For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, September 14th, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show it is, Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org, and I keep all my interview archives there.
More than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
And this week's been a pretty good week for interviews on my other radio show, including Jon Pfeffer on the overall incoherence of American foreign policy, Eric Margulies on the crisis in Libya, and Anthony Gregory on the evolving positions of the left and right on the drug war.
All right, well, it's becoming more and more clear that the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that led to the death of the American ambassador and three others was not part of the reaction to this movie, these YouTube clips called The Innocence of Muslims, but instead was part of the problem of fighting a war for Al-Qaeda in Libya at the same time you're fighting a war against them in Pakistan.
And it looks like it was a reaction to the killing of a Libyan Al-Qaeda fighter in Pakistan named Sheikh Al-Libi a few weeks back.
But across the rest of the Middle East, there have been massive protests, of course, leading to the sort of siege of the embassy in Egypt and the burning of the flag and all this kind of thing, which, of course, was the intended purpose of this video.
And it's clear from the journalism of Max Blumenthal at The Guardian that it's the very same network of anti-Muslim propagandists that he's written about previously in his article The Great Fear at TomDispatch.com and which the Center for American Progress did their great study of too, the anti-Islam industry in America.
Well, there's this new study out about these same creeps.
It's called Not Qualified, Exposing the Deception Behind America's Top Pseudo-Experts on Islam.
It just happens to be released in a very timely way here.
And tonight's guest is Alejandro J. Butel from the Muslim Public Affairs Council that put this story out.
Welcome to the show, Alejandro.
How are you doing?
Scott, pleasure to be on.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And now, I don't know if this has anything exactly to do with the movie that was produced in Southern California that has caused all this controversy and, of course, widespread protests against America in the Middle East, whether it has anything to do with the actual attack at that embassy in Libya is an open question still.
Anyway, these people that you profile here, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz, some of these horrible people, they certainly have laid the foundation for, you know, in spreading this hate and this ill-informed view of Islam and of Muslims in America that, you know, a lot of these other guys are probably, you know, the people who put this movie together maybe are even on a lower tier of the right than Frank Gaffney, if such a thing is possible.
They're just basically picking up his leavings and then putting it together in YouTube form, that kind of thing.
But these are the same people who inspired, in his own words, Anders Breivik, the mass murderer in Norway, who attacked and murdered the children of the Socialist Party because they have such a liberal immigration policy toward Muslims.
But anyway, so, you know, this is no joke.
This is not just some interesting thing.
These are the purveyors of the worst bigotry in America.
They're far more prominent than the Ku Klux Klan.
And the damage that they sow is, you know, much greater and potentially could be much, much greater were there, for example, another major September 11th-sized terrorist attack in this country or something like that.
We could see, like, a Japanese internment again, only of Muslims this time.
And it'll all be because of people listening to the expert Daniel Pipes.
Well, it's funny that you mention that, Scott, because actually one of the things that we did when we had profiled Daniel Pipes was that although he's the only person, the one single person out of the 25 people that we had found and surveyed that actually had an Islamic Studies degree, his background is so tarred by bigotry and hatred.
That it makes any sort of expertise that he has practically useless and put into question.
And since you brought up the issue of the Japanese internment, in fact, Dr. Pipes had actually written an op-ed back in 2004, late 2004, where he had actually tried to justify the Japanese, the internment of Japanese Americans and make that as a bridge over to why we may need to engage in mass internment of American Muslims.
Now, of course, he's tried to backpedal on it, but when you see the words from what he originally said in the op-ed, it's quite clear that, you know, there's no way you can sugarcoat it.
And I would invite everyone there to look at our report and click on the link where we have actually meticulously sourced and detailed everything out there, not just on him, but these other 25 individuals.
And then finally, going back to what you've been saying earlier regarding, you know, how this is an issue of national security, I think people like William McCance, who's the former director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, you know, he's been tweeting, thankfully, our report out, and it's been getting picked up by folks.
Now, one of the things that he calls these individuals are counterterrorism hucksters.
And I think that's key because these are people who claim to have some sort of expertise not just on Islam and Muslims, but then they also claim to be national security experts.
But when you go through and you do a critical review of these people, they don't have that.
And that's important to know because these are life-and-death situations that we're talking about, whether we're looking at the strategic analysis that informs our policymakers at the highest level to the basic training that the FBI and our local and state law enforcement police officers get every single day.
This is something that's important.
We need to put an end to this cottage industry of people and really make sure that the real experts are the ones that shine.
Right.
Now, I hate to just be so reductionist, but it seems to me that this is almost, particularly when you get to the Muslim Brotherhood is everywhere and all that kind of thing, but even with the Brotherhood to the side, it seems like basically this is just a carbon copy.
