09/24/15 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys, welcome back to the show.
Our first guest today is Eli Clifton and, well, first of all, welcome back to the show.
Eli, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very good to have you back here.
Now, I know recently you've been writing for the Lowe Blog, but I can't keep track of where all you write because when I Google you up, you're all over the place.
So introduce yourself for us, would you please?
All right, I'm Eli Clifton.
I'm a fellow at the Nation Institute, and you're exactly right.
The place where most of my work appears, at least in its original publication, is at LoweBlog.com, L-O-B-E-L-O-G.com.
Okay, great.
And, yeah, of course, that's the Great Jim Loeb, and there's tons of great content from all kinds of great writers going back years and years there, the Great Jim Loeb.
Okay, cool.
So, yeah, very happy to know how to introduce you then.
Lowe Blog is the most prominent spot you're at right now.
However, like I say, people Google you up, they'll find all kinds of stuff like this thing that you did for the Center for American Progress back a few years ago, which, you know, full disclaimer, that's the Democrats basically, right?
But anyway, still great work called Fear Inc., and it's all about not just prejudice or whatever, Islamophobia, but the Islamophobia industry.
What is behind and who is bankrolling the movement to make us hate and fear Muslims?
And you might as well throw in Arabs, even though most American Arabs are actually Christians, and most American Muslims are actually Asians, not Arabs, but whatever.
Details, details, and stuff.
The point being, we're supposed to hate and fear the enemy within because they're all out to get us, and if you watch the Republican campaign right now, it is just a race to the bottom when it comes to this kind of crap.
It's just, it seems like it's gotten so far out of control, really, since Obama came.
People thought that was going to kind of heal all these divides, but really, it just put a big partisan emphasis behind, like, where everyone on the right has this partisan motivation to be more racist and more intolerant instead of, you know, if it was a Republican in power, not so much.
But anyway, it's like the lid has just been taken off the pot with Obama as the terrorist Muslim infiltrator, usurper, undermining America and whatever.
I mean, a big part of the right kind of believes this, and we all kind of feel the the spillover from it, you know, and some people, oftentimes Sikhs, get beaten over it and sometimes killed over it, this kind of thing.
So I was just sort of hoping, because it seems like it's so important still and again and even more than ever now, to get, you know, just kind of a rundown.
Let the audience hear kind of a thumbnail sketch of who and what forces are behind this movement.
Well, you know, I think it really hit on something there with the fact that one would think with, you know, 9-11 now receding further and further into the past, that that would have been sort of the high point, the high watermark, as it were, for Islamophobia in the United States.
But, you know, when we started on this report at the Center for American Progress, that was kind of the key assumption that we wanted to tackle is this idea that, you know, most people completely reasonably assume, well, you know, the hijackers of the planes on 9-11 were Muslims, they were, a lot of them were Saudi, and a fact that frequently gets forgotten.
And that would have been the high point for Americans having, expressing distrust toward Islam, toward Muslims, and Arabs.
The truth is, though, when we looked at the polling numbers, we saw, well, in September 2010, a Washington Post-ABC News poll, it found that 49% of Americans held an unfavorable view of Islam.
Okay.
But in 2002, only 39% held an unfavorable view of Islam.
So that already suggests that something is off.
Why did it go up by 10 percentage points over that time period, when in all likelihood, one would think that those numbers should be reversed, should be 49% in 2002, and 39% in 2010.
And what we started to look at was, yeah, the amount of money, and the amount of time, and the amount of bandwidth given to Islamophobes, leading up to really the 2008 election, really, really skyrocketed.
We had family foundations putting money in over the 10 years from 2002 to 2010.
Family foundations put over $40 million into a number of Islamophobic organizations.
They funded misinformation experts like Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy, David Yerushalmy at the Society of Americans for National Existence, Daniel Pipes at Middle East Forum, and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.
And these folks suddenly, you know, around 2008, they broke into the mainstream.
They were on Fox News.
They were on CNN.
They were talking about the ground zero mosque, which was really the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which was neither a mosque, nor at the site of the World Trade Center.
It didn't matter.
It was suddenly a controversy.
And yet, the attempts to paint Obama as a Muslim were a large component of that.
Now, the thing that I find surprising now is that in 2012, in the 2012 cycle, it really didn't seem like it was as dominant a narrative.
You know, it had sort of played out.
