative Right” in general, including several of their key figures, readers are advised to familiarise themselves with the “Big Lie” propaganda technique and the associated historical precedent.

Tea Party icons Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck have recently been going into overdrive in terms of the scale of their extremism. During the past few weeks, there has been considerable controversy over Fox News contributor, senior Republican politician, and potential candidate for the 2012 presidential election Newt Gingrich in particular due to the following remarks he made about US President Barack Obama:

Via Media Matters for America:

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”
…
D’Souza’s remarks: “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost”.

The incredible irrationality (or open bigotry – take your pick) of levelling such accusations against an individual who was not only born in the US but has actually spent very little time indeed in Kenya is obviously self-evident, most of all because Barack Obama met his father only once and was just 10 years old at the time.

Furthermore, using the term “anti-colonial” as an intended “insult” is particularly bizarre, considering the original ideological basis for the creation of the United States of America via the War of Independence and the fact that America’s own Founding Fathers were forcefully opposed to colonialism. Gingrich has subsequently refused to retract his remarks, and has repeated the ‘defence’ that “His [Obama’s] father was from Kenya”. To add insult to injury, he also made references to “Third World mentality” – again, remember that in the case of Barack Obama himself, this is someone who is not actually from the ‘Third World’ at all.

The usage of the term “tribesman” in relation to Obama’s father also panders to negative stereotypes about Africans, bearing in mind that Obama Sr actually received his postgraduate education at Harvard and eventually worked as an economist for the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. Furthermore, it would be unwise for both Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D’Souza to use such an “armchair psychology” approach, considering the possible conclusions that could be reached if the tables were turned and their own behaviour & ancestral backgrounds were similarly “analysed”. Incidentally, the Indian-born D’Souza, whose ancestral roots lie in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, is a convert from Roman Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity whose previous romantic relationships included the right-wing American demagogues Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.

Gingrich’s description of President Obama as “authentically dishonest” is similarly a poor choice of words, considering that Gingrich was the first Speaker of the House to ever be disciplined for unethical conduct by the House of Representatives. And he has even admitted to cheating on his own wife while he was simultaneously leading the Republican attacks against President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair.

A selection of examples of Newt Gingrich’s previous remarks

· Newt Gingrich has an extensive history of bigoted and racially-inflammatory rhetoric.

· Gingrich claims that the Tea Party is “likely to end up as the militant wing” of the Republican Party.

· Gingrich has appeared on Glenn Beck’s radio show and claimed that the Obama Administration is trying to “end….America as it has been for the last 400 years”.

· Gingrich claims that Obama and his administration are threatening America as much as Nazi Germany did; he also compared the “secular, socialist machine” to Nazi Germany. The latter analogy in particular has been publicly condemned by the American Jewish Committee as “diminishing the horror of the Holocaust”

· Gingrich claims that the greatest battle for America “since the Civil War” is underway. Coincidentally, former US president Jimmy Carter recently said on Larry King Live on CNN that Obama is currently having to deal with the most hostile environment of any president in American history, and that even Abraham Lincoln didn’t face this scale of hostility in the run-up to the American Civil War.

· Gingrich has formed a group called “Renewing American Leadership [ReAL]”, which has ties with the “Black Robe Regiment”, a conservative political-religious group recently promoted by Glenn Beck. ReAL was created to “preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage” and involve Evangelical Christians in America’s political process. Readers should note that, in reality, not only does the US Constitution explicitly emphasise the separation of Church and State, but Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli – signed directly by the Founding Father & 2nd US president John Adams in 1797, and unanimously approved by Congress – explicitly states that “as the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…..it has in itself no character of enmity towards the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [ie. Muslims]”.

· Gingrich has compared the Cordoba Initiative’s Park 51 to “Nazis….putting up a sign next to the Holocaust museum”. This is a disgusting example of ascribing collective guilt, not least because the American Sufis involved in the Corboda Initiative have explicitly stated that they are enemies of Al-Qaeda (and in the case of key figures like Imam Rauf, they’ve actually been involved in assisting both the Bush Administration and the current Obama Administration in anti-Islamist-extremism efforts). Furthermore, such public statements sabotage the American government and military’s ongoing efforts to “win hearts and minds” in the Muslim world; for example, it becomes difficult to convince the latter that America is not hostile towards Muslims if a very senior Republican politician is openly claiming that Muslims by default are effectively like Nazis. I doubt that America’s own Muslim citizens are particularly happy to find themselves described in such terms either. It also reinforces Al-Qaeda’s distorted propaganda that America is an enemy of Islam and that Muslims en masse are a persecuted group worldwide.

