Aug 8, 2012 No Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Excerpted from ATLAS SHRUGS: Salon is in full smear gear in this latest blog post targeting politicians fighting for freedom, the preservation of individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and equality for all under the law.
Fight for these candidates. They are our first line of defense.
There is a bright side to this. Should the civilization-suicidal death wish that writers like Alex Seitz-Wald are working hard to achieve materialize, they will live under the most extreme, oppressive, and radical ideology on the face of the earth. This is something that they richly deserve.
Actually this is a ringing endorsement for Adam Hasner, whom I enthusiastically support. As for Islamic apologists like Alex Seitz-Wald, it is only a matter of time before he is getting measured for a suicide vest. “Adam Hasner: Islamophobe for Congress” Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, August 8, 2012
Congress’s anti-Islam caucus will likely grow in November, and Florida’s Adam Hasner may be its worst new member
Rep. Michele Bachmann has gotten a lot of attention lately for her witch hunt against Muslims in the U.S. government, but she’s not alone. In addition to the four lawmakers who signed on to her letters, there are a handful of others who together might be called the Islamophobia Caucus — and their ranks are likely to swell after November, thanks in part to one of the caucus’ most outspoken members, Rep. Allen West.
Salon’s “witch hunt” link goes to an interview Seitz-Wald did with Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, who calls Bachmann’s call for an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the government “galling.” Seitz-Wald doesn’t ask Ellison (of course) about the fact that in 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb. The Muslim American Society, according to Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “is the de facto arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. The agenda of the MAS is to … impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism policy.”
But Seitz-Wald doesn’t ask Ellison about any of that. He just lets him go on about “McCarthyism.”
After redistricting made West’s 22nd Florida congressional district slightly more liberal, he moved to the 18th. Running in his place is Adam Hasner, the former Florida House majority leader who abandoned a previous bid for the Senate. Hasner has already earned top-flight endorsers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and West himself, as well as several major conservative organizations.
But perhaps a bit farther down the list is Pam Geller, the anti-Islam blogger and activist who spearheaded the effort against the so-called ground zero mosque. While she may not have officially endorsed Hasner, they’re clearly comrades in the fight against Shariah law. “Pamela [Geller] and I were on the front lines of that together, fighting to make sure that we kept her safe here,” Hasner told a Fort Lauderdale crowd in June of last year. For her part, Geller has written numerous blog posts praising Hasner, whom she declared to be “my friend.” “So many patriots and elected officials joined us, like Adam Hasner,” she wrote in June of last year. Here’s a photo of them posing together from her blog. (Hasner did not reply to requests for comment.)
Note Seitz-Wald’s Alinsky tactics. He doesn’t even bother to try to establish that anything I say or do is wrong, aside from a sideswipe at the “so-called” ground zero mosque. Instead, he takes for granted that his liberal readers will think of me as someone to be shunned, and think something is wrong with Hasner for being associated with me. This is a despicable but common tactic on the left: demonize someone relentlessly, and then criticize other people on the right for having anything to do with him or her. And the right, full of craven cowards, all too often goes along, eagerly allowing the left to set the agenda and dictate with whom it can and cannot associate.
As the Florida Independent noted in September of last year, Hasner has been involved in a “long-time crusade against the supposed threat of Sharia in the U.S.” In 2009, he appeared on a panel in D.C. with Geller and Frank Gaffney, the man behind Bachmann’s with hunt, according to a press release unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge. Robert Spencer, another key figure in the Islamophobia cottage industry, called Hasner a “fearless truth teller” (here’s a photo them posing together via Spencer’s blog, Jihad Watch).
Before that, Hasner invited notorious Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders to Florida. “When I invited Geert Wilders to join me for a Free Speech conference in Palm Beach County, not only did the hotel cancel its plans to have him come in, but I was the one who was asked by the Hamas front group, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, to resign from the Florida House of Representatives, because I was an Islamophobe and a hater,” he said in the Fort Lauderdale speech. Wilders has made crusading against Islam his top priority. He was under house arrest for hate speech in Holland and is barred from visiting several countries.
