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.

# # #

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

==============================

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. . .”

# # #

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.

# # #

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

9/11/01 Has Been Called ‘The New Pearl Harbor’ for Today’s Generations of Americans, But Nearly Forgotten is the Wave of Anti-Japanese Bigotry That Swept the U.S. After 12/7/41, Leading to the Forced Removal and Internment of Upwards of 120,000 Japanese-Americans — Will America’s 1.3 Million Muslims Face the Same Fate?

Copies of a 1942 edition of the San Francisco Examiner announce with a screaming — and highly derogatory — banner headline the impending removal of thousands of Japanese-Americans from their homes and businesses in California and relocation to internment camps located in remote areas across the western U.S. As many as 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated amid a wave of anti-Japanese bigotry that swept the country following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 have often been called “The New Pearl Harbor” for today’s generations of Americans. But a mounting controversy over plans to construct an Islamic center near Ground Zero has unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim passions across the country of a magnitude that, if it continues unchecked, could match the ill will toward Japanese-Americans during World War II. (Photo courtesy National Archives)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, August 31, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana

* * *

As controversy continues to build over the planned construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks away from New York’s Ground Zero, there has been a dramatic spike in incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry in recent weeks, indicative of a wave of Islamophobia that is sweeping across the United States.

Opposition to new mosques isn’t limited to New York. There have been demonstrations and acts of violence against existing and proposed Muslim houses of worship from coast to coast — including a suspected arson fire Friday night at the site of a new Islamic center in suburban Nashville.

A spokesman for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department said that the blaze, which destroyed construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, has been ruled as arson. Gasoline was poured over the equipment and ignited.

The Sheriff’s Department and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — as well as the FBI — are jointly investigating the fire as a possible hate crime, according to Andy Anderson, special agent for the BATF.

MUSLIM TAXI DRIVER IN NEW YORK ATTACKED

Acts of violence against individual Muslims have also risen sharply — the most notorious such incident so far being an attack on a Muslim taxi driver last Tuesday night in New York. The driver, an immigrant from Bangladesh, was slashed by his knife-wielding passenger after he acknowledged being a Muslim.

Police arrested Michael Enright, 21, who had just returned from filming U.S. Mariens serving in Afghanistan and charged him with felony attempted murder motivated by religious bias in the attack on 43-year-old taxi driver Ahmed Sharif. Police said Sharif was slashed across the face, arm and hand.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg condemned the attack, telling reporters at a hurriedly-called City Hall news conference that it was “clearly motivated by anti-Muslim bias. . .This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we pray to.”

ANTI-MUSLIM PASSIONS RAGING ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Much of the anti-Muslim passion is being fanned by conservative politicians and hard-line right-wing Christian evangelicals who consider Islam an “evil” religion and an “enemy of the Judeo-Christian way of life.”

Long before the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” escalated into a major headline-grabbing battle over the right of Muslims in America to freedom of worship under the First Amendment, there has been a steady uptick in anti-Muslim sentiment across the country:

# Several Christian ministers in Sheboygan, Wisconsin led a noisy protest in May against a proposal to build a local mosque in a former health food store purchased by a Muslim doctor.

# Members of the right-wing Tea Party movement in late July insultingly brought dogs — much beloved by Westerners but considered unclean animals by Muslims — to picket Friday prayers at a mosque in Temecula, California, whose leaders want to build a new house of worship on a vacant lot nearby.

# Also in late July, trustees of a Roman Catholic church in the New York City borough of Staten Island rejected a proposal to sell a former convent owned by the parish to a Muslim group that wanted to convert it into a mosque, after word of the proposed sale was made public, sparking loud anti-Muslim protests by local residents.

# Muslim leaders in Bridgeport, Connecticut asked for police protection on August 6 after members of a right-wing Christian-supremacist group staged an angry protest outside a local mosque during Friday prayers, shouting hateful anti-Muslim invectives at the worshippers, and accusing their children of being “murderers” as they left the mosque. The protesters were members of the Texas-based Operation Save America — an offshoot of anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue.

# And just last Tuesday, a zoning board in Mayfield, Kentucky reversed its decision to allow a group of Muslim refugees to use a local building as a mosque. The owner of a flower shop located next door to the building, a self-described evangelical Christian, said it might have been different if the building was to be used as a Baptist church.

AT HEART OF ISLAMOPHOBIC WAVE: 9/11, THE ‘NEW PEARL HARBOR’

By now, the source of the current wave of anti-Muslim bigotry sweeping the country should be obvious: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, damaged the Defense Department’s headquarters at the Pentagon in Washington and killed more than 3,500 people.

The attacks, committed by 19 al-Qaida terrorists, was almost immediately considered an act of war against the United States by a foreign force on U.S. soil — the first such act of war since the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, which plunged this country into World War II.

Even this columnist, a New York City native whose stepfather was a member of the construction crews who built the twin towers when I was a kid, regarded the events of September 11, 2001 as a repeat of December 7, 1941 — the new Pearl Harbor for the present generations of Americans alive today — as I watched the full horror of the 9/11 attacks unfold on live television.

I even remember writing on a chalkboard in a now-defunct juice bar in my adopted hometown of Burlington, Vermont, the following message as I watched the destruction of the twin towers:

“Days of Infamy: December 7, 1941 — September 11, 2001.”

September 11, 2001 would, for my generation and for every generation of Americans alive today, forever live as a day of infamy, much as December 7, 1941 would live as a day of infamy for the World War II-era GI Generation — whom retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw dubbed “The Greatest Generation” — most of whom are no longer with us and the shrinking number of them who remain are now well into their 80s and 90s.

AN EERIE ECHO OF AN UGLY CHAPTER IN U.S. HISTORY RIGHT AFTER PEARL HARBOR

It truly is unfortunate that there are fewer and fewer Americans of the GI Generation still living, for lost with their passing is the collective memory of one of the ugliest chapters of American history — one that the current wave of Islamophobia threatens to repeat.

