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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Stefan Salisbury.
He's a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
His most recent book is Muhammad's Ghosts, an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate it.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I really like this article.
And I almost can't believe how ridiculous the propaganda and scaremongering is about people believing in Islam, you know, somewhere between Canada and Mexico.
But then again, I think the war party has decided long ago, I think they realized that since they don't really have any real arguments at all, it's probably better to take the narrative as far away from reality as possible.
That way, those who can be fooled all of the time will stay with you.
And that means that we still need to invade Syria to find Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons.
And it means that any Muslim who tries to build a mosque in our community is probably a terrorist trying to destroy our lives and marry our daughters and cut off our son's heads and turn us into the Islamo-fascist caliphate.
Sound about right?
Well, I have to say there's a lot of that out there.
And the more I've reported on this, the more across the country, the more I come to think there are sort of zombie myths or vampire myths that just won't die.
And you can riddle them with facts, you can beat them over the head with truth, and they rise again.
And the controversy over the Cordoba House, the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, is just a classic case in point.
It is known to the entire country as the mosque at ground zero, even though it's not a mosque, and it's not at ground zero.
Nevertheless, that's the way the story is framed.
That's the way the issue is perceived by millions of Americans.
And I said to say, I think it's a failure on the represents a failure on the part of the media to bring out the actualities of the story and instead rely on the way that those who are in opposition to this construction have framed the issue themselves.
And that's happened over and over and over again.
Those who are opposed, in this case, coming from very, very, very extreme parts of the Tea Party movement, and God knows where else, the anti-Muslim mafia, they have framed this issue.
And by this point now, several months into it, it's permanently fixed.
So that is it's and you see this over and over and over again across the country, particularly with these mosque protests.
There are mosque protests now popping up all over the country, mosque construction and or expansion opposition everywhere, Georgia to Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, California.
And there are certain themes that run through all of these these protests.
And one of them is that Muslims in general represent some sort of fifth column, that they are by definition un-American and they cannot be allowed to subvert American communities.
In fact, today I read in the Wall Street Journal that the American Family Association, famous for vilifying artists in the late 80s, early 90s, is now demanding that there be no mosque construction anywhere at all in America.
This is a country that I believe was founded.
One of the one of the core principles of America's is freedom of religion.
And yet here is a religious leader of a large organization saying no, no mosques should be built.
Well, it's not like that's not your opinion, Stefan.
The fact of the matter is that the people who put together the Constitution in Philadelphia deliberately left any reference to higher mystical religious authority or power out.
And it was they were making a statement here, unlike all of the the state constitutions at the time, unlike all the states of Europe, they were not claiming a divine right for authority.
The authority of the U.S. government comes from the people only.
And then the First Amendment forbids them from either forcing you to believe in anything or preventing you from believing in anything.
And then, of course, before you even get to any of that, it's simply a question of property rights.
People want to build a mosque.
That's you know, you'd have to show damages or, you know, get lost.
As simple as that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we're not talking about, well, you know, they're pouring pouring oil out on the dirt and it's seeping into the groundwater or something.
We're talking about people building a mosque on their property.
What's it to you?
Right.
And they they the local community, of course, has approved this this construction, this project.
But it's it's it serves the political purposes of some politicians in New York state and elsewhere to to fan the flames here.
And and then there are anti-Muslim organizations that are using it for their own purposes as well.
But within the within that community of Lower Manhattan, it's been approved by the community board.
They gave the go ahead a couple of months ago.
And and the Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York approved the construction a couple of days ago.
So locally, it has, you know, the the legal legal support and all the legal eyes are dotted.
And the polls have shown that while New York City in as a whole, all five boroughs is in opposition to construction of this project in that location.
However, Manhattan, which is where it's located, is overwhelmingly in favor of construction.
That's so great to hear.
It's so funny.
It's just like when they used to say, you know, to oppose the government or any of our foreign policy at all is direct treason against the people who died on 9-11.
And they'd be saying that on the same day there'd be a giant anti-war protest in downtown Manhattan from the people who live through that saying enough is enough.
Stop with the killing.
Yeah.
And so thanks, people of Manhattan.
I appreciate it.
Well, you know, there there there's it's no accident that that this has become such a huge issue because it is being exploited by by political figures from outside of that community.
I'm talking about mainstream political figures from, you know, a couple of several presidential wannabes, Sarah Palin to Newt Gingrich, you know, gubernatorial hopeful like Rick Lazio and, you know, former former mayor Giuliani.
