Results Reveal African-Americans Continued Their Decades-Long Boycott of GOP Primaries and Latino Participation Nosedived Amid Red-Hot Furor Over Immigration; Advocacy Group Charges Plot by Republicans and Tea Party Groups in Wisconsin to Suppress Nonwhite Voter Turnout in November’s General Election

UNPREPARED FOR AN INCREASINGLY NONWHITE ELECTORATE — Voters enter and leave a polling station in Savannah, Georgia during the 2008 general election. With the U.S. population — and electorate — becoming more and more racially and ethnically diverse, the Republican Party faces a crisis of survival as the results of this year’s GOP primaries show that turnout, while greater than that in the Democratic primaries for the first time since the 1930s, was overwhelmingly — and in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters. To complicate matters for Republicans even more, a liberal advocacy group is accusing the Wisconsin GOP and Tea Party groups of plotting to suppress nonwhite voter turnout in the November 2 general election and has called for an investigation by the U.S. Attorney and the state’s Attorney General. (Photo: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 28, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Much has been discussed and written in the mainstream media about how Republicans stand poised to gain seats in November’s midterm congressional elections — perhaps even taking control of the House of Representatives.

Much also has been discussed and written about the fact that for the first time since the 1930s, more people voted in Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries, amid a wide “enthusiasm gap” between partisans of the two parties.

But almost nothing has been discussed and written about a striking pattern in the primary voter turnout that should sound loud alarm bells to the Republican Party’s electoral viability in the future — and not just Tea Party insurgents scoring stunning upset victories over establishment Republican candidates.

In state after state, the results found that turnout in the Republican primaries was overwhelmingly — in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters, as African-Americans continued to shun the GOP in droves, despite the largest number of black Republican candidates for Congress since the post-Civil War reconstruction era.

Of much greater concern to the party, however, Latino voter turnout in the GOP primaries also nosedived to record-low levels, the clearest sign yet of a backlash by Latino voters — even conservative Cuban-Americans in South Florida — against Republicans over the volatile issue of immigration that could have serious repercussions for the party in November and beyond.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Wisconsin and the state’s Attorney General have been asked by a liberal advocacy group to investigate the Wisconsin GOP, the conservative Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party groups in the Badger State after the group made public what it said were documents and tape recordings of a plan to suppress turnout of nonwhite and college-student voters in the November 2 election.

Implementation of the plan would violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the advocacy group Own Wisconsin Now charged in a press conference last Monday.

THIRTEEN OF 33 BLACK REPUBLICANS WIN IN PRIMARIES — BUT WITHOUT BLACK VOTER SUPPORT

Thirteen of the record 33 black candidates seeking Republican nominations for Congress won in their states’ GOP primaries. But they did so with very little support from African-American voters, who have cast their ballots for Democrats by overwhelming margins since the early 1970s. Most of the black GOP candidates are staunch conservatives, some with the backing of the Tea Party movement.

The most high-profile black Republican candidate, South Carolina state Representative Tim Scott, knocked off Paul Thurmond, son of the late Senator Strom Thurmond, in a June 22 runoff for the GOP nomination.

Scott — who won the backing of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — will face a black Democrat, Ben Frasier, in the November election. Scott is heavily favored to win in this deeply conservative state, but is unlikely to win over black voters, who make up nearly 30 percent of South Carolina’s population and who vote Democratic by a margins of up to eight to one.

There have been no black Republicans in Congress since Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003 amid rumors, denied by Watts, of a feud with then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. Watts’ late father, Buddy was often quoted as saying that “A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.”

WISCONSIN GOP ACCUSED OF PLOTTING TO SUPPRESS NONWHITE VOTES IN NOVEMBER

Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, told reporters at a press conference in Madison, the state capital, that his organization had obtained documents and tape recordings that he said showed the state Republican party was plotting with Tea Party groups and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a national conservative group, an effort to suppress turnout by nonwhites and college students in November’s election by employing the practice of “voter caging.”

Ross identified on one audiotape Time Dake of the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, a local Tea Party group, as talking during a June 12 meeting with Reince Preibus, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party and Mark Block, the Wisconsin state director of Americans for Prosperity, about sending out mailings to voters across the state and use any mail that is returned to challenge voters’ registrations.

The result? “Some voters are forced to cast provisional ballots, which require them to follow-up the day after an election for the ballot to be counted,” Ross said. “Historically, about 35 percent of all provisional ballots are never counted.”

Ross said his organization had made formal requests to the U.S. Attorney and to the Wisconsin state Attorney General’s office for an investigation into the alleged plot “to engage in voter suppression and to monitor the organizations’ activities leading up to the November 2, 2010 election to prevent any actual unlawful voter suppression.”

TEA PARTY LEADER INSISTS EFFORT AIMED AT STOPPING VOTER FRAUD

Dake confirmed in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison that he and other local Tea Party members had attended the June 12 meeting, but said it was AFP that had been planning on sending out mailings to confirm people are “legitimate voters.” But Dake insisted that the effort was aimed at preventing voter fraud and denied targeting nonwhites or college students.

