Terrified by Bail Christopher;

Author:Bail, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Source: Data extracted from the Facebook Graph Application Programming Interface by the author.

ACT inspired particularly impassioned discourse among its fans during late 2012 and 2013. For example, ACT assailed New Jersey governor Chris Christie for appointing several Muslims to high-profile positions within his government, and 3,789 Facebook users shared ACT’s message about Christie across their own social networks. ACT also launched a campaign to condemn Muslim speakers at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Several of those singled out for criticism were targeted because they had connections to the North American Islamic Trust—the large hedge fund, described in the previous chapter, that funds most Muslim organizations but was listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the U.S. government’s controversial case against the Holy Land Foundation. Finally, ACT sponsored a letter-writing campaign on its website to members of congress in order to investigate whether U.S. national security institutions were being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Soon thereafter, Michele Bachmann made national headlines for accusing senior State Department official Huma Abedin of spying on behalf terrorists.27

The only other civil society organizations that won sizeable Facebook audiences between 2011 and 2013 were the Islamic Society of North America—the largest Sunni religious organizations in the region—and Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), an Internet-based movement that is part of the American Freedom Defense Initiative—a civil society organization. Anti-Muslim bloggers Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller founded SIOA to protest the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, as the next section of this chapter describes. Yet even before this high-profile controversy, Spencer and Geller received modest notoriety for their anti-Muslim views. Not unlike Gabriel, Pamela Geller is a telegenic leader who made multiple appearances on major U.S. news programs during this period. For example, she first received media attention as part of a 2007 campaign to shut down a New York charter school that offered dual-language instruction in English and Arabic titled “Stop the Madrassa.” SIOA also sponsored numerous public campaigns designed to expose Americans to the threats of Islam—most visibly large advertisements on the sides of buses in several major U.S. cities. Though SIOA does not boast the grassroots support of ACT, it has dense international networks to prominent anti-Muslim activists in other countries such as Dutch politician Geert Wilders and nativist groups in Britain.

Both ACT and SIOA are closely connected to the anti-Muslim organizations described in previous chapters. For example, David Yerushalmi—founder of the Societies of American for National Existence—serves as legal counsel for the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an organization that grew out of SIOA.28 SIOA’s board members also include Frank Gaffney, leader of the Center for Security Policy—who famously accused Grover Norquist of being a terrorist sympathizer, as chapter 3 described. Both SIOA and ACT regularly rehearse the “stealth jihad” narrative of anti-Muslim organizations such as the Center for Security Policy and JihadWatch.org. As the previous chapter described, this narrative warns of “creeping Shariʾah,” or the gradual subversion of the U.S. Constitution by Muslim activists who practice strategic lying or “taqiyya.” Yet ACT

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.