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All right, introducing David Noriega.
He is a reporter for BuzzFeed News, and he's got, well, it's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
Meet the charming, terrifying face of the anti-Islam lobby.
An article all about a group called Act for America and its leader, Bridget Gabriel.
Very good work.
Very important work here.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate you making some time for us today on the show to talk about this.
The Islamophobia industry.
It's a very unique and interesting phenomenon in America right now.
Of course, everybody knows that history began on September 11th.
And the cause was that Islam makes people hate innocence and virtue and attack it.
And that the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations never happened.
And so since we have to start with that premise in all discussions of America's terrorism problem, I guess that kind of makes it pretty easy for people like this to just take that premise and run with it.
In fact, what is to distinguish between an Islamic terrorist and the Muslim who lives next door to you?
Right.
I mean, I think that's that's the entire premise that the anti-Islam lobby, as we call it in the story, has been advancing for a while.
I mean, I think the difference between your typical anti-Islam ideologue and and Brigitte Gabriel is the fact that she has devoted her career to really actually sort of bringing those ideas to the local level and to the individual level, making people feel like that's something that affects them and their in their sort of mundane daily life.
And it's something that they can act on in a concrete way, right, rather than a sort of rather than than than an abstraction in perhaps the way that it may have been before.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's a very good way to put it, because you do have Frank Gaffney's of the world, but nobody ever really meets him.
We just laugh at him and point and retweet his EMP conspiracy theories and whatever.
But this lady, she travels and she really gets work done is the point you're making here.
Exactly.
She really you know, she really gets her hands in the dirt.
She really she does the the the tedious, you know, hands in the dirt work of organizing people and talking to people one to one and empowering people to talk to others in their communities.
You know, I mean, there's there's a very clear relationship, actually, between the Frank Gaffney's of the anti-Islam lobby and Brigitte Gabriel.
They're not you know, they're not just sort of occupying the same space, but doing things differently.
There is a there's a sort of progression with these ideas where they often originate with people like Gaffney or people like David Yershami or Bill Warner and, you know, those those folks.
And they sort of go through the Brigitte Gabriel Act for America machine in order to be disseminated to people in a way that feels actionable to them.
Right.
So the the relationships aren't just they're not coincidental.
It's a it's a process.
Right.
Right.
OK, so, yeah, elaborate a little bit, would you, about Yerushalmi, who's he and what's he about?
David Yershami is an attorney.
He is he's basically the well, he and Gaffney together, but mostly Yershami was the brain child of the anti-Sharia craze, you know, that happened a few years ago that started, I think, around 2010 and peaked, if I'm not mistaken, around like 2011, 2012, something like that.
He's a lawyer based in New York.
There's actually, you know, for anyone who's curious, there's a pretty good profile of him in The New York Times from 2011 by Andre Elliott.
And it's it's still good.
It's still a good profile and it's mostly still relevant.
It explains basically, you know, who he is and the work that he does.
He actually is he is he's general counsel for the Center for Security Policy for Gaffney's group, and he co-founded another group called the American Freedom Law Center.
I think of him as basically being the anti-Islam lobbyist lawyer.
That's the role that he plays.
And that has, you know, both in terms of litigation, right, participating and starting or defending from litigation, but also in terms of crafting legal language for for legislation.
That's his his principal role.
Well, and, you know, the tie with Gaffney is really key here because, you know, of all the neocons, he certainly is kook enough to actually believe this stuff.
Right.
Like on a Daniel Pipes type of a level where, you know, where Wolfowitz knows he's lying.
Gaffney gets so worked up about things that he likes being scared of that he makes a very good pitch man for this kind of thing.
Right.
Like this is a guy who I'm just guessing I can't really read his mind, but it seems he really believes that Iran is about to have a nuke, even though they don't have any nuclear weapons grade material whatsoever in their entire country.
And somehow they're going to sail a barge with a missile on it to America's east coast, launch one missile and instead of nuke in New York or D.C. with it, they'll launch it into the air and somehow with magic, because no really EMP effect from an atom bomb could achieve this, they'll knock out all electronics in North America forever.
And we will all starve in the dark and 90 percent of us will die.
And he's the kind of guy who really I mean, he's pushed that for years.
And if you ask him, I've seen video of him being, you know, people asking him follow up questions.
He seems to really believe this stuff.
So that makes him very effective.
I think that he's kook enough that he takes this stuff so seriously that it makes him work really hard with others to really spread this, you know, and make people terrified of Muslims, even though there are millions of Muslims in America.