“No, it wasn’t targeting anyone,” Dake said. “I don’t know how you could tell these were minorities or students.”

Mark Block, a spokesman for AFP, denied attending the June 12 meeting, telling the State Journal that he wasn’t in Madison. But in a separate interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Block said he had discussions with Dake and others about targeting voter fraud.

DISTRUST OF GOP BY BLACKS RUNS DEEP — BUT IT WASN’T ALWAYS THAT WAY

For nearly a century after the Civil War, African-Americans were the Republican Party’s most loyal voting constituency. This was, after all, the party of the “Great Emancipator,” President Abraham Lincoln. The GOP was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party by former members of the Whig Party, which tore itself apart in the early 1850s over the slavery issue.

It’s hard for anyone alive today to imagine, but the fact is the two major parties’ political philosophies in Lincoln’s time were the exact reverse of what they are today. From its founding in 1792 until the late 1940s, the Democratic Party was far from friendly to African-Americans. On the contrary, the party was an arch-enemy of blacks, especially in the Deep South, where Democrats wrote, passed and strictly enforced the region’s blatantly racist “Jim Crow” segregation laws.

Many Southern Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s were, in fact, also members of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan. That anti-black hostility by the Democrats didn’t leave post-Civil War African-American voters — That is, those outside the South who could vote — much of a choice than the GOP, the party of Lincoln.

Things began to change in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, issued an executive order to desegregate the Army and introduced civil-rights legislation to Congress the following year. This resulted in conservative southern white delegates walking out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest. The southerners later formed the States’ Rights Party — which came to be known as the “Dixiecrats” — with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential nominee.

By the 1960s, the Democratic Party was a house bitterly divided — pitting northern liberals against southern conservatives — over civil rights for African-Americans. It took the support of Republicans in Congress, mostly northern and midwestern liberals and moderates, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner from Texas, confided to his aide, Bill Moyers (now a prominent TV newsman and commentator) after signing these two landmark bills into law, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

GOLDWATER AND NIXON SET THE STAGE FOR A MASSIVE REVERSAL OF FORTUNE FOR BOTH PARTIES

By “we,” Johnson meant his Democratic Party. But what Johnson didn’t anticipate was that the Republicans were about to lose Black America for a generation — and longer — when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964. Goldwater voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (which he publicly regretted years later).

The damage to the GOP’s standing with African-Americans had only just begun.

Enter Richard Nixon. In a bold and determined comeback bid eight years after losing his first run for the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon devised an electoral strategy for victory in 1968 that forever altered the character of the Republican Party — and turned the fortunes of both major parties completely upside-down.

It was a formula best described by Kevin Phillips, a top Nixon campaign strategist, in a 1970 interview with The New York Times: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the [African-American] vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“The more [blacks] who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips continued, “the sooner the [anti-black] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

But there was also the threat posed to Nixon’s 1968 candidacy by the third-party run of the arch-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. The Nixon campaign felt compelled to outflank Wallace in the South in order to win the election. In the end, Wallace took enough Southern votes away from Nixon to nearly cost him the White House.

NOW REPUBLICANS LOSING LATINOS OVER IMMIGRATION

More than four decades later — and despite the election in 2009 of an African-American, Michael Steele, as its national chairman — the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” is still very much alive and now threatens to alienate another entire segment of the electorate: Latinos.

Unlike blacks, however, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and of the electorate. A recently-released study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the University of New Hampshire predicts that non-white births will likely outpace white births sometime this year — and that the Latino birth rate already is outpacing the white birth rate in the Southwest, particularly California.

Indeed, the current furor over illegal immigration may very likely have led to the defeat of two incumbents in the Texas Republican primary in March. Both incumbents were Latino and they both lost to white challengers by landslide margins.

In a blog posting on LatinaLista.net, blogger Marisa Trevino blamed the defeat of incumbent Texas Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo and other Latino candidates in the March 2 Texas GOP primary squarely on “a steep rise in anti-Hispanic sentiment perpetuated by GOP politicians, ultra-right conservatives, conservative talk-radio hosts and the budding Tea Party movement” brought on by the bitterly divisive issue of immigration.

Another Latino Republican incumbent, Judge Felipe Reyna of the Waco-based 10th District Court of Appeals, was soundly defeated by a white challenger, Al Scoggins, 68 percent to 32 percent. Four other Latino Republicans in Texas also lost to white candidates in the primary by landslide margins.

By contrast, in the seven Texas Democratic primary contests in which Latino candidates competed, the Latino candidate won in six. Of the three Latino Democratic incumbents who lost their bids for renomination, two lost to Latino challengers. The lone Latina who lost to a non-Latino challenger, state Representative Dora Olivo, was defeated by an African-American, Ron Reynolds, in a heavily African-American Houston-area district.

POLL: CALIFORNIA LATINOS STILL DISTRUST GOP 16 YEARS AFTER PROP.187

A newly-released Los Angeles Times poll found that California Republicans are still paying a severe political price among Latino voters for their support of Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education.

