Late last year, Walid Shoebat, a self-styled “expert” on Islamic extremism, reportedly told public safety personnel attending a Las Vegas anti-terrorism conference that the way to solve the threat posed by terrorists was to “kill them…including the children.”
And on May 11, despite criticism of the Las Vegas speech, Shoebat, who continues to tout his credentials as an “ex-terrorist” in the Palestine Liberation Organization despite serious questions about his purported biography, was welcomed to a similar place. He delivered a keynote address to more public employees who attended the second annual South Dakota Homeland Security Conference held in Rapid City–a conference entirely funded by federal tax money. The topic was “Jihad in America.”
David Montgomery of the Rapid City Journal reported on the speech:
Walid Shoebat, who says he was a former terrorist in the Palestine Liberation Organization before converting to Christianity, said that Americans should focus on what he called the “culture of terrorism” among Muslims rather than “only the ones who carry out the explosive act.”
Shoebat said closet supporters of terrorism exist throughout the Muslim community in mosques, community groups and in the U.S. armed forces.
“You’ve been infiltrated at all levels,” Shoebat said. “Are all Muslims who interpret for the U.S. military terrorists? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean you play Russian roulette.”
Shoebat’s appearance was paid for by a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security as part of the second annual South Dakota Homeland Security Conference. He also spoke at the first conference last year in Sioux Falls.
Shoebat was invited for a second time to the conference because the speech was highly popular among attendees, Jim Carpenter, the state’s director of homeland security, told Montgomery. “The critiques and evaluations that came back highly recommended that he come back again…We acted on those, and that’s why he came back.”
But even more alarmingly, Shoebat, described by religion writer Richard Bartholomew as “a pseudo-expert on terrorism…[who] teaches that Obama is a secret Muslim and that the Bible has prophesised a Muslim anti-Christ,” is only the tip of an anti-Muslim iceberg being funded by taxpayers. Author and journalist Chris Hedges recently reported that “much of this [anti-Muslim] indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010.”
Since September 11, the federal government has poured money into fighting terrorism. But some of this money has gone to pay for public employee attendance at seminars and trainings that feature crude propaganda about Islam. The speakers at these trainings, like Shoebat, also often push a far-right agenda when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict. For example, on his website, Shoebat claims that “the Arab refugees are being used as pawns’ to create a terror breeding ground, as a form of aggression against Israel.”
Shoebat and others like him preach bigoted tropes about Islam across the country at similar conferences paid for with taxpayer money. The trend has continued despite more public scrutiny in the form of investigations published by the Washington Post and a March 29 letter from top senators in the Senate’s Homeland Security committee. The letter, authored by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, expressed concern about “state and local law enforcement agencies…being trained by individuals who not only do not understand the ideology of violent Islamist extremism but also cast aspersions on a wide swath of ordinary Americans merely because of their religious affiliation.”
The Senate letter came after the publication of a comprehensive report by the Political Research Associates that documented how “public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat.”
“What we are documenting here is the institutionalization of these views in a critical part of our government—those who have the power to monitor, extract, arrest and interrogate people,” Thom Cincotta, the author of the report, told me in a recent interview published in AlterNet. “This isn’t the type of country we want to be. We want to embrace our diversity and build ties with the Muslim-American community.”
But despite the increase in public scrutiny, and demands from the Council on American-Islamic Relations to drop Shoebat from the South Dakota conference, the Shoebat show went on.
The scrutiny of Shoebat was met with a shrug from Carpenter, the state’s director of homeland security. He told the Rapid City Journal that he doesn’t think that “we should be complacent in any way…Sometimes it takes folks to wake us up a little bit.” But in reality, Shoebat and others like him let law enforcement go to sleep on the real work of counter-terrorism.
Alex Kane, a freelance journalist based in New York City, blogs on Israel/Palestine and Islamophobia at alexbkane.wordpress.com, where this post originally appeared. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.
Because the US has outsourced much of Homeland Security’s work to Israel, it is safe to ask where this kind of craziness is coming from. It used to be called blowback.
What is perfectly clear from reading Walid Shoebat’s statements is that he got his “expertise” from watching corny low-budget Jean Claude Van Damme movies produced by Zionist hacks.
Shoebat is nothing more than another Curveball con man, selling his wares to the highest bidder.He claims to be a former PLO terrorist, biut neither the CIA, FBI nor the PLO has ever heard of him.
The Jerusalem Post took him down a peg or two. I dont know what happened to the JPost’s website but it’s all one long paragraph.
link to jpost.com
Another takedown:
link to youtube.com
“Since September 11, the federal government has poured money into fighting terrorism.”
This is a questionable assertion, to say the least. Since September 11, the federal government has poured money not into fighting terrorism, but into indoctrinating the American people that there is an international terrorist threat roughly equivalent to the international communist threat that was used to justify and camouflage imperial interventions. In other words, the clash of civilizations is intended to replace international communism as the central bogeyman. Also, much of the anti-terrorist security measures are intended to create a climate of fear among the general population in order to justify more overt forms of coercive domestic control to deal with the anticipated social upheaval resulting from the effects of domestic structural adjustment.
From the link to the letter: “Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Me., Tuesday sought information to ensure that federal funds for counterterrorism training are not being wasted on programs that could undermine the national effort to deter homegrown terrorism.”
“… undermine the national effort to deter homegrown terrorism.” That’s key. Our Senators want to make sure that these anti-Muslim efforts don’t interfere with future plans to quell domestic disturbances and other forms of resistance to neo-liberal globalization. All of these “anti-terrorism” laws and programs have worked to criminalize dissent and militarize the police. Welcome to the emerging American police state.
Shoebat spoke at our university years ago and even then was comparing the Palestinians to Nazis. When objections were voiced in the following days, most of the co-sponsoring groups pretended that they could disassociate themselves from such content.
more disturbing than the fact that it was on DHS’s dime (since DHS doesn’t seem to do any quality control with its grants) is the fact that the apostate freak, whose stupidity is evident to any straight-thinking person, was well-received by the South Dakota homeland community community. It means that they are not straight-thinking. The PRA report quotes senior federal intelligence officials, who seem to be in agreement that the garbage purveyed by Shoebat and his ilk is really unhelpful for homeland security purposes.
The problem with Shoebat’s ideas, and those advanced by his Zionist fellow travelers, is that those ideas actually promote anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia while doing absolutely nothing in helping law enforcement deal with whatever so-called terrorist threat there may be. Never mind that 99.999% of these threats are hype for the purpose of using fear to control the American masses. But, I digress.
His ideas are no different than canvasing for Menorahs and then rounding up the owners with the intention of containing AIPAC’s control over the United States.
The guy is an idiot, a liar and a con-man. But, Jim what’s-his-name from South Dakota is lapping Shoebat’s views as though they were the best thing since Bill O’reilly’s garbage.
link to prisonplanet.com
Alex, it looks like you got it right two months before CNN bothered to do some due diligence on its so-called expert. Kudos to you, man.