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.
You should think about shopping an op-ed to LA Times and some other papers.
Shoebat is the biggest ignorant idiot in the world. He’s like an Arab Tom Friedman.
Shoebat long since exposed as a fraud:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1206632362598&pagename=JPost%
http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=96502
Jerusalem Post
Mar 30, 2008
The Palestinian ‘terrorist’ turned Zionist
By JORG LUYKEN
When he was 16, says Walid Shoebat, he was recruited
by a PLO operative by the name of Mahmoud al-Mughrabi
to carry out an attack on a branch of Bank Leumi in
Bethlehem.
At six in the evening he was supposed to detonate a
bomb in the doorway of the bank. But when he saw a
group of Arab children playing nearby, he says, his
conscience was pricked and he threw the bomb onto the
roof of the bank instead, where it exploded causing no
fatalities.
This is the story that Shoebat, who converted from
Islam to Christianity in 1993 and has lived in the
United States since the late 1970s, has told on tours
around the US and Europe since 9/11 opened the West’s
public consciousness to the dangers of Islamic
extremism.
Shoebat’s Web site says his is an assumed name, used
to protect him from reprisal attacks by his former
terror chiefs, whom he says have put a $10 million
price on his head.
Shoebat is sometimes paid for his appearances, and he
also solicits donations to a Walid Shoebat Foundation
to help fund this work and to “fight for the Jewish
people.”
The BBC, Fox News and CNN have all presented Shoebat
as a terrorist turned peacemaker, interviewing him as
someone uniquely capable of providing insight into the
terrorist mindset.
Now he and two other former extremists are set to
appear along with US Senator Joe Lieberman, Ambassador
to the US Sallai Meridor and other notables at an
annual “Christians United For Israel” conference in
Washington in July.
The three “ex-terrorists” have appeared previously at
Harvard and Columbia universities and, most recently,
at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, in February,
at a conference whose findings, the organizers said,
would be circulated at the Pentagon and among members
of Congress and other influential figures.
Last year, Shoebat spoke to the BattleCry Christian
gathering in San Francisco, which drew a reported
22,000 evangelical teenagers to what the San Francisco
Chronicle described as “a mix of pep rally, rock
concert and church service.”
The paper described Shoebat as a self-proclaimed
“former Islamic terrorist” who said that Islam was a
“satanic cult” and who told the crowd how he
eventually accepted Jesus into his heart.
However, Shoebat’s claim to have bombed Bank Leumi in
Bethlehem is rejected by members of his family who
still live in the area, and Bank Leumi says it has no
record of such an attack ever taking place.
His relatives, members of the Shoebat family, are
mystified by the notion of “Walid Shoebat” being an
assumed name. And the Walid Shoebat Foundation’s
working process is less than transparent, with
Shoebat’s claim that it is registered as a charity in
the state of Pennsylvania being denied by the
Pennsylvania State Attorney’s Office.
Shoebat’s claim to have been a terrorist rests on his
account of the purported bombing of Bank Leumi. But
after checking its files, the bank said it had no
record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere
in the relevant 1977-79 period.
Shoebat told The Jerusalem Post that this could be
because the bank building was robustly protected with
steel and that the attack may have caused little
damage.
Asked whether word of the bombing made the news at the
time, he said, “I don’t know. I didn’t read the papers
because I was in hiding for the next three days.” (In
2004, he had told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph: “I was
terribly relieved when I heard on the news later that
evening that no one had been hurt or killed by my
bomb.”)
Shoebat could not immediately recall the year, or even
the time of year, of the purported bombing when
talking to the Post by phone from the US. After
wavering, he finally settled for the summer of 1977.
The Sunday Telegraph described Shoebat as a man who
“for much of his life… was eager to commit acts of
terrorism for the sake of his soul and the Palestinian
cause.”
In that interview he described how he and his peers
were indoctrinated as children “to believe that the
fires of hell were an ever-present reality. We were
all terrified of burning in hell when we died… The
teachers told us that the only way we could certainly
avoid that fate was to die in a martyrdom operation -
to die for Islam.”
But an uncle and a cousin of Shoebat, who still live
in Beit Sahur in the Bethlehem area, where Shoebat
grew up, said that Shoebat’s education was rather mild
ideologically, and that religion did not play a
dominant role.
The uncle, interviewed at his home, said he remembered
little about his nephew, because Walid left for
America at the age of 16, and because his American
mother always kept a distance from the rest of the
family. The uncle and his wife both said firmly that
there was no attack on Bank Leumi.
When questioned on this discrepancy, Shoebat was
adamant that he did carry out such a bombing, and that
his relatives deny it to cover up for another cousin
who was with him during the attack and still lives in
Bethlehem.
