Funding Wilder’s Hate – The Israel Lobby Connection

Reading the opinion section of DutchNews.nl (Wilders and the US – Israel Lobby), there was an interesting point about how Wilders gets his funding.   For me it explains so much, that his paymasters are behind him trying to get a dangerous Israeli Spy elected to the Dutch Parliament.   Also, the links to ugly hate websites like FrontPage Magazine and blogs like Jihad Watch.   Disturbing and adding to the bigger picture, Wilder’s attendance at the hate-fest Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem was sponsored by Arieh Eldad, leader of extreme right Hatikva party, that simply wants all the Arabs (to them there is no Palestinians) out of the West Bank (now we know why Wilders is obliged to say that Palestinians are really Jordanians). 

The item is extremely condemning on many fronts, particularly against Israel and not necessarily supported by me, it is an opinion.  I think it does explain a few things in regards to Wilders’ funding and thus links, influences and obligations.    I always recommend, and in this case insist, that the entire item be read to understand the context of the author. Full acknowledgements of course to the author Giles Scott-Smith of TheHollandBureau.com. 

A crucial detail about Wilders’ party, the PVV, is that it only has two official members: himself, and the Friends of the PVV Foundation which he formed as a finance-gathering apparatus. 

Dutch law states that every party with a membership of 100,000 or more can receive state subsidy. Wilders’ decision to keep his party in his own hands therefore also has severe financial consequences. 

Someone else aside from the Dutch state has to provide the money. Much of it comes from the US, where Wilders travels regularly. According to the Volkskrant, in 2008 Wilders even changed the statutes of the Foundation to ensure that it could be used to accept donations for legal cases – the grounds of which remain unspecified in the document – that he might be faced with. 

The Dutch press has tracked down several of the principal financial sources for the PVV in the US. Two figures stand out: David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. Horowitz runs the online FrontPage Magazine and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which with an annual budget of around 5 million dollars is an important financier of outlets such as Jihad Watch and Islam critic Robert Spencer. 

According to the NRC, it was Horowitz who introduced the Dutchman to leading conservative activists Senator Jim DeMint and Dick Cheney´s daughter Liz last year, and brought Wilders into contact with one of his own financiers who is not named. 

Pipes is founder of the pro-Israeli Middle East Forum and has long been in favour of a pre-emptive strike against Iran. Pipes also formed the Legal Project in 2007 to raise and distribute funds for researchers, journalists, and authors who face legal battles based on their critical statements about Islam – ‘jihad by court’, as they say. 

Wilders is of course an ideal recipient. In 2009 Pipes managed to round up “an amount in six figures” for Wilders in the USA. Interesting detail is that both Horowitz and Pipes belong to the Right of the Republicans but see Wilders mainly as a useful extension of their pro-Israeli agitating. 

Theselinks are all the more remarkable because during his time as a member of the VVD (prior to 2004) Wilders followed the line of that party – sympathy for Israel but critical of any moves that would disrupt chances for lasting peace. 

Wilders even spoke out against the West Bank wall and the continuing expansion of settlements. But his designs for the PVV as his vehicle to political power demanded a regular sizeable income, and that meant cozying up to the radical anti-Islamic Right. Again according to the Vrij Nederland, showings of Fitna in the US last year came with a $2500 price tag for those wanting to join GW at the top table. 

 

Wilders condemned disloyalty, implying Muslims' loyality was elsewhere. We wonder to whom Wilders' real loyalty is to?

Walid Shoebat: Con Artist and Hate-for-Profiteer

Often the name Walid Shoebat comes up in the anti-Islam blogosphere; praised as a “former terrorist”, the honest zealous convert to Christianity, writes books about the ugliness of Islam, his defending of Israel and his warnings about jihad taking over America.   Sounds too much, as Sarah Palin would say “you bet ya!”

Walid Shoebat is a con artist – who pushes his questionable history to advantage, abused his heritage for advantage, became a zealous evangelical Christian either for profit or out of madness and hangs around other hate-for-profiteers to roll-around in self-praise.

Shoebat is half-Palestinian, half-American, not that this matters.  He claims to be a former PLO terrorist but as many have pointed out, there is no evidence of such and the example he gives, of attacking an Israeli bank is rejected by the Bank itself, the PLO and the Jerusalem Post  as absurd  (Bank Leumi said that “after checking its files, the bank said it had no record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere in the relevant 1977-79 period”.) .   His links to Evangelical groups that have also claimed to have had ex-terrorists amongst them, with equal questionable backgrounds, has only added to the doubt of this farce.

This evangelical link has had mixed benefit and added hypocrisy for Shoebat.  Chosing to go down this path guarantees an audience and book buyers, thus income.  At the same time, he has to sell to the religious zealots and this falls flat.

Recently Shoebat claimed that the word “666″ in the Book of Revelation was actually a misreading of the Arabic phrase “in the name of Allah”, supernaturally revealed to the author who copied the Arabic script as he saw it.”  That he had seen this “Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus”.   As one popular Christian blogger pointed out, “  So, does the  Codex Sinaiticus offer any better evidence to favour Shoebat’s claim? The digitised text has just been made available on-line, and the answer is, as expected, ”no”. The Codex Sinaiticus actually spells the number out as “six hundred and sixty six.  In other words, Shoebat’s claim is an epic fail at all levels, and as regards the Codex Sinaiticus he either lied about seeing it or lied about what he saw”.

