Snake Oil Sellers of the Christian Right?

[marmar]

from Inter Press, via CommonDreams:




Published on Friday, February 22, 2008 by Inter Press Service
Snake Oil Sellers of the Christian Right?
by Khody Akhavi


WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (IPS) - The U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs came under heavy criticism earlier this month from Muslim and religious freedom advocacy groups after it invited to a conference three self-professed “former terrorists” with strong links to the Christian right.

Collectively known as the “3-X Terrorists”, Walid Shoebat, Kamel Saleem and Zacharia Anani are front line soldiers in the U.S. “culture wars”, a discursive battle over “values” and hot-button issues ranging from abortion to radical Islam.

The men collected 13,000 dollars for their appearance at the 50th annual Academy Assembly, a four-day conference attended by 200 international students and Air Force cadets and organised under the auspices of the school’s political science department.

To supporters, the 3-X represent “moderate” voices; they are self-professed Muslim extremists who converted to evangelical Christianity and are now exposing Islam for what it really is. To critics, they are frauds, accused of fabricating much of their past exploits as mass murderers in order to peddle their Islamophobia on the lecture circuit and on cable news networks, including Fox News Corp. and CNN.

But it is their relationship with political leaders and organisations across the right-wing Christian spectrum that seems to have elicited the greatest concern from critics.

“These men are frauds, but that is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims,” wrote former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges in a widely circulated online essay.

“They offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly,” he said.

Controversy seems to follow Shoebat and his associates wherever they go. Members of the public and the news media were not allowed to attend a student-run forum featuring the three at Stanford University. Princeton University cancelled a scheduled talk by Shoebat in 2005 because it was perceived as being “too inflammatory”. In 2006, Columbia University restricted public attendance at a speech with Shoebat and former Nazi Hitler youth and German soldier Hilmar Von Campe only three hours before the event was to take place. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/22/7236/

[gratuitous]

1. "Controversy seems to follow"

Strange, isn't it, that such stalwart spokesmen for such red meat Republican values have to be carefully sheltered from open discussion, and shielded from the standard vectors of analysis and criticism? Media excluded, attendance restricted, and so on. Hey, since it works so well for Dubya, why not for mouthpieces parroting the Dubya worldview?