And, you know, they've all weighed in on this and, you know, in fierce opposition to it with, in some cases, not to logical arguments, but the current mayor Bloomberg has has come out several times with very strong support.
And most recently in an address, you know, affirming, I think, the core beliefs of this of this country, freedom of religion and tolerance.
So and property rights, I guess.
So it's it's it's something that resonates on a national level and therefore could be could be used.
But, you know, it is an election season.
All right, everybody, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Stephen Salisbury and he's got this great one at Tom Dispatch.
It's under Tommy's name over at anti-war dot com, of course.
And it's called Extremism at Ground Zero again.
And we'll be right back with more after this.
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All right.
So it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Stephen Salisbury.
He's got this great article at Tom Dispatch and at anti-war dot com slash Engelhardt about mosque paranoia and so forth.
And now here's the thing.
I got a conspiracy theory of my own, Stephen.
As long as the war parties push in this protocols of the elders of Islam, we're supposed to make me believe that all of my neighbors are my enemy based on what I guess they might believe when they're doing their religious thing or something.
My conspiracy theory is this.
Our enemy is the state and they are out to get us.
And the people who are the most powerful, the iron law of oligarchy and all that, the ones who have access to use the power of the state against us, they're out to get us.
They're the ones who are evil.
And as long as we're demagoguing, let's point our fingers where they ought to be pointed, which is the Washington, D.C., New York City corridor.
They're the ones who are destroying our society.
They're the ones who are turning the entire world against us.
It's not the Mexicans.
It's not the Muslims, the the the weak and the powerless, the voiceless in our society who are bringing us down.
It's the people who are running this show who are doing it to us.
You can say that that the kind of xenophobia that we're seeing now emerging around the country has deep roots and has been allowed to sort of grow within a state nurtured garden, if you will.
And by that, I mean, if you look back, just take the anti-Muslim sentiment as it's expressed in the various mosque protests around the country now.
In the immediate wake of 9-11, you know, the government was faced with, you know, a horrific problem.
I mean, they they were caught completely by surprise.
You know, now we know that they shouldn't have been or I don't want to get into that.
But but they mounted this massive investigation, which led immediately to literally tens of thousands of arrests and detentions and interrogations of almost exclusively of Middle Eastern and South Asians.
And this was followed up, you know, a year after 9-11 with with a very, very labyrinthine immigration program called special registration, which only applied to people from 24 predominantly Muslim nations and plus North Korea.
And this led eighty eighty five thousand people or so to register with the government, be fingerprinted, photographed and so forth.
And they were they were complying with the law.
And for their efforts in doing that, 13000 were placed immediately in deportation proceedings and 3000 were detained.
So within a year of 9-11 at 5000, at least a minimum of 5000 people jailed by the government, almost every single one of them was Muslim.
Then you had the drumbeat of plots and arrests and successful investigations, you know, in in city after city, you know, in New York, there was a Herald Square bombing plot disrupted by the New York police.
Lots of publicity there.
Chicago, Lodi, California, I mean, all over the country, there are these things that the anxiety levels around the country were maintained, you know, by the steady drip, drip, drip of of arrests and the attendant publicity.
Now, a lot of these cases turned out to be a lot less than initially trumpeted by the by prosecutors.
But nevertheless, the point is that the you know, the the the point driven home every time there was a busted plot so-called was that, you know, there are extremists, foreign elements in our midst.
People have to be on their guard, they have to be suspicious.
I mean, Bob Mueller, the FBI gave a remarkable speech at Stanford, which he said, you know, that what I'm most concerned with, actually, this was before Congress, he said this, what I'm most concerned with is what we're not seeing.
So they're trying to investigate things they can't see.
So that involves immediately involves the government in, in essentially, prevention.
I mean, that's what they were charged with doing there to prevent the next attack.
That's, that's pre-crime.
That's like a fictional dystopian notion.
So you have law enforcement engaged in investigating things that can't be seen.
And the reason they can't be seen is that maybe they're not there.
But, but in the atmosphere that was created within within the within the country, in the wake of 9-11, something not being there was not acceptable.
It was not an acceptable outcome of an investigation.
So it's not surprising that people around the country, ordinary Americans began to think that, well, you know, if the FBI and local police and the INS people are looking at Muslims all the time, there must be something there.
You know, that's, that's the fertile seed ground for, for the stuff that you're seeing now bearing fruit.
It was prepared largely by by government actions and policies.
So yes, I would agree with you in that sense.
And now, you know, the thing is, too, you mentioned Robert Mueller there, the head of the FBI.
