This is in most respects a typical Washington Post piece; indeed, it is typical of establishment propaganda media articles in general: it presents demonstrably true statements about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat as if they were clearly false and evidence of a bigotry and hatred that should shock all decent, right-thinking people. (The only way in which it is not typical is that WaPo reporter Matea Gold actually allowed me to respond to the “anti-Muslim” smear, although she did not, of course, explain why anyone should take the hard-Left Southern Poverty Law Center seriously as an authority on “hate” when it includes no Leftist groups on its “hate” list.) More below.
“Bannon film outline warned U.S. could turn into ‘Islamic States of America,’” by Matea Gold, Washington Post, February 3, 2017:
The flag fluttering above the U.S. Capitol is emblazoned with a crescent and star. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” rise from inside the building.
That’s the provocative opening scene of a documentary-style movie outlined 10 years ago by Stephen K. Bannon that envisioned radical Muslims taking over the country and remaking it into the “Islamic States of America,” according to a document describing the project obtained by The Washington Post.
Absurd! Preposterous! Hatemongering! Fearmongering! Right? Well, Matea Gold didn’t bother to ask Omar Ahmad what he thought of this. Ahmad, Hamas-linked CAIR’s co-founder and longtime Board chairman, once said: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” He denies saying those words, but the original reporter still stands by her story. And Hamas-linked CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper once said: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.” Meanwhile, according to a captured internal document, the Muslim Brotherhood (to which all the major Muslim groups in the US are linked) is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house….so that it falls, and Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.” Then there is the Washington, DC imam who wants to “establish an Islamic State of America by 2050.”
But Gold mentions none of this, and if Infidels take note of it, they’re racist, bigoted, “Islamophobes,” according to the Washington Post.
The outline shows how Bannon — years before he became a strategist for President Trump and helped draft last week’s order restricting travel from seven mostly Muslim countries — sought to issue a warning about the threat posed by radical Muslims and their “enablers among us.” Although driven by the “best intentions,” the outline says, institutions such as the media, the Jewish community and government agencies were appeasing jihadists aiming to create an Islamic republic.
Much has been made of this as alleged evidence of Bannon’s “anti-Semitism.” Here again, unpleasant facts are no less facts for being unpleasant. Jews in the U.S. voted overwhelmingly twice for Obama and his policies of appeasement. Those Jews who didn’t are just as upset about that as anyone else, because they see how self-defeating it is. And as for government agencies, since 2011, by Obama’s order, scrupulously avoided any mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. It was essentially an official policy of appeasement.
The eight-page draft, written in 2007 during Bannon’s stint as a Hollywood filmmaker, proposes a three-part movie that would trace “the culture of intolerance” behind sharia law, examine the “Fifth Column” made up of “Islamic front groups” and identify the American enablers paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”
The outline, titled “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism [sic] in America,” lists Bannon as the movie’s director, as well as its co-writer with his longtime writing partner Julia Jones. The title page includes the line “A Film by Stephen K. Bannon” in capital letters….
The outline offers an early glimpse of Bannon’s belief that the West and “supremacist” Islam are headed for a “fundamental clash of civilizations,” as the outline says. Bannon later expressed this view publicly as chief of Breitbart News, a site that often features articles about radical Islamists and has provided a platform for the alt-right, a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.
This is, as commonly repeated as it is, an outright lie. The establishment propaganda media first equated the term “alt-right” with “white supremacist” and then tars Breitbart with it. In reality, of course, there is no white supremacist promotion at Breitbart.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a 2014 talk via Skype to a group at the Vatican, according to a transcript first published by BuzzFeed. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
9/11. Fort Hood. Boston. Garland. Chattanooga. Orlando. San Bernardino. Etc. 30,000+ violent jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11. Was Bannon really exaggerating?
“I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam,” he added, citing ancient battles between Christian and Islamic forces….
The 2007 film summary calls the Muslim Brotherhood “the foundation of modern terrorism.”Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who reviewed the outline for The Post, called it “propaganda” that was “designed to generate hate against not just Islamists, not just extremists, but Muslims writ large.”
