Romney’s adviser on Middle East has had a career boosted by Israel lobby

It is routine for American experts to dismiss the Arab world as being full of conspiracy theory. Tom Friedman does it. So did Michael Gordon in the New York Times the other day in an article on Saddam Hussein. But some of this criticism stems from the fact that Arab media insist on talking about the Israel lobby in a way that our media refuse to do. Al Jazeera has an excellent piece by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad on Walid Phares, Mitt Romney’s scary adviser on foreign policy in the Middle East. Why isn’t this in the American press? Ahmad:

By any measure, Phares’ career has been an unmitigated success: He has found rare exalted space in the Israel lobby’s firmament, which has helped elevate him into various government advisory positions. He is promoted as a featured expert by the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. He is also an associate of Israel’s Ariel Center for Policy Research and a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He serves on the board of ACT! For America, a pressure group that Politico described as part of an “effort to transform anti-Islam crusading into a mainstream lobbying effort”. The group was established by Brigitte Gabriel, whom Deborah Solomon of the New York Times Magazine has described as a “radical Islamophobe”. Like Phares, Gabriel emerged from the sectarian milieu of the Lebanese civil war, whose prejudices both now seek to foist on the wider world.

Phares also serves on the advisory board of the Clarion Fund, a production company associated with the radical Israeli settler group Aish HaTorah, which even Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has described as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today”. The Clarion Fund came to prominence with the anti-Islam film Obsession, 28 million copies of which were distributed during the 2008 presidential campaign in an attempt to inflame Middle America’s suspicion of the “Muslim Manchurian candidate” Barack Hussein Obama. Phares has appeared in at least two of Clarion’s films, The Third Jihad and Iranium, the latter an unabashed call for regime change in Iran, including the use of military action. In an extended appearance on Fox’s Hannity, Phares joined the film’s producer, Rabbi Raphael Shore of Aish HaTorah, to stress the implacability of the Iranian regime and the menace of radical Islam. Both denounced successive US administrations as appeasers. They also cast aspersions on the Arab Spring, declaring it a replay of the Iranian revolution, a prelude to an Islamist takeover.

So eccentric are Phares’ views that, earlier this year, even Republican Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Representative Peter King had to drop him from his controversial “Muslim radicalisation” hearings. This prompted a spirited defence from Robert Spencer, who accused King of “shrinking-violet delicacy“. Spencer serves with Phares on the board of Gabriel’s ACT! and, like Phares, is fighting his own holy war. In The Post-American Presidency, a book co-authored with Pamela Geller (featuring a foreword by John Bolton), he exposes the Obama Administration’s “war on America” which includes inflicting universal healthcare and public education on its people and eroding its commitment to Israel. In a promotional video posted online, Spencer and Geller exhort viewers to stop “the anti-Semite in the White House, and his useful idiots in the Congress”, before they bring about “a second Holocaust”.

But the most significant of Phares’ affiliations are with FDD and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), two think-tanks that played a leading role in pushing the war against Iraq. In April 2002, in a seemingly coordinated campaign, the two think-tanks ran ads which lumped Yasir Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein into a single unified threat menacing the US and Israel. It is the same dissolving of differences that Phares trades in today.