It hadn't worked in 2008.
Obama had been elected president anyways.
You know, there'd been this, like, $16 million project to send this Islamophobic DVD to swing state voters in 2008.
Didn't work.
And in 2012, you know, we published this report then, and we really felt like, well, you know, it kind of seems like this has subsided.
I'm frankly pretty surprised to see it coming back now.
We have Ben Carson saying on Sunday that he wouldn't support a Muslim becoming president.
And Carson claims in the past several days that his campaign has raised over a million bucks.
So it shows that there still is money to be made, and there's still a currency in these bigoted views.
That said, as you well put it, it's sort of a race to the bottom in the Republican Party right now.
And it would be unfair to characterize the resurgence of Islamophobia as occurring in a vacuum.
We're seeing all sorts of sort of hyper-ethnic nationalist type of things being said.
And I'm afraid that this sort of has a warm home in places where those types of views are accepted.
Yeah.
Well, and it's such a great narrative, too, where when somebody like Carson says this kind of thing, it's seen on the right as this brave admission of the truth that they'll never say whatever.
But this guy's brave enough to say it.
So there's a million dollars.
And the more opposition that you bring to it, the more persecuted and right they feel that, oh, you know, the cultural Marxists, they're selling us out to the Islamofascists and whatever.
But meanwhile, and this is the part where even on the left, it hardly ever gets mentioned.
People just don't want to talk about this.
I'm not exactly sure why, because it's such an easy case to make.
I know there's some partisanship to it, but, you know, come on.
The basic argument here is that they attacked us on September 11th because we're good and free and white and Christian and Jewish and they're evil and Muslim and Islam makes them evil and makes them want to hate and attack good things.
But that's a lie.
The reason that they hate us is because George H.W. Bush, Jeb's father, occupied the Saudi desert and Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, kept them there for his entire presidency, bombing Iraq on average every other day, killing people from the bases right near Mecca and Medina, the Holy Peninsula.
And they attacked us not on 9-11, but in 93 at the First World Trade Center, at the Khobar Towers, at the African embassies, the USS Cole.
They tried to attack LAX in 2000.
And all of this, not because of Islam, but because of trespassing.
Simple as that.
Any white, Republican, conservative Christian could understand what happens when you trespass.
You get shot.
It's just as basically and simple as that.
All of this is just cover for what's really going on here.
And of course, I left out support for Israel and their occupations of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, which is half the Al-Qaeda argument, too.
That's what this always was.
And I thought that Ron Paul had actually won this argument for honesty in American discourse back in 2007 and 2008 when he whooped Rudy Giuliani on this.
And yet somehow we're still just supposed to ignore the fact of the existence of the 1990s and all the horrors brought to the people of the Middle East by Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton before Jr. ever even showed up.
Well, I mean, I don't know exactly who we're characterizing as they there, but if we want to narrow that down to Al-Qaeda or to ISIS, I think, yeah, I mean, yeah, the people who attacked us.
I don't mean Muslims in general.
I mean, those the actual attackers, they said that they did it because of these actual things that the Americans had done, not because Islam makes them hate whoever happens to live between Canada and Mexico.
I think it's important that we recognize that the people who, such as Ben Carson and other Islamophobes who I just mentioned, who are embracing this narrative of Islam being inherently at war with the West, are really throwing in their support for the most radical and violent minority of Muslims and their understanding and description of Islam.
When you interpret Islam that way, you are simply saying Al-Qaeda and ISIS are right.
That the West and the East and the Christians and the Muslims are inherently going to be in violent conflict.
And if you're going to push back against extremism, then you have to reject that and say, well, that is actually not how most Muslims see it.
It's not how most Americans see it.
It's not how most Westerners see it.
It's not how most Christians see it.
Right.
And what it implies is a total war.
I mean, there's a billion Muslims in the world.
We're going to live with them somehow or not.
Exactly.
Why you would validate the worldview of people who are flying airplanes into buildings is kind of beyond me.
And it seemed like a very poor national security or policy argument.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
And I'm sorry for going on so long in the dang discussion, too.
But hang on right there, Eli.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more Eli Clifton from Loblog.com.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
Sorry, I went on too long and you might not have heard all of what Eli was saying as we went into the break there.