If they were all at war with us, we would know it.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the question of sincerity with people in the anti-Islam lobby is an interesting one.
And it's one that keeps coming up.
Right.
And it's unfortunately one where I think we're often left to speculate.
But I definitely think that Gafni is a true believer, for sure.
I think Gabriel is a true believer as well.
You know, there are obviously also people who are sort of affiliated with these these groups and these ideas that, you know, I think it's safe to say they're doing it for for personal, financial and or political gain.
But yeah, you know, I mean, the thing that I find most interesting about Gafni is that, you know, there are obviously a lot of parallels between sort of Cold War hysteria and Cold War paranoia and conspiratorial, you know, frameworks and post 9-11 conspiratorial frameworks.
Right.
I mean, they're they're very similar in their structure.
They're similar in their mindset there.
They're similar in their kind of paranoid thinking.
Gafni is is just a very direct, concrete link between the two.
Right.
I mean, he he sort of cut his teeth on the Cold War paranoia and has now just transplanted it fully into the anti-Islam paranoia.
I mean, it's really it's just it's it's as direct as you could hope.
And, you know, it makes that parallel all the more illuminating because, you know, this is not even though the perceived enemy might be different, the the frameworks and the structures and the ways of thinking, I think, are, you know, we've seen them countless times before in American history.
Right.
Well, you know, at least there was a Soviet Union and Communist China and a Communist Party USA that was trying to get power, you know, mostly by electoral means.
But at least there were kernels of truth to grab onto there.
But now, on one hand, I'm supposed to think that the terrorists are a bunch of cavemen.
And on the other hand, they are going the New World Order is going to be the Arabs taking over or something like that.
And the only way and the way we all know they don't have a single ship.
Right.
So the way that they're going to do it is they're going to sneakily immigrate here and take over our gas stations.
And then it doesn't matter that there are three hundred and ten million American self-identified Christians who are not about to bow down to any Sharia caliphate here.
But just forget every other thing you know about the world in order to believe that somehow this is anything.
You couldn't even put this in a comic book.
It's so stupid.
You know, give me a break.
The Soviet Union was a thing with H-bombs, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
I mean, you bring up a good point, which I still I think it's not completely irrelevant to what's happening now.
Right.
In the sense that there's, you know, I think with groups that are founded on paranoia like this, there's often something that you can point to that exists in the real world, you know, no matter how sort of tiny a percentage of their total worldview, it actually constitutes.
But there's, you know, the reason that Act for America works, right.
The reason the reason that Brigitte Gabriel can go give these speeches and really rile people up and make them feel like they are a part of something, make them feel like they're doing something that's good for America and for the world is because there are terrorist attacks.
Right.
I mean, there are, you know, like Orlando happened in San Bernardino happened.
These things these things happen and people are afraid.
Right.
I mean, there has to be there has to be a some kind of tendril connecting the things that people are feeling to reality, no matter how tenuous in order for these things to to to flower.
Right.
And again, you know, I think in terms of the sort of actual material viability of these things, it's you know, I don't want to get too lost in those comparisons.
But yeah, absolutely.
There's there's there's a huge, huge, huge, huge leap between that fear that is based on something at least partially real and the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is slowly perpetrating, you know, sort of internal takeover of of American society.
Like there's there's no there's just no I mean, the leap is so huge just to be astounding.
But yeah, I mean, I do think one of the most interesting things about this is how there has to be something there to exploit.
Right.
They can't just kind of manufacture these ideas out of whole cloth and impose them on people.
There has to be something preexisting there that can be exploited.
Yeah.
All right.
So elaborate there about the Muslim Brotherhood plot, would you?
Sure.
I mean, this is in the cosmology of the anti-Islam lobby.
There are several sort of interconnected conspiracy theories that explain everything right, that explain how the world works, explains what happened, what's happening, everything that's happening in the United States, et cetera, et cetera.
Their principal bugbear is the Muslim Brotherhood.
They believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is directly behind virtually every single Muslim American civil society organization.
They believe that pretty much every single time a Muslim in the United States even begins to approach some kind of position of social prominence, that, you know, the hand of the invisible hand of the Muslim Brotherhood is actually behind it.
And it's a part of a, oh man, I think at this point, like 20, like 30 or so year long meticulous plot to infiltrate America and the West in order to, you know, kind of slowly turn those cultures tolerant towards, you know, Islam and things like Sharia, which really does not mean what people in the anti-Islam lobby say that it means.