The measure, introduced by Republican state Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy and strongly backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, passed with 59 percent of the vote — only to be struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that immigration is the exclusive domain of the federal government.

With Latinos comprising 30 percent of the California electorate, the state GOP’s support for Prop. 187 cost it control of both houses of the state Legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, the majority of the state’s congressional delegation and four of the five statewide elected offices.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — a moderate who is himself an immigrant from Austria — is the only Republican in the last 16 years to have escaped Latino voters’ wrath. And he’s likely to remain so, for the Timespoll found that Latino voters are still refusing to support Republican candidates, backing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown — a former governor who is currently state attorney general — over his Republican opponent, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, by 19 percentage points.

In the race for the U.S. Senate, Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer holds a commanding 38-point lead over her Republican challenger, Carly Fiorina among Latinos, the poll found.

Passage by the GOP-dominated Arizona Legislature of Bill 1070, a highly controversial anti-illegal-immigration measure, has triggered a backlash by Latinos against Republicans across the country . The law itself, which requires police to verify the status of someone they have stopped or arrested if they suspect that the person is in the country illegally, has come under withering legal attack as a state intrusion into federal authority and as opening the door to racial profiling by police against Latinos, who make up nearly a third of Arizona’s population.

With Latinos comprising the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — already outpacing whites in births, according to the Census Bureau — Republicans are staring into permanent minority status, if not outright oblivion, if they continue to play the anti-immigrant card.

GOP POISED TO MAKE GAINS IN 2010, BUT ITS WINS ARE LIKELY TO BE SHORT-LIVED

Historically, with the notable exception of the post-9/11 election of 2002 — when the dominant issue was national security and the “war on terror” — the party in control of the White House has suffered losses in every midterm congressional election since 1934. The 2010 midterms are unlikely to buck that trend, with pre-election polls all pointing to Republicans making significant gains this November as voters grow increasingly disgruntled over the still-sour economy.

But with Tea Party-backed candidates scoring a stunning string of primary victories — including the shocking upset wins in Delaware by Christine O’Donnell and in New York by Carl Paladino — The GOP is being pulled ever farther to the right, while at the same time alienating nonwhite voters at an astonishing rate.

While the GOP may claim big gains this November, its victories could prove to be short-lived. already, there is much speculation about whether former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is positioning herself to make a run for the top spot at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

If she runs, Palin will likely face a formidable opponent who has his own designs on winning the White House: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A Palin-Gingrich battle for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination would be bruising enough; the power struggle between the Tea Party movement and the GOP old guard is almost certain to intensify in the next two years, regardless of what happens this November.

And that — combined with the GOP showing little sign of reflecting America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity — spells serious trouble for the Republican Party in the not-too-distant future.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved

Republicans in Delaware and New York Face November Rout After Far-Right Candidates Backed by Tea Party Movement Score Stunning Upsets in Respective Primaries for Senate and Governor; Rightward March Puts Northeast Republicans on Endangered Species List in a Fiercely Moderate-to-Liberal Region of the Nation Already Dominated by Democrats

SURVIVAL OF REPUBLICAN PARTY IN NORTHEAST IN JEOPARDY — Republicans are gleeful about having outdrawn Democrats in the 2010 primaries across the country for the first time since the 1930s. But GOP hopes of taking control of the Senate were likely dashed last week when Christine O’Donnell (left) scored a stunning upset victory over GOP establishment-backed Representative Mike Castle in the Delaware Senate primary, while another Tea Party-backed hopeful, Carl Paladino (right), came from behind to overwhelm former Representative Rick Lazio in the New York GOP primary for governor. But the shocking twin victories scored by the hard-line right-wing movement also pose a serious threat to the long-term electoral viability of the Republican Party in the Northeast, a fiercely moderate-to-liberal region that was once a rock-solid GOP bastion but is now is overwhelmingly Democratic. (Photos Courtesy Examiner.com and Rochester Daily Record)

(Posted 11:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 21, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: Due to a computer crash, this week’s column is being posted six hours later than usual. We regret any inconvenience that the delay may have caused.

By SKEETER SANDERS

Republicans are in a heady, almost gleeful, state of mind as the final campaign toward the November 2 midterm elections gets under way in earnest.

For the first time since the 1930s, more people cast ballots in the Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries, and there is a far higher level of enthusiasm and willingness to vote among Republicans this year, as anger over the sour economy continues to trump nearly every other issue. Historically, such anger over bad economic times has been bad news for the party in control of the White House and Congress — in this case, the Democrats.

But Republicans shouldn’t pop the bubbly just yet. In fact, they need to be seriously worried about the party’s long-term electoral survival in the one region of the country where Republican officeholders are a shrinking minority: The Northeast.

The headline-grabbing GOP primaries in Delaware and New York last Tuesday, which saw hard-line right-wing Tea Party-backed candidates score stunning upset victories over party establishment-backed candidates, threaten to sink the Republicans into political irrelevancy in the most fiercely moderate-to-liberal region in the country — home to nearly 46 million people in 11 states from Maine to Maryland — that was once a rock-solid GOP bastion but is now overwhelmingly Democratic.

