All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Next up is Max Blumenthal on the phone from Israel today.
Of course, he keeps the website at maxblumenthal.com.
He's the author of Republican Gomorrah.
And, uh, you've got to read this piece at alternate.
Meet the right wing hate mongers who inspired the Norway killer.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How are you?
It's great to be on with you.
I'm good.
Good, good.
Now, um, I like to tell people pretty much every day on the show that they have to go and read your Tom dispatch piece from last December called, uh, the great fear and, uh, yes, describing, uh, the machine, the very small group of people who are pushing this hate and fear all Muslims angle on the people of, uh, not just America, but of Europe as well.
And, uh, you've just done the very best work of, uh, doing the sorting of who's who and who they all work for and what the hell is going on here.
And you break some new ground in this piece, uh, meet the right wing hate mongers who inspired the Norway killer.
And I'll just be quiet and let you explain what you found here.
Um, well, basically what I tried to do with this piece is, um, go a step further than I had in the past, um, where I simply laid out the network, showed their, um, extreme rhetoric and, uh, kind of described the connection between, um, Anders bearing Brevik, the Norway terrorist, um, and, um, the people who were involved who, you know, created the apparatus of this, um, Islamophobic fascist fear.
And so what I noticed and what I've just been noticing, but, um, as a characteristic of the rhetoric of the people who Brevik cited in his 1500 page manifesto, which is online, um, people like Robert Spencer, the pseudo academic voice of Islamophobia who is cited 55 times, or people like the neocon Daniel pipes who is cited 18 times people like Pamela Geller, the, um, you know, shrieking, rabid, hysterical, um, paper mache, faith maniac, um, who is cited numerous times in, um, Brevik's manifesto.
They have the tendency to call for armies to kill, uh, Muslims or promote images that support mass killing of Muslims and leftists, the kind of people who Brevik would have called cultural Marxists.
And by the way, Brevik is borrowing this phrase from an American conservative, uh, writer and, uh, you know, quasi intellectual named William Lind, much of his rhetoric comes from America, which is interesting.
And so you have a whole network of people who over the years have consistently supported state terror against Muslims by the, the American army, by NATO and by Israel.
And very recently, um, when the second flotilla, um, was prepared to disembark from Greece to the Gaza strip to break the Israeli siege, uh, there were a number of semi-prominent conservatives on Twitter who are openly calling for the Israeli army to massacre these Americans on the U S boat to Gaza.
So they, these are supporters of state terror and Brevik who is influenced by them, basically just kind of went a step further.
He took their rep, he put their words into action, but he was alone.
He kind of acted alone and not in the capacity of a state terror.
He was just a lone terrorist and that kind of embarrassed them and forced them to condemn him.
So my point was that, you know, this Islamophobic network as hysterical and dangerous as it is, has been, um, sort of acting within, um, somewhat, um, culturally tolerated, acceptable realms.
And now Brevik has put them on the spot because he's gone outside the, um, kind of terror that is wielded by official armies and celebrated by, you know, national holidays and populations and done it himself and said, these people influenced him.
And so, and so now on only now is this Islamophobic international being held accountable.
All right.
Well, one footnote there.
Um, I feel like I gotta add that William S.
Lynn himself is anti-war and always was, uh, throughout this whole last decade.
Um, but you're right that he sure, uh, he is the guy, as far as I know, that coined the phrase cultural Marxist and is very much kind of, uh, you know, talks in that whole Western civilization being undermined by the left kind of language, that kind of thing.
But, uh, he certainly did promote the kind of genocide that, uh, Pamela Geller and her friends promote.
No.
And it's interesting to, to, um, look at Brevik as a representative of the, uh, new ultra right, because he's not exactly pro war in the kind of imperialistic way that the neoconservatives are.
And it reflects a new shift in the Republican party, which, um, substantially opposes, um, the U S intervention in Libya.