It's John Mueller, as far as I know, no relation over at the University of Chicago that wrote the book Overblown.
That's right.
I think it's his terminology that I've kind of adopted, which is that the Al-Qaeda attack of 9-11 was a last gasp.
Hail Mary pass.
One last shot at putting everything into trying to lure America into the Middle East, into within rifle range, basically to bog us down, to bleed our empire dry, a death of a thousand cuts.
The action is in the reaction.
That was the thing the whole time.
And yet the government from George Bush and including everybody else, I guess, basically they couldn't go along.
They couldn't tell people the truth about what the attack represented at all.
They had to pretend that they attacked us because we're all virgins and believe in Jesus and are wonderful people.
And the better we are, the more they hate us because of their evil religion.
And as MJ Rosenberg pointed out over at TPM Cafe the other week, the reason that the ADL joined in with the right wing bigots on this is because it is in their interest to keep Americans from accepting Muslims as their neighbors, because if we can have kind feelings for our Muslim neighbors, it makes it harder to demonize, to the point of inhumanity, Israel's enemies.
And it's in the ADL's interest, apparently, not to prevent defamation, but to encourage defamation, as long as it is congruent with the Likud party's agenda.
So you have the entire establishment plus the Israel lobby who have to pretend that they attacked us for no reason other than their problem, not anything we ever did that could have possibly led to something like this.
And everything that we've done since then is simply the reaction to history beginning that day.
Well, I can't speak to the ADL's motivation.
I mean, it is true.
Well, MJ Rosenberg used to work at AIPAC, so I think his word is worth something there.
Yeah, that I just can't speak to.
But I can speak to, certainly, there have been instances, there have been cases brought by the federal government against so-called plotters that have really played up the element of anti-Semitism.
And it's an interesting, actually, there's a very interesting case in Newburgh, New York, involving four guys.
And I can't remember if we talked about this before, but in that case, they were, these four guys, you know, all real sad sacks, African-American Muslims of a sort.
I mean, they were just basically hangers-on.
And one of them is a paranoid schizophrenic, and they're homeless.
And anyway, they were busted and charged with seeking to plant bombs at a couple of synagogues in the Bronx, and to shoot down, they were also charged with planning to shoot down military planes from Stewart Air Base in Newburgh with surface-to-air missiles.
I mean, I just can't imagine that.
But nonetheless, these are the charges.
And when their arrest was announced at the beginning, or the spring of 2009, I think it was, prosecutors made a big deal out of the synagogue bombs and talked about the virulent anti-Semitic jihadists and all this stuff.
And it turns out, and also Bloomberg said, well, you know, everyone has to keep their vigilance now.
And the Simon Weisenthal Center came out with a statement saying that what this shows is that, you know, Jews in America have to remain vigilant, so forth.
So essentially, these guys were just established as murderous anti-Semites.
But when more of the actuality of what happened came out, you got a little different picture.
And it turns out that that whole case was largely ginned up, if not entirely, by a federal informant who came into Newburgh driving a very, very expensive Mercedes, offering jobs to all these out-of-work people.
It's a depressed economy up there, flashing money.
And it turns out he was offering $250,000 for carrying out a plot.
And, you know, he sucked in these four characters, who couldn't even find the Bronx, frankly, and told them, basically told them that Jews were responsible for every act of violence against Jews.
They were behind the war in Iraq, you know, the whole line here, and got them all riled up.
And then, of course, they're culpable for going down there and planting bogus bombs that were supplied by the FBI.
But my point is that one of these characters is caught on – is heard on tape saying, oh, I'm not going to go out and do any of this stuff.
I'm not going to hurt anybody.
And besides, you know, you offer that amount of money to anybody in this town, they'll do anything.
They don't care what the cause is.
You know, I mean, you're offering money, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars to people who don't even have a job or sleeping on the streets.
Well, the thing is, Stephan, is that, as you say, this is just one of many, many examples of these kind of built-up bogus cases or – and there are cases where people maybe have some, you know, quote-unquote tie that's all blown completely out of proportion if they're not outright entrapped.
But you were saying before, this really sets the stage, right?
This is kind of the benchmark that we're going from, so that then when an attack on a mosque comes, we think, well, you know, these people are pretty dangerous.
Every once in a while, there's an orange alert, and one of them paraded across the screen in shackles, and I guess I should be pretty scared of them.
And now, here's what I'm getting to, though, is that this debate is taking place, like all debates now, with the underlying question of the American economy and the falling apart of our empire and everybody feeling very insecure about a lot of things.
And as you said, the narrative is that Muslims are not our friends and neighbors.