O’DONNELL ALREADY HAUNTED BY CONTROVERSIAL PAST COMMENTS ON SOCIAL ISSUES

In Delaware, Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell set off a political earthquake by defeating longtime Representative Mike Castle for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat long held by Vice President Joe Biden. And in New York, Tea Party-backed candidate Carl Paladino shocked former Representative Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination for governor.

But within hours of O’Donnell’s upset victory, the newly-minted GOP nominee’s past role as an arch-conservative social activist with ties to the Religious Right came back to haunt her — and to cause deep embarrassment for GOP leaders — when video clips quickly surfaced on the Internet and cable-news channels in which O’Donnell, who first gained national exposure in the mid-1980s as a spokeswoman for conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Concerned Women for America, made a series of highly controversial statements on the use of condoms, the fight against AIDS, the role of women in the military, and even witchcraft.

With TV gadfly Bill Maher vowing to release more embarrassing video clips of O’Donnell’s appearances on his now-defunct ABC talk show “Politically Incorrect” — on which O’Donnell was a frequent guest — former Bush political adviser Karl Rove lambasted O’Donnell’s remarks as “nutty” and declaring flatly that the Senate race in Delaware “is not a race we’re going to be able to win.”

In a heated exchange with Sean Hannity on Hannity’s Fox News Channel show last Wednesday night, Rove raised questions about O’Donnell’s personal finances amid allegations by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog group, that she illegally spent campaign funds to pay her personal bills.

Hannity sought to defend O’Donnell by claiming that the allegations about her finances were “trumped-up charges from my standpoint that the Republican establishment was against her.”

Rove immediately fired back, “Did you ask her about the people who were following her home to her headquarters? There are just a lot of nutty things she’s been saying that don’t add up. Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took nearly two decades to pay her college bills so she could get her college degree? How did she make a living?”

PALADINO GOES BALLISTIC ON CUOMO AFTER PRIMARY WIN

A week after millionaire real estate magnate Carl Paladino came roaring back from a double-digit deficit in pre-primary polls to overwhelm former Representative Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination for governor in a 67 percent-to-33 percent landslide, New York Republican Party leaders remain in a state of shock, whipsawed by a hurricane of anti-incumbent fever fueled by a Tea Party movement that the GOP establishment failed to take seriously.

Paladino spent more than $3 million of his own money in a campaign that was marked by often-incendiary rhetoric on the stump, including a vow to invoke eminent domain to block the construction of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero. “I’ve been driving land-use issues for 40 years, and I understand the full powers of the governor. If the [American Civil Liberties Union] or anyone else wants to challenge me in court, I’m ready for the fight,” Paladino said in a campaign statement.

That was music to the ears of former Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, who touched off a firestorm of controversy last May when he blasted the proposed Park 51 center as “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and “the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

And Paladino wasted no time in lashing out at his Democratic rival, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo — by hitting him below the belt, at least figuratively. In a written challenge to Cuomo to a debate, Paladino all but challenged Cuomo’s manhood. “Frankly, I don’t think you have the cojones to face me and the other candidates in an open debate,” he wrote. Cojones is the Spanish word for testicles.

In a rip at Cuomo’s father, Mario, who was governor from 1983 to 1995, Paladino wrote, “So Andrew, for the first time in your life, be a man!” Paladino wrote. “Don’t hide behind Daddy’s coattails even though he pulled strings to advance your career every step of your way. Come out and debate like a man!”

The New York Daily News reported in its Tuesday editions late Monday night that a “furious” Cuomo was preparing to strike back hard at Paladino. “If a guy says you have no cojones, how do you punch him back, call him an a–hole?” the newspaper quoted a source close to the Cuomo campaign as saying.

DESPITE TEA PARTY BRAVADO, NORTHEAST REPUBLICANS FEAR DISASTER IN NOVEMBER

Despite assertions by Tea Party activists of a “people’s revolution” at the ballot box on November 2, Republicans in Delaware and New York — and the rest of the Northeast — are openly fearful that the right-wing movement’s primary wins will spell disaster for their party and render irreversible a 20-year erosion of voter support for a GOP that has moved too far to the right in a region of the country that remains fiercely moderate to liberal.

The Northeast was a solidly Republican bastion for nearly a century after the party eclipsed the Whigs in the 1870s. It has been home to such moderate-to-liberal GOP stalwarts as Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller of New York; George Aiken, Ralph Flanders and James Jeffords of Vermont; Lowell Weicker and Christopher Shays of Connecticut; Edward Brooke and William Weld of Massachusetts; Thomas Kean and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey; Richard Schweiker and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Margaret Chase Smith, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.

But the political loyalties of Northeasterners began to shift from Republican to Democrat after conservatives led by Barry Goldwater overthrew the “Northeastern Liberal Establishment” at the 1964 Republican National Convention. The trend accelerated in 1968 after the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon instituted its now-infamous “Southern Strategy” of openly appealing to conservative white voters in the South who vehemently opposed the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.