That chapter is the even more virulent wave of bigotry against Japanese-Americans that swept the country in the months following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — bigotry so intense and widespread that it ultimately resulted in tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans forcibly removed by the federal government from their homes and businesses and sent to internment camps located in remote area across the western U.S.

The discrimination and hostility that German-Americans experienced during World War I was nothing compared to what Japanese-Americans would endure after Pearl Harbor. The Germans were white and European; the Japanese were neither. What happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II was — most historians today agree — one of the most blatantly racist episodes in the nation’s history.

And it was directed by none other than the man considered America’s greatest president of the 20th Century — Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That the treatment of Japanese-Americans was motivated by anti-Asian racism was made clear by the uncovering of FBI documents from that era. From 1939 to 1941, the FBI compiled what the bureau called the Custodial Detention Index on U.S. citizens, “enemy” aliens and foreign nationals which might be dangerous. Interestingly, the so-called “enemy races” identified in the FBI’s files specifically excluded those of German and Italian descent.

ANTI-JAPANESE SENTIMENT RAN HIGHEST IN CALIFORNIA, HAWAII

Nowhere did anti-Japanese bigotry run higher than in California and Hawaii, where Japanese-Americans were most heavily concentrated. Unlike German-Americans and Italian-Americans, who numbered in the millions and were spread across the country, there were fewer than a half-million Japanese-Americans. The attack on Pearl Harbor led to fears that Japan was preparing a full-scale attack on the U.S. west coast, making Japanese-Americans — particularly the American-born, second-generation nisei — a convenient target for discrimination.

Japan’s rapid military conquest of much of Asia made their war machine appear to some Americans frighteningly unstoppable. Civilian and military officials had concerns about the loyalty of Japanese-Americans and considered them to be a security risk.

Upon examination of historical record, however, it became clear that these concerns often grew more out of anti-Asian racial hatred than any actual security risk, particularly since no such alarm was raised about German-Americans and Italian-Americans.

Nor was the racist sentiment one-sided. Japanese propaganda films captured after the war revealed an equally racist attitude by Japan against the mostly-white Americans — making it clear that each side saw the other as less than human.

Nonetheless, American attitudes toward the Japanese and Japanese-Americans in World War II stood in stark contrast to their attitudes toward Americans of German and Italian ancestry — even when compared to the prejudice toward German-Americans during World War I. Then-President Woodrow Wilson never issued an executive order for the detention of Americans of German or Austro-Hungarian ancestry during that war.

FDR ORDERS INTERNMENT OF UP TO 120,000 JAPANESE-AMERICANS

Thus, on February 20, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 ethnic Japanese — 62 percent of whom were U.S. citizens — from their homes to hastily-constructed “war relocation camps” located primarily in remote regions, far from the country’s major urban centers.

Roosevelt’s order authorized U.S. military commanders to designate “military areas” at their discretion, “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” These “exclusion zones,” unlike the “alien enemy” roundups, were applicable to anyone that an authorized military commander might choose, whether citizen or non-citizen.

Eventually such areas would include both the east and west coasts, and about a third of the country’s interior — and were applied almost exclusively to all of those of Japanese ancestry, although there were many instances of Chinese-Americans also getting caught up in the internment. Indeed, the internments in California brought back memories of violent attacks on Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans by white mobs in San Francisco in the late 1800s.

INTERNMENT PROVED IMPRACTICAL IN HAWAII

The internment order proved, however, to be impractical to enforce in Hawaii — despite the fact that Japanese-Americans there were closer to essential military facilities than most of their compatriots on the U.S. mainland. This was because Japanese-Americans were over a third of Hawaii’s population — and were too vital to the islands’ economy.

Instead, the whole of Hawaii — which, although a U.S. territory, was not yet the nation’s 50th state — was placed under martial law. The Army imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the entire population of Hawaii except those on official business and compiled intelligence dossiers on nearly half a million Hawaiians.

Today, Hawaii is the only state in the U.S. that has a majority-Asian population. Slightly more than 50 percent of Hawaii’s residents today are of Japanese ancestry — including U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye — a highly-decorated World War II veteran — and U.S. Representative Mazie Hirono.

In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Over $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to Japanese-Americans who had either suffered internment or were heirs of those who had suffered internment.

WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF WITH AMERICA’S 1.3 MILLION MUSLIMS?

With the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II all but faded from the collective American memory, there is a real danger that this dark chapter of American history, as the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana warns in his famous aphorism quoted at the beginning of this column, could be repeated — this time against America’s estimated 1.3 million Muslims.

The open hatred that the 9/11 attacks have generated against Muslims ignores the fact that, of the more than 3,500 people who were slaughtered at the hands of the 19 al-Qaida terrorists, there were dozens of victims who were themselves Muslims — including Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New York City police cadet who was also a part-time ambulance driver and a medical student; and Mohammed Jawarta, who worked for MAS, a private security firm.

Let’s not forget that among the nation’s 1.3 million Muslims include a significant number of celebrities, including three-time heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali; basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the reigning Miss USA, Rima Fakiah — even though she has herself come out against the proposed Cordoba House Islamic Center; actor/comedian Dave Chappelle; Aasif Mandvi, of the faux-news comedy “Daily Show;” and composer A. R. Rahman, a frequent visitor to the U.S. from India who’s best known for scoring the music of the Golden Globe and Oscar-winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire.”

WAVE OF ISLAMOPHOBIA A DANGEROUS PRECURSOR TO OUTRIGHT FASCISM

The strong, passionate feelings expressed by the loved ones of the more than 3,500 people murdered by the 9/11 terrorists are something that has to be taken seriously. But the voices of the relatives of the 9/11 victims have, unfortunately, been joined by an ugly chorus of anti-Muslim bigots and extremely arrogant WASP evangelicals who believe that all non-Christian people of faith are condemned to go to hell for praying to a “false god.”

