Oh, Liberty Lamp, we have missed you so! One of our favorite blogs on the internet is back to do a tad bit more damage to the psyche of those racist-loving right wingers that think they are flying under the radar when they are actually crashing to the ground. They return with a report on how one of our regular hatemongers David Horowitz is flipping out over a new report by the Center for American Progress about the anti-Muslim network he has created. The concern over these elements has ramped up significantly since the shootings in Oslo this summer (which honestly pisses us off, actually. Folks, we as a society know these people and have all the info about them beforehand. Isn’t it a good idea to be proactive against them BEFORE they kill someone instead of pretending you are doing the world a favor by protecting freedom of speech that actually needs protection from them?) Horowitz, for his part, sees the handwriting on the wall, and since he doesn’t want to to be the modern-day King Belshazzar, he is trying to do damage control. Now if his attempts is enough for the Liberty Lamp to return to the playing field, it has GOT to be the best stuff on Earth (sorry Snapple)!
The Liberty Lamp
My, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, gentle readers– we haven’t gone anywhere.
We subscribe to a heck of a lot of email listservs, and among them JihadWatch and the David Horowitz Freedom Center are among our most prolific subscriptions. Every day, we’re treated to a landslide of the most paranoid and ridiculous delusions about the coming floodtide of fifth-column Muslim ninja insurgent terrorists, walking amongst us– unseen!
On August 26, 2011, Center for American Progressreleased a large and comprehensive report entitled Fear, Inc.The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, which details the funding and propagation of Islamophobic rhetoric in the United States.
This report (which can be viewed in its entirety here) does little more than report publicly available information about who funds organizations like Jihadwatch and figures like David Horowitz and Pam Gellar, then goes to on to document the tangible effects this sort of rhetoric has on society.
The existence of such a report in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s mass slaughter in Norway is timely and necessary, and the exercise of bringing transparency to shady matters is the epitome of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. That Breivik was a fan (if not a pen-pal) of Gellar’s makes his inclusion in this report all the more salient.
This report therefore directly threatens the careers of the members of the cloyingly titled “Stop Islamisation of America” movement.
Naturally, the content of the emails changed to apoplectic fits about how the “Islamic Supremacist Propaganda Machine” is silencing critics of Islam and is waging a war against freedom of speech.
David Horowitz and Robert Spencer seized this opportunity to needle their audience for hard cash– claiming the best way to defend freedom of speech was to send them as much money as you possibly could.
Here is one of Horowitz’s begging and BAWWWWing e-mails:
Your reward for throwing your money away on this “heroic act of patriotic freedom-fighting?” A copy of David Horowitz’s latest book. ( OH JOY!) Freedom isn’t free, you know.
The Center for American Progress report is obviously not an assault on freedom of speech. This is more apparent when it is compared with the actions of the groups it exposes– who routinely demonize and scapegoat all members of a religion as dangerous and duplicitous savages. Does applauding people who commit mass murder as a valid form of “combat” against said religion count as “defending freedom of speech?” Only in the mind of the murderer.
The only real difference between blindly ranting that all opposition to “pro-America” activists is funded by an Islamic conspiracy or a Jewish conspiracy is the site on which it’s published. If we were to simply change “Muslim” to “Jew” in your screeds, it would be indistinguishable from the anti-Semitic bile that is pumped out of Stormfront or VNN; sorry, Mr.Horowitz– that makes you a racist.
MORE TRANSPARENCY ON WHO IS FUNDING RACIST POLITICAL GROUPS
Another impressive report on transparency, issued on August 30, 2011, was produced by Center for New Community– in which it details the organizational and financial structure of the anti-immigration movement in the US. As it turns out– and as we have reported in the past– all of t
he major anti-immigration organizations in the US have been founded by, receive funding from or are otherwise associated with a man with white supremacist ties named John Tanton.
It is also worthy to note that the Scaife Foundations that supply Tanton with money are related by blood to the same Richard Mellon Scaife that funds a bulk of the anti-Muslim bigotry in this country and are also mentioned in the above Center for American Progress report.
Oh, what a tangled web.
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