By the turn of the millennium, the Republicans’ conservative drift turned into a full-scale ideological purge when right-wing party hard-liners began a full-scale jihad to drive the GOP’s few remaining moderates and liberals — whom the hard-liners derisively brand “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — out of the party altogether, culminating in the departure in 2007 of Lincoln Chafee, the last truly liberal Republican in the Senate, who lost his 2006 bid for re-election to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.

Chafee is now running for governor of Rhode Island as an independent.

Today, the Northeast remains the most solidly moderate-to-liberal region in the country — but now its voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. Not a single Republican represents the six New England states in the House of Representatives. Only three of the region’s 22 U.S. Senators and three of its 11 governors are Republican. All 11 Northeastern states’ legislatures are controlled by Democrats.

With the Tea Party victories in Republican primaries across the country, many of the party’s few remaining moderates fear that not only will O’Donnell and Paladino be buried in Democratic landslides in their respective races, but that they will drag other Republicans in the Northeast down with them, rendering the region lost to the GOP for generations — just as the Democrats lost the South in the 1960s and that region has remained a conservative Republican bastion ever since.

In an interview with The New York Times, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) warned that “We [Republicans] can’t be a majority party if we can’t appeal across the spectrum, if we have an exclusionary approach in general.

“A 100 percent ideological purity test — I don’t live in that Utopian world; it’s not reflective of the real world,” Snowe told the Times. “I hope that’s not the approach.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Pastor Terry Jones Might Not Have Carried Out His Planned Burning of Korans, But a Gay-Hating Kansas Cult Went Ahead and Did Just That — and So Did Other Christian Extremists, a Sure Sign That Paranoid Religions Fanaticism Is No Longer Limited to Radical Muslims and Potentially Poses the Greatest Threat to World Peace Since the Cold War

A member of the rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church holds provocative protest signs during the 2006 funeral in Minnesota of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. Westboro made good on its promise Saturday to burn copies of the Koran and the American flag outside its headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. There was also a Koran burning in Tennessee and an unidentified man ripped out pages of the Muslim holy book and set them afire during a protest rallies both for and against a proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. (Photo courtesy Minnesota Public Radio)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 14, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

As America marked the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks over the weekend, the solemn remembrances of the more than 3,500 people who lost their lives were overshadowed by a raging global firestorm sparked by a disturbing rise in anti-Muslim sentiment.

Ceremonies at New York’s Ground Zero to mark the destruction of the World Trade Center took a back seat to massive demonstrations both for and against construction of an Islamic community center and mosque to be located two blocks away on Park Place — during which an unidentified man ripped out pages from a copy of the Koran and set them afire.

A Florida pastor who drew international condemnation after he announced plans to burn copies of the Muslim holy book backed off at the last minute. But that didn’t stop a gay-hating cult in Kansas from staging its own Koran burning. Members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church burned not only a Koran, but also an American flag outside their headquarters in Topeka.

Westboro, made up entirely of relatives and in-laws of its iron-willed leader, Fred Phelps, has generated nationwide outrage in recent years — including a lawsuit that will be heard before the Supreme Court later this fall — over its viciously homophobic protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cult believes that U.S. troops are dying as “God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality” and attacks Muslims as following a “false religious system with a pedophile as its prophet.”

TENN. MINISTERS, N.Y. PROTESTER ALSO BURN KORANS — FLA. MOSQUE FIREBOMBED

Westboro wasn’t alone. In Springfield, Tennessee, two local Christian ministers held a private Koran burning Saturday in the backyard of their home. The Rev. Bob Old and the Rev. Danny Allen denied that they were holding their Koran burning to protest the Park 51 project in New York. “It’s about faith, it’s about love, but you have to have the right book behind you,” said Old, as he held up a copy of the Koran before setting it aflame. “This is a book of hate, not a book of love.”

Meanwhile, an unidentified man tore out pages from a copy of the Koran and set the ripped pages aflame during a massive protest against the proposed Park 51 Islamic center, the New York Daily News reported Sunday. He was not arrested. A second man also tore pages out of a Koran and offered them to anyone in the crowd as “toilet paper,” according to the newspaper.

Most disturbing was an incident that happened in Jacksonville, Florida in May, but didn’t become national news until last month: A mosque was firebombed while worshippers were inside for Friday prayers. A surveillance video released by the FBI showed a middle-aged white man believed to be carrying a can of gasoline walking in the courtyard of the Jacksonville Islamic Center of Northeast Florida on the night of the incident.

The FBI is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime and act of domestic terrorism, a bureau spokesman told radio station WOKV. “It was a dangerous device, and had anybody been around it, they could have been seriously injured or killed,” said spokesman James Casey. “We want to sort of emphasize the seriousness of the thing and not let people believe that this was just a match and a little bit of gasoline that was spread around.”