Um, they are more interested in focusing on Sharia and what they consider the, uh, what they call the demographic Jihad being waged by Muslim immigrants.
So they want the army to sort of serve as a bulwark against immigration and against the East and to act as sort of a defensive force against, uh, against, you know, what, what they believe to be an Islamic caliphate trying to spread into the West.
And that's, that's the rhetoric we're hearing from them.
It's not about invading their countries anymore.
And although they revel in the violence that's meted out by armies against Muslims, it's about, uh, some sort of crusade to save Western civilization.
And, um, Brevik sort of invented his own.
Go ahead.
It almost seems like there's a split among the neocons.
Like you mentioned Libya there.
And I, I think like the Paul Wolfowitz has said, oh yeah, you know, we love democratic revolutions everywhere.
Whether, you know, America's helping like in Libya or we're just, uh, you know, pretending like this is what we wanted all along in Egypt or something like that, but it was really, as far as I could tell, kind of the dregs of the neocon movement, the Frank Gaffney's and stuff who, who came out with this whole, you know, support our dictators.
Don't let them fall kind of attitude.
Right.
Um, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Um, and these are the people who've been run out of the Republican establishment, so they had the latitude to make these kinds of inflammatory statements, um, while other neoconservatives who are still operating inside respectable beltway channels are looking for a spot on Mitt Romney's campaign, seeing, you know, where they can work inside the Republican party.
So there's a split within the neoconservative movement and there's a general split between the neoconservatives and the Republicans as the economy tanks and Americans grow less and less willing to stomach foreign interventions at the same time.
I mean, this is all leading to a shift in the ultra right because, um, they're not going to give up on their racism towards Muslims, which is really an inversion of anti of classical antisemitism.
They're just going, they're just going to couch it in a, in their domestic agenda and, and focus more on these kinds of bills that figures like David Yerushalmi are introducing in the States to ban Sharia law.
And that in a way is extremely dangerous and maybe more dangerous because they are attacking American citizens.
I mean, we have to remember Michelle Malkin was able to, um, write a book calling for the internment of American citizens who are Muslim and make it a bestseller because conservative groups bulk bought the book.
And now we're hearing on the, on the Republican campaign trail, and I'm not letting the Democrats off the hook for their, for, um, you know, their foreign policy prescriptions, which are, um, occasionally pretty Islamophobic, but on the Republican campaign trail, we're hearing calls for loyalty oaths for Muslims who serve in the federal government, including in like the post office.
And I mean, this, this is, this is where the, so this is where the right is going in Europe and the U S.
All right.
Uh, it's Max Blumenthal on the line from Israel today.
The piece at alternate is called meet the right wing hate mongers who inspired the Norway killer.
And, uh, he's also got another one at max Blumenthal.com called, uh, Anders Bering Breivik, a perfect product of the axis of Islamophobia.
And we'll be right back after this it's anti-war radio.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Max Blumenthal.
Max Blumenthal.com is the website.
The new piece at alternate is meet the right wing hate mongers who inspired the Norway killer.
And now max, um, you mentioned, uh, David, you were shawmi, uh, who is behind, uh, there's a great New York times article we talked about on the show the other day, uh, about how he's behind all this legislation, trying to get the states to pass these laws, banning Sharia.
And there's a quote from him in this times piece where he says, you know, if this thing passed in every state without friction, it would not have served its purpose.
The purpose was heuristic to get people asking this question.
What is Sharia?
And that goes right to something that you talk about in, in your article here at alternate, which is that this is really all about foreign policy.
I mean, as, as you said before the break, there's a risk here, you know, especially with, uh, the Bush and Obama legal precedents that they could just start rounding people up, uh, like Michelle Malkin wanted, uh, back in three or whatever.
But, uh, mostly what this is about, as you say, in your article is just dehumanizing Muslims in general, in, as part of the new counter-terrorism strategy.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, we've seen, um, first of all, the David Yerushalmy piece in New York, in the New York times, I mean, it's not, it's sort of peripheral to our conversation, but the reporter, Andrea Elliott, who covers the, uh, Muslim beat for the times characterized Yerushalmy's views on race is controversial.
