The "Ground Zero Mosque" is this summer's Death Panels. It's a phony controversy based on right wing lies, created and promoted by the usual suspects, and amplified by some absolute loons who are inexplicably taken seriously. Breitbart, Gingrich, News Corp and The National Republican Trust PAC gin it up, while lunatics like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Sarah Palin run with the ball to inflame the wingnut base.
Al Franken:
They (Republicans) do this every two years. They try to find a wedge issue, and they try to work it.
And here we are again, on the defensive, earnestly debating something that was not an issue until the GOP spin machine created it.
The proposed Park51 project, then known as Cordoba House, first came to notice when the New York Times covered it in December 2009. There was a tip for the rightwing noisemakers in the article, and they seized it.
As a Sufi, Imam Feisal follows a path of Islam focused more on spiritual wisdom than on strict ritual, and as a bridge builder, he is sometimes focused more on cultivating relations with those outside his faith than within it.
But though the imam is adamant about what his intentions for the site are, there is anxiety among those involved or familiar with the project that it could very well become a target for anti-Muslim attacks.
Opportunity knocked. Salon has a timeline of what happened next.
Pamela Geller / Stop Islamization of America
May 6, 2010: After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, "Panel Approves 'WTC' Mosque." Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, "Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction." She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, "This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem." (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama's real father. Seriously.)
May 7, 2010: Geller's group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launches "Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!" (SIOA 's associate director is Robert Spencer, who makes his living writing and speaking about the evils of Islam.) Geller posts the names and contact information for the mayor and members of the community board, encouraging people to write. The board chair later reports getting "hundreds and hundreds" of calls and e-mails from around the world.
Geller is a certified crazy lady. For select quotes from her insane blog, go here. TPM interviews her here. Her organization, Stop Islamization of America, is organizing the Sept 11 anti-mosque rally that Newt is busy distancing himself from after she announced he would appear alongside "rabid Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders" and a videotaped message from Breitbart himself. Geller's group sued the NY MTA to get this disturbing ad placed on the side of city buses.
WaPo reports that "Geller often partners with Robert Spencer, a best-selling writer who is less flamboyant but perhaps more influential."
Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch
As noted in the Salon excerpt above, Spencer is the associate director of Geller's group SIOA. FAIR reports:
Spencer publishes Jihad Watch, which has been described as a "notoriously Islamophobic website" (Guardian, 2/7/06). Spencer has compared the Islamic holy book, the Quran, to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (Human Events, 12/7/05), and thinks that Islam is "innately extremist and violent" (FAIR Smearcasters Report).
Here's his site. Say no more.
News Corp
The Murdoch machine was on the case immediately. Per Salon's timeline:
May 13, 2010: Peyser follows up with an entire column devoted to "Mosque Madness at Ground Zero." This is a significant moment in the development of the "ground zero mosque" narrative: It's the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months. Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a "human-rights group." Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House's opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011.
Lots of opinion makers on the right read the Post, so it's not surprising that, starting that very day, the mosque story spread through the conservative — and then mainstream — media like fire through dry grass. Geller appeared on Sean Hannity's radio show. The Washington Examiner ran an outraged column about honoring the 9/11 dead. So did Investor's Business Daily. Smelling blood, the Post assigned news reporters to cover the ins and outs of the Cordoba House development daily. Fox News, the Post's television sibling, went all out.
Salon again:
While national conservatives have picked up the ball, what local opposition there is to the proposed community center has been ginned up by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post -- mainly via perpetually outraged columnist Andrea Peyser, whose anti-mosque columns are regularly teased on the front page.
The entire anti-mosque campaign isn't about anything other than pure, paranoid Islamophobia. A Peyser column a few weeks ago was entirely about people in Sheepshead Bay -- some miles from Ground Zero -- protesting a proposed mosque solely because they're scared of Muslims.
Next they needed an ad campaign.
The National Republican Trust PAC
Ben Smith:
Among the first conservative groups gunning for the ground zero mosque was the National Republican Trust PAC, whose television ad two broadcast networks refused to air on the grounds that it seemed to tie the organizers of the community center, without evidence, to the planners of the terror attacks.
But it became a hit on YouTube, and combined with the complaints of New York politicians and some conservative bloggers, the project became a national issue.
"Once we brought this issue to the American people, the politicians were falling all over each other to get out in front of it," said Scott Wheeler, the group's executive director.
The ad "repeatedly presents Muslims as armed, masked men intent on destruction. The ad is so virulent that it was rejected by both NBC and CBS."
Sarah Posner:
[Scott] Wheeler is the executive director of the National Republican Trust PAC, which during the 2008 presidential campaign ran incendiary ads attempting to link Obama to terrorism. He's a veteran of other efforts to conduct "investigative journalism" that is then used in campaigns to spread falsehoods about Democratic candidates. Currently, according to the Special Guests site, "he is preparing to spend millions of dollars for TV ads between now and the November elections to force elected officials to take a public stand on the building of the Mosque." After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation into the money behind the Islamophobic fervor, Wheeler said, according to the Special Guests site, "Pelosi's Stalinist tactics will not work on The National Republican Trust PAC. We ignited the issue of the Ground Zero Mosque with our television ad that was banned by CBS and NBC. We have demanded that every federal elected official declare where they stand on this issue so their voters can decide where their representative stands, with the American people or with the Islamists." (Oh, I get it. Stalinists and Islamists.)
Since the National Republican Trust is a political action committee, its donors and expenditures are public information, available at the Open Secrets site maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics.
At the moment their website has a photo of Nancy Pelosi in a headscarf, titled "Queen of Jihad" and calling her "Mullah Pelosi." Subtle much?
So this is who we're dealing with, and we're falling for it hook, line and sinker. This is no different than the Death Panels lie. It's organized, it's professional, it employs the loons to scare up the wingnut base and the popular rightwing press to spread falsehoods on a daily basis. And somewhere in the backroom are Newt Gingrich and Scott Wheeler, fanning the flames and dialing for dollars.
How many times are we going to fall for the same dirty trick?