ANTI-MUSLIM INCIDENTS IN U.S. SPARK ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE OVERSEAS

The Koran burnings in the U.S. triggered an outbreak of anti-Christian violence by outraged Muslims in India, Afghanistan and Indonesia.

In India, violence erupted in the Kashmir Valley and in two towns in Punjab state, the New Delhi-based Indo-Asian News Service reported Monday. At least three people were killed and several people were injured when rioting mobs burned a Christian missionary school to the ground in the Muslim northern Kasmir town of Tangmarg.

Indian authorities imposed a round-the-clock curfew throughout the territory, but angry Muslims continued to stage protests in the Pulwama district of southern Kashmir, shouting pro-Koran and anti-American slogans, IANS reported. Similar protests erupted in the city of Srinagar in Punjab state, which borders Pakistan. There were conflicting reports about the fate of a Christian church in Srinagar. Some reports said the church was torched, but others said that only its wooden cross was set afire by the protesters.

In Afghanistan, two people were killed and half a dozen injured as protests held against the event on Sunday turned violent, the Los Angeles Times reported. Hundreds of protesters in Lowgar province, south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, tried to storm the provincial governor’s headquarters. Afghan police responded by firing on the crowd.

And in Indonesia, a Christian worshipper and a minister were attacked by assailants as they headed to Sunday morning prayers at a church in the city of Bekasi, 25 miles east of the capital,Jakarta, according to Catholic Online, a Catholic news and information Web site.

The worshipper was stabbed in the stomach and the minister was hit on his head with a wooden plank. Neither victims’ injuries appeared to be life-threatening. No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, Catholic Online reported, but a group of Muslim hard-liners are suspected.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous majority-Muslim country with 220 million people, is a secular democracy with a long history of religious tolerance. But Islamic militants have been been agitating in recent years for the imposition of Sharia law. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono condemned the attack and vowed to bring the assailants to justice.

FLASHBACK TO 2006: THE CONTROVERSIAL PROPHET MOHAMMED CARTOONS

Those who burned Korans over the weekend had to have known that they would provoke strong and even violent reactions among many Muslims. One only has to look back four years, when a Danish newspaper, the conservative Copenhagen daily Morgenawisen Jyllands-Posten, published a series of highly unflattering editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

That the cartoons depicted any image at all of the prophet — which is strictly taboo in the Muslim world and considered even by moderate and secular Muslims to be the ultimate blasphemy against their faith — is bad enough. That they depicted Mohammed in an unflattering, even mocking, light — including one cartoon showing the prophet wearing a turban the looked like a bomb — made the outrage among Muslims even more heated and ultimately, it boiled over into violence.

Thousands of enraged Muslims rampaged in Beirut on February 5, 2006, setting fire to the Danish Embassy, burning Danish flags, lobbing stones at a Maronite Christian church and ransacking a Christian neighborhood in the Lebanese capital.

Troops fired bullets into the air and used tear gas and water cannons to push the crowds back after a small group of Islamic extremists tried to break through the security barrier outside the Beirut embassy. Flames and smoke billowed from the building. Security officers said that at least 30 people had been injured in the violence.

When other European newspapers republished the cartoons, the violence spread across the Middle East, as angry mobs torched the Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, stormed and ransacked European Union buildings, and desecrated the Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, French and German flags in Gaza City.

In an editorial published on January 30, 2006, the editors of Jyllands-Posten, while defending their right to publish the cartoons, nonetheless apologized, stating that “they have indisputably offended many Muslims.”

A DANGEROUS NEW COMBUSTIBLE ELEMENT: CHRISTIAN EXTREMISTS

While the motivations of the newspapers’ printing of the Mohammed cartoons remains a subject of debate, there’s no doubt about the motivations of those who burned the Koran this past weekend: Sheer anti-Muslim bigotry. They did it deliberately, fully aware that it would be extremely offensive to Muslims and knowing that it would provoke a violent response from Muslim hard-liners.

That the Koran burners were Christian extremists who, like Pastor Terry Jones, believe that “Islam is of the Devil” — or, in the case of the virulently homophobic Westboro cult, believe that Muslims “follow a pedophile prophet” — introduces a dangerous new combustible element in this age of the Internet that, if left unchecked, could threaten world peace to a degree not seen since the 40-year Cold War between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union.

In the nine years since 9/11, religious extremism can no longer be seen by Americans — or the world — as the exclusive province of Islamic radicals. There are also radical Christians among us, some of them all too eager to re-launch a crusade against “the Islamic devil.”

For centuries, religious leaders have perpetuated and reinforced this “us-versus-them” mentality by preaching that there is only one true pathway for humans to relate to God, that all other pathways are false and that those who follow those other pathways are wrong — even “evil” — and must be opposed by whatever means necessary.