Yerushalmy has written that, uh, he believes whites are genetically superior to Brown and black people.
So I don't, I don't know how that's controversial.
Usually in a controversy, there are two equal sides with legitimate points, but anyway, back to, um, to what you're saying.
I mean, we've seen, um, since nine 11, the FBI enact what I would consider to be an Islamophobic policy of targeting Muslim leaders with very little evidence, creating stings inside mosques, paying off people to collaborate with them and create, um, sort of a sense that there are terror cells all over the United States and time and time again, they're unable to convict these Muslim leaders on any of the charges.
And they've had to actually change the law.
Um, even going through the Supreme court to establish that, uh, people can be prosecuted for material support for terror, which means that a group like the Holy land foundation, the largest Muslim charity in the United States, its leadership was sentenced nearly to life in prison for sending money into the Gaza strip through charities, which were controlled by people affiliated with Hamas that had no connection to terrorism or violence.
These same charities were funded by the American red cross and USA ID.
And the prosecution even said, we're not accusing them of supporting terrorism.
So they, they've actually changed the laws, um, according in, in, in order to it, it just have successful prosecutions of Muslims.
The FBI has released a pamphlet, um, for its agents, um, during training about the Muslim community, which says that Muslims have eighth century values.
Um, you can read about this online.
The pamphlet's been reproduced.
Someone like named Waleed Shobot, who's a professional con artist whose claim to fame was that he was a PLO terrorist who somehow found the light of Jesus and is now campaigning against Sharia and against terror.
Of course, he was never in the PLO.
He's been revealed as a fraud is speaking at law enforcement conventions and is speaking on the federal payroll for federal law enforcement officials, telling them how to fight Muslim terror.
And in one speech, he said, one tactic we have to employ is to kill them and their entire families.
Um, that's happening below the radar.
And people that we've been talking about in this conversation are pulling the strings, so it's really up to American citizens to hold their government accountable because it's already gone over the line.
It's not just about, you know, challenging them in the private arena.
It's about actually revealing that the government is internalized.
A lot of these canards about Muslims that have been invented by people like David Yerushalmi.
Well, you know, my friend Anthony Gregory pointed out that when George Bush was the president, he was, you know, the head conservative alpha male or whatever.
And he would sit up there and say, we're not at war with Islam.
It's this extreme interpretation that these few people believe in only, which itself is a big lie.
Obviously, it's a tactic in a war going on here.
But anyway, he said, but we're not at war with Muslims in general.
And but that once George Bush was gone and Obama came in, and especially when he might be a secret Muslim, too, and all this nonsense, that the lid was taken off the pot, basically, and it just completely boiled over.
And so now not just do the hijackers hate us for our freedom because of their radical Islamist Islam or whatever, but now not just Muslims did it, the Muslims and they're all out to get us.
Their caliphate is going to take us all over if we don't stop them all.
Yeah, yeah.
You made a really important point, and I talked about it in my piece that Tom Dispatch, The Great Fear, that after 9-11 and partly because of George W.
Bush's tolerance streak, which he developed being as being governor of Texas and interacting with the Latino community there who he needed to get elected, there was the opinions of Muslims by Americans remain basically static.
In other words, there was no spike in Islamophobic sentiment immediately after 9-11.
It was only with the rise of Obama and the attack on Obama as a crypto Muslim and a foreigner, and before he released his birth certificate, 49% of registered Republicans believed that he was a foreigner.
It was only until the rise of Obama that Islamophobic sentiment spiked among the general public.
And I would argue that Barack Obama has played a role in encouraging it, not only by failing to forcefully denounce it because he's a weak president.
He's just a weak figure who's afraid to take on his opponents directly.
But after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Islamophobic sentiment has spiked to unprecedented levels in the United States.