He was talking about how, you know, this Islamophobia, the narrative behind it is basically conceding to this fringe enemy of Bin Ladenite types that they are the true and legitimate face of Islam, which is exactly what their enemies should not be doing, which is, of course, a very good point there.
And now, so I wanted to get back to some of what you reported here in Fear Inc. and some of these other articles.
If you just type in Eli Clifton and Islamophobia, you'll find all kinds of different stuff, too, at Salon.com, at Loblog and, of course, the big study, Fear Inc. at AmericanProgress.org.
But you really break down in here.
I mean, you guys really did the great journalism on all this stuff, breaking down exactly, you know, who is bankrolling this Islamophobia business.
The most intriguing part of this to me was the story of the model legislation being introduced just to give the impression that it was necessary, which is a very important story.
So please do tell.
Right.
I mean, this is very much in line with some of the things conducted by ALEC and other right-wing organizations.
And basically, the model is to create a boilerplate legislation that then you get state representatives to roll out across the country.
And this has a couple advantages.
And the biggest one really being that a lot of legislation that gets introduced at the state level doesn't get noticed.
And that's pretty valuable, because sometimes these things can hold a lot of weight.
They can have a huge impact.
And one of the ways they can have an impact is that you can then, once you've introduced it in 40 or 50 states, you can say, well, clearly this has a lot of support since it's been introduced across the country.
In this case, there was legislation introduced that was anti-sharia legislation, which is something that is really not something that's a threat to the U.S. legal system.
At no point has sharia law really usurped the Constitution or U.S. law or local jurisdictions.
This is pretty much entirely fabricated and fiction.
But it was rolled out really across the country using boilerplate legislation, largely created by David Yaroshalmy and advocated by a number of the misinformation experts who we identify.
And it was successfully pushed out across the country.
Finally, there was actually pushback, believe it or not, in Florida, because Orthodox Jews there recognized that the only instance in which religious law or a private arrangement between two consenting parties might actually be deferred to by a judge is in the case of contract disputes.
And they had used a Talmudic law and rabbis in some instances in Florida, where the parties agree that they're going to abide by this.
And when a judge sees it, they say, well, you know, you agreed to these terms, so you have to figure it out through the terms that you've already agreed on, much like sort of how one could tie oneself to a mediation process and a contract.
And it was pretty interesting, because that was that was a big showdown over in Florida, as far as a lot of us who watch this are concerned.
And it ended up being pushed back there because of the fact that this actually would infringe on not just Muslims, but on other religious groups.
Yeah, now that's really important.
I didn't know that story.
And that's a great point to make.
I guess I was also thinking about various Christian groups and their divorce proceedings and child custody and this kind of thing where they they have agreements to go along with what their minister decides if they have a dispute or whatever like that.
And these are the same people who are the suckers for this demonization of Islam, but it's their customs that are being threatened, too.
Exactly.
And, you know, I mean, it's frequently the fear mongering often says, well, that this could extend into interfering in like criminal proceedings.
There's no way that's going to happen.
It hasn't happened.
You're not going to be successful going and assaulting someone or killing someone and saying that you're going to use your your freedom of religion as a defense.
You could try it.
But I mean, their track record thus far for people trying that type of thing is that court and not to look very favorably upon that argument.
Right.
And then now I'm sorry, could you name some of the foundations?
You said some family foundations, but and then even more interesting than that is the arms manufacturers behind this campaign.
Well, yeah.
So the foundation, the Linda and Harry Bradley Foundation, which is no more institutional than a family one, the Newton and Rochelle Becker Foundation, the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, those are those are interrelated to the Russell Berry Foundation and the William Rosenwald Family Fund all played really.
But, you know, they all contributed significant sums of money in terms of arms manufacturers.
That was something I discovered maybe a little less than a year ago was that Frank Gaffney, the Center for Security Policy, actually just recently organized an anti-Iran deal rally where Donald Trump was present in front of the Capitol and is a big proponent of the conspiracy theory that there's been a Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the White House.
And it turned out he was getting $10,000, $20,000 from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas.
I have it for one year that when that when I for which I got the documents for, it's possible it occurred in other years as well.
But it certainly raises some questions about why somebody who's so far out of the fringe was receiving money from some of the major aerospace manufacturers in the U.S. Yeah.
Well, it's important point how fringy he is, right?
Because Frank Gaffney, former unconfirmed attempted undersecretary of defense back in the Reagan years or something, he is sort of seen as the scum of the neocon movement, right?