That this chorus is disregarding the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion to ALL Americans — including the nation’s Muslims — is an obscene affront to the very foundations upon which this country was built — and to which I, as a member of a faith minority myself (I’m a Wiccan) — must raise my voice in protest.

It is also a dangerous descent into an ideology that this country sent up to 12 million of its bravest to fight against in World War II.

That ideology is fascism — the belief that one race or one religion or one ethnicity or one nationality is superior to all others and/or that all others are evil. What some Americans are saying about Muslims today is little different from what Hitler and his Nazis said about Jews in Germany more than 70 years ago.

Even Japanese-American survivors of the World War II-era internment see dangerous parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, with some survivors warning within days of the 9/11 attacks that what happened to them could happen to American Muslims.

Santayana is right. Those who cannot remember the past truly are condemned to repeat it.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

President Striking a Delicate Political Balancing Act, Reassuring Military Commanders That His 2011 Deadline for U.S. Troop Pullout From Iraq ‘Isn’t Set in Stone’ While Seeking to Assuage the Democratic Party’s Anti-War Hardliners

As the last U.S. combat brigade in Iraq prepared to leave the country and cross the border into neighboring Kuwait early Monday — seven years after the U.S.-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime and 20 years after Saddam sent his army to invade Kuwait — some 50,000 American troops are to remain Iraq until the end of 2011 to advise Iraqi forces and protect American interests. But there is some doubt that President Obama will keep his self-imposed deadline and American forces could remain in Iraq indefinitely. (Photo: Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 24, 2010)

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SPECIAL REPORT
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By GARETH PORTER
Inter-Press Service
(Published under a Creative Commons license)

When the Obama administration unveiled its plan last week for an improvised State Department-controlled army of contractors to replace all U.S. combat troops in Iraq by the end of 2011, critics associated with the U.S. command attacked the transition plan, insisting that the United States must continue to assume that U.S. combat forces should and can remain in Iraq indefinitely.

But the differences between the administration and its critics over the issue of a long-term U.S. presence may be more apparent than real.

All indications are that the administration expects to renegotiate the security agreement with the Iraqi government to allow a post-2011 combat presence of up to 10,000 troops, once a new government is formed in Baghdad.

OBAMA WALKING A POLITICAL TIGHTROPE AS MIDTERM ELECTIONS LOOM

But Obama, fearing a backlash from anti-war voters in the Democratic Party, who have already become disenchanted with him over Afghanistan, is trying to play down that possibility. Instead, the White House is trying to reassure its anti-war base that the U.S. military role in Iraq is coming to an end.

An unnamed administration official who favors a longer-term presence in Iraq suggested to The New York Times last week that the administration’s refusal to openly refer to plans for such a U.S. combat force in Iraq beyond 2011 hinges on its concern about the coming midterm congressional elections and wariness about the continuing Iraqi negotiations on a new government.

Vice President Joe Biden said in an address prepared for delivery Monday that it would take a “complete failure” of Iraqi security forces to prompt the United States to resume combat.

Obama referred to what he called “a transitional force” in his speech on August 2 — ironically, the 20th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait — pledging that it would remain “until we remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of the next year.”

He also declared an end to the U.S. “combat mission” in Iraq as of August 31. But an official acknowledged that combat would continue and would not necessarily be confined to defending against attacks on U.S. personnel.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: TRANSITION PLAN STILL BEING WORKED OUT

The administration decided on the transition from military to civilian responsibility for security at an inter-agency meeting the week of July 19. It made the broad outlines of the plan public at an August 16 State Department news briefing and another briefing the following day, even though crucial details had not been worked out.

Colin Kahl, the deputy assistant defense secretary of for Middle Eastern affairs and Michael Corbin, Kahl’s counterpart at the State Department, presented the administration’s plan for what they called a “transition from a military to civilian relationship” with Iraq.

PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTORS TO TAKE OVER FROM U.S. TROOPS

The plan involves replacing the official U.S. military presence in Iraq with a much smaller State Department-run force of private security contractors. Press reports have indicated that the force will number several thousand, and that it is seeking 29 helicopters; 60 personnel carriers that are resistant to improvised explosive devices; and a fleet of 1,320 armored vehicles.

The contractor force would also operate radars so it can call in airstrikes and fly reconnaissance drones, according to an August 21 report in The New York Times.

Kahl argued that the transition is justified by security trends in Iraq. He said al-Qaida is “weaker than it’s ever been,” that the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has been “largely disbanded” and that there is no strategic threat to the Iraqi government.

CRITICS NOT CONVINCED IRAQIS READY TO TAKE CHARGE OF THEIR OWN SECURITY

That provoked predictable criticism from those whose careers have become linked to the fate of the U.S. military in Iraq and who continue to view the United States as having enormous power to decide the fate of the country.

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, a frequent visitor to Iraq at the invitation of General David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and General Ray Odierno, Petraeus’ successor, dismissed the idea of giving the former U.S. military role in Iraq to the State Department and Kahl’s assessment of security trends as far too optimistic.

Some officials were talking “as if we’re on the five-yard line,” Pollack told the Christian Science Monitor. “We’re on more like the 40 –- and it’s probably our 40.”

Pollack argued that the U.S. has great influence in Iraq, which it must use for “persuading” Iraqi leaders to do various things. If the U.S. troop presence ends in 2011, he argued, that U.S. power would suffer.

CONCERN OVER IRAQ’S STILL-UNRESOLVED POLITICAL CRISIS

Other variants of that argument were offered by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, both of whom have been frequent guests of the U.S. command in Iraq and have generally hewed to the military view of Iraq policy.

Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who shared the media spotlight and adulation of Congress with Petraeus from 2007 to 2009 before retiring from the Foreign Service, opined that the military needs to keep enough presence in Iraq to encourage Iraq’s generals to stay out of politics.

The real position of the administration over the issue is not much different from that of its critics, however. In answer to a question after a briefing August 17, Kahl said, “We’re not going to abandon them. We’re in this for the long term.”

