It's Richard Scaife again. Scaife is the far-right Mellon heir whose net worth is close to a billion and who funded the "Arkansas Project' investigations of Bill Clinton leading to impeachment and the "swiftboat" attacks on John Kerry. His foundation supports the Cato Institute and Heritage -- and a long list of rightwing organizations. He's a big stockholder in NewsMax.
Now, as it turns out, he's been funding much of the anti-Muslim paranoia for the past decade. Adam Serwer writes in the Washington Post:
This funding has allowed the Islamophobic right to amplify and mainstream an anti-Muslim message that remained on the fringe while President George W. Bush urged a message of tolerance. Think tanks like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security policy have used the funding to produce reports promoting the myth that most Muslim Americans are conspiring to replace the Constitution with Sharia law. It’s helped people like attorney David Yerushalmi design anti-sharia legislation being pushed in at least 23 states, in four of which those the bans have actually passed. It’s helped anti-Muslim writers like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, cited frequently by alleged anti-Muslim Oslo terrorist Anders Breivik, promote and sustain their work.
The campaign to persuade Americans that Islam is the enemy and that American Muslims are all potential radicals and terrorists has borne bitter fruit.
Last year a Washington Post poll found that almost half of Americans, 49 percent, now have an unfavorable opinion towards Islam, up ten points from 2002 and “the most negative split on the question in Post-ABC polls dating to October 2001.”
There's no effective counter-movement on the left, one that would stand up for American Muslims against what Serwer calls the "Sharia panic industry."