They are a fifth column.
It's the protocols of the elders of Islam.
There's a secret communication between all the Muslims in our society, and what they're really here for is to bring our society down, that kind of thing.
It's part and parcel, really, I think, with the persecution of Mexican immigrants as well and other South American immigrants.
I don't want to leave people out.
And so, the thing is, and I think this is really what you're getting to in this article, is that just because John Ashcroft and the big rounding up is over now doesn't mean it can't happen again.
This could get much worse if people accept this premise of this fifth column, this conspiracy theory about what Muslims are up to, and this society could turn into the McCarthy era again, or who knows what, depending, really, I think, more than anything else, on the unemployment rate.
Yeah, I think the big wild card here is the economy, and people are feeling enormously nervous about that, and rightly so.
A lot of people are out of work or underemployed in some way.
They don't have any money.
They're losing their homes.
They see their neighbors in the same situation.
There's a lot of fear out there.
In that kind of a situation, all you need is for somebody to come along who can synthesize this demonization of Muslims and tie it into the widespread contempt for Washington, rightly or not, and the economic woes.
You get somebody who's able to do that, and you're going to have somebody who's far more potent than Joe McCarthy ever was.
I mean, Joe McCarthy was part of Washington, really, and you may recall that what really ended his reign of recklessness and smearing people were his colleagues in the Senate.
McCarthy went after one institution too many.
He went after the army.
Right.
The Senate turned against him and censored him.
And the thing is, he was actually right about a lot of reds in the State Department and things like that when the classified material was declassified, and especially the Russian documents came out.
A lot of it was true, but the real sin that went on that I think a lot of people who go back, you know, revisionists who defend McCarthy, what they miss is the climate of fear in the whole country.
Not that there's really a communist out to get you.
I guess people really bought into that, but that you could be accused of being one if you're not careful.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
And, you know, it wasn't – I mean, McCarthy was the most public figure, but, you know, there were red hunts that went on, you know, all over the place.
People went after their local schools.
They went after, you know, of course, unions were, you know, hotbeds of, you know, communist activity, which, you know, in those days unions actually, you know, had members.
Now it's not so much of an issue.
But, yeah, again, it's the invisible enemy within that has to be rooted out and can't be seen, so therefore it can be anyone.
It could be you.
It could be me.
And, you know, so therefore we have to be constantly on our guard, and if there's any question about somebody, then, you know, off with their head.
Well, now, here's the thing, too, and I'm sorry because one of the things you said at the beginning of the show is about how, you know, these guys control the narrative so much and we don't really get the facts of the reporting.
But, so, I mean, can you report to us about Islam and whether this is really true at all, that somehow this religion mandates the destruction of our society?
Because that's really the question that we haven't confronted, which is there – that's the – you boil it down, that's the assertion of the war party here.
Yeah, well, it's ridiculous.
It's like you could make the same accusation about any major religion, you know.
Let me give you an example from my own personal experience.
You know, I published this book a little while ago, Muhammad's Ghosts, and it focuses on one mosque, what happened to one mosque here in Philadelphia that was caught up in the war on terror.
And there was a big FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force raid on it, which ultimately led to the destruction of this mosque.
So I follow this whole story and the ramifications within the community and it allows me a way to talk about, you know, a lot of the things that we're talking about here.
And when I was first – when this mosque was first raided, it was very uncertain what exactly the feds were looking for, what were these agents looking for, why was it raided?
And you couldn't really get a straight answer from federal authorities.
You know, the FBI said, no, it wasn't our raid, it was a JTTF raid.
The warrant was issued for financial documents and it turned out that the IRS was behind the raid.
So it was like a dribble and pass game.
You know, the ball went around and around from one agency to another, you know.
In other words, it was a fishing expedition in the first place.
They're making up excuses later, it sounds like.
Yeah, I think ultimately that's what it was.
But my point was that in going around talking to people in the community about, you know, about this mosque.
And it was a – it was not a big mosque.
It was a small mosque in a working – out of the way working class district here in Philadelphia.
And so it was not well known.
It's not something that, you know, a place that people were familiar with.
So going around, people basically said what they had heard on the rumor mill about the place.
And, you know, they wouldn't believe the stuff they heard.
Oh, it's the Taliban mosque.
It's the mosque where, you know, the imam there is, you know, very, very radical and so forth.
Well, none of this was true.
None of this was true.
The imam there was a, you know, was a very religious man.
And but he was – and he opposed the war in Afghanistan and he opposed the war in Iraq.
