PrintOctober 11, 2007
Radical Islam's Willing Bloggers
The burgeoning left wing smear industry, set up to manufacture attacks on conservatives, has its own radical Islam sector. I know this by personal experience.
Earlier this week I reported that a known HAMAS operative was scheduled to speak at the Ohio State Capitol later this month (see Thomas Lifson's related blog entry). Within hours, a leftist attack blogger affiliated with the Ohio Democratic Party had published an ad hominem broadside in response parroting talking points prepared by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Lenin used to crow about the West's "useful idiots" -- politicians, intellectuals and journalists who were either ideologically blinded or just plain stupid to not take Soviet Communism's drive to conquer the world seriously. But in the present war against Islamo-Fascism, some on the Left are more than duped, they appear to be in service to the radical Islamic agenda.
My article published Monday concerned the appearance of Anisa Abd El Fattah (her nom de jihad; lit. "Anisa, servant of the conquest") at an "interfaith" forum to be held in the Ohio Statehouse atrium on October 28th. Fattah previously headed an organization called the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which one convicted terrorist leader admitted was "the political command for HAMAS in the United States." UASR was also founded by HAMAS deputy political director and Specially Designated Global Terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook. Fattah also co-authored two books with current HAMAS spokesman Ahmed Yousef, one of her former colleagues at UASR who fled the US in 2005 and immediately reappeared as part of the HAMAS leadership. She was also a paid consultant for more than a decade to convicted terrorist leader Abdurahman Alamoudi's American Muslim Council.
With breakneck speed, an attack piece posted by blogger Brian Guilfoos of Plunderbund appeared launching into a number of supposedly damning personal tidbits about me. Since I am such an evil character, Guilfoos argued, everything I said about this HAMAS operative must be false and driven by rampant Islamophobia. Classic ad hominem.
But there were two curious elements to this leftist attack blogger's post. The first is that all the information Guilfoos cited was contained in a dossier complied by CAIR and circulated by CAIR national vice-chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras (a Columbus-area resident). Al-Akhras and his associates have been circulating the CAIR dossier, which has gone through several editions, with a significant amount of personal information about me, including personal financial details, work history, and even information on my family members, to Ohio and Franklin County Democratic Party operatives and establishment media representatives. After I exposed an Al-Akhras business partner sitting on the county's Homeland Security oversight board, a position his associate was forced to resign from, Al-Akhras hired a student intern on a 90-day project to do nothing but opposition research on me (Al-Akhras solicited prospective candidates on a closed email list of local Islamic extremists, an email I obtained from an anonymous dissenting member of the list).
One amusing highlight taken from the first version of the CAIR dossier, dated July 24th and bearing Al-Akhras' name, is this insightful discovery:
A Hilliard, Ohio resident and a 1986 graduate of Hilliard Davidson High School. Patrick S. Poole is a self-described "writer" who is "single, straight, Protestant, a smoker and a drinker". [fn19]...On his MySpace, Mr. Poole has a total of ten "friends".
The fact that I'm overweight, balding, and wear glasses didn't make the dossier's final editor's cut, but there is allegedly much to be discerned by the fact that I have ten "friends" on MySpace (perhaps I need to accept more of those friend invites from "Candy", "Misty", and "Lula"?), and that I occasionally both drink and smoke. What escaped CAIR's notice, however, is that sometimes I smoke and drink at the same time! How deep does my infidelity run! I seriously wonder why Mr. Guilfoos didn't expound further on these stunning findings in CAIR's razor-sharp psychological profile of yours truly.
The other curious element to both Guilfoos' attack piece is that taxpayers may be footing the bill for his political blogging and for Al-Akhras to circulate CAIR's dossier. Most of Guilfoos' blog posts, all political-related, appear during business hours, when one might assume he should be tending to his job as systems analyst for the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Unless he works the graveyard shift, perhaps.
And emails I obtained through an Open Records Act request finds that CAIR's Ahmad Al-Akhras has been emailing copies of their dossier to political operatives during work hours when one might assume he was supposed to be tending to his job as assistant director of transportation for the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC). Another graveyard shift employee?
Both the Ohio Supercomputer Center (a division of the Ohio Board of Regents) and MORPC are publicly-funded institutions. Maybe someone should look into that? If someone does, they also might want to look into the multiple anti-Israel rallies Al-Akhras has organized and led at the Federal Courthouse in Downtown Columbus during business hours. Where can I get a job like that?
So what damning information did Guilfoos supposedly uncover about me? Did he obtain copies of my cancelled paychecks from the global Zionist conspiracy? Did he publish those much-rumored pictures of me wearing a dog collar and leash crouching at Mistress Ann Coulter's high-heeled feet? No such luck.
Apparently, my grave crime for which anything I say should immediately be deemed categorical lies is that I'm a Christian. And since I'm a Christian that takes my faith seriously, I must be a Christian Reconstructionist, and therefore want to overthrow the government and install a Christian theocracy, Guilfoos implies. He couldn't even be bothered to identify something I had actually said, but rather, connected me to something someone I know said 25 years ago, and concluded that "it is reasonable to believe that (they) share a number of opinions" without providing any evidence of this alleged agreement. And according to Guilfoos, I'm also connected to Sun Myung Moon by eight degrees! What further proof is needed?
He didn't even mention that I once worked for someone who worked for a major Christian Reconstruction writer three decades ago, though he's now a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, which otherwise might ruin the narrative, except they can expand the conspiracy connecting me to both Sun Myung Moon and Pope Benedict! And to cap it all off, someone once spent 3,000 words describing how I was personally connected to the Illuminati conspiracy. How that didn't get included in CAIR's dossier and Guilfoos' attack piece is anyone's guess.
The problem with this CAIR-fed narrative is that I've been among the most active and public critics of Christian Reconstruction 2.0, known as "Federal Vision" theology. I've even gone so far as creating and editing for several years a website dedicated to challenging this most recent incarnation of Christian Reconstructionism. Furthermore, my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), of which I am an ordained officer, was the first to explicitly reject this theology in the 1980s, and just a few months ago overwhelmingly adopted a report harshly criticizing its newest manifestation.
It must be disappointing to Ahmad Al-Akhras and CAIR that after so much money they've spent researching my background and so much time spent poring through hundreds of my articles and blog posts, this is the best that they can come up with to attack me.
But with an immediate crisis at hand (my revealing of Fattah's appearance at the State Capitol), sometimes you have to go with what you've got. Fortunately, they have bloggers available on stand-by like Brian Guilfoos, who will present this "research" as their own.
Other leftist bloggers, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Jill Miller Zimon have taken Guilfoos' story and embellished it further. Zimon comments that my reporting of the HAMAS operative appearing at the Ohio Statehouse is "baiting and particularly he uses Jews and Judaism and Israel in a way that many Jews never would". Like Guilfoos, she doesn't provide any evidence, of course, and I the only mention of "Jews and Judaism and Israel" were comments made by Fattah herself, but who needs evidence?
Patrick Poole is an occasional contributor to American Thinker, and also the Executive Director of Central Ohioans Against Terrorism.