But anyway, all to sort of set the stage for this final coup, at which point, you know, Western Europe and the United States get turned into like satellites of the Islamic state.
That that is like the sort of overarching governing conspiracy theory of the anti-Islam lobby.
So that's, you know, that's what allows them to say, for example, that care, the Council on American Islamic Relations and is not basically, again, like I said, every single prominent Muslim American American organization is actually just a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
What's one of the interesting things about that is that because of the way that that conspiracy theory is sort of structured, people like Act for America, groups like Act for America wind up more often than not.
Sort of saving the worst of their vitriol for American Muslims who are just really, really decidedly the most moderate Muslims you could possibly ask for.
Right.
And I mean, even that even even that is sort of like a problematic framing.
Right.
It's like because it places there's like a spectrum from radical to moderate, which is not necessarily true.
But I mean, you have people, you know, you have.
Well, it's not the religion, it's the politics.
How radical are their politics?
Right, right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
No.
And you have, you know, I mean, there are so many cases of it.
There is one particularly interesting case that I looked at while I was reporting on this piece but didn't actually make it into the story was the the case of a guy named Parvez Ahmed in Florida who was appointed to a small human rights commission for his his his city in Jacksonville.
He's from Jacksonville.
And, you know, he's like he he was actually involved in a pretty high level in care and then left care because he thought care was not doing enough to sort of like integrate to prevailing American cultural values.
You know, he thought that care should go out and be more supportive of LGBT rights.
He thought, you know what I mean?
He was he was doing all of the things that supposedly, you know, we would want a good Muslim to do, quote unquote.
Right.
Like big quotes around all of that.
But anyway, he was he was one of Afro-America's first major targets.
They just they they launched this relentless campaign to try to discredit him and to try and paint him as a fake moderate who's actually radical in disguise.
You know, they he wound up needing to have he worked for a university at the time.
The president of the university was so freaked out by what was happening that he wound up assigning like a campus security detail to him.
You know, these Afro-America folks were showing up at every kind of public function that he was involved in and like recording his every move, you know, there was really harassing him.
And the it's just it's it's really emblematic.
I think that incident, that anecdote is really emblematic of the real enemy for people like Afro-America, right, which is essentially any Muslim that does any kind of substantial work towards having Muslims be sort of accepted, normal, prominent participants in and members of American society.
They they just can't stand that.
Right.
Yeah.
More reverse trutherism for me today.
These people.
And that's a joke.
But these people are doing the dirty work of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
This is exactly why terrorism works, is because you get idiots like this to say that this, you know, hail Mary pass or or marginal event as tragic as Orlando was as far as the rest of society goes.
It's really it's nothing like a real military assault on our country or anything.
And it's reacting to that in such a way as to it could be, you know, quote unquote, in effect, they're attempting to push every Muslim who doesn't want to go to war with America into the position of feeling like they have to, or at least that they will always be enemy aliens within our society and aren't welcome to come and integrate.
And which is a real uphill task in America where Muslims are so well integrated and almost all come from upper classes of countries where they've emigrated from and, you know, have advanced degrees and are participants in society and that kind of thing.
Right.
Sure.
But yeah, I mean, these people really are working for Osama right now with this.
Yeah.
I mean, that's one of the one of the key features of conspiratorial political thinking is the tendency to cast things in sort of civilizational apocalyptic terms.
Right.
It's good versus evil, East versus West, whatever you want, whatever framework it is you want to apply.
And, you know, obviously that, you know, if that reminds you of something, what it should remind you of is exactly the way that ISIS sees the world.
Right.
And that's why, you know, one of the funny things about the anti-Islam lobby, you know, funny in quotes, is that so much of it is comprised of evangelical Christians, right.
Just people who are very firmly in the Christian right.
And that includes Brigitte Gabriel, who fighting the same holy war as al-Baghdadi is.
Right.
Like they actually see things.
And there is more of a similarity between the way that they see the world than the way that they and anyone else sees the world.
And, yeah.
So, of course, that's going to feed the conflict.
Right.
I mean, of course, that that's going to that's going to only put people into camps.
It's only going to put, you know, it makes things simpler and in doing so sort of justifies any number of acts of violence that you might want to sort of dream up or get behind.
Yeah, exactly.
From both sides, from both sides.
Yeah.
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Right.
And they yeah, they just feed off each other.
And the moderates are the enemy of both.
And as you said, some of these people are just making a living and what a great way to make a living.
You know, as far as that goes.