If it’s not put in check, this “us-versus-them” mentality will ultimately destroy us all.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

Kansas-Based Westboro Baptist Church, Which Has Drawn Much Controversy (and Lawsuits) Over Its Rabidly Homophobic Protests at Funerals of American Soldiers Killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Says it Will Burn Copies of Muslim Holy Book if ‘Sissy Brats of Doomed America’ Persuade Jones into Calling Off His Planned Burning on 9/11 Anniversary, Which Is on Hold — For Now

UNYIELDING CULT A THREAT TO U.S. TROOPS? — A member of the rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church holds highly inflammatory signs in a recent protest at the funeral of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Westboro, whose members are made up entirely of the family of its iron-willed leader, Fred Phelps, insist that U.S. troops’ deaths are “God’s punishment for America tolerating homosexuality.” Westboro has now vowed to burn copies of the Koran, the Islamic holy book, after the Rev. Terry Jones shelved plans to burn Korans outside his Pentacostalist church in Florida today (Saturday), the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (Photo: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Saturday, September 11, 2010)
(Updated 12:00 noon EDT Saturday, September 11, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

A rabidly anti-gay Kansas-based cult — which has drawn nationwide outrage for staging protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — has vowed to burn copies of the Koran, now that the pastor of a fundamentalist church in Florida has put on hold his planned burning of the Muslim holy book that was scheduled for today (Saturday), the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In a press release posted Friday on its Web site, GodHatesFags.com, the Westboro Baptist Church announced that it will “burn the Koran and the doomed American flag” at noon local time today (1:00 p.m. EDT) at its headquarters in Topeka.

The cult branded Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida a “false prophet” who allowed himself to be “bullied by sissy, intolerant rebels worldwide into cancelling plans to burn that blasphemous idol called the Koran.”

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BULLETIN — PASTOR JONES NOW SAYS HE’LL ‘NEVER’ BURN KORANS

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FLORIDA PASTOR BACKS OFF AMID DIRE WARNINGS OF NEW WAVE OF TERROR ATTACKS

Amid worldwide outrage from Muslims and threats of violence, Jones announced Thursday that he was putting on hold his plans to burn copies of the Muslim holy book after receiving a telephone call from Defense Secretary William Gates, who, according to press reports, warned him that he and his followers would put the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in “grave jeopardy” and urged him not to carry out his plans.

Meanwhile, the international police agency Interpol and the U.S. State Department issued warnings that terrorist attacks would likely increase around the world if the Koran burning went ahead.

Jones told reporters at a Thursday press conference that his decision not to carry out his planned Koran burning was prompted by assurances from a local Muslim imam that a controversial Islamic cultural center and mosque to be built two block away from Ground Zero — where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by al-Qaida terrorists — would be moved to s site farther away.

But in New York, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who purchased the property last December on which the proposed center would be built, denied any such agreement. “I am glad that Pastor Jones has decided not to burn any Korans,” Feisal said in a statement. “However, I have not spoken to Pastor Jones or to Imam Musri [of Florida]. I am surprised by their announcement. We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.”

EXTREMELY HOMOPHOBIC WESTBORO UNLIKELY TO BE PERSUADED TO BACK DOWN

Unlike Pastor Jones, however, the Phelps clan at Westboro is unlikely to be persuaded to back down form its threat to burn Korans. In fact, the cult has burned the Muslim holy book before, in 2008. But at that time, their book-burning drew almost no media notice.

Westboro’s absolute hatred of homosexuality is what drives its highly controversial actions. It has drawn nationwide outrage for its protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — and is the defendant in a harassment lawsuit by the father of a soldier killed in Iraq that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices will hear arguments in the case when the high court begins its 2010-2011 term next month.

Westboro’s extreme homophobia is what also drives its hatred of Muslims. It openly accuses the Prophet Mohammed — without a shred of proof — of being a pedophile. In its announcement of its planned Koran burning today, the cult employs highly inflammatory language against not only Muslims, but also Catholics. “Like priests-rape-boys Catholicism, Islam is just another false religious system with a pedophile as its prophet,” the Westboro statement says. “You’re not supposed to be finding common ground with idolatrous perverts, but throwing down their altars, as God instructed!”

State and federal laws have been passed to keep Westboro picketers hundreds of feet away from the military funerals. But the cult is highly litigious: Shirley Phelps-Roper, the eldest daughter of pastor Fred Phelps, is an attorney and has filed numerous lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of those laws. She’s also countersued the plaintiff in the case now pending before the Supreme Court.

The cult was expelled in 1991 from the conservative Southern Baptist Convention in part for its extremist interpretations of the Bible and for its membership being exclusively of the Phelps family.

“We share concern over the unbiblical views and offensive tactics of Fred Phelps and his followers,” the SBC said in a statement posted on its Web site. “His church is not in any way affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and his extreme position not only stands in contrast to ours, more importantly they stand in contrast to God’s Word. . .”