Like he doesn't get invited to Thanksgiving with Richard Perle and them.
He's sort of a lower down specimen of of neocon hack.
Am I right about that?
They have class distinctions inside the neocon movement.
I mean, I'm not privy to the invite list for Richard Perle's Thanksgiving dinner.
It does kind of seem like that, though, right?
I prefer not to even imagine what that looks like.
But you know what?
Previously, I would have I would have agreed with you.
But as of maybe a couple of months ago, I've seen groups like like Frank Gaffney Center for Security Policy and people associated with it being brought more and more toward the Republican foreign policy establishment, for instance, AIPAC promoting signatories to Frank Gaffney's letters in opposition to the Iran deal.
I think that maybe the distinctions that existed either were only in our minds or have broken down a bit over as the push against the Iran deal really came together.
I really was just trying to denigrate Gaffney and not elevate Perle, but but now so all of this and you can see why because this whole thing you could call it Operation Conflation.
Just, hey, Americans, hate and fear everybody that lives east of Israel and west of India so that at some point we can get around a bomb on them.
And that's basically what it is.
I think that that's certainly some of these donors and some of these misinformation experts that that probably is a motivating aspect for them.
And especially when you're named some of these big corporations, Northrop Grumman.
I mean, what do they care about anybody's religion or anything else?
Their job is simply selling munitions to the U.S. state.
That's it.
And they need, you know, reasons for the government to need to buy their munitions.
Pretty obvious.
It seems like it.
And I mean, they certainly would characterize it that way.
But I think they certainly actually would agree with the fact that they supported Frank Gaffney because he's been a big advocate of military spending.
And we know why Frank Gaffney is a big advocate of military right.
And what he wants it all spent on.
And you know what, too?
Here's the thing about this, man.
It's this is destroying America.
This is such a big deal.
And I think that, you know, whatever.
Obviously, there's always been racial problems and they ebb and flow.
And sometimes they're better and sometimes they're worse.
But and right now, on one level, PC is completely out of control on everybody's every utterance.
But then on the other hand, you have just, you know, perfectly, seemingly perfectly politically correct bigotry like this.
You know, it's not OK to pick on blacks anymore.
It's not OK to pick on gay people anymore.
But, boy, you can pick on Muslims.
And, you know, whatever you do, don't pick on the powerful.
You got to find somebody, you know, who can't really fight back very much and demonize them.
And, you know, it's making the country sick.
I don't really believe in that collective unconscious kind of a thing.
But as a metaphor, I do.
You know what I mean?
It's sort of like when Bush said, hey, if you're on the right side of the political spectrum, you got to rally around me and support torture because we did it and we don't want to go to prison.
So come on, all conservatives.
We love torture, don't we?
And the whole right rallied to torture where before they weren't like that.
You know what I mean?
And they were, you know, kind of, but not like that.
And so it's just it's poisoning the whole culture.
It's making everybody hate each other more and for no good reason, all just for corrupt and and and secret reasons.
Right.
Reasons that are not above board, but like we're talking about arms sales and, you know, devotion to Israel and this kind of thing.
I would just I would just add, though, in actually George W. Bush's defense, he spoke out shortly after 9-11 saying that, you know, that America is not at war with Islam and really took this on head on.
And it's possible that some of the things he said actually did keep those numbers down in terms of the percentage of Americans who held an unfavorable view of Islam.
He's also the only sitting U.S. president to visit a mosque, something that right now, I know there's a little bit of pressure, thanks to my good colleague Ali Gharib, who wrote about it in The Nation, trying to encourage the perhaps now's the time for Barack Obama to go visit a mosque after the incident with the kids, the high school student who built a clock and was arrested for it.
And that, you know, there's an opportunity here.
That said, I can also understand why Obama's been cautious to want to avoid the Islamophobia issues, considering all the scrutiny on him.
And I'm sure he's questioning whether him speaking out on it would potentially make it worse or make it better, given the amount of the amount that he's been a target of so much of this propaganda.
Yeah, well, that's what Catholic vice presidents are for.
You know, get out there, white man, and denounce this bigotry.
What the hell?
Anyway, thank you so much for doing my show again, Eli.
You're great, man.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so that's Eli Clifton, fellow at The Nation and read him at lobelog.com.
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