He offers no evidence to back this up, and of course the WaPo reporter doesn’t ask him for any, because this is what she wants to hear.
“There’s no way you can look at this and Steve Bannon’s other comments and remarks and say Steve Bannon is a friend of American Muslims,” said Hamid, the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.”
“It’s remarkable that someone involved with a film like this is at the center of power at the White House,” he added.
And this is the idea: to intimidate President Trump into dropping Bannon, because the establishment propaganda media is convinced that much of what makes Trump Trump really comes from Bannon. They’re hoping that a Bannon-less Trump will be toothless and easy to control.
Tim Watkins, a producer who participated in discussions with Bannon about the project, rejected the idea that the film was driven by anti-Muslim bias.
“This is not because Bannon had a hate or dislike for Muslims,” Watkins said. “I believe that he believed that no society is without its radical fringes.”
Watkins said he and Bannon met with Steven Emerson, author of the 2002 book “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us” and founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, at an Italian restaurant in Washington and discussed the project. After hearing about Emerson’s research, Watkins said he came up with the idea for the opening sequence featuring the reconstituted American flag flying over the Capitol dome.
“Based on what I heard, it seemed like a documentary in the making,” Watkins said.
Emerson, whose book asserts that many Muslim institutions in the West have provided ideological support for militants, is listed as an executive producer in the proposal. A section of the film was to be drawn from his research archives, according to the document.
“Steve Bannon and I definitely had some interaction at some point about a film, due to a mutual interest in the threat of radical Islamism,” Emerson wrote in an email, describing himself as someone who deeply respects Islam. He added that he did not recall ever seeing the outline, which he said contained material that was not drawn from his work.
“I believe there is a witch hunt and campaign of character assassination being waged against Steve Bannon for his comments against radical Islam like there has been waged against me for many years in order to silence critics of radical Islam,” he said.
No doubt about that.
The outline uses stark language to spell out the dangers posed by Islamist jihadists.
“The ideology is scary, and its ideologues will frighten small children as we bring to light an unbroken chain of ‘thinkers’ who epitomize the culture of hate,” the outline reads.
Part of the film would detail “the rise of a global holy war — financed by the cash flow of oil — to attack and destroy western civilization,” according to the outline.
The proposal names two dozen conservative writers and terrorism experts who could serve as potential on-screen guests, including Robert Spencer, director of the Jihad Watch website, who is labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim “propagandist.”
In an email, Spencer rejected that term as “a smear,” adding that he is “no more anti-Muslim than critics of Nazism were anti-German.”
Spencer, who has written for Breitbart and was interviewed by Bannon on Breitbart’s daily radio show, said he did not recall any discussions about the 2007 film proposal. But he said that he found Bannon “to be brilliant and extraordinarily well-informed about both the history and doctrines of Islam.”
The outline warns about “front groups and disingenuous Muslim Americans who preach reconciliation and dialogue in the open but, behind the scenes, advocate hatred and contempt for the West.”
It names the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America as examples of such “cultural jihadists.” After The Post’s revelation of the 2007 script, CAIR officials on Friday urged Republicans to call for Bannon’s dismissal, saying that he promoted “virulently anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.”
Matea Gold doesn’t mention some salient facts about Hamas-linked CAIR and Hamas-linked ISNA. Why did she see fit to omit these facts, which would significantly change her readers’ views of Bannon’s critics? CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. As I noted above, CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.) A California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI, and a Florida chapter distributed pamphlets with the same message. CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. A CAIR operative recently called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Same question for Gold regarding ISNA. Federal prosecutors included ISNA on a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Hamas-financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). ISNA is listed among “individuals/entities who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.” ISNA’s conferences have featured pro-jihad rhetoric: at the 2009 convention, for example, panelists expressed extreme anti-Semitism and support for Hizballah.
Omissions like these demonstrate why I call the Washington Post and its ilk the establishment propaganda media. They aren’t anything close to news outlets. They are propaganda centers for globalism and Islamic supremacism.