Then Kahl observed, “Iraq is not going to need tens of thousands of [American] forces.” That is consistent with the figure of 5,000 to 10,000 being called for by the military, according to the administration official quoted by The New York Times on August 18.

‘WE HAVE TO SEE WHAT BAGHDAD DOES NEXT’

At another point, Kahl said, “We’ll just have to see what the Iraqi government will do,” adding that the “vast majority of political actors in Iraq want a long-term partnership with the United States.”

It is been generally assumed among U.S. officers and diplomats and the Iraqi officials with whom they talk that once a new Iraqi government is agreed on, it will begin talks on a longer-term U.S. troop presence, as former National Security Council official Brett H. McGurk told the Times last month.

At a Pentagon press conference in February, General Odierno referred to the purchase by the Iraqi government of “significant amounts of military materiel from the United States,” including M1A1 tanks and helicopters.

Odierno said he expected it would require a “small contingent” of U.S. personnel to “train and advise” the Iraqis. That formula implicitly anticipated a continuation of the U.S. combat presence in the guise of “advisory and assistance” units.

COMMANDERS TOLD: DON’T STRAY FROM WHITE HOUSE MESSAGE

But the administration apparently made it clear to Odierno and to others that they were not to contradict the administration’s public posture that U.S. troops were being withdrawn by the end of 2011.

During the interagency meeting that adopted the administration’s transition plan, Odierno told reporters at a breakfast meeting July 21 he expected U.S. troops in Iraq to be down to zero by the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is not admitting publicly that it would consider such an extension of the U.S. troop presence. The spokesman for al-Maliki said on August 12 there are alternatives to keeping U.S. troops in the country, such as signing “non-aggression and non-interference pacts” with its neighbors.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Republished under a Creative Commons License.
The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

It’s on Private Property Owned by Muslims; They Have Every Right Under the First Amendment’s Guarantee of Freedom of Religion to Build a House of Worship on Their Property — Lawsuit to Stop Proposed Mosque Filed By Conservative Group Founded By Christian Evangelist Pat Robertson Should Be Thrown Out

Controversy continued to build over construction of a proposed mosque on this New York City block near Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Opponents of the mosque have become more vocal — including Republicans who have vowed to make it a campaign issue in the fall. Lawyers with ties to Christian evangelist Pat Robertson have sued to block construction of the mosque, but are unlikely to be successful — and could provoke a First Amendment freedom-of-religion countersuit by the Muslim owners of the property.  (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, August 17, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

It’s a controversy that’s been building for months and now threatens to explode into a major First Amendment battle over Muslims’ constitutional right to freedom of worship.

It also threatens to further roil an already volatile midterm election campaign.

“It” is proposed mosque to be built on private, Muslim-owned property in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when 19 al-Qaida extremists hijacked four California-bound airliners shortly after takeoff. Two of them, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were slammed into the World Trade Center, destroying the landmark twin towers and killing more than 3,000 people.

Lawyers from a conservative group founded by Christian evangelist Pat Robertson have filed a lawsuit to block the mosque. But the lawsuit by Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice is very likely to fail — and could even provoke a First Amendment freedom-of-religion countersuit by the Muslim owners of the property.

PLANS FOR MOSQUE HAVE BEEN CONTROVERSIAL SINCE MAY

Plans to build the mosque on a private, Muslim-owned property located on Park Place, just two blocks from Ground Zero, had been controversial from the day they were announced in May. The planned 13-story mosque and cultural center would replace a building that formerly housed a clothing store and has stood unused since the 9/11 attacks, its interiors heavily damaged by debris from the fallen twin towers. The project includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center.

Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, who helped found the Cordoba Initiative following the 9/11 attacks and whose organization is spearheading the project, along with the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said the proposed Islamic center is intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims and that it would be open to the general public.

Rauf, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the nearby Al-Farah Mosque on West Broadway, purchased the property last December for $4.85 million, according to official city records. The 29-year-old, 175-member Al-Farah congregation is made up primarily of Sufi Muslims who practice a more spiritually-focused, mystical tradition of Islam, according to NY Resident magazine.

Plans call for the mosque to be completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011. When completed, the mosque could house as many as 2,000 people for Friday prayers.

RAUF A LONGTIME ADVOCATE OF CLOSER TIES BETWEEN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THE WEST . . .

Rauf is an author and longtime activist who’s made it his personal mission since the 9/11 attacks to improve relations between the Muslim world and the West. He has been imam of the al-Farah Mosque since 1983. The 62-year-old native of Kuwait, who has lived in the United States since 1965 and has been a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1977, said in an interview with NY Resident magazine, that the American system of government, with its principles of tolerance, is a paragon of Islamic ideals — even if the country sometimes falls short of those values.

He is the author of three books on Islam and its place in contemporary Western society, including What’s Right with Islam. In a September 30, 2001 interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Rauf condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic. “Fanaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam.” he said. “That’s just as absurd as associating Hitler with Christianity, or David Koresh with Christianity. There are always people who will do peculiar things, and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion. But the Koran is… God says in the Koran that they think that they are doing right, but they are doing wrong.”

. . . WHILE ALSO A CRITIC OF U.S. POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

But in that same interview, Rauf said that the attacks were, in part, “a reaction against the U.S. government politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights, [but] where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries.”

And in a 2004 comment made while on a visit to Australia that drew criticism back home, Rauf compared the 9/11 attacks to the Western allies’ firebombing of the German city of Dresden and nuclear bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians,” he said. “But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.”

Rauf also called on the U.S. government to reduce the threat of terrorism by altering its policies in the Middle East, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ironically, the State Department announced last week that it was sending Rauf on a religious outreach trip to the Persian Gulf states of Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to talk about Muslim life in America and to promote religious tolerance — a move that drew sharp criticism from conservatives.

FAMILIES OF 9/11 VICTIMS FIERCELY OPPOSE MOSQUE . . .