And that partly has to do with Obama not simply reiterating what Bush said.
And instead, he wanted to benefit from these triumphalist gloating celebrations in the streets, these frat boy celebrations outside the White House and portray himself as tough.
So now we have 24% of Democrats.
I think this is a this is a recent poll by, I think, Ohio State University.
I put it out on Twitter and your listeners can find it.
24% of registered Democrats consider Muslims a threat to the United, an internal threat to the United States.
And something like 20% of Americans say they would not want to have a Muslim friend.
And of course, the statistics, the Islamophobic sentiment is much higher among Republicans because they belong to a party that is officially Islamophobic.
So it's troubling that so long after 9-11, these attitudes keep growing.
And I don't know where it's going to go, but it's clearly we're clearly at a dangerous place.
Well, now, in your article, you talk about this doctrine of asymmetric warfare that, as you say, does away with the hearts and minds strategy of winning over the occupied and that basically just terrorizing people into being unwilling to resist anymore is the superior way to go.
And I wonder, and you're saying this is developed by these Israeli generals and so forth.
I wonder if you did you have a specific connection between this doctrine of, you know, kill them and their wives and kids, too, with the propaganda against Muslims here in America?
It's part and parcel of the so-called war on terror and the acceptability of massacring Muslims, and that's what I'm trying to point out, which is that this movement, this Islamophobic movement within the right has been able to win so many followers because some of their attitudes had already been mainstreamed by the Israeli and the American military and intelligence establishment, which are working together hand in glove, as we already know.
And to demonstrate that, I just talked about how military doctrine has shifted in the war on terror in Vietnam.
The doctrine, of course, there was, you know, massive acts of terror committed through the Hamlet strategy against Vietnamese indigenous populations.
But at least the overriding explicit doctrine was counterinsurgency, which meant you have to win the hearts and minds of the natives, which means you have to keep civilian casualties at a low.
Openly and quite clearly during the war on terror, first through an Israeli philosopher named Asa Kasher, who is the Israeli army's in-house ethicist and the former head of Israeli military intelligence, who heads all the Israeli army colleges, Amos Yadlin, these two characters developed a doctrine called asymmetrical warfare to employ against specifically Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And the point of it is that assassinating leaders of these groups is permissible.
And not only that, but it's permissible to to kill massive amounts of civilians who might be mixed in with the military wing of Hamas or Hezbollah, and that killing a terrorist neighbor is acceptable in the words of Professor Asa Kasher.
And they've marketed this to the Pentagon.
So we see the United States adopting a policy of assassination through predator drones in tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And when in a in a recent strike in Pakistan, the U.S. killed scores of women and children, the then head of CENTCOM, central commander of the military, David Petraeus, who may someday run for president, accused Afghan civilians of burning their children alive to increase the death toll to embarrass the U.S.
So no one's going to be prosecuted for for attacking civilian population.
There's a clear there's a clear link between Israel attacking civilian targets in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead with white phosphorus and the U.S., the United States using white phosphorus on the civilian population of Fallujah and what they call the shake and bake operation years before.
And in fact, when Asa Kasher wrote the doctrine for Israel before it went into Gaza in 2008, he cited what the U.S. did in Fallujah as a precedent.
So there's a symbiotic relationship of state terror between Israel and the U.S. against Muslim populations who've been and what what the people we've been talking about are doing, like the Pam Gellers, the Robert Spencers is is playing.
They're handling the cultural way of this campaign.
In other words, they're dehumanizing Muslims through sort of a private propaganda campaign so that when asymmetrical warfare gets out of hand, nobody really cares.
We're not talking about Obama's predator drone war in Afghanistan because who who could care less about these people who have been so so thoroughly dehumanized over the last 10 years?
Who are they?
They just don't fit into the frame.
And, you know, being in Israel, having spent almost a year here, it's the same thing.
There are these massive tent protests all over Tel Aviv right now.