It's sort of a funhouse mirror version of the protocols of the elders of Zion, that what these people are pushing is the protocols of Islam, that all the Muslims in America, they can all hear each other think, and they all agree with each other, and they're all here for one thing.
And it's not to raise a family and try to live a good life before they have to die like all the rest of us.
No, it's because they're here to subvert and destroy our society.
And, I mean, who knows if Frank Gaffney really believes this or not, but he keeps saying it over and over and over again, and you end up with a lot of people who really take his word for it.
I mean, he sure seems confident and seems to have looked into it.
So maybe it's true.
And regular people have said to me, on more than a couple occasions, and I was a cab driver for a while, so I had a little more exposure to the common man, one at a time kind of thing, maybe than the average guy, but anyway, people have said to me, well, you know, I think that the reason that they own all the gas stations is so one day they can just take it all from us, when the war comes and whatever.
People really, they take what they heard Frank Gaffney say, and then they imagine how it might be possible, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, let me tell you a little something about myself here for a moment, Scott, and then bring it to the conversation here.
I am an American Muslim, but obviously when you hear my name Alejandro Butel, it doesn't exactly scream of an Arab or Middle Eastern or, you know, quote, Muslim background.
In fact, I am the son of an Italian and Hispanic immigrant, and my father happens to be Jewish, and my mother happens to be Catholic, and I'm a Muslim.
Okay, so we have a very sort of diverse background in my family.
Man, Thanksgiving at y'all's place must be really interesting.
Oh, oh, you know, at our dinner time conversations, we do the two things that we're never supposed to do here in America in polite conversation, which is talk about religion and politics, and we do that on a regular basis.
But that aside is the fact that, you know, growing up I would hear stories from my family members about the hatred that had led to a lot of the anti-Jewish bigotry that had taken place.
And so it's very interesting that you bring up the issue of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because there was actually an article in 2006 by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the title of it was The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels.
And basically what it was was talking about this cottage industry of anti-Muslim bigots, but not in the United States, in Europe, and talking about how there are striking parallels to what these people were saying about Jews back in the 1930s and 40s to now what is taking place in post-911 era in Europe.
And so there are some very striking parallels of the kinds of hatred that are taking place right now.
It may be different faces, but it's the same sort of junk that's being spattered again, and I always urge my fellow Americans to take this with a huge grain of salt and definitely be very cautious and very skeptical.
All right, now, there's 25 people in here, and obviously we can't go through them all, but I would say probably Pipes and Gaffney and Horowitz.
Well, maybe not Horowitz.
Nobody cares about him anymore.
Maybe Pamela Geller.
Let's start with Pipes, though.
Can you please tell us as much as you can?
Does he know anything?
I mean, he must have at least read the Quran.
He knows something about it in order to smear it so well all the time.
Islam, right?
No?
Well, you know, I'm glad you brought him up, because like I said before, Daniel Pipes is the only person out of the 25 individuals that we had surveyed in our report that had actually obtained any sort of degree in Islamic studies.
And here's where it gets interesting, because Daniel Pipes is trained as a medieval Islamic expert.
He is not trained in contemporary politics.
So he's basically trying to use history that has happened hundreds of years ago, and then imposing it on the current events of today.
And so right there you're already having a lot of problems.
But then on top of it, when we look through at a lot of his academic records, even there it gets incredibly spotty, because for instance, it's not even certain whether or not this guy has been to the Arab-speaking Middle East in about 30 years.
The last known record of him actually doing any field research for any sort of academic writing that he did was back in 1981 for a book called Slave Soldiers in Islam.
And by the way, that book, Slave Soldiers in Islam, had actually been rated as one of the worst books on Islam by Dr. Hanad Abou El Fadl, who is a professor of Islamic Studies and Islamic Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
And what's interesting about Dr. Abou El Fadl is not only is he a foremost expert, where he's received both academic degrees in both Al-Azhar University, classical Islamic training, but also Western academic training as well.
So this is a guy who really knows his stuff incredibly, and yet he looks at Daniel Pipes' record and says, this guy just doesn't make the cut.
And that's on the stuff that he's actually supposed to be good on.
That's correct.
And so he's supposed to represent the best of the best within this cottage industry, but even when scrutinized by his fellow academic peers, he doesn't come up to par.
And that is an indication of the kinds of people that we're dealing with.
Back in 2004, a lot of people cared what Daniel Pipes thought, but does anybody care what Daniel Pipes thinks or says anymore at all?
Well, he can still be influential in a number of ways.
Just because he's not in the public spotlight doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't have influence behind closed doors.
And remember something, when we look at things such as the law enforcement training that has taken place and that just got exposed no less than two years ago, with the FBI and other places, we don't know who he's been teaching in a lot of these military intelligence and law enforcement circles there, because these things don't get publicized to the average American.
They're behind closed doors, and so in many cases, Daniel Pipes may still have influence in spouting lots of views these ways.