· Gingrich also claims that there should be no mosques near Ground Zero until there are “churches in Saudi Arabia”, thereby effectively stating that the US should duplicate Wahhabi Saudi Arabian attitudes towards minority places of worship and, to make matters even worse, penalise American citizens for – and hold them hostage to – the actions of foreign governments & foreign terrorists purely because they’re affiliated with superficially the same religion (even if they’re from very different “denominations”).

· Gingrich has made a bizarre threat that American judges who “use Sharia to interpret the Constitution will not remain in office”……even though there is no history of any American judge ever having done this.

An associated article focusing on Glenn Beck will be published tomorrow.

This is of course intensely annoying to supporters of Obama, but I highlight this to make two points. First, a lot of people criticised Obama for not moving on DADT quickly enough. He had good reason to: the Democrats didn’t have enough votes to pass it. And even now they don’t.

Secondly, and more importantly, it once again highlights why sometimes discipline is useful and important in politics. I bet there are more Democrat senators who did not like the idea of passing DADT. And I bet there were Republicans who wanted to. But the Republicans are extremely disciplined, which means they can block legislation and restrict Obama’s agenda. This also helps them electorally.

Democrats on the other hand are badly disciplined, and because some don’t buy Obama’s progressive agenda, continually shoot the party in the foot by stopping their own legislation.

This is worth noting when people use the voting records on TheyworkForYou.com to make a point about how terrible Labour cabinet ministers or MPs were. Their voting record doesn’t tell you anything other than what the leadership wanted. You might argue of course that these means Labour (or Tory MPs) are spineless. Perhaps. But there clear political advantages too in such a strategy. My only regret is that Barack Obama can’t threaten / whip his Democrat senators harder and get them to stand in line.

Dr Chopra was recently interviewed by the New York Times about the book’s contents and his motivations for writing it. It’s a very interesting article, and indicates that as a “semi-fictionalised biography”, the nature of the book may not necessarily be quite what many people may expect. The article also includes some comments about Sufism and current issues such as the ongoing controversy surrounding the Sufi Imam Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative’s Park51 (the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”). Three quotes in particular stand out:

Are you concerned someone will issue a fatwa against you?

I wrote the book factually and with respect. Beyond that, I can’t control anyone’s reaction.

You refer to Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is overseeing the planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. Are you saying Sufism represents the reform branch of Islam?

Yes. Traditional Islam is a mixture of all obedience to Allah, and if that requires militancy, so be it. Whereas Sufism exalts beauty, intuition, tenderness, affection, nurturing and love, which we associate with feminine qualities.

If someone asks what religion you are, what do you say?

I say God gave humans the truth, and the Devil came and said, “Let’s organize it, we’ll call it religion.”

As is now known worldwide, there has been a huge amount of publicity about the now-cancelled “Quran-burning” by Terry Jones, a pastor in Florida who not only attempted to link his own anti-Islam agenda to the ongoing “Ground Zero Mosque” issue involving Park51/Cordoba House in New York, but also views Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism as being literally “from the Devil”. In fact, if he’d wanted to “send a message to radical Islam” as he’d claimed, it would have made far more sense for him to burn a bonfire of photos of Osama bin Laden instead. It’s also worth remembering that by far the largest numbers of victims of Islamist militants have actually been ordinary Muslims; tens of thousands have been killed during the past decade alone.

In relation to the Quran-burning issue in particular, Pickled Politics recently discussed the inordinate weight that many sections of the mainstream media have given to the extremists on all sides; the need for moderates everywhere to oppose the latter has also been emphasised by the Sufi Imam Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative. Readers may also be interested to hear that Imam Rauf was interviewed at great length by CNN last week, and a wide range of relevant issues were discussed in considerable detail (full transcript here).

There are some horribly ironic facts in this situation: Not only has Imam Rauf been actively assisting the US Government with anti-Islamist-extremism efforts for a number of years (both the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration), but Salafi-Jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban actually violently hate Sufi Muslims, because they regard Sufis as “heretics” who are “excessively liberal” and “excessively benevolent” towards non-Muslims. Therefore, we now have Sufis being persecuted by fundamentalist Christians, the American “conservative Right”, and militant Islamist extremists, aided and abetted by Fox News and their allies in the Republican Party.

