The recent massacres in the US and Paris have spurred anti-Islam fervor
December 8, 2015
Frank Gaffney, the brazenly Islamophobic ideologue who heads the neoconservative Center for Security Policy, agrees with GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson that Muslims should probably not be allowed to run for president. Gaffney also recently hosted avowed white supremacist Jared Taylor on his radio show, saying that he “appreciated tremendously” Taylor’s work.
Brigette Gabriel, a vitriolic anti-Muslim demagogue, claims that President Obama “cannot bring himself” to say “anything bad about Islam” because of his “beautiful childhood memories” of “praying just like Osama bin Laden prayed.” She ludicrously alleges that “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.”
Former CIA officer and Islamophobic activist Clare Lopez has claimed that members of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the U.S. government and shaped the Obama administration’s foreign policy towards the Middle East. “They’re very smart,” she has said of the alleged Muslim Brother operatives. “These guys are not camel-jockeys with towels on their heads.”
Max Boot, ardent neoconservative ideologue and official foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), argues that in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks the U.S. should send “at least 20,000 personnel” to fight ISIS. He has also called for the U.S. government to unilaterally declare an autonomous Sunni region in Iraq, claiming this is “something that the U.S. can effectively guarantee even without Baghdad’s cooperation.”
Introducing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the American Enterprise Institute’s recent “Irving Kristol” awards, Bill Kristol characterized the Israeli leader as the “preeminent leader of the free world.” Kristol, who called for 50,000 U.S. ground troops to be sent to fight ISIS in Syria after the Paris attacks, is one of a number of neoconservative figures promoting the presidential candidacy of Sen. Marco Rubio.
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has called for more leeway to be given to U.S. intelligence agencies in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. He opined in a recent Fox News op-ed: “Knee-jerk, uninformed and often wildly inaccurate criticisms of programs (such as several authorized in the wake of 9/11 in the Patriot Act) have created a widespread misimpression in the American public about what exactly our intelligence agencies have been doing and whether there was a ‘threat’ to civil liberties.”
Former CIA director James Woolsey, an unabashed neoconservative hardliner with deep ties to defense contractors, has helped spur misleading accusations that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is at least partly to blame for the terrorist attacks in Paris. “I think Snowden has blood on his hands from these killings in France,” he said in an interview.
Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA, is an unabashed supporter of surveillance and torture policies, as well as a proponent of a hardline “pro-Israel” U.S. agenda in the Middle East. He says that it is “cool” that two years after the Snowden revelations, all the NSA has had to do is slightly reform its “little 215 program about American telephony metadata.”
Arthur Waldron is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and a well-known China hawk. He called for the Obama administration to cancel the recent state visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping and argued that Washington should have “made clear something we dare not: namely that sanctions that bite are the alternative.” Waldron has been affiliated with a number of militarist groups, including the Center for Security Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Project for the New American Century.
John Tkacik is a former State Department officer and fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. A long-standing China-hawk, Tkacik argues that as “China’s navy grows stronger … the U.S. Navy shrinks.” He claims that the United States “no longer has any real maritime strategists.”
Matthew Taylor, a filmmaker with ties to the Republican Party, is the director of Los Abandonados, a controversial documentary that advances conspiracy theories about the Argentinian government. Observers have questioned the financial and political motives of the film’s producers and backers, in part because of Taylor’s track record of making films that advance right-wing causes and also because of the relationship between some of the filmmakers to investors who own part of Argentina’s national debt.
The John Hay Initiative, a neoconservative-dominated group advising 2016 GOP presidential candidates, recently released the book Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World. The book provides a decidedly militarist foreign policy vision for a future Republican presidential administration. Among its recommendations, the books calls on the United States to build the “capability to successfully conduct preemptive attacks on the small nuclear arsenals of particularly dangerous countries like North Korea and Iran.”
Fred Thompson (1942-2015)
Fred Thompson, a TV actor and former Republican Senator from Tennessee who was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War, passed away on November 1. He gained national prominence during his brief run for president in 2008, during which he pressed a stridently militaristic foreign policy platform. More recently, Thompson attacked President Obama for purportedly having “no concept” of the “founding principles of our government.”
Ahmed Chalabi (1944-2015)
Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious Iraqi political figure who played an instrumental role in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has passed away. He was 71 years old. As a McClatchy obituary stated, “perhaps no man had more lasting influence on American foreign policy than Chalabi, whose faulty intelligence Bush administration war boosters used to sell Americans on an ill-planned invasion whose legacy we see today in the Islamic State and the de facto partitioning of Iraq.”
David Albright, a controversial nuclear non-proliferation “expert” with close ties to prominent neoconservatives, claims that a recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on alleged past nuclear weapons work by Iran is wrong. He has also attacked other nuclear experts that disagree with his analysis, including Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, who replied on Twitter saying: “Suggest you stand down & apologize, whoever you are. The David Albright I know would never write such drivel.”