So it's one thing where he's out there in public, but sometimes the fact that he's not in the public view can make him even more dangerous, because then he's not subject to scrutiny anymore.
Yeah.
Well, for the rest of us, you know, eh, maybe it is just an interesting topic on a radio show one afternoon or something, but if you're a Muslim, then Daniel Pipes comes to town and trains your local cops really matters to you a lot, and that's where the rubber meets the road here, is you don't have, as far as I know, a bunch of people like yourself going around and training cops that don't listen to Daniel Pipes.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
This is what you need to know.
These people have the field to themselves when it comes to teaching the armed American security forces what they need to know about Muslims.
Right.
And that's one of the things that's very scary.
I think now, perhaps in the past few months, we're starting to see a little bit of a shift, but I'm not satisfied, because, again, we don't know what happens behind closed doors.
And the thing is that our law enforcement officials have a tough job out there where they're trying to maintain safety and security.
But the thing is that if they're getting influenced by these bigots who are masquerading themselves as scholars, you can see where the conditions for abuse are going to start to come out very frequently.
And this is a problem.
And it then runs to the core of who we are as a nation and our constitutional values.
Are we going to be a nation that abides by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
Or are we going to be cowed and misled by people who are pseudo-experts and deceiving our fellow American citizens, including those who have been mandated to serve and protect our communities?
I want it to be the first, not the second.
Right.
Yeah, that's kind of my question in the Middle East, too, is for the people...
And, you know, I don't think the Libya thing really has much to do with that movie, other than...
Well, in fact, one report I read said there wasn't even a protest before the raid occurred, although there are conflicting reports about that.
Maybe they used a protest as cover to do the attack they wanted to do.
But there were protests all across the Middle East, anti-American sentiment enraged and whatever.
And, of course, they have plenty of reason to be angry anyway.
But it seems to me like the most obvious thing in the world is that whoever put that YouTube together was trying to get them to react.
And so if someone is trying to get you to react, then the best way to fight them back would be to not react, rather than fall right into their trap.
It seems to be going off without a hitch, really, from the point of view of the guys who put that thing together.
Yeah, and it's very unfortunate that the events have taken place.
And, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, first and foremost, my heart and my prayers go out to the families of the ambassador and the other State Department officials that have lost their lives, because I think they're trying to work hard and perhaps do the right thing.
I'll take it at face value.
And so we have to keep in mind that, obviously, at the end of the day, the people who have perpetrated these acts must ultimately be held to account.
And so as an American Muslim, I have to say that this is wrong in terms of the violent nature of the protests that have taken place, as well as what I believe to have been basically some sort of extremist ruse to use the movie as a pretext to attack and kill people in Libya.
That said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that here at home, we need to be very vigilant against those people who are trying to instigate a clash of civilizations between Muslims abroad and Westerners, including Americans, here at home.
And this is something that I feel to be completely unacceptable, and it's important why we need to continue to work towards exposing and countering the cottage industry of individuals that are trying to put out nothing but fear, hate, and deception toward the American people, and ultimately incite, again, a clash of civilizations.
Yeah, you know, I think you'd be really lucky to find someone on TV ever get this right.
Hell, most people don't even watch TV news.
I don't know.
But it just seems like no one ever explains that, you know, if you took, say, the last 12 years, and you had America's exporting of our culture the way we do, and all the advances in technology and digital media and everything else, and the cultural assault on the old world, I think there would be reactions against that here, there, and the other place.
There are a lot of conservative, reactionary-type groupings of people all across the old world who aren't going to like that very much.
But then again, you know what?
Times change, and things are what they are, and these kinds of things happen.
But when you combine all of that with a military empire, with a CIA-supported tortured dictatorship that murdered your cousin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and the Americans not only, they're not just satisfied to come and torture your cousin and steal all your oil and fight a war for you because that's what Ariel Sharon wants, and all this kind of thing.
But they also want to change your very way of life.
They also want to make your daughter a Christian, and if they have it their way, according to their TV shows anyway, a slut, too.
And this kind of thing.
Now, that's the kind of thing that people write about.
So it's not just that some guy draws a cartoon of Mohammed.
It's that the people who support the tortured dictator are now mocking Mohammed, too.
That is an entirely different kind of equation.
In fact, I think if we had the empire without the cultural assault, that would probably be more tolerable, or somewhat near as tolerable, as the cultural assault without the empire.
But the two together is what makes people want to say, like we saw in Iraq, the differences between the occupiers and the occupiees is what led to a lot of that violence.
There's definitely no doubt that a mix of these factors that you have mentioned have certainly pushed into Al-Qaeda's narrative.
And I think that this is one of the things, again, that I have to keep emphasizing over and over and over again, is that these kinds of things only push us towards a clash of civilization when we really don't necessarily want to do that.