However, a more encouraging development in America which has unfortunately received comparatively little publicity is the following: During the course of the past year, members of a church in Memphis, Tennessee, have gone out of their way to welcome the presence of a neighbouring Islamic Centre which is in the process of being built. This has very recently been covered by CNN and MSNBC as a positive counterexample to the rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry in other sections of American society.

Via the Huffington Post:

If only Terry Jones, the firebrand behind “International Burn a Koran Day,” were going to Graceland. A small detour could lead him to the doorstep of fellow Pastor Steve Stone….When Stone read in the newspaper that a new Memphis Islamic Center was coming to town, he scrambled to make a sign and took to the street.

“Heartsong Church welcomes Memphis Islamic Center to the neighborhood.”

…..Stone’s counterpart, Dr. Bashar Shala, was overwhelmed by the reception. The sign was only the start of a heartwarming relationship that formed between the two communities. Heartsong eventually decided to let the Islamic Center use their hall while building a new facility.

Besides bringing their own constituencies together for some interfaith activities, Shala and Stone have gone public together with their example. They appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown” on Wednesday night….Stone found one more example that should resonate with observers:

“I heard [Jones] on a station the other day saying about radical Islamists that ‘these are people you just cannot reason with.’ And I thought that was the pot calling the kettle black.”…..Stone doesn’t stand alone. Last week, he blogged that, “The majority of the response both locally, nationally and internationally has been positive and affirming. And honestly, that has been both surprising and heartening to me.”

…..The Memphis Commercial Appeal recently trumpeted a separate local gathering of 150 supporters after the arson [attack on a mosque] in Murfreesboro. Attendees brought their own signs, with slogans like “We’re all in this together” and “My God is not a bigot.”

The original Huffington Post article includes a video clip of Pastor Stone and Dr Shala’s interview on MSNBC. During the weekend I also saw Pastor Stone being interviewed by CNN; not only was he even shown to be kindly allowing the local Muslims to use the church for Islamic prayers, but he also mentioned that the members of his church now view their new Muslim friends as their “brothers and sisters”.

Such positive attitudes are a demonstration of the very best of mankind and of Christianity itself, not to mention being a far more accurate reflection of Jesus’s own teachings and behaviour; furthermore, they are also very much in line with the humane and far-sighted stances of America’s Founding Fathers. Two examples summarising the latter are given below; they also show how far Fox News and the more extreme elements of the Republican Party have diverged from these ideals.

The Founding Fathers on Muslims, Jews and religious discrimination

The first example has already been mentioned previously on PP, but I do not think it can be repeated enough. The following is from Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1797 directly by the Founding Father and 2nd US president John Adams, and unanimously approved by Congress. Adams was the direct successor to George Washington, and the immediate predecessor of President Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion….it has in itself no character of enmity towards the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [ie. Muslims].”

The second example involves President George Washington himself, who was determined to make a statement emphasising the new nation’s secular and egalitarian ideological basis. Therefore, in August 1790, Washington wrote a letter to American Jews. Bear in mind that the original founder of New York had first attempted to expel Jews from the city and then banned synagogues from being built anywhere in Manhattan, a prohibition which was implemented until 1730. Considering the increasingly disturbing pattern of behaviour towards modern-day Muslims which many American Jews have also condemned, Washington’s eloquent statements still have an extremely important message. The inspiring extract below says it all:

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation.

…..It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.

…..May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

During his recent rally in the American capital, Fox News anchor & ‘Tea Party’ icon Glenn Beck made some tearful remarks about how “we need another George Washington” and how he knew that “there was a George Washington somewhere” in the crowd. Considering his extensive history of racially-charged and fundamentalist religious rhetoric, Beck and his allies would do well to take heed of his alleged hero’s own words above.

A few specific groups and individuals could be identified; LGF shows a picture of several English Defence League members, and TPM picture 11 shows EDL activist Kevin Carroll (I previously blogged on Carroll here) [UPDATE: Apparently Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who heads the EDL as "Tommy Robinson", was refused entry at JFK Airport].

