Month: January 2010

Jeff Stein has a great piece on how the most prominent CIA apologist for waterboarding has finally ‘fessed up that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Much of the news media treated this CIA “expert” like a hero back in 2007. I assume they will ignore his recantation.

Late last night the website for The American Conservative magazine was attacked by unknown hackers. They wiped out the content and replaced it with spyware.

The site is currently offline and will hopefully be restored this morning.

Our spotlight of the day (“Add Yemen to America’s Long List of Easy Enemies”
by Mark Ames) is from that site, so it is not currently working.

It is a shame when some people feel their counter-arguments are so weak that they must resort to such attacks.

PS: If you are a subscriber to the print edition, you have no problems reading all the articles right now. And it’s a good way to support TAC. You can subscribe over the phone at 800-579-6148 – a full year is $29.95, and two years is just $54.95.

How much damage can one man inflict and still be treated like a saint and savior in Washington?

Ben Bernanke’s career answers that question. The Establishment media has rallied around the current Fed chairman as if his reign was the triumph of wisdom and goodness – instead of a debacle of bursting bubbles and ruined lives.

Even though the Federal Reserve is supposedly independent [insert guffaw here] – Bernanke will not be permitted to continue in his job unless the Senate votes this week to grant him another term.

Sen. Russell Feingold, Sen. Barbara Boxer, and Sen. Byron Dorgan announced last week that they will vote against another term for Bernanke. Unfortunately, I doubt that most Republican senators will have the courage or gumption of these Democrats on this vote.

The Senate will be voting on Bernanke while having little or no idea what the Federal Reserve has done in recent years. That is why Congress must pass Ron Paul’s legislation to Audit the Fed.

These are only first steps, but they would be a giant leap back in the direction of fiscal sanity. The Federal Reserve has been bankrolling the war machine in this country for decades, and a loss for the Fed would make it more difficult to use a charge card for the current or next war.

Continuing on the subject of Eli’s last post, it might be worthwhile to examine in more depth the burgeoning alliance between right-wing supporters of Israel and the European far right. The importance of this topic was driven home by the publication of a new Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes towards various religions. The poll, which found that over half of Americans view Islam unfavorably, also found that “the strongest predictor of prejudice against Muslims is whether a person holds similar feelings about Jews.”

While the poll deals with the American rather than the European context, it is a reminder that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have typically gone hand in hand. This is worth remembering when looking at the rise of European far-right leaders like Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and the late Jorg Haider of Austria. Hostility to Muslim immigrants forms the centerpiece of their political stance, but their parties have also tended to espouse anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial — a reminder of their neo-fascist roots.

But this anti-Semitism has quite naturally prevented them from making common cause with neoconservatives and other right-wing Zionists in America, whose militant stance towards “Islamism” (very broadly defined) would otherwise make them natural allies of the European far right. Hence we have seen in recent years that the savvier of the European far right leaders — such as Filip Dewinter of the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang (VB) — have dropped the explicitly anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubled down on Islamophobia. They realize that by portraying themselves as staunch supporters of Israel and allies in the war against Islamofascism, they can acquire a new set of influential and well-connected supporters in America — the likes of Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, etc. (Eli, Ali and I wrote about the connections between Wilders, his U.S. supporters, and the VB this past February.)

While focusing on Islamophobia rather than anti-Semitism is certainly a savvy move, whether it is sincere is another question. The VB, for example, is a successor to the Vlaams Blok, which disbanded in 2004 after being convicted of “repeated incitement to discrimination”; its fall was precipated by top VB official Roeland Raes’s widely-publicized Holocaust denial on Dutch television. Despite the VB’s claims to have cleaned up its act since the Raes scandal, the Belgian Jewish community isn’t buying it. They maintain that, regardless of whatever philo-Semitic noises the top leadership makes in public, the group has a clear pattern of associating with anti-Semitic and neo-fascist elements. (Right-wing apostate Charles Johnson has in recent years provided the most thorough coverage of the devil’s bargain that the American Islamophobic right has made with the European far right.) Similarly, although Wilders himself does not come from the neo-fascist milieu, there can be little doubt that his base of popular support contains many of the same elements as Le Pen’s and Haider’s.

All this is to say that Daniel Pipes and his compatriots are playing with fire when they embrace Wilders and other European Islamophobes. While the European far right has proven increasingly willing to say the right things about Jews for tactical reasons, all indications are that hatred of Muslims frequently goes hand-in-hand with hatred of Jews.