The two Muslim organizations in charge of the project say that the $100 million complex will create a venue for mainstream Islam and a counterbalance to the extremism that motivated the 9/11 hijackers. But from the beginning, the planned mosque has been under fire from relatives of 9/11 victims, who say they are deeply offended by the mosque being built so close to where their loved ones were killed.

That many families of 9/11 victims oppose the mosque being located so close to Ground Zero is understandable, given the tremendous emotional trauma they suffered.
Nancy Nee of Long Island, whose brother, George Cain, a New York City firefighter, was killed when the twin towers collapsed, told AOL News on August 4 that she wanted Muslims to be able to build a community center — but somewhere farther away from Ground Zero.

“We’re upset,” Nee said. “Not at the fact that Muslims have a right to practice their religion here … we’re not like that. But I feel that it’s a slap in the face to put it close to Ground Zero.”

“I think it’s an insult, an in-your-face insult, to the families of the victims of 9/11,” said Leonard Castrianno, Sr. of Amherst, N.Y., who lost his son, Leonard, Jr., in the attack. “What makes it more insulting is that they want to [finish the] building on [the tenth anniversary of the attacks] on 9/11/11,” he told the Buffalo News.

. . . BUT SO ALSO DO ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTS AND CHRISTIAN SUPREMACISTS

Unfortunately, the opposition also includes a passel of anti-Muslim bigots and Christian supremacists — including a controversial right-wing Christian evangelist, Bill Keller, who announced in July that he would counter the mosque with a nearby Christian center.

“How do you battle the darkness? With the light!” the fundamentalist Keller declared on his 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero Web site, which is laced with vicious anti-Muslim invectives. Keller says he wants to take “an ongoing stand” against the mosque and “combat this new evil being constructed near Ground Zero” and “bring people the Truth of God’s Word and the love and hope of Jesus Christ!”

Mark Williams, the former chairman of the Tea Party Express, touched off a firestorm of controversy in June, when, in a blog post on his Web site, MarkTalk.com, he denounced the proposed mosque as “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and a place “for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god,” according to the New York Daily News. Williams resigned as chairman of Tea Party Express to devote full-time to fighting against the mosque.

In late June, thousands staged a protest against the proposed mosque, a demonstration that was virtually ignored by the mainstream media — including the conservative-leaning Fox News Channel and the New York Post — but which received heavy coverage on numerous right-wing Web sites, including that of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

FUROR OVER MOSQUE BECOMES A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

The furor over the proposed mosque became a campaign issue in the upcoming midterm congressional elections Friday when President Obama spoke out in support of the project during a White House dinner marking the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“Let me be clear,” the president said. “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.

“This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” Obama added.

The president’s remarks drew almost immediate criticism from Republicans, with some promising to make the mosque a campaign issue. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the president’s remarks “demonstrate that Washington, the White House, the administration, the president himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America.”

Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, promptly fired back. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Van Hollen said that the president “stating the principle that under our great constitution, we do not discriminate against people based on their religion.” Van Hollen added that “it would be wrong to politicize the issue” and that New Yorkers should be left to discuss it.

GROUP WITH TIES TO ROBERTSON SUES TO BLOCK MOSQUE

Meanwhile, a conservative group founded by Robertson filed suit in New York state court, seeking to overturn the unanimous vote of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to deny landmark status for the damaged former Burlington Coat Factory building, paving the way for its demolition to make way for the mosque.

The lawsuit charges that the city violated its own policies and procedures in rejecting landmark status and exhibited “an arbitrary and capricious abuse of discretion and contrary to decades of administrative precedent.”

It is highly unlikely that the ACLJ’s lawsuit will succeed — or even if it will be heard. Not only is the suit likely to be dismissed on the grounds that the Muslim owners of the property have every right under the First Amendment to a build a house of worship on their Park Place property, but as lawyers for an organization founded by a Christian evangelist with a long record of making highly controversial statements — including a slam at Islam last November as a “violent political system” — they might not have legal standing to bring suit to stop the mosque in the first place.

In any case, Robertson’s group is skating on dangerously thin legal ice. The Muslim owners of the property could file a countersuit accusing Robertson’s group of seeking to force the city to deny them the right to build their mosque, which would clearly violate their First Amendment right to freedom of worship on their own property.

The fact is, the Muslims who purchased the Park Place property did so in full compliance with the law. They own it. They have every right under the First Amendment to build a house of worship on it, if that is want they want to do.

Neither the 9/11 families, nor all the politicians, Islamophobic bigots and Christian supremacists who oppose the mosque have any constitutional right to stop it. Period. End of story.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

With Two Federal Courts on Opposite Coasts Declaring That the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 Both Violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Foes of Marriage for Gay and Lesbian Couples Fall Into Siege Mentality as a Final Ruling by the Supreme Court Is Now All But Inevitable

It’s now a virtual certainty that the Supreme Court will have the final say on whether gay and lesbian couples have the same freedom to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that interracial and interfaith couples have. With federal courts in Massachusetts and California having ruled, respectively, that the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 and California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 both violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, some opponents of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples already are reacting with outbursts of paranoid hysteria. (Photo courtesy U.S. Supreme Court Web site)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Wednesday, August 11, 2010)
(Updated 11:00 a.m. EDT Friday, August 13, 2010)

* * *

NOTE TO READERS:This week’s column — my first since returning from a two-week vacation — is being published a day later than usual, due to unexpected travel delays that resulted in my returning home too late for my Monday-night deadline. I apologize for the delay. Next week’s column will appear as usual on Tuesday, August 16.

By SKEETER SANDERS

Time appears to be running out for opponents of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Within the space of a month, two federal courts — one in Massachusetts, the other in California — have ruled that laws that prohibit same-gender couples from marrying or deny federal recognition to such marriages are unconstitutional under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled last Wednesday that Proposition 8, a voter-approved measure that bars gay and lesbian couples from marrying, “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license” and, in fact, “does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.”