So and this is why the work that you're doing is so important here, because you're putting all of this in a much more realistic context.
And again, everybody, the article is that BuzzFeed.
It's called Meet the Charming, Terrifying Face of the Anti-Islam Lobby.
And I'm about to ask you to elaborate a little bit more about Bridget Gabriel and a little bit more about that.
But first, could you talk about because you did mention, but it was in passing on a different subject, about the Sharia law craze, which this included a lot of state or at least a handful of state legislatures passing laws against Sharia to protect us from Sharia law coming, which is, of course, silly because there never was a threat of that.
But passing laws against the threat makes it seem like there is one.
So that's effective propaganda as far as that goes.
But so and of course, we do see the Islamic State and they're throwing alleged gays off the roof for their crimes, supposedly.
And people say, oh, no, if that's what Sharia is and that's coming to Texas or coming to California, then, you know, oh, my God, what are we going to do about it?
But you said, no, that's not really what Sharia law means.
But you didn't get a chance to say what you meant by that.
So please do.
Yeah.
So so Sharia, the word itself just means the path.
And it refers to I mean, it's it's really it's a very big and nuanced and kind of accommodating concept.
Right.
And it basically just refers to the sort of religiously informed or dictated code of conduct that applies to every practicing Muslim, at least in theory.
Right.
So just the way that any given Muslim lives his or her life.
And it extends to to really everything.
It's just a sort of all encompassing code of conduct.
Now, one component of that is that it has a legal or jurisprudential component, which is the work of, you know, religious legal scholars interpreting, you know, Islamic scripture in order to come up with with with laws.
Right.
But the thing is that that that aspect of Sharia, the sort of concrete legal aspect of Sharia varies really dramatically from culture to culture.
Right.
There's no it's a question of how it's interpreted and implemented in the context of a larger political system.
So, you know, when when people like David or Shalmi or Frank Gaffney or Brigitte Gabriel talk about Sharia law, they refer to it as if it were this sort of coherent, monolithic legal code that says that we should throw, you know, LGBT people off roofs and we should stone women and et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
When what they're actually referring to are the most extreme, the most violent iterations of that legal code that exist and have existed in the world, which are particular to certain very specific regimes.
Right.
Again, it's a very specific political context, such as Saudi Arabia.
That's kind of the most common example.
Right.
So so this is the notion that Sharia law is a concrete thing that exists in the world that is sort of, you know, describes the underlying legal code for all of Islam is itself.
It's a spurious idea.
Right.
And B, the idea that that there is an effort to impose, you know, said Sharia law in places where it does not currently, you know, where it's not currently in place is I mean, if you talk to any practicing, reasonably educated Muslim, one of the first things they'll tell you about Sharia is that, you know, one of one of the sort of most widely agreed upon and consistently implemented aspects of Sharia when it comes to these legal frameworks and these political frameworks is that for Muslims who live in civilizations where, you know, the state is not Islamic and Sharia is not Sharia law, however, is being interpreted is not the law of the land.
It is part of Sharia to respect the law of the land as it exists in that place.
Right.
Like it's actually built into the code that you're not supposed to use the code to take over whatever civilization it is that you're that you're living in.
So anyway, I mean, like the the number of ways in which this conspiracy theory can be debunked is really there.
There are a lot of ways that you can do that.
Let's talk about the truth of, you know, what are the supposed controversies as far as how Sharia has been used by anyone in America, for example, because, again, there's got to be a kernel of truth that they're seizing on to twist out of context here.
Right.
Right.
Right.
But I mean, in this instance, it's so, so very tenuous.
So in some instances, for example, the way that Sharia comes up in in a government context is with like Sharia, what they call Sharia compliant finance.
Right.
So Sharia has some guidelines with respect to money.
Right.
How you how you can spend it.
It governs things having to do with like interest, that kind of thing, as many religions do.
The you know, whenever any kind of American government entity wants to do business with a corporate or other entity that is based in a country with Islamist form of government, then there are people whose job it is to figure out how to make those financial transactions conform to the laws of the other party in the transaction.
Right.
Which is something that you would do with.
I mean, that's something if you if you were engaging in a financial transaction with a company based in like anywhere, I don't know.
Yeah.
Anywhere you would you would you would have to figure that you would have to compare the legal framework.
You'd have to make sure that whatever you're doing is legal in both countries, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's really just that.