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Civil-Liberties Watchdogs Say Proposed Cordoba House Islamic Cultural Center Near New York’s Ground Zero Is Likely to Come Under Intense U.S. Government Surveillance Once It’s Completed; ACLU Sues FBI for Information on the Bureau’s Surveillance of Muslims in California and Elsewhere; FBI Says No Probable Cause — or Warrant — Is Required for Such Surveillance

As controversy over a proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque to be built two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero continues to rage, new concerns are being raised by civil-liberties watchdogs that the planned Cordoba House and other Muslim houses of worship across the country are being subjected to intense U.S. government surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information on the FBI’s probe of Muslims in the San Francisco area. For its part, the FBI says that no suspicion of wrongdoing is required for the agency to conduct such surveillance. (Photo courtesy Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, September 7, 2010)

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SPECIAL REPORT
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By WILLIAM FISHER
Inter-Press Service
(Published under a Creative Commons license)

The bitter controversy over the building of an Islamic community center and mosque near the site of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 is sparking new fears of government snooping on Islamic holy places — which it now claims it can do without a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper are suing the FBI in U.S. District Court in San Francisco over the agency’s failure to respond to a five-month-old request for information on its investigation of Muslim groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The groups are seeking details under the Freedom of Information Act of any surveillance the FBI has carried out since 2005 on area mosques and Islamic centers, as well as information on the recruitment of Muslim school children into the agency’s Junior Agent Program.

ACLU ATTORNEY: FBI SHOULD TARGET SPECIFIC SUSPECTS, NOT SPY ON ALL MUSLIMS

Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, told IPS that the FBI “should focus its resources on targets for whom it has specific facts that support a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, rather than using undercover informants to spy on people in their houses of worship.”

She added, “The lawsuit we have brought is one seeking records, so that we — and the public — can evaluate the FBI’s policies and practices to make sure they enhance national security without undermining our civil liberties.

“We have not sued for any misconduct other than failing to provide governmental records as required by law,” Harumi continued.

FBI: NO SUSPICION OF WRONGDOING NEEDED FOR SURVEILLANCE

But, according to the FBI itself, the agency needs no suspicion of wrongdoing before it initiates surveillance.

In a July 28 letter addressed to Senate Judiciary committee members Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) — following the testimony of FBI Director Robert Mueller — the agency said that suspicion of wrongdoing was not necessary to launch an investigation against an individual or organization.

“No particular factual predication is required” for the initiation of a preliminary investigation, according to the FBI’s operational guidelines.

FBI’S POSITION BLASTED AS ‘DRAGNET’ APPROACH

“This is intelligence gathering run amok,” said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. “The FBI is saying it can initiate surveillance without a reason.”

“This is a dragnet way of uncovering information and a dramatic step backwards in the history of civil rights,” he charged.

“The FBI has made an admission that we’ve known all along: That the agency is allowed to surveil without any suspicion of criminality,” according to Nura Maznavi, counsel for the Program to Combat Racial and Religious Profiling at Muslim Advocates, an affiliate of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.

PLAINTIFFS ACCUSE FBI OF RACIAL PROFILING OF MUSLIMS

Muslim Advocates, the ACLU, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee are among the organizations claiming that the FBI’s guidelines use race as a basis for determining whether to initiate surveillance, thereby unfairly targeting Muslims.

But Mueller told the Senate Judiciary committee that race and religion could not be used as sole criteria for initiating an investigation of a person or organization.

Maznavi and Buttar have accused the FBI of initiating investigations in Muslim homes and mosques that they characterized as “general fishing expeditions” that could lead to clues about other members of the community.

The FBI also visits people at their jobs, said Maznavi, adding that such surveillance impacts a person’s reputation at their place of employment.

The agency also frequently sends informants into mosques, Maznavi alleged, pointing to two high-profile cases in California and Florida. Such a practice makes congregants suspicious of one another and promotes fear within the community, she said.

FBI MAY BE VIOLATING FOURTH AMENDMENT

The basis of the FBI’s contention is unclear. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. It specifically requires search and arrest warrants be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

The ACLU of Northern California made its initial request for records under the Freedom of Information Act in March, according to their complaint. The plaintiffs hope to persuade the U.S. District Court to force the FBI to process their FOIA request and release the records immediately.

The plaintiffs first sought out the FBI records after area Muslims contacted the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus with concerns that the Bureau was scrutinizing their activities and attempting to recruit “informants and infiltrators,” according to the ALC.

In a statement, the group said the FBI had failed to produce its records despite admitting in March that media attention on the investigation of Muslim groups entitled his clients to expedited processing of their FOIA request.

“The lawsuit is about transparency,” said Somnath Raj Chatterjee, a pro bono lawyer for the groups.

In 2009, it was revealed that the FBI used paid informants and agents provocateurs in U.S. mosques. The American Muslim community says this news sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities.

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Justice Department began rounding up Arabs and other Muslims and — mistakenly — anybody who looked “Middle Eastern,” including Sikhs from South Asia, according to a 2008 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In the months after the attacks, some 5,000 men were held in detention without charges, most without access to lawyers or family members. There were no prosecutions and no convictions of any of these people, according to the CCR report.

Some, who were in the U.S. with expired visas or who had committed other immigration infractions, were deported.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Published under a Creative Commons license.
The ‘Skeeter Bites Report copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.