Judge Walker’s ruling came just weeks after another U.S. District Court judge in Boston struck down the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. Judge Joseph Tauro ruled May 8 that DOMA, as the law is commonly known, unconstitutionally denies federal spousal benefits to married gay and lesbian couples in Massachusetts — where same-gender marriage has been legal since 2004 — in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and intrudes upon the state’s exclusive authority over marriage under the Tenth Amendment.

With a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court now all but inevitable — and which potentially could produce at least a 5-4 majority to uphold the lower court rulings — some foes of same-gender marriage already are reacting with paroxysms of paranoid hysteria, with a niece of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. going so far as calling such marriages “genocide.”

ANTI-GAY PARANOIA ON FULL DISPLAY AT RALLY IN ATLANTA

Speaking at a sparsely-attended rally in Atlanta called by the right-wing National Organization for Marriage, Alveda King denounced same-gender marriage. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be extinct, and none of us wants to be,” she said. “So we don’t want genocide! We don’t want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage!”

King insisted that “It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage between one man and one woman” — ignoring the fact that advances in medical technology have made it possible since the late 1970s for gay and lesbian couples to procreate through in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination.

Alveda King’s opposition stands in stark contrast to that of her late aunt, Coretta Scott King, who spoke out in 2004 in support of same-gender marriage and against a proposed federal constitutional amendment to ban it.

“Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union,” she told USA Today. “A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”

The NOM rally drew only about 35 participants, who were outnumbered by more than 300 counter-demonstrators, who voiced their approval of Walker’s decision.

RIGHT-WING PUNDITS GO BERSERK, ATTACK JUDGE WALKER

Predictably, right-wing pundits went berserk, attacking Judge Walker for alleged “judicial activism” and “judicial tyranny,” in the words of the Heritage Foundation’s Chuck Donovan. Donovan called the ruling “an affront to the millions of California voters who approved Proposition 8 in 2008 after months of vigorous public debate.”

Robert Knight, a senior writer and correspondent for the right-wing Coral Ridge Ministries, went farther: He accused Judge Walker of having “embraced the false premise that homosexuality is morally irrelevant or even something to be promoted through public policy” and denounced his ruling on Prop. 8 as a display of “contempt for the rule of law” and even part of “the criminalization of not only Christianity but of the foundational values of civilization itself.”

Meanwhile Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) sought unsuccessfully to push for a resolution in the House during its one-day session on Monday condemning Judge Walker’s ruling. He attacked Walker personally, pointing out the fact that Walker is gay. “For one openly homosexual judge to toss aside seven million voters (and 45 state laws on marriage if this case advances) is the height of government arrogance.” he said. “And it’s certainly not good public policy. A society without accountability or moral boundaries is a society that will not long survive.”

But Judge Walker is no liberal. A conservative jurist who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Walker’s nomination was stalled for two years by Senate Democrats who objected to his membership in an all-male private club and to his having been the attorney representing the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee in its 1982 copyright-infringement lawsuit against the organizers of the first Gay Games in San Francisco, originally dubbed the “Gay Olympics.”

Two dozen House Democrats, led by now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), whose district includes San Francisco, opposed Walker’s nomination because of his alleged “insensitivity” to gays while representing the IOC and USOC. Walker was renominated in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush and elevated to Chief Judge of the U.S District Court for Northern California in 2004 by President George W. Bush.

IT’S THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, STUPID!

Of course, Donovan, Knight, Smith and other right-wingers conveniently ignore the fact that those seven million Californians who voted for Prop. 8 did so in direct defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which states quite explicitly that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the conservative half of the legal team that brought suit against Prop. 8, said in an August 8 interview on “Fox News Sunday,” the U.S. Supreme Court has fourteen times since 1888 — most famously with its landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that struck down laws that banned interracial marriages — “articulated that the right to marriage is a fundamental right. We’re not talking about a new right here.”

When reminded by host Chris Wallace that seven million Californians voted in favor of Prop. 8, Olson shot back that six million Californians voted in the 1960s “to change their constitution to say that you could discriminate on the basis of race in the sale of your home. The United States Supreme Court struck that down” as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote,” he said.

Olson noted that the high court has repeatedly defined marriage “as the most fundamental relationship we have in this country,” one that cannot be denied to certain individuals because of their race, nationality, religion or creed. Nor, Olson argued, should it be denied to certain individuals because of their gender.

HOW WILL THE SUPREME COURT RULE?

While both sides in the same-gender marriage fight now concede that the issue will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, no one can predict how long it will take before the justices will finally take up the case. Nor can anyone predict which case the justices will take up first: The Prop. 8 case, known officially as Perry v. Schwarzenegger, or the Massachusetts case against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known officially as Massachusetts v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Although both U.S. District Court judges — Walker in San Francisco and Tauro in Boston — invoked the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, the Massachusetts case differs substantially from the California case in that whereas Prop. 8 barred gay and lesbian couples in California from marrying, DOMA denied federal spousal benefits to already-married gay and lesbian couples in the Bay State, where same-gender marriage has been legal for six years.

Judge Tauro ruled that DOMA also violates the Tenth Amendment, “by forcing the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] to engage in invidious discrimination against its own citizens in order to receive and retain federal funds in connection with two joint federal-state programs.”

IT’S UP TO JUSTICE KENNEDY WHICH WAY THE HIGH COURT WILL GO

No one expects the Supreme Court’s four conservatives — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts — to be sympathetic to the notion that gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry. Likewise, no one expects the court’s three liberals — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — nor its newest justice, Elena Kagan, to favor denying full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, either.

That leaves it up the court’s ninth justice, moderate-conservative Anthony Kennedy, to be the pivotal fifth justice. And given the fact that Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in two previous cases that gays won (Romer v. Evans in 1996 and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003) as well as a separate opinion concurring with the majority in a third ruling in June seen as a victory for gays (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez), the odds are very good that if the justices agree to take up the Prop. 8 case, the court will split at least 5-4 in favor of affirming Judge Walker’s ruling.