Global news media have had one common headline over the past few days – a Christian pastor wanting to burn the Qur’an. World leaders, including the Vatican, have condemned the proposed event in Gainesville Florida, yet violent protests have erupted in parts of the Muslim world.

Pastor Terry Jones is an unpleasant individual. The minister behind the now-suspended Qur’an burning lives in luxury, yet forces his followers to live in accommodation he owns and work long hours for his business unpaid. His own daughter labelled his group a ‘cult’ which had no more than fifty followers until this whole controversy got the oxygen of 24×7 media publicity around the globe.

Book burning is never right. It is not only vulgar, but also invokes memories of totalitarian regimes trying to destroy ideas they do not approve of. Furthermore, it indicates a failure of the burner to combat what is written, leaving them with no option but to try and erase what they could not challenge intellectually. And, in secular societies, such as the United States, a man of god should respect rights of others to practice their religion as they see fit.

This proposed Qur’an burning has been widely condemned by plenty of prominent people; no doubt many of those share the aversion to book burning. But some have condemned the proposed actions of an unknown, leading a handful of people, not because of the hurt it causes to ordinary Muslims worldwide, but the expected violent reactions of a small community of criminals within the Muslim world that would attack and kill innocent people.

Neither the Qur’an burning nor the violent reactions of the small community of Muslims have wider support among Christians or Muslims. In fact, both actions go against the teachings of the religion they profess to defend. Yet the global community is obsessed with the actions of these minorities. But the biggest casualty in all this is the freedom of speech and expression which are integral to a free, democratic and secular society.

Free speech takes many forms, and that includes the right to offend. There is no point in claiming to believe in free speech, unless you also defend the right of people to do things like this (even if at the same time you urge them to stop because it is unnecessarily rude).

The President of the United States, his cabinet members and senior armed forces commanders have all urged the despicable Terry Jones to stop his event and rightly so. The global media, however, chose to highlight phrases within those statements that directly point towards the potential reaction among a small group of hardliners within the Muslim community, who anyway wish to destroy the US and the West. Curtailing freedom of speech due to the fear of what a small group might do is deeply disturbing and goes against the very basic ethos of a democracy – and definitely the ethos of the “land of the free and home of the brave”.

The Qur’an is a book, not a person. Burning it is not the same as burning a person. It is not incitement to violence (and the lack of riots when say, a mother or child is murdered by Al Qaeda betrays a certain hypocrisy), unless you believe in the fallacy that Muslims are inherently violent.

There have been some very sensible reactions to this inherently stupid and hurtful idea of burning a Koran. The one that stands out is the position taken by the Southern California chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) – they plan to counter the burning through education, by handing out thousands of free Qur’ans across America.

Others need to follow their lead and make debate the battleground once again, not book burnings or threats of violence. If we change the way we live and discard our principles the fundamentalists of all colour, creed and religion would win – we must never accept that irrespective of the sacrifices we may have to make. Pluralism and debate make our societies great – and that is what the fundamentalists of all types hate most about us. We must not give them an inch when it comes to curbing pluralism and freedom of speech and expression.

Further to my recent articles about Fox News’s bankrolling of the Republican Party and Jon Stewart’s exposé of the connections between Fox News and the “Ground Zero Mosque’s” alleged Saudi financier, some more information is continuing to come to light about the sheer scale of what is actually going on behind the scenes.

Firstly, let’s start with Fox News’s connection with the Republicans. It goes far beyond the $1 million which the channel’s parent company News Corp has now been confirmed to have donated to the Republican Party:

Via ‘Media Matters for America’:

“In recent years, at least twenty Fox News personalities have endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or causes, or against Democratic candidates or causes, in more than 300 instances and in all 50 states. Republican parties and officials have routinely touted these personalities’ affiliations with Fox News to sell and promote their events.”

The rest of the Media Matters article gives a detailed breakdown of exactly who has been involved, what activities they’ve undertaken, dates & locations etc.

Comprehensive details about the exact amount of money involving people associated with Fox News during the 2010 election cycle alone can be read here. Apparently it comes to nearly $50 million to date, with far more pending.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. During the past few days, both the New York Times and the New Yorker have published articles revealing the billionaires who are actually bankrolling the “Tea Party” movement and doing everything they can to destroy Barack Obama’s presidency. The details below expand considerably on Sunny’s recent PP article which also mentioned the matter, although that article focused on environmental issues.