We cannot continue to spend our values, our blood, and our treasure in this kind of way, especially for us as Americans, because it is only going to lead to collapse.
History has shown this time and time again.
And so it's important that we reflect on our values here as a nation and try to return to them, ranging from making sure that we're on an equitable basis with dealing with other nations, to the very fact that we need to make sure that the marketplace of ideas replaces bad ideas with good ideas.
And I think that this is a very important case study here for us to really drive home the point that there's a lot more work to do at home, there's a lot more work that we need to do in terms of fixing ourselves abroad as well.
Because clearly, if this film, which is absolutely disgusting, can incite these kinds of things, that means that there's more to it than just that.
For instance, the Danish cartoons that had taken place didn't really rile people up for at least six months.
People learn to live with getting insulted every day, but there's a lot of other factors that seem to go into this.
And so, on the one hand, as a Muslim, I want to make sure that I'm condemning the violence that's taking place and it's wrong that happened there.
I cannot emphasize that enough that it's wrong.
But at the same time, we as Americans also need to make sure that we're playing our cards smart and right, because the situation is very fragile right now, and things can get a lot worse if we're not smart moving forward.
Right.
And you know, those pictures of...
I think it was on the front page of USA Today, burning American flags and a guy saying, we hate America and whatever.
I mean, this is exactly the kind of propaganda that they used against Iran and Libya back in the 1980s when I was a little kid.
In fact, a guy even just said to me the other day, well, you know, those Iranians, they hate us.
Like, that was how history began, was the Iranians hated the people from the middle of North America for no good stinking reason.
And nobody ever needed to even ask or even wonder, never even needed to wonder, well, why?
They just hate you because you're white and Christian and from North America, are you sure?
Come on, man.
And so now here we are again.
Jeez, would you get a load of these Islams?
Here a year ago, we thought that, wow, they almost look like Democrats out there in the streets of Egypt trying to create a democratic form of government for themselves and that kind of thing.
Wow, TV can't even pretend they're bad guys.
TV's having to admit that we actually support the dictator and maybe we need to stop and let these people have...
No, look at them.
They hate us because we're white.
They hate us because we're America.
They hate us because we're Christians.
They hate our wonderful American flag.
And just look at them go completely cuckoo bananas over a stupid YouTube video of some stupid movie.
And so maybe, I guess, Frank Gaffney is right that it's just inevitable that either they gotta go or we gotta go.
I mean, that's what's going on here.
Because nobody ever gets the context that you're talking about.
Everybody only gets the image on TV today, on the front page of USA Today, today.
And what that says is, well, looks like we got a problem with the Egyptians now.
You know, and Scott, there's two things that I want to bring out in terms of this because what you're talking about really is the distortion of, I think, an important national conversation that really needs to take place in terms of what our values are and how we interact with the rest of the world.
You know, when you mentioned before about the images of Libyans burning American flags and Middle Easterners doing this, that, and the other thing, one of the things that hasn't been as well reported is the fact that there are also a lot of Libyans out there right now that have protested the violence that took place as well as that there have been a lot of condemnations that have taken place in terms of the violence in Egypt and in other parts of the Middle East as well.
But is that going to make for a sexy story?
Is that going to be part of the narrative?
No, not necessarily.
What's making headlines right now is clash, is blood, is things that really call for more confrontation.
And so as part of that, you know, that sort of median mantra, if it bleeds, it leads, is the fact that you have these cottage industry people, these hucksters, and frankly in the case of someone like Frank Daphne Buffoon, is that they seek to distort this conversation further.
And again, it gets very, very dangerous because the reason why I bring up the fact that there are these counter-protests taking place in the Middle East is that there is goodwill on both sides of the aisle here to try and stave off anything, you know, worse situations and possibilities.
But you have this cottage industry of individuals, Stephen Emerson, Frank Daphne, Daniel Pipe, you know, all the 25 individuals and more that will seek to only focus on the flag-burning, the bearded guy, the woman in the burqa, the people who raise their guns in the air, in order to paint this very distorted image that's taking place right now, whereas the reality on the ground is far different from what we're seeing in the media at times.
Alright, well, I know you gotta go, and I do too, but I really appreciate your time.
I really appreciate y'all's work on this great study.
I really hope people will read it.
I really hope that people will take this and maybe spam their local TV news people with it.
Maybe spam their local police departments with it.
Not qualified.
I certainly hope that they spread the word.
Yeah, yeah.
Get this thing out here.
Do a little bit.
Post it up on your Facebook page or something.
Not qualified.
...behind America's top 25 pseudo-experts on Islam.
Thanks very much for your time, Alejandro.
Appreciate it.
Scott, it's my pleasure.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Alejandro J. Butel from mpak.org, the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
And that's the show for this evening.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
And all my interview archives can be found at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