Is it any wonder, then, that some opponents of same-gender marriage are plunging headlong into paranoia? They know that the votes aren’t there in Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-gender marriage — that’s already been tried in 2005 when the Republicans controlled Congress and it failed to garner anywhere near the two-thirds majorities in both houses required for passage.

So as the battle over same-gender marriage heads inexorably toward the final showdown in the Supreme Court, expect even more extreme rhetoric from the far right, as their paranoid homophobia become more and more transparent.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

Tea Party Express Founder and Chairman Accuses NAACP of Being Bigots for Denouncing Racist Elements Within the Broader Tea Party Movement, Ignoring His Own Well-Documented Record of Bigoted Rants and Raves; Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party ‘Scandal’ — Hyped for Months by Fox News and Other Right-Wing Media — Is Exposed As a Politically-Motivated Hoax

 IN DEEP DENIAL OF HIS OWN BIGOTRY — Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, seen here during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, has come under increasing fire for making a series of highly inflammatory remarks that have been denounced as bigoted. But Williams is not only unapologetic, he’s actually accusing his critics of being bigots themselves, while ignoring his own well-documented rants. After the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, passed a resolution at its annual convention condemning expressions of racism within the broader Tea Party movement, Williams fired back, accusing the NAACP of being racist. Meanwhile, an alleged scandal surrounding claims that the New Black Panther Party engaged in voter intimidation — hyped by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for months — has been exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration. (Photo courtesy CNN)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 20, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: This column is taking a two-week break after this issue, while I go on vacation. It will resume on Tuesday, August 10. 

By SKEETER SANDERS

Stubborn. Bullheaded. Tart-tongued. Full of himself. A bigot.

These are some of the things that critics of Mark Williams, the founder and chairman of Tea Party Express, one of several groups in the broader conservative Tea Party movement,  have been saying about him in recent months.

To that, you can add one more: A [bleeping] hypocrite.

The acerbic Williams has accused  the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, the NAACP, of bigotry — totally ignoring his own well-documented record of making highly inflammatory and bigoted statements.

Meanwhile, an alleged scandal in which the Justice Department was accused by conservatives of downplaying allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party — which the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets had been playing up for months — was exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration.

WILLIAMS RIPS NAACP FOR CONDEMNING ‘EXTREMIST ELEMENTS’ IN TEA PARTY

Williams had the gall to accuse the NAACP of being “professional race-baiters” after delegates to the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City passed a resolution last Tuesday condemning “extremist elements” within the Tea Party movement and calling on the movement’s leaders “to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”

Addressing convention delegates, NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said that his organization “has no issue” with the Tea Party movement itself. “We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” he said. “What we take issue with is the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements.”

Taking direct aim at Tea Party movement leaders, Jealous continued, “The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”

NAACP CITES SLURS AGAINST BLACK AND GAY LAWMAKERS AT TEA PARTY RALLY

In a statement posted on its Web site, the NAACP said the resolution was passed “after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches” across the country “using vile, antagonistic racial slurs and images” against President Obama. Photos of some Tea Party protesters’ racially inflammatory anti-Obama signs were posted with the statement.

The NAACP statement also made reference to a Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill in March against the passage of the health-care reform bill, in which a black member of Congress, John Lewis (D-Georgia), was called the racist N-word and an openly gay member of Congress, Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), was branded the six-letter homophobic F-word.

A second black congressman, Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri), was spat upon by a protester as he was walking toward the House wing of the Capitol Building. Fearing an assault, Capitol Police immediately hustled Cleaver into the building and subdued his would-be assailant. The person was later released after Cleaver chose not to press charges.

WILLIAMS CALLS NAACP ‘OLD FOSSILS MAKING A BUCK OFF SKIN COLOR’

In an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio, Williams branded the NAACP “professional race-baiters . . . who make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history,”

That same day on CNN, Williams went further. Asked if the Tea Party movement should tell bigots that they’re not welcome, Williams replied, “Racists have their own movement — It’s called the NAACP! They’re a bunch of old fossils looking to make a buck off skin color!”

In a highly inflammatory posting on his blog, Williams wrote what he said was a “satirical” letter to the nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, from Jealous, in which Williams sought to take issue with the 100-year-old NAACP’s continued use of the now-outmoded term “colored people” in its formal name — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — even though the organization has been popularly known and referred to by the media simply by its acronym for the last 30 years.

“We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing,” Williams wrote. “Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!”

Williams concluded his “satire” with the following: “Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong!”

WILLIAMS TRIES TO DRAW ATTENTION AWAY FROM HIS OWN RECORD OF BIGOTED REMARKS

If Williams was trying to be cute, he failed miserably. He also failed in his apparent attempt to draw attention away from his own record of making highly inflammatory, bigoted remarks — a record that is well documented, despite his best efforts to sanitize it.

(Williams took his “satirical” NAACP letter off his blog site, MarkTalk.com, after it was reported by the mainstream media — but not before the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters copied the letter in full and posted it on its own Political Correction Web site.)

Indeed, so well-documented is Williams’ record of bigoted comments that his claims that the NAACP is a bunch of “professional race-baiters” is utterly without credibility — and at the same time reveals how deeply in denial he is about his own bigotry.

WILLIAMS SLAMS MUSLIMS, SAYS THEY WORSHIP A ‘MONKEY-GOD’ . . .

He’s certainly an anti-Muslim bigot. Williams made that abundantly clear in May, when he touched off a furor by blasting a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.

The New York Daily News, citing a blog posting on his MarkTalk.com Web site, reported that Williams branded the project “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and wrote that Muslims “worship the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

The 13-story glass-and-steel building, which includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center, is under construction just two blocks from the where twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked California-bound jetliners crashed into them and exploded in massive fireballs of jet fuel.