Shoebat evinced no particular surprise that his family
could be tracked down simply by asking Beit Sahur
locals where they lived, even though his Internet site
claims that his is an assumed name.
Shoebat describes his conversion to Christianity as a
transformation “from hate to love.” He told the Post
that he believes “in a Greater Israel that includes
Judea and Samaria, and by this I mean a Jewish state.”
He argued that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip and
rehouse Jews there, regarding Gaza as Jewish by right.
“If a Jew has no right to Gaza, then he has no right
to Jaffa or Haifa either,” he said.
He advocates that the government of Greater Israel
introduce a law providing for the exiling of anybody
who denies its right to exist, “even if they were born
there.”
He has little sympathy for the PLO or Hamas. “The
Palestinians have not met a single demand from
Israel,” he said, and added, “Both the PLO and Hamas
have not given up the goal of destroying Israel.”
“The Jews are not aware of the true threat,” Shoebat
said. “They are still fighting dead Nazis. It is easy
to fight dead people. But they don’t have the will to
fight the living Nazis, the Islamic radicals.”
He told the Post he had set up his Walid Shoebat
Foundation to educate Americans as to why the US
should support Israel. Shoebat said the foundation had
reached out to over 450 million people. He said it
held events where he and others like him – whom he
called “ex-terrorists” who have become Zionists -
spoke about their views to Jewish, Christian and
secular audiences.
A New York Times report last month on the Air Force
Academy event, headlined “Speakers at Academy Said to
Make False Claims,” noted that “Academic professors
and others who have heard the three men speak in the
United States and Canada said some of their stories
border on the fantastic, like Mr. Saleem’s account of
how, as a child, he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs
via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights.
No such incidents have been reported, the academic
experts said. They also question how three middle-aged
men who claim they were recruited as teenagers or
younger could have been steeped in the violent
religious ideology that only became prevalent in the
late 1980s.”
The Times quoted Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the
history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, as saying after he heard
Saleem speak last November at the college that he
thought the three were connected to several major
Christian evangelical organizations.
“It was just an old time gospel hour: ‘Jesus can
change your life, he changed mine,’” Howard said.
The professor told the Times that his doubts about the
authenticity of the three grew after he heard stories
like that of the Golan Heights tunnels, “as well as
something on Mr. Saleem’s Web site along the lines
that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam.
The grand wazir of Islam is a nonsensical term.”
The newspaper said Arab-American civil rights
organizations have questioned “why, at a time when the
United States government has vigorously moved to jail
or at least deport anyone with a known terrorist
connection, the three men, if they are telling the
truth, are allowed to circulate freely.”
A spokesman for the FBI, the paper reported, said
there were no warrants for their arrest.
The Times said the three men were to be paid $13,000
for the Air Force Academy event.
Visitors to Shoebat’s Internet site are encouraged to
make a donation to his foundation to enable him to
disseminate his message. However, a notice on the page
states that for “security reasons,” the money will not
be debited to his foundation, but rather to a company
called Top Executive Media. The name Top Executive
Media is used by a greetings card firm from
Pennsylvania called Top Executive Greetings, a company
with an annual turnover of $500,000. When one makes a
donation through the Shoebat Internet site, the Web
address changes to topexecutivegreetings.com/shoebat.
This seems to be the only active page for the company;
its homepage is blank.
Asked by the Post whether the Walid Shoebat Foundation
is a registered charity, Shoebat replied that it is
registered in Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania State Attorney’s office said it had
no record of a charity registered under this name.
Questioned further, Shoebat said it was registered
under a different name, but that he was not aware of
the details, which are handled by his manager.
“I remain separate to the running of the charity so
that I am not constrained by church rules,” he
explained, adding that the organization’s connection
to certain churches meant it would be difficult for
him to speak to secular audiences if he became too
involved in running it.
Dr. Joel Fishman, of the Allegany County Law Library
in Pennsylvania, expressed doubts about this donation
process. If the money were being given to a registered
charity, the charity would have to make annual reports
to the state and federal government on how it was
being spent, he noted.
Shoebat insisted donations were not being misused,
however. “I survive by being an author,” he said. “I
only get paid for being an author. All the money that
is donated gets put back into events.”
If the Bank Leumi bombing claim is unfounded, it is
unclear why Shoebat would have wanted to manufacture a
terrorist past. True or not, however, it has plainly
brought him some prominence and provided him with a
means to speak in favor of Israel and be paid for
doing so.
Pingback: FRAUDULENT ANTI-TERRORIST ‘EXPERT’ EXPOSED « Desertpeace
Pingback: FRAUDULENT ANTI-TERRORIST ‘EXPERT’ EXPOSED « Muslim in Suffer