Hasner and Spencer, November 2011Leftist journalistic propagandist Alex Seitz-Wald tries to smear Florida Congressional candidate Adam Hasner with association with Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, and me, as well as other freedom fighters, in “Adam Hasner: Islamophobe for Congress” in Salon today. But over at Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller artfully fisks him:
Rep. Michele Bachmann has gotten a lot of attention lately for her witch hunt against Muslims in the U.S. government, but she’s not alone. In addition to the four lawmakers
who signed on to her letters, there are a handful of others who
together might be called the Islamophobia Caucus “” and their ranks are
likely to swell after November, thanks in part to one of the caucus”
most outspoken members, Rep. Allen West.Salon’s “witch hunt” link goes to an interview
Seitz-Wald did with Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, who calls
Bachmann’s call for an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in
the government “galling.” Seitz-Wald doesn’t ask Ellison (of course)
about the fact that in 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In
recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim
American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the
nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993
after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune
in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s
English-language website, Ikhwanweb. The Muslim American Society, according to Steven Emerson,
director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “is the de facto
arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. The agenda of the MAS is to “¦
impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism
policy.”But Seitz-Wald doesn’t ask Ellison about any of that. He just lets him go on about “McCarthyism.”
After redistricting made West’s 22nd Florida congressional
district slightly more liberal, he moved to the 18th. Running in his
place is Adam Hasner, the former Florida House majority leader who
abandoned a previous bid for the Senate. Hasner has already earned
top-flight endorsers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and West himself, as well as several major conservative organizations.But perhaps a bit farther down the list is Pam Geller, the
anti-Islam blogger and activist who spearheaded the effort against the
so-called ground zero mosque. While she may not have officially
endorsed Hasner, they”re clearly comrades in the fight against Shariah
law. “Pamela [Geller] and I were on the front lines of that together,
fighting to make sure that we kept her safe here,” Hasner told a Fort
Lauderdale crowd in June of last year. For her part, Geller has written
numerous blog posts praising Hasner, whom she declared to be “my friend.” “So many patriots and elected officials joined us, like Adam Hasner,” she wrote in June of last year. Here’s a photo of them posing together from her blog. (Hasner did not reply to requests for comment.)Note Seitz-Wald’s Alinsky tactics. He doesn’t even bother to try to
establish that anything I say or do is wrong, aside from a sideswipe at
the “so-called” ground zero mosque. Instead, he takes for granted that
his liberal readers will think of me as someone to be shunned, and think
something is wrong with Hasner for being associated with me. This is a
despicable but common tactic on the left: demonize someone relentlessly,
and then criticize other people on the right for having anything to do
with him or her. And the right, full of craven cowards, all too often
goes along, eagerly allowing the left to set the agenda and dictate with
whom it can and cannot associate.As the Florida Independent noted in September of last year, Hasner has been involved in a “long-time crusade
against the supposed threat of Sharia in the U.S.” In 2009, he appeared
on a panel in D.C. with Geller and Frank Gaffney, the man behind
Bachmann’s with hunt, according to a press release
unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge. Robert
Spencer, another key figure in the Islamophobia cottage industry,
called Hasner a “fearless truth teller” (here’s a photo them posing together via Spencer’s blog, Jihad Watch).Before that, Hasner invited notorious Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders
to Florida. “When I invited Geert Wilders to join me for a Free Speech
conference in Palm Beach County, not only did the hotel cancel its
plans to have him come in, but I was the one who was asked by the Hamas
front group, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, to resign from the
Florida House of Representatives,
because I was an Islamophobe and a hater,” he said in the Fort
Lauderdale speech. Wilders has made crusading against Islam his top
priority. He was under house arrest for hate speech in Holland and is
barred from visiting several countries.Seitz-Wald doesn’t tell you that Wilders was acquitted of the
spurious and politically motivated “hate speech” charges, or that he
stands for a free society, as do I. He knows his lemming readers will
hate who he tells them to hate, and he doesn’t have to give them
reasons. And if Wilders is barred from visiting several countries, it is
because the politically correct elites in those countries are listening
to their Alex Seitz-Walds, bowing to Islamic supremacists and turning
against freedom fighters. This is their shame, not their glory.When Hasner caught flak for the invitation,
he was unperturbed. “These are the same people who have been attacking
me all session. This isn’t about being anti-Islam, this is all about
the right to free speech and they are trying to stifle it,” he casually
told the St. Petersburg Times in April 2009. Wilders personally
thanked Hasner in his speech, saying, “We need strong leaders like we
have here today, Allen West and Adam Hasner. We need strong men like
that.”Indeed we do, and Alex Seitz-Wald shows why with every new paragraph.
Within just a few days of the Wilders speech, it was an event that
Hasner did not attend that raised eyebrows. He apparently boycotted an
imam’s opening prayers at the state Legislature. The Palm Beach Post reported at the time:As usual, the Florida House opened session today with a
prayer. But for the first time this year (and possibly the first time
ever), that prayer was led by an imam, Qasim Ahmed, from the Islamic
Learning Institute in Tampa. The prayer was videotaped by Ahmed Bedier,
United Voices of America director, who remarked on the absence of House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Boca Raton. Bedier said he was videotaping the “historic” moment. “We did notice Hasner’s empty chair. That’s definitely noticed,”
Bedier said”¦ Hasner said he wasn’t on the floor this morning for
personal reasons and noted the iman was in the House at the invitation of Rep. Jim Waldman, D-Coconut Creek. “It’s Jim Waldman’s right as a member to invite whomever he wants,” Hasner said.Seitz-Wald doesn’t mention, not surprisingly, that Qasim Ahmed appears to be a polygamist
— and that polygamy is illegal in the United States. Adam Hasner had
good reason not to want to appear with him. But for Alex Seitz-Wald, the
only motive could be “bigotry,” not a desire not to appear to be
validating people who flout the law.