But, you know, so often whenever anyone in any kind of position within or adjacent to a government entity in the United States does any kind of work having to do with Sharia compliant finance, then people say, you know, this is obviously a sign of the sort of impending takeover of Sharia law.
There are also, you know, another sort of frequently cited example is like family disputes.
Right.
Family courts, which is something that, you know, there's a very there's a very clear parallel there in that, you know, Judaism and various sort of Christian denominations have very similar things.
Right.
They have these sort of external arbitration systems for issues that don't necessarily rise to the level of a legal or criminal or civil problem.
Right.
So these are really I mean, they're really the position that these concerns occupy in the legal system is infinitesimally small.
Right.
I mean, it's just not it's it's it's so small and so marginal and applies to so few people in so few instances.
But that that is the kernel of truth that gets.
Well, that's so important.
Listen, I mean, when you make the comparison to Jews and Christians, hey, Jews and Christians listening, this is your freedom of religion, too.
What he's saying is that Muslims have their own customs for how they get divorced.
OK.
None of your business.
And they're not trying to impose it on you.
And it's the same thing as you have your customs for doing those kinds of things, too.
That's also none of their business.
It's all we're talking about here is the American way going back to William Penn, for Christ's sake.
You know, pretty straightforward, pretty straightforward.
All right.
So a little bit of freedom of religion, one on one there for the children.
All right.
Now, so tell me more about this lady, Bridget Gabriel, and also about and well, I don't know if it's too much of a diversion and time intensive.
Maybe you can skip the rape case she's exploiting here.
But at least please explain, you know, really what this organization is, who this lady is and how her organization works.
Right.
So she, Bridget Gabriel, has a really interesting backstory.
She is a Maronite Christian from Lebanon.
She was born in a town called Marjoune on the southern border of Lebanon, the border with Israel.
She, you know, when she was 10 years old, the Lebanese civil war started in her telling.
This is the story that she tells everywhere, you know, in her books, in her speeches and her promotional materials, is that when she was 10 years old, a Palestinian military strike near Marjoune destroyed her house and she and her family wound up having to live in an underground bomb shelter for several years.
The key thing here is that she explains the she she casts the Lebanese civil war as a sort of plainly religious conflict, which was started by radical Muslims out of hatred for Christians and Jews, which is simply untrue.
It's just patently untrue.
I mean, any halfway respectable scholar who's looked at the Lebanese civil war will tell you that that's not true.
It was an immensely complicated conflict with, you know, a number of factions, a number of causes.
Religion was one.
And especially towards the beginning of the conflict, one small component.
Right.
I mean, even the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Gabriel's telling was sort of the instigator for a lot of this, was a secular Marxist socialist organization.
You know, they were not they were not Islamists by any stretch of the imagination.
You know, after 1979, after the Iranian revolution, that sort of injected some degree of Islamism into the Lebanese civil war.
But it was, you know, it was not one created until after the Israeli invasion in 1982.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So, I mean, it's just it's a really, really, really stunning simplification of a very complicated conflict.
So but, you know, it works.
And so she bills herself as a, quote unquote, survivor of Islamic terror.
Right.
And one of the things that she likes to say is that, you know, she's she's stared the enemy in the face.
Right.
Like she knows who the enemy is because she's she's suffered at the hands of the enemy.
But as as a as a sort of personal history, it's very effective.
It makes people really believe her.
And that's also that also has to do with another sort of ancillary and very interesting phenomenon in this world, which is that there is a huge appetite amongst especially, you know, far right evangelicals and far right Zionists in America.
There is a huge appetite for emissaries of these ideas, right, of these anti Muslim ideas who are themselves from the Middle East or who are or at least claim to be former Muslims.
Right.
There's just like nobody gets more attention than somebody who can claim some kind of connection to that world, right, to the Middle East or to the Arab world or to Islam.
And, you know, my theory is that it has to do with sort of evangelical redemption narratives.
Right.
It's sort of like people seeing the light.
But anyway, that's I'm straying a bit from the point.
Anyway, Brigitte Gabriel uses this personal history of hers to to to convince people of these conspiratorial ideas that we've been talking about.
And she specifically does it in, you know, two or three different ways.
A, she writes books.
She has two New York Times bestsellers.
B, she she's on the speaking circuit.
She's a, you know, very effective, highly sought after speaker, particularly in the evangelical and Zionist speaking circuits and with Act for America for America's for grassroots organization that she founded in 2007.
She, you know, built the organization with the help of Guy Rogers, who was the former national field director for the Christian Coalition, which is Pat Robertson's grassroots organization, which, you know, sort of changed the face of American conservative politics in the 90s.