But, you know, this is Philadelphia.
This is the national headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee.
I think they opposed the war in Afghanistan as well.
And not to mention the war in Iraq.
You know, we've had Quaker cells in our midst for centuries.
Right, one of them was just on this show right before you today.
You know, but those are the kinds of stories that are told about places that people don't know.
And so they're the stories that get out there as an example, again, in a very small way of what happened in a huge way with the mosque at Ground Zero that's not really at Ground Zero and isn't really a mosque.
Well, and, you know, there was something so shocking to me, although I guess it wasn't really surprising, but still it's just a head-shaking kind of a thing.
In the Washington Post, it says that the main imam, I don't know his name, who's working on this community center in New York.
Yeah.
That he's become the focus of all this attention.
He actually – all the conservatives are mad because the State Department is sending him on a tour of the Muslim world.
And they're saying, oh, he's the terrible guy and he's getting subsidized by America and whatever.
But the State Department answered back that actually this guy's been doing this for years.
And we send him around the world and he explains to people in the Muslim world that, oh, in America they have total freedom of religion.
It's great and Muslims get along fine and they're very prosperous and not persecuted and it's wonderful.
And now here he is, they're sending him on a mission that they'd already arranged before this controversy broke out.
And now he's going to go around the world and go, yeah, I'm the guy that half the country's flipping out because I want to build a community center.
So this is now – and he's on his way on a Karen Hughes mission to spread the truth about how good America is to these people right in the middle of this madness.
I think that speaks for itself.
It's another instance where facts don't matter.
Here this guy's been doing it for years and it's true, he has been doing it for years.
And everybody gets all riled up about it because he's doing what he has been doing.
But – For America, not taking advantage of the State Department.
They have a pretty good deal worked out with this guy.
I know, I know.
But this is not rational.
We've gone through periods like this in our history before, of irrationality.
We talked a little bit about the McCarthy period.
But a great analog of what's happening now is really the period right after the First World War, the period of the Palmer Raids.
When there was terrific anti-immigrant sentiment that was focused on Italians and Russians and Eastern Europeans.
And in the wake of the Russian Revolution, oh my God, there was a terrific fear of Bolsheviks and rampant radicalism in the United States.
And Obama was placed in front of the home of Mitchell Palmer, who was Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General.
And that led to what are known as the Palmer Raids, in which Mitchell got his young subordinate, J. Edgar Hoover, to set up basically nationwide drag nets in which they rounded up something like over 10,000 immigrant – supposedly immigrant radicals and unionists and anarchists and Bolsheviki for deportation and criminal proceedings.
And it really led to a terrific upsurge in anti-immigrant feeling.
And again, it was something that the government provided the framework for.
And it launched Hoover's career.
Hoover was a young guy.
He was in his mid-20s, and he was in charge of this very high-profile investigation for the Attorney General of the United States.
And what it did was it established the FBI, which in those days was called the Bureau of Investigation.
But that's what launched Hoover, and he launched those raids and drag nets in almost exactly the same way that John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller launched their own investigation almost a century later.
Right.
And now, as you said, we have all these Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which a lot of this stuff predated 9-11 anyway.
But, of course, now we have the Department of Homeland Security, which will never go away till the empire falls.
I mean, this thing's a permanent institution in America now.
I'm not even sure exactly really what purpose they serve, different from the different police agencies under the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department.
But I guess, you know, ultimately, they'll be the centerpiece of the National Police Force of America when all the state and local authorities are integrated with the national police, don't you think?
Well, I mean, the FBI is the only, it's a huge agency, but it's, I think, the only one that's outside of the Homeland Security Department.
I think that was a stipulation.
It would stay within the Justice Department.
So, yeah, I mean, Homeland Security is this massive enforcement bureaucracy.
Essentially, it brings together all these different police agencies from other federal departments under one roof.
I would think it creates a bureaucratic nightmare, myself.
But, yeah, that's what we're faced with.
All right.
Well, we need to wrap this thing up, everybody.
Steven Salisbury from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
I really do appreciate all that you're doing to help improve understanding on this issue, Stephen.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate you having me on to talk about it.
And, by the way, for the record, when I was going off about our enemy is the state, I mistakenly still had your microphone down.
So if you did hem and haw during any of that, which is perfectly acceptable, I was taking out a very radical position there.
But none of that came through, and I didn't turn your mic up until probably maybe the second word of your actual answer.
So just for the record, he wasn't necessarily endorsing my craziness with his silence, everyone.
All right.
Thank you very much, Stephen.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
See you.
