Who is Larry Johnson? Not a question I'm in position to answer definitively, but the self-described former CIA agent has left quite an eyebrow-raising paper trail.
His vendetta against Barack Obama goes back at least to January when he posted a blog entry on Huffpo that accused easily the most articulate politician of modern times of a Bush-like feeble-mindedness, and it reached something of a pinnacle last week when he promised his No Quarter readers a video of wife Michelle uttering, somehow falsely and awkwardly, the word 'whitey.' Needless to say Johnson never delivered on that promise, and yesterday a number of bloggers discredited the whole thing as not only a hoax but a rip-off.
However, to my mind, it's an entirely different episode occurring in between those two events that is in some ways the most interesting and revealing. On May 3, Johnson chose to associate himself with a NYC blog called "Stop the Madrassa" by posting a lengthy "exposé" of Obama’s connections to the former weatherman and terrorist Bill Ayers, and it is here that our story really begins...
Never mind what Johnson's post supposedly reveals about Ayers, much less the "friendship" between Ayers and Obama, as his research expertise as a former CIA agent seems to consist in little more than a teenager's familiarity with Google. The much more important question is, Why on earth did the man post on Stop the Madrassa? Why reach out to this particular blog's audience? And, anyway, how did he find out about it?
Stop the Madrassa is the brain-child of one Pamela Hall -- a woman, who almost single-handedly got the principal of the Brooklyn-based Kahlil Gibran International Academy to step down late last year. Kahlil Gibran is a publicly financed Arabic language school in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn that she and her organization have labeled "Islamic" and militantly anti-American. Last summer, Hall took some snapshots of student designed t-shirts with the words "Intifada NYC" written across the front and caused a stir in the mainstream press by spinning it as a kind of call to arms (never mind the harmless pastel colors and the fact that the shirts were made by a bunch of thirteen year-old girls, or indeed even that in Arabic, as Debbie Almonstaser, the principal, dutifully explained, means simply to "shake off," because to explain in this way, to Pamela Hall, is to "dhimmify" -- or in more pedestrian terms, to aid and abet -- the expansionist dreams of unrepentant terrorists).
Let me explain: Pamela Hall is the leader of the New York Chapter of the United Americans Committee, which is a jingoistic, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activist organization. She appeared on Fox’s "Hannity and Colmes" and several other right-wing radio shows last year when the firestorm over the Kahlil Gibran school was at its peak. On December 1, 2007, she gave a speech at a self-described press conference in Queens in support of a young third-party candidate named Vito Vaccaro. Vaccaro was (and still is, I suppose) running as a "Loyalist" candidate for a state senate seat in the New York State Assembly.
I know all of this, because I attended that December 1 meeting on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which included Vaccaro and the Loyalists on its most recent list of 20 top nativist organizations. In fact, they went so far as to call Vaccaro, whom Ms. Hall called one our "brightest" young stars, a white nationalist. And for good reason: The Loyalist party platform -- I have it right here in front me in the form of a brochure with unmistakably fascist iconography -- calls for applying special identifying marks on all Muslim driver-licenses, permanently banning all immigration from Muslim countries, and deporting both illegal and legal non-citizens with Muslim ancestory.
Vaccaro and Loyalist co-founder Brian Nordvall are also, strangely, active members of the Kahanist organization "the Jewish Task force," which is associated with "the Jewish Defense League" and run by one Chaim Ben Pesach, aka Victor Vancier – an Israeli exile who once spent many years in prison for setting off bombs at Lincoln Center during the 1986 Moscow State Symphony's concert there. The Jewish Defense League, by the way, is on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. But Pesach and his young devotees are nevertheless still very active and have recently launched a new organization called – surprise – "Jews Against Obama."
So, again, I ask: Why does Larry Johnson, a supposed democrat, choose to associate himself not only with right-wing extremists but with white nationalists whose hatred (or fear) of anything Muslim has led to an un-holy alliance with avowed Zionist terrorists?
I’m told the CIA has "the Jewish defense League" pretty well under wraps. Was that not in your wing, Mr. Johnson? And tell me: Do you reject and denounce these unfortunate ties?