And those are the three ways that she, A, disseminates her message and B, makes money.
So she she's very charismatic, very media genic.
She shows up on TV all the time.
Whenever there's a terrorist attack, she gets called on to, you know, usually Fox News, but sometimes other places to ostensibly explain what's happening.
She and, you know, people who people who know about her and follow her really, really, really love her.
She has a rabid following.
Right.
I mean, the people think she is just so amazing and such an inspiring figure.
And, you know, they think she speaks the truth when nobody else is willing to speak the truth.
And that's part of what makes her so powerful.
Right.
Is it just as a as a person, as a as a sort of character?
She's very charismatic and compelling.
That's, you know, that's basically Brigitte Gabriel in a nutshell.
And then so when she's just on a permanent tour like Iron Maiden or something, just going around town to town or what?
I'm not sure she would appreciate the Maiden parallel, but she I think she used to be a lot more right.
I think she used to be I think she used to, you know, I should say that this is I don't know this for sure.
This is sort of just based on having read basically everything that's out there about Brigitte and having kind of tried to sort of trace the way that her career has progressed over the years.
I'm pretty sure that she used to she used to rely more on her speeches as a form of both influence and income.
And now that's a little bit less because she's a little bit more of a like a rare and therefore even more sought after speaker now.
And she I think she spends more of her time these days actually just working on the politics of it and working on Act for America and and kind of leveling up in terms of actually wielding political influence rather than just going around and giving speeches.
Well, you know, in the past I've spoken with Max Blumenthal, who wrote a great article for Tom Dispatch called The Great Fear about the Islamophobia industry.
And Eli Clifton has done I think he did the first report for the Center for American Progress and they did a follow up as well.
And certainly Blumenthal and Clifton both found a lot of connections to Israel here in a pretty clear narrative that the Israel lobby wants Americans to hate and fear Muslims of all descriptions from now on as best they can, because guess who their enemies are and guess who they're stealing land from people who are Muslims.
So as long as they can make it look like, oh, yeah, we're your Ford Apache out here fighting your war for you on the front lines against the Muslim menace and all that, then that does real well for their narrative of stealing the West Bank because they so called have to and getting away with it with American acquiescence.
And I wonder, you know, how much of Israel and their lobbies and their influence you found.
You mentioned Yael Rashami, which is not just that he's Jewish, but it's that he's, you know, connected with Israel lobbying organizations and that kind of thing, as they have shown.
But I wonder how much of that you found in your research on this subject.
So, you know, I definitely haven't done a reporting to the extent on that specific connection to the extent that people like like Blumenthal and Clifton have done.
But there's a lot of stuff that you don't have to dig at all for that's out there.
That's very clear.
I mean, you know, some of the when you when you sort of zero in on any individual sort of like iteration of these groups and the work that they do, you will almost always find some kind of explicitly pro-Israel person or organization who is affiliated with it or sponsoring it or in some way enacting it.
Right.
I mean, it's it's it's pretty it's pretty out on the surface.
It's not that hard to find.
Right.
I mean, it's there are people who, you know, sort of hardline pro-Israel Americans are very frequently to be found in the company of the anti-Islam lobby.
It's just that's that's just how it is.
Right.
I don't I don't think anyone even especially tries to hide it.
I think it's just those are the folks involved.
Right.
Whenever whenever you look at this kind of thing, there's two camps.
Right.
For the most part, there are other kind of more complicated people in sort of dynamics involved.
But usually there's one of two camps or both at the same time.
And it's as I've mentioned, evangelical conservatives or hardline pro-Israel conservatives.
That's it.
That's who the audiences are.
That's who the that's usually where the money comes from.
That's where the sort of civic organizing structures come from.
I mean, the connection is is is pretty evident in that sense.
Well, and, you know, as Walton Mearsheimer emphasized in their book about the Israel lobby that, hey, this is politics in a democratic society.
That's how it works, man.
You hire lobbyists to push your narrative, to get your agenda through.
And, you know, checks and balances rely on others doing work that pushes back and where others would distort the truth.
We got to tell what it really is.
And so it's very important work that you've done here.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate that.
All right.
So that is David Noriega.
Check him out at BuzzFeed dot com.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar dot com.
In fact, meet the charming, terrifying face of the anti-Islam lobby.
It's also sub headline Bridget Gabriel wants you to fight Islam again at BuzzFeed dot com.
And that's the Scott Horton show.
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