In late 2007 Shoebat along with those other Evangelicals were involved in the Colorado Springs Air Force Academy contraversy.   Elements of the US Air Force Academy’s religous right allowed Shoebat and two others under the banner of anti-terrorism experts  to speak to the students.    It was described by Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids said “It was just an old time gospel hour — ‘Jesus can change your life, he changed mine,’ that is mixed in with ‘Watch out America, wake up America, the danger of Islam is here.’ ”   Professor Howard said his doubts about their authenticity grew after stories like the Golan Heights saga as well as something on Mr. Saleem’s Web site along the lines that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam. “The grand wazir of Islam is a nonsensical term.”   (Saleem, one of the three is Kamal Saleem, who has a similar hate-for-profit website and makes outrageous claims of being an important terrorist and who “educates state and federal political leaders, military leaders, intelligence specialists, security officials and contractors, law enforcement agencies”, yet does not even merit even a Wikipedia page).  As someone who has worked with the national security, law enforcement and other agencies, one does not advertise it without serious back-up or one does not advertize it at all.

Shoebat’s website has the standard three elements that hate-for-profiteers seem to have in common.  It has lots of phrases/links to horrible acts or radical quotes, it praises those that give him money (in this case it is pro-right-wing Israeli and Evangelical, and lastly it has lots of money-making links and pictures of his books.   There is not much academic, newsworthy and impartial in any of it.  It quotes Martin Luther King Jr about love, without considering it disrespectful and most certainly the great man would have considered Shoebat a fraud.    

Amongst the quotes of Shoebat in his website he proudly claims that “”The occupation is in the minds of Children who are taught hatred.”  That is strange considering all but pro-Settlers consider Israel “occupied”.  Even the Prime Minister of Israel calls it a occuption.   We assume that there is no “Two State Solution” option for Shoebat, that the race of his father simply does not exist.  Why is that Walid?   It may be in his other quote “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?”.   We can guess that identity is not an issue for him and he is carefully following the ultra-orthodox political line that Palestinians are Jordanians and should go there.   For a devout American Evangelist, why is he towing a dangerous, fringe ultra-orthodox Jewish party-line?    He is often targeted as being a pawn of Israel.  I do not know that, but he may very well have sold-out to a certain fringe radical group within it, a bit like Wilders, with no logical connection that can be fathomed except for money, support and sales.

On the same front page as the above quotes, Shoebat also says that “The Israeli Arab Conflict is not about geography but about Jew hatred” and yet a few lines down says “No one (Arab or Jew) has a “right of return” Jews who fled Arab persecution from 1948 to 1956 should have no right of return to Arab lands, and Arabs who ran away in 1948 and 1967 should have no right of return either”.    So it is about land afterall and conveniently Jews should not have a right of return to lands that they do not want to go back to anyhow?  Get real Walid, the subject is about land and your following the Settler Arguments down to the full stop at the end of the sentence.

The question of Israel for me is about radicalism, those against it and those defending it with the average person on both sides of the border suffering for it.    The Settler Movement is an ugly religous-based excuse for land-grabbing and is as evil as the radical hijackers who took over the resistance against it.   Walid Shoebat may claim to be an Evangelist, from his work above he is failing to prove that, but there is no doubt that he is used, abused and backed by the radical Zionist Settler Movement.

Sham, scam-artist, con-man, hypocrite, cultural sell-out, ugly radical – take your pick, all are good descriptive of the scum known as Walid Shoebat, profiteer from hate.

Quoting Anushay Hossain’s “What’s up Saudi?”

I came across an item by website editor, feminist, Bengali-born Anushay Hossain that I found compelling to quote in part.  Though I tend to try to look at and discuss the complexities, Anushay tackles the subject head-on (and probably rightly so).   As a woman and a Muslim, she sees the ugly sexism, institutionalised foolishness, and what I liked, was clearly defining the hypocrisy of calling some things religious when it really comes down to the perversion of many Saudi Men taking advantage of the old ways.   The topic is a questionable “fatwa” that was raised by Sheikh Abdul Mohsin al-Abaican who said that there is need for a symbolic bond between un-related men and women whom are in constant contact with each other.  The issue, being drivers of women who need transport, since they are banned themselves from sitting behind the wheel.  The old custom of introducing a male into the family by drinking the breast-milk of the women – being the only symbolic bond possible…..  you can imagine the rest yourself.   As usual, I give full acknowledgement to the author (Hossain) and recommend the entire item be read to avoid loss of context by the author.

While the Saudi authorities pretend as though they are the ones who hold the moral high ground by continuing to go out of their way to keep the sexes segregated and prevent women from driving, the issuing of fatwas such as this just goes to show who the real perverts are: Saudi men.

Saudi men and “scholars” who would rather preserve women’s purity (and other BS) by not allowing them to mix with men, but telling them it is okay to have strangers suckle on your breast so they become related to you?!

As one Saudi woman asks, “Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?”

The truth of the matter is, Saudi authorities want to keep denying women the right to drive as part of their larger efforts to curb the mobility of women and in effect, their rights. After all, the less you are able to get around the less you are able to do. It’s the hiding behind all the Islamic and religious justification that is the most disgusting part to tolerate.

Kudos to the women of Saudi Arabia for taking this as an opportunity to expose to the world and keep reminding us of the culture of absurdity they are forced to live in. These women should be congratulated for using the issuing of yet another insane fatwa and flipping it into an opportunity to maybe one day, finally winning their right to drive.