Via the New York Times:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

…..Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly. The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.

Via the New Yorker:

This article is quite long but meticulously researched, and none of the author’s right-wing detractors have been able to find any factual errors in its contents. The article focuses on the Koch brothers, who have apparently been at the epicentre of the increasingly-militant right-wing anti-Obama movement right from day one; via their group “Americans for Prosperity”, they’re also directly connected to Fox News. According to a Republican campaign consultant mentioned in the article, they even provided the money to start the “Tea Party” movement in the first place.

Both the NYT article and the New Yorker article are definitely worth reading in full, but the scale of what has really been happening can be summarised in the following extracts from the latter:

The brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus…..Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it“.

…..And the brothers’ investment may well have paid off: Americans for Prosperity, in concert with the family’s other organizations, has been instrumental in disrupting the Obama Presidency….Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “With the emergence of the Tea Party,…..the Kochs are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”….Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama….They are out to destroy progressivism.”

…..Phil Kerpen, the vice-president for policy at Americans for Prosperity, is a contributor to the Fox News Web site. Another officer at Americans for Prosperity, Walter Williams, often guest-hosts for [Rush] Limbaugh…..[Glenn] Beck appears to be a fan of the Kochs; in the midst of a recent on-air parody of Al Gore, Beck said, without explanation, “I want to thank Charles Koch for this information.” Beck declined to elaborate on the relationship.

…..The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them.

So, not only is the “Tea Party” movement not quite the “grassroots uprising” which it has been presented as, but it’s been orchestrated and financed right from the start by a handful of individuals who have been determined to keep a very low profile indeed.

As for Fox News, since they’ve repeatedly been encouraging people to “follow the money” in their allegations about Park51/Cordoba House, the same logic applied to them continues to confirm the following facts: Not only are there direct links between Fox News and a Saudi Arabian prince, but there are also direct links between Fox News, the Republican Party, the “Tea Party” movement, and the shadowy Right-wing billionaires who have been revealed as manipulating everything behind the scenes.

As recently discussed on Pickled Politics, last week Jon Stewart and The Daily Show brilliantly exposed the fact that the unnamed person Fox News had been repeatedly claiming was allegedly financing Park51/Cordoba House (aka the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and with implied ties to radical Islamist extremists was actually the Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder of Fox News’s parent company News Corp and an individual closely affiliated with News Corp’s primary owner Rupert Murdoch himself. Fox News have subsequently completely dropped their stories about the shadowy “unnamed financier”, and are apparently also refusing to respond to post-Daily Show queries about the matter. Nevertheless, the issue raises the following questions:

· Why is Prince Al-Waheed continuing to work closely with an American news channel which is a) actively involved in pandering to negative stereotypes about Muslims en masse and b) is simultaneously playing an active role in damaging relations between the West (especially the United States) and Muslim populations overseas ?

· Why are Fox News violating the principles of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, considering that the latter was signed in 1797 directly by the Founding Father & 2nd US president John Adams and ratified & unanimously approved by Congress, and explicitly states that “as the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion….it has in itself no character of enmity towards the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [ie. Muslims]” ?

· Why are Fox News effectively promoting militant Wahhabism as the “default” version of Islam ?

· Why are Fox News persecuting Sufis, the Muslim group which is the most forcefully opposed to Islamist extremism (particularly militant Wahhabism) and whom both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have a murderous level of hatred for ?

· In summary, why are Fox News effectively doing Al-Qaeda’s dirty work for them ?

Some further facts about Fox News have also subsequently come to light. Despite the channel’s claims of being “fair and balanced” and their repeated denials of any bias towards, or association with, any of the major American political parties, Fox News’s parent company, News Corp, has now been confirmed as making a $1 million donation to the Republican Party. This is actually the single largest donation by any corporation, and has a number of ramifications, as summarised in the extracts below:

Via the New York Times:

The News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, contributed $1 million to the Republican Governors Association this summer, the Bloomberg news service reported this week.

The donation makes News Corporation the Republican group’s single “biggest corporate donor,” according to Bloomberg.

….Some progressives seized on News Corporation’s contribution as evidence of bias. Media Matters for America, the liberal media monitoring organization, claimed that “this large corporate donation to the G.O.P. underscores News Corp.’s role as an appendage of the Republican Party.”

