Bartholomew's Notes

For a while now, Debbie Schlussel has been engaged in a feud with Walid Shoebat: she accuses Shoebat of having plagiarized her work, and of responding to her complaints with a “Fuck you, bitch”. Now Schlussel accuses Shoebat of sending her annoying emails under a fake name:

Mr. Shoebat took it upon himself–despite my praise of him on this site–to engage in a pattern of behavior that spanned plagiarism and obscene verbal abuse to the non-stop barrage of harassing messages he sent me over the last two days under a fake name, “Sandra Medina.”…Shoebat made the mistake of e-mailing me using an e-mail he and his son had used to e-mail me before with their real names…And after I asked Shoebat not to e-mail me again, he did anyway–three times, so far–including a fake letter to himself, his equally unhinged chief of staff [Keith Davies], and his friend–who else but another phony?–Sean Hannity.

The emails were sent from the address “aga_tangola@yahoo.com”; Schlussel claims it was used in emails sent to her and to Rachel Neuwirth from Walid’s son (Theodore Shoebat) in 2006.

Schlussel also goes into further detail about how the feud began:

In response to [Imad] Hamad’s claims [against Shoebat], Shoebat put out a press release, which plagiarized–word for word–my column on Hamad. I contacted Shoebat’s PR person, Maria Sliwa (interestingly, she’s also plagiarist Aaron Klein’s publicist and helped him rip me off), asking why my work was ripped off. Sliwa told me that Walid Shoebat insisted my name be removed because he didn’t want to be associated with “the Zionists.”…Shoebat told me a million different stories. First, he told me he was a fan of my work and that he’s upset that Ms. Sliwa took my name out of the press release and ripped off my work–that it was her decision. Then, he admitted he lied about that and that he, himself, made the decision to steal my work because “I don’t want to be associated with the Right”…Later in the day, Shoebat called me back and told me, “You know, I called a lawyer. And you can’t sue me [DS: I never said I would], so I don’t have to give you credit for your work. I can take it and use it however I want. Fuck You, Bitch!”

This is, of course, all grist to the controversy over Shoebat’s self-proclaimed past as an Islamist-inspired Palestinian terrorist; the Jerusalem Post, among others, has raised some concerns about his tale. Shoebat is certainly an unreliable narrator: I’ve noted a change in his conversion story from orginally becoming a Christian after reading an apocalyptic paperback by Grant Jeffrey to becoming a Christian after reading a Bible at the behest of his wife, and his proclaimed “message of love” is actually a message of anti-Muslim hate (particularly as expressed in his son’s homemade videos, as I blogged here). There are also a couple of other odd discrepancies: his wife is Roman Catholic, yet Shoebat used to be associated with Simon Altaf’s fundamentalist anti-Catholic and anti-evangelical website; he claims to have consulted ancient manuscripts of the Bible when developing his theory that “666” is actually Arabic for “In the name of Allah”, when it’s obvious that he has not. He has also claimed to be living under an assumed name while also saying that he has come from the “Shu’aybat” (or “Shuyabat”) family. Minor issues, perhaps, but “the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones”.

Meanwhile, Shoebat has recently enjoyed extra publicity through the free distribution in American newspapers of the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, in which he appears as a supposed expert. And the Shoebat bangwagon will soon be coming to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in an event at Augustana College sponsored by “Campus Crusade, LifeLight, Priority Associates, SEA, Life 96.5 and the Sioux Falls HopeLine”.

As a footnote, it should be remembered that Schlussel is not adverse to a bit of internet-based harrassment herself.

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