Three hundred thousand people were protesting on Saturday and I was there protesting for social justice.
No Palestinian flag, no mention of the people who are being occupied.
And many of the people protesting are going to go into reserve duty and participate in the occupation.
So it's almost as if through this dehumanization, they don't even have to think about the Palestinians as people.
They just aren't in the frame.
And so we can't look at the cultural dimension of Islamophobia without looking at the political and military dimension of it first.
And that's just what I've tried to do with the most recent piece I wrote for Alternet.
Right.
Well, you know, ultimately, the purpose of racism and the purpose of dehumanizing people and using these words for them is so that it's OK to kill them.
You know, it's a lot harder for a man to just take a bayonet and kill another man.
But if he's just a bug, it's not so bad.
In fact, William Fallon, the former head of CENTCOM, who I think many would maybe even including me would credit with stopping the war with Iran back in 2007, said, look, when the time comes, we'll crush them like ants.
It's just now is not a good idea.
It's not a good idea to do it now.
In fact, today's the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
And, you know, nobody would think of the Japanese as subhuman monsters or whatever with round glasses and buck teeth in their dastardly ways or whatever, like they portrayed it back then.
But how did they get away with dropping nuclear bombs on people?
They portrayed the Japanese as less than human.
These are the same people who would be our friends and neighbors.
Now, nobody in America is racist against the Japanese now, are they?
It just wears off just as easy as it takes hold, you know.
Now, this speaks to the sort of weakness or nonexistence of an anti-war movement in the United States.
I mean, there's a famous story about during Christmas, during the height of the trench warfare in World War One of British and German soldiers meeting in the middle of coming out of their trenches on Christmas to light a Christmas tree together.
And on the German side, the only person who refused to come out of the trench was Corporal Adolf Hitler.
It's a true story.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I know about the Christmas truce, but I didn't know about Hitler refusing to come out of his trench.
Geez.
Well, the Christmas truce happened almost every year between these armies, and they were, I think, able to do it because these guys didn't know why they were there.
They were drafted into these king's wars and they felt a cultural affinity for each other.
They were Europeans, they were all white, they were all Christian, and they had this affinity.
And only this extreme fascist figure was able to divorce himself from that.
And now we have a situation where the United States, largely or increasingly through remote control, is attacking a civilian population at times that Americans feel no cultural affinity for.
And so it doesn't do anything.
It doesn't create any rupture or sense of reflection among the American public.
It just proceeds unabated.
And meanwhile, all the energy for street protest is on the right.
I don't see many left wing protests that have the same energy and ferocity and rage as the protest that I, for example, saw outside a Muslim community center in Yorba Linda, California, which was staged by followers of Pam Geller and Robert Spencer.
And that's just that's what troubles me, is that the energy and the outrage is on the right.
Meanwhile, liberals are trying to organize in October to fight for a strong middle class and to have this progressive Tea Party led by Van Jones.
But with a positive agenda and everything's being done top down, they can't even criticize Barack Obama.
Instead, they criticize Washington as a stand in for Obama.
And then you just look at the global picture.
Just look at what's happening outside the U.S., even in Israel, which I'm just heavily critical of the protests here.
But people are organizing on Facebook and Twitter without leaders, without politics to vent their rage against it, not just politics, but a system that's completely not only betrayed them and deprived them of a future, but which is actually physically attacking them.
And so what does that say about the United States for me traveling around the Middle East, where I've been for the past month in Lebanon, in Jordan, now in Israel, seeing people rise up out of nowhere with no leaders makes me more and more disillusioned about the state of citizens in the U.S.
And I wonder what it will take to get them to come out of their houses and come out of their shells.
Where will the anti-war movement stand up?
Where will they draw the line?
All right, everybody, that's Max Blumenthal.
The new piece at Alternet is meet the right wing hate mongers who inspired the Norway killer and check out his great blog at Max Blumenthal dot com.
Thanks very much.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott.