Via the Huffington Post:

From Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association:

“By contributing $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, Fox has crossed a bright line. Fox can no longer pretend that it is a ‘fair and balanced’ news organization when Rupert Murdoch greenlights a million dollar contribution to defeat Democratic governors.

“Time and time again, Fox News has defended itself against accusations that it is nothing more than a tool of the Republican Party. We know now that the reality is so much worse: they’re bankrolling the GOP. FOX’s news division is ignoring the fact that its own parent company made a direct and unprecedented partisan contribution to defeat Democrats. This is hypocrisy at its worst, and is a sad day for all of us who believe that an independent and impartial media is vital to our democracy.

“Not only does this contribution severely compromise Fox’s news reporting, but it even breaks Fox’s own promise to its shareholders that it won’t give money to benefit officeholders.”

Glenn Beck rally in Washington

In other news related to Fox, one of the channel’s most controversial and well-known anchors, Glenn Beck, who had previously stressed the need to “follow the money” in order to expose Park51/Cordoba House’s financiers, until Jon Stewart’s own exposé revealed that the trail led back directly to Fox News, organised a “Tea Party”-affiliated rally in Washington on Saturday which allegedly drew approximately 300,000, predominantly white, attendees. Beck himself has subsequently claimed that 500,000 people turned up, although American networks such as CBS along with other media sources such as the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post have given the lower estimate of 87,000. The Tea Party has included incredibly ignorant senior opponents of Park51 who believe that Muslims, specifically Al-Qaeda terrorists, worship a “monkey-god”, thereby conflating them with Hindu devotees of Hanuman. Sarah Palin, who was also present at the rally, has previously stated that she would consider Beck for her running mate if she decides to formally bid for the presidency.

Glenn Beck spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the same location, although Beck claimed that the timing was purely a coincidence and that he was unaware of the anniversary when organising the event. Reverend Al Sharpton, who simultaneously held a counter-rally, has accused Beck of trying to hijack the civil rights movement; Beck, who has a lengthy history of using explicitly religious rhetoric and has a literal interpretation of such matters (as opposed to using such terminology in the purely metaphorical sense), has similarly been accused by some American Christian organisations of perverting the message of Jesus and attempting to hijack Christianity.

Nevertheless, Beck repeatedly made references to “God”, including the need for Americans to “turn back to God” and for God to be “restored to the centre of American life”, not to mention his remarks during his subsequent follow-up show on Fox News that “the message he feels he’s supposed to give the audience is get behind the shield of God”. The rally itself was ostensibly to promote “restoring integrity, truth and honour to America”, a somewhat ironic notion considering Fox News’s dubious track record in such matters.

Glenn Beck: Obama’s America is like “the damn Planet of the Apes“

Beck, who is known to suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and has described himself as a “borderline schizophrenic”, also has a very long track record indeed of using racially-charged rhetoric, and has openly accused US President Barack Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people”; furthermore, during a rant on his Fox News show on 4th August 2010 while Obama’s picture was displayed on the large video monitor next to him, Beck openly described Obama’s America as being like ”the damn Planet of the Apes“.

Beck has even unapologetically promoted a viciously racist and anti-Semitic book written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling, a Nazi-sympathising American author and activist who described “un-Christianized” “colored people” as “savages,” called Hinduism and Islam “debasing and degrading”, claimed that the world’s Jewish population were to blame for everything negative affilicting mankind, described “racial inter-mixing” as a “communist plot”, praised Hitler’s leadership, and attended Nazi party meetings in Germany during the late 1930s along with speaking at rallies organised by US-based Nazi groups after the start of World War 2; for many years after the end of the war, the author continued to make anti-Semitic remarks about several American presidents, including Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

Many South Asian readers of this website will be aware of certain historical precedents for liberal, intellectual, inclusive “bridge-builders” such as President Obama being obsessively opposed (and ultimately defeated) by more aggressive, ruthless and ambitious religious fanatics. As for their modern-day counterparts such as Glenn Beck and other members of the “conservative Right” in America, the behaviour of such demagogues increasingly reminds me of Ron Perlman’s character in the 1990s film The Last Supper. Readers who are familiar with that movie, especially the implications of what can be heard (but not seen) during the last few moments of the final scene, will be aware that the comparison is not exactly flattering.