[wvns] Boston Muslims Forgive Israel Advocates
Boston Muslims Forgive Israel Advocates
Karin Friedemann
World View News Service
Many celebrated the construction of New England's largest mosque as
proof of "the Muslim community coming into its own." Yet not everyone
celebrated. In 2004, the City of Boston was sued for selling the land
to Muslims. Racist commentators whipped up public hysteria against the
mosque.
"Muslims are very upset," said Mushtaque Mirza, who has lived in
Boston for 30 years. "The mosque is always depicted as [supporting]
terrorism."
The lawsuit against the City was dismissed in 2007, but irreparable
damage had already been done. Donations slowed to a trickle, the
mosque only half built.
When in 2005, mosque directors Dr. Yousef Abou Allaban and Ossama
Kandil sued Fox News and the Boston Herald for defamation, analysis of
discovery materials exposed a professionally coordinated network of
pro-Israel organizations, mass media, Islamophobic academics, and real
estate developers. The directors accused a growing list of defendants,
including Steven Emerson, the David Project, and Citizens for Peace
and Tolerance (CPT), whose president is Dennis Hale, of "a concerted,
well-coordinated effort to deprive ... members of the Boston Muslim
community of their basic right of free association and the free
exercise of their religion."
The Jewish community
Some Jewish groups kindly distanced themselves from this conspiracy to
deprive Muslim Americans of their constitutional rights, which is a
federal crime, but Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish
Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, whose stated mission
includes minimizing the political influence of groups feared hostile
to Israel, stated, "None of those organizations [who signed statements
supporting the mosque] are members of the organizations of the JCRC.
We don't consider them to be a part of the mainstream Jewish community."
Who is Charles Jacobs?
In 2006, Dr. Yousef Abou-Allaban, chairman of the board of the
Islamic Society of Boston, addressed Charles Jacobs, president of the
David Project, in an open letter that was quoted in the Boston Globe.
"We would like to know why you and others at the David Project appear
to be so intent on inflaming relations between our communities,"
Abou-Allaban wrote. "Do you really hate us that much?"
Charles Jacobs, like Charles Krauthammer and Richard Perle, earns his
living through a speakers' bureau called Benador Associates, which
specializes in pro-Israel campus events focusing on Islam and
terrorism. Fareeha Iqbal, a student at MIT, attended one of his lectures.
"Dr. Jacobs' talk expressed blatantly racist and anti-Islamic views.
In fact, I have never seen Islamophobia exuded so blatantly at a
public forum at MIT, nor such racist views aired at a panel discussion
on human rights."
A pioneer in the technological aspects of mass-marketing hate, CAMERA,
which Jacobs co-founded in 1982 to enforce pro-Israel bias in the
news, email blasts tailored "action alerts" to huge databases of
specific target groups.
This Polish immigrant, armed with only a BA from Rutgers and a Masters
in Education from Harvard has proven exceptionally effective in
manipulating the US government and major American institutions into
following policy blueprints created by his Israel advocacy
organization, the David Project.
The David Project
The David Project is an affiliate member of the Israel on Campus
Coalition (ICC), a network of national Jewish organizations, founded
in partnership with the Jewish student organization Hillel and the
Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. (The three
organizations share a building in Washington.) It is essentially an
Islamophobia franchisor complete with manuals and training videos.
In October 2003, the David Project funded a film, produced by Ralph
Avi Goldwasser, to slander professors Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad,
Hamid Dabashi, and Georges Saliba of Columbia University's Department
of Middle East studies. Joseph Massad became known as one of the most
dangerous intellectuals on campus. Calls for the professor's dismissal
were issued by Congressman Weiner and by the editors of the Daily News
and the New York Sun, and the propaganda film was shown in Israel
before a government minister at an anti-Semitism conference.
The David Project regularly places racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim
speakers on Harvard campus, but its first major accomplishment was
blocking a $2 million donation from the late president of the United
Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, for a chair in
Islamic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. The Project's 2003
smear campaign, coordinated with the ADL, sought to exclude Arabs and
Muslims from developments at Harvard University.
Charles Jacobs smeared Shaykh Zaid's donation to Harvard.
Anti-Sudan Campaigns
Jacobs' pro-Israel advocacy organization spearheaded the campaign to
vilify the Islamic Republic of Sudan, and provided huge quantities of
lurid, both popular and pseudo-academic material, in which Sudan is
described as a "terrorist, genocidal" state engaged in a "holy war."
Charles Jacobs' carefully designed "PR puff pieces" about "slavery" in
Sudan have managed to secure national media coverage.
While pro-Palestine activists have long struggled to halt public
funding of Israel, the dishonest "Save Darfur!" campaign, put together
by DP friends and trainees, is the quickest divestment success in
history. Sudan divestment resolutions have become law in Iowa and are
in the process of approval in 12 states. The JCRC coordinating with
the David Project has further poisoned human rights discourse with
this effort to turn Arab and African Americans against each other.
ISB Settles Lawsuit
The furor over the Roxbury mosque has exposed the ways Israel advocacy
groups pollute discourse on US foreign and domestic policy, which have
until now remained mostly invisible to American political scientists.
Two lawyers that were originally helping the David Project, Jonathon
Leffel and Jacob Feinberg, apparently had a change of heart and handed
over to the Islamic Society of Boston damning evidence against the
David Project.
The ISB had always made clear that they would settle if the David
Project stopped challenging their right to build the mosque. On May
29, 2007 the David Project offered to withdraw Policastro's appeal,
and on May 30, 2007, the Muslim American Society announced that Kandil
and Abou Allaban agreed to dismiss their defamation lawsuits.
Every time Jacobs, Kaufman, or Goldwasser look out of the top floor
window of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies in downtown Boston, they
will see the dome and minaret despite their best efforts to prevent
its completion.
Karin Friedemann is editor of World View News Service in Boston,
focusing on the Islamic world. Please visit
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/.
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