. . . ALSO HURLS INVECTIVES AT JEWISH POLITICIAN — AND THE PRESIDENT

Williams was just as incendiary in his condemnation of a New York politician, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is Jewish and supports the planned mosque. Williams branded Stringer “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank for the price of an approving glance from Hitler.”

Stringer promptly fired back with a blast of his own at Williams, vowing that he’s not going to take “faith-based filth” from anybody.

“To use words around my religious beliefs, to use words calling me out about my faith, is just absolutely despicable,” Stringer told the Daily News. “This [mosque] is about tolerance and respect for diversity. He [Williams] can spew his hatred — and we’re going to hit right back. You don’t let people like this gain any ground.”

Williams has also made inflammatory anti-Muslim remarks about Obama — despite all evidence that the president is a Christian — calling Obama “an Indonesian Muslim-turned-welfare thug” and a “racist-in-chief.”

He’s also referred to the president as an “enemy of America,” lumping him with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — despite the Obama administration’s increasingly get-tough policy toward Iran’s nuclear program — the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and even former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has come under sharp criticism by supporters of Israel as being biased in favor of the Palestinians.

So deep is Williams’ apparent Islamophobia that he’s even stepping down from his post as chairman of Tea Party Express to devote full-time to his drive to stop the construction of what local media in New York refer to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

ALLEGED ‘SCANDAL’ OF NEW BLACK PANTHERS EXPOSED AS PARTISAN HOAX

Meanwhile, the conservative Republican vice-chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in an extraordinary interview published Friday by Politico.com, accused her fellow Republicans who hold a majority on the commission of a clear partisan bias against the Obama administration in their investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of allegations of voter intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the [New] Black Panthers; this has to do with [the GOP majority's] fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Abigail Thernstrom, who was appointed vice-chairwoman of the commission by President George W. Bush.

Thernstrom told Politico that her conservative colleagues on the commission made their political aims crystal clear “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year. “My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring [Attorney General] Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” she said.

Thernstrom has strong conservative credentials. She is a tough critic of affirmative action and of “political correctness” — especially on matters of race. An adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Thernstrom is also member of the board of directors of the conservative Institute for Justice and is a frequent guest on “Fox News Sunday.”

ALLEGED SCANDAL STEMS FROM 2008 ELECTION DAY INCIDENT IN PHILADELPHIA

The alleged scandal stems from an incident on Election Day 2008. Poll watchers found two NBPP members standing outside of a polling station in an African-American neighborhood of Philadelphia. One of the two was a credentialed poll watcher, while the other was brandishing a police-style nightstick baton.

From there, the details get murky. The man with the nightstick was subsequently identified as a member of the NBPP, a militant, Texas-based black-nationalist organization. Founded in 1989, the NBPP, contrary to its name, has no connection with the original, California-based Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s co-founded by Bobby Seale and the late Huey Newton.

Chris Hill, a Republican poll watcher, said that voters had been complaining about intimidation by NBPP members, but the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office said it had not received any such complaints, according to WTXF-TV, the local Fox affiliate in Philadelphia. The nightstick-wielding man was escorted away by Philadelphia police, but no charges were filed against him.

Hill then contacted Rick Leventhal, a correspondent for the national Fox News Channel, and repeated his earlier claim that the two NBPP members were intimidating voters. Fox News aired the story — which was quickly picked up by Breitbart.com and other right-wing media — and has been trumpeting it repeatedly ever since.

FEDS SUE NBPP, BUT LATER HALTS CASE — ANGERING CONSERVATIVES

In January of last year, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the NBPP and three of its members alleging violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stemming from the incident at the Philadelphia polling station. The lawsuit named NBPP members King Samir Shabazz, who had brandished the nightstick, and Jerry Jackson as defendants. A default judgement was entered against Shabazz and Jackson after they failed to appear in court.

In May of last year, Justice Department officials, over the vehement objections of prosecutors who were working on the case, ordered the lawsuit dropped — prompting accusations by conservatives that the orders came directly from Attorney General Eric Holder and that they were racially motivated, as Holder is black.

INTIMIDATION OF WHITE VOTERS ALLEGED — IN AN ALL-BLACK VOTING PRECINCT!

As the controversy continued to build — driven by Fox News, The Washington Times, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media — J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and alleged that the case was dropped because the Justice Department “did not want to protect the civil rights of white people.”

There was one major problem with Adams’ testimony: The polling station at the center of the controversy was located in an all-black election precinct — a fact that Thernstrom caught almost immediately.

In a scathing July 6 article published in the online edition of the conservative National Review, Thernstrom blasted what she said was a lack of evidence to substantiate the allegations of voter intimidation.

“After months of hearings, testimony and investigation, no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots,” she wrote. “Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.”

Thernstrom ripped her conservative colleagues for charging that “the Philadelphia Black Panther decision demonstrates that attorneys in the [Justice Department's] Civil Rights Division have racial double standards. How many attorneys in what positions? A pervasive culture that affected the handling of this case? No direct quotations or other evidence substantiate the charge.”

NBPP IS DESPISED BY ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS

Although the claims of voter intimidation were exposed as false, the NBPP nonetheless remains a highly controversial organization with very few fans — and is deeply despised by the surviving members of the original Black Panther Party, who adamantly insist that the NBPP is illegitimate and have even taken it to court.

The Huey P. Newton Foundation, founded by former original Panthers David Hilliard and Newton’s widow, Fredrika Newton, has vociferously objected that the new party “denigrates the [original] Party’s name by promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the [original] Party was founded.”

The NBPP continues to use the Panther name and logo in spite of a permanent injunction obtained by the original Panthers in 1997 prohibiting the NBPP from using either. NBPP founder Aaron Michaels has been equally contemptuous of the original Panthers, branding them “has-been wannabes” and rejecting the injunction. “I don’t give a damn what judge issued an order,” Michaels said. “Nobody can tell us who we can call ourselves!”

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have identified the New Black Panthers as a hate group, “based on the anti-white, anti-gay and anti-Semitic views its leaders have repeatedly expressed.”

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.