Remember the good ol’ days during the Red Scare? Remember when if you wanted to defame anyone or anything and destroy their credibility and legitimacy, all you had to do was cry out the following phrases: Commie, pinko, Marxist, socialist, Stalinist?
Well if you missed those good times you do not have to delve into nostalgia any further. Now you can join the new Red Scare i.e., calling anyone or anything an Islamist. Here are the phrases you should know to be the best damn conspiracy theorist/fear-monger/anti-Muslim/Pam Geller wannabe you can be: Muslim Brotherhood operative, Islamofascist, stealth-jihadist, dhimmi, Islamic Supremacist, jihad-enabler, terrorist, taqqiya, and kitman.
But all jokes aside, this conspiracy theory that Radical Islamists are behind OWS has taken a new sick turn.
Crackpot conservatives are now smearing the Occupy Wall Street Movement as having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. One such crackpot, Tom Trento has this to say about OWS Orlando version, known simply as Occupy Orlando:
As The United West video teams circulated (overtly and covertly) through hundreds of protestors at “Occupy Orlando, “ I was informed that a Muslim activist lawyer with whom we had confrontations in the past, was at this demonstration. Though it has been two years, we could never forget the easily-agitated, Mr. Shayan Elahi. Yes, Orlando, this is the same Muslim who lost a race in 2010 to become a Judge.
…
After Elahi’s second try at “intimidating” us (yes, it was comical) it became obvious to us that he was not just an observer at this event but a participant…and then it all came together. Shaya Elahi is the leader (of the leaderless) Occupy Orlando! It turns out that he is the “official” legal counsel for this movement and indeed one of the key people, if not the main person calling the shots!
Once we watched Shayan Elahi in action, running around, signing up speakers, providing direction, telling people what to do, we started to connect the dots to the stated Face Book Mission Statement of “Occupy Orlando,” which reads, “…we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”
http://www.loonwatch.com/...
But let’s get the facts straight. First no OWS movement in the U.S. at least, has an official leader. This fact has been attested by such people as Michelle Goldberg and Hussein Ibish. Even Occupy Orlando’s FaceBook page confirms this fact (http://www.facebook.com/...)
Secondly comparing your movement to the Arab Spring does not mean you love Sharia Law or radical Islam. It simply means as Occupy Orlando’s FaceBook page states, you love using citizen power in regaining control of democracy from the hands of the few, as the Arabs have done in the Middle East by using popular uprisings to remove dictators.
Sadly, Tom Trento is not the only one linking OWS to Islamists. There is also Andrew Breitbart.
Andrew Breitbart must be getting desperate. The last time he was even relevant was probably during the Anthony Weiner scandal.
Friday on his BigGoverment web site he has published an article asking his readers to comb through thousands of emails that he says are from OccupyWallStreet organizers. He claims to have acquired them from a “private cyber security researcher.” Breitbart provides links to download these emails so that his minions can scour them for evidence of “links to socialist, anarchist, and possibly even jihadist organizations.” (http://www.alternet.org/...)
Furthermore,
Breitbart is publishing emails that were expressly created by individuals for their personal use. They were private communications amongst people who did not grant their publication and were not advised of it. The emails were literally stolen by a hacker who admits that he gained access to them through deception and misrepresentation (social engineering). And Breitbart is now complicit in the crime by publishing the ill-gotten goods with full knowledge of their origins.
In publishing the emails of OWS protestors without their consent however, Breitbart has crossed the line from being just a simple hybrid of journalist and conman who fools his irrational and gullible readers for money (don’t forget his false smear of ACORN) to being an actual criminal who is enabling and sponsoring the transgressions of his mysterious hacker. It is also important to note that Breitbart is hiding the identity of this hacker as well and thereby has added abetting and possibly harboring a criminal to his sins.
But the conspiracy disseminated by Tom Trento, Andrew Breitbart and Frontpage magazine (which called the protestors “jihadists” and “economic-terrorists), has no basis in facts. The OWS movement has largely been non-religious. All the protestors are bonded by economic and social concerns (such as rising student debt and high unemployment) not religious ones. In fact their declaration published in The Occupied Wall Street Journal, does not list any religious reasons to occupy Wall Street.
Hence, I believe these crackpot conservatives are looking for the Islamists and Islamist sympathizers in all the wrong places. They should be looking at their own party (the GOP) and Fox News.