Joseph Farah’s feud with CAIR co ntinues to escalate, with a new title from WND Books prompting a media scramble. As WND reported on Wednesday (Rep links added):
As revealed in a new book detailing the operation and its findings, the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is not the beneficent Muslim civil-rights group it claims to be. Indisputable evidence now shows CAIR and other “mainstream” Islamic groups are acting as fronts for a well-funded conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas – to infiltrate and destroy the American system… “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” a WND Books publication by counter-terrorism investigator P. David Gaubatz and “Infiltration” author Paul Sperry, documents CAIR’s ultimate purpose to transform the United States into an Islamic nation under the authority of the Quran.
…With evidence from “Muslim Mafia” in hand, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terror Caucus, and other members of Congress – including Reps. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., and Paul Broun, R-Ga. – plan to hold a press conference today in Washington calling for an investigation and an end to political lobbying by front groups such as CAIR.
“Now we have proof – from the secret documents that this investigative team has uncovered, coupled with the ones recently declassified by the FBI – that [radical Islamists] agents living among us have a plan in place, and they are successfully carrying out that subversive plan,” Myrick writes in the foreword to “Muslim Mafia.”
As well as the three named Republicans, also present was Trent Franks, who recently declared that Obama does “insane things” because he is “an enemy of humanity”.
The book is just the latest of Farah’s publicity stunts, although it seems to have been his most successful. Last year WND Books published a book by Joel Richardson (of “Muslim Antichrist” fame) called Why We Left Islam, which Farah predicted would lead to riots across the Muslim world. Instead, all he got was a snarky comment from CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper about WND‘s anti-Muslim position and referencing its publication of a 2001 article by Sperry about dropping pigs’ blood from areoplanes over Afghanistan. Farah complained this last point was untrue, and that by making the claim CAIR had in effect issued a death threat against him (in fact, Sperry had advocated threatening to put blood in Afghanistan’s water supply, which Farah dismissed as merely “satire”). Farah also encouraged readers to donate to Michael Savage’s anti-climatic copyright lawsuit against CAIR.
The book has brought considerable scrutiny to Gaubatz, who as championed by Melanie Phillips in 2007. I’ve blogged him before regarding his absurd “Mapping Shari’a” project and his role in the new “Stop Islamization of America” organisation; Glenn Greenwald notes a history of overheated rhetoric:
He previously called Obama a “crack head” and wrote that “a vote for Hussein Obama is a vote for Sharia Law.”
And as for Gaubatz’s own site (see here):
The entire site is filled with the most extreme and repugnant anti-Muslim paranoia imaginable, claiming that “CAIR represents the ideology of terrorist groups”; warning that “CAIR places ‘insiders’ into Congressional offices in order to push the CAIR and Islamic terrorist agendas“; displaying a photograph of Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress, with this caption: “One of your leading elected officials (supporter of CAIR) with researcher Chris Gaubatz. How much information do we have on Carson and Congressman Keith Ellison?; and warning that “Young Muslim children are being taught across America to engage in violence against non Muslims and Muslims who do not uphold Sharia law.”
Gaubatz links this to a socialist conspiracy, and he claims that the media suppress details of Obama’s past drug use because of their own drug use. Media Matters has more in the same vein.
According to WND, Gaubatz had his son grow a beard and pretend to be a Muslim in order to infiltrate CAIR and smuggle out “12,000 pages” of documents. Of course, the fact that Gaubatz is a nutjob does not necessarily preclude the possibility that something devastating about the organisation has been turned up, but the signs are not encouraging: much of the material on WND about the book rakes over old controversies long in the public domain, and the centre-piece – which the four House Republicans are milking to death – is simply an unremarkable memo about lobbying strategy. Daniel Pipes, meanwhile, is trying to hype the book at the Jerusalem Post, but while he assures us that it “contains too much new information to summarize in small compass”, the only revelations he gives us are that CAIR has allegedly exaggerated its membership base and that it gets funding from Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
Greenwald also notes a 2003 comment from Rep Myrick:
In remarks about domestic security threats, Rep. Sue Myrick of Charlotte said, “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country”. . .
Myrick’s comments came during a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation last week about what she called Americans’ lack of readiness to deal with future terrorist attacks. During a question-and-answer session, she spoke about danger within the country.
“You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, ‘You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.’ Every little town you go into, you know?”…
Of course, politicians often show a weakness for grabbing headlines by associating with self-promoting and self-styled “anti-terror” experts. But as Patrick Mercer MP knows, such media stunts can end in embarrassment.
The book has a website here.
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