Anti-Muslim fearmonger organization “Act for America” is bringing another team of hucksters to whip South Dakotans into fear and donations. With the help of the Family Heritage Alliance, AfA is hosting self-professed jihad experts John Guandolo and Chris Gaubatz to present “Understanding the Threat” (that’s the name of these consultants’ website, too)—i.e., the “Global Islamic Movement” that’s coming to kill us all.
Note the sponsors: this unreasoning fear brought to you by former Rep., still Rev. Scott Craig’s church (Act for America SD chair Amy M. Willson is secretary there), some Rapid City AGers, and the Pennington County Republican Party (which includes John Thune’s West River rep Qusi Al-Haj, who I think would be smarter than to let his party support such foolishness).
Willson, who dedicates her Facebook page to dreary repostings of her culture war, is inviting legislators to her group’s event:
“Knowledge is power,” says Willson in her letter, but propaganda and conspiracy theories are just tiring… and that appears to be what Guandolo has to offer:
In congressional testimony and on conservative talk shows, Guandolo dishes up conspiracy theories involving a prominent Muslim professor and organizations, implying that they are enabling Muslim terrorists. In one Columbus, Ohio, training, he accused a local professor of having ties to terrorism. (A Columbus Joint Terrorism Task Force member and an FBI agent told attendees that this individual had absolutely no ties to any such thing.) He has argued that former CIA director John Brennan is a secret Muslim and that Barack Obama was in league with Hamas. He’s said that Muslims don’t have First Amendment rights. And when Cedar Valley College in Lancaster, Texas, canceled his signature three-day law-enforcement training seminar, Guandolo claimed it was the work of “suit-wearing jihadis” [Jessica Pishko, “This Islamophobic Conspiracy Theorist Is Training America’s Cops,” The Nation, 2017.03.28].
Guandolo had to resign from the FBI after jeopardizing an investigation by boinking an informant. That dalliance was one of many extramarital affairs documented by Guandolo, including trysts with female colleagues at the FBI. It’s a good thing Amy Willson’s church and Family Heritage Alliance are so forgiving of sexual sin.
Guandolo also makes money training cops about jihad (because, you know, your local cops face far more jihad than speeding, shoplifting, or meth). What do Guandolo and his UTT employee Gaubatz tell cops?
The non-profit attempts to trace the roots of this specific strain of officially-sanctioned Islamaphobia and present a disconcerting picture of unaccredited, self-proclaimed “experts” (none of them are, say, students of Islamic studies or have PhD in religious studies) who take taxpayer dollars to spread hate.
The contents of the sessions themselves are kept largely under wraps, particularly since groups like the ACLU and CAIR have identified the trainings’ anti-Islamic message, and organized protests against many sessions. (Guandolo argues these protests show how important the trainings are.) But according to Guandolo’s website, the training provides necessary information involving the funding apparatus of terrorism as well as where to find potential people to profile for arrest. Many of Guandolo’s talking points in his recorded public appearances reiterate half-regurgitated facts that are misinterpreted and dipped in the poison of association and rumor. For example, Guandolo and his colleagues argue that the Holy Land Foundation trial provides evidence that CAIR and other American Muslim Associations are in some way associated with Hamas. These statements have been proven to just not be true [Pishko, 2017.03.28].
Notice Willson’s use of a superfluous exclamation point in her group’s name in the return address in her letter: “Act! for America.” Interestingly, fellow superfluously self-punctuating xenophobes’ club “Americans First, Task Force” is hosting these same shady fellows the day after their Rapid City show. AF,TF is distributing a similar UTT poster, but without the A(!)fA logo:
Under AF,TF’s Facebook post asking people to “*mark your calendar*” for the Aberdeen event, Amy Willson comments:
“Will do!”—sure… I think, “already did.”
If not their strange penchant for extra punctuation, then this communication, these posters, and these identical programs indicate that my local xenophobes are coordinating their efforts with (or having them coordinated by) Act for America and at least one well-connected branch of South Dakota’s Republican Party.
Please know that Indivisible Rapid City is doing all we can to shine light on events like this in Rapid City. We will be protesting the event discussed above as well as another anti-Islam event on 6-21-17. Please check out our FB events page https://www.facebook.com/pg/rapidcityindivisible/events/?ref=page_internal or our website https://www.indivisiblerapidcity.org/ for several blogs on this topic and our events calendar.
Please know that those of us who want to stand up to this type of stuff in our communities are not alone!
Rock on, Lori!
Thanks for all your group does to expose these cockroaches. Making money from promoting hate has to stop in South Dakota. It’s possible these groups are fronting for jihadists, themselves. They’re doing more to recruit suicide bombers and radicalize young Muslim men than the Islamic State in Syria itself, is. Psychologists sincerely proclaim that a young Muslim man in a welcoming USA town is unlikely to become radicalized but if he lives in a town with rampant hate speech, publicized hate meetings and constant invitations to violence, he can only take so much intimidation before action occurs. If a tragic, violent event happens in Pennington County these hate groups are 100% to blame. Criminal charges would be wholly appropriate. – Porter Lansing ~ equality activist
Porter, wouldn’t these problems all go away if everybody would just give up on theism? ;-)
Lori, along with the primary mission of spreading truth and other American values, I hope your protests help you recruit members to your group and build toward further political action in 2018. Keep an eye out for which legislators attend the hate fast next week, then mobilize voters to hold them accountable at crackerbarrels next year and vote them out.
AFA and FHA are complete and total scams put on by the so infatuated with God that they have fallen away from Him crowd.
They tirelessly link Islam with Liberals, make politics all about “the gays” and baby killing, and they misrepresent the words of our Lord – all just to shamelessly shill and fundraise for Republican politics. They are propagandist money changers. It’s sad.
Funny to see this particular God crowd let an adulterer lecture them about threats to Christian decency.
It’s more disgusting than funny. The sight of their very own selves in the mirror should turn their stomachs. They are so far from what they aspire to be that they have actually done the work of the Devil in their crusade for God.
Well, hate is still alive and well in Rapid City, I see. Hating Indians must be too 20th century for today’s Pennington County Republican Party, and Stan took the fun out of Republicans’ making Jews the scapegoat for all the ills of the world. You might disagree with Stan, but you can’t hate him, so the Republicans moved on to hating some new victims. Here’s a suggestion for the haters: look in the mirror. That’s what you should hate. But then, haters have to hate someone who doesn’t look like them, and looking in the mirror isn’t something haters do very often anyway.
Apparently the haters insist on using a tax-funded facility to proselytize their hate, even when they have all these big mega-churches filled with haters who are sponsors of this event. Really? Must they defile the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, when they could spew their hate under the suffering Jesus on the cross? Why don’t they just burn their crosses with Jesus hanging on them at their own hate-filled venues, where Jesus would never visit. He hated hate.
Good one, Don Pay.
Cory, why do you frustrate the Muslims by not believing them? They tell you the world must submit to Islam or be taxed or killed…they tell you women are property….they tell you Shariah law supersedes our laws….they tell you honor killing is done by the devout….they tell you anyone who isn’t a Muslim is an infidel….they tell you deceiving a host country is fine because is a first step in jihad….and yet you don’t believe them?
You’re Lora (not Laura) Hubbel, aren’t you? Who’s they? People who follow fundamentalist Islam and are radicalized aren’t Muslim any more than you are Christian. And who the hell are you to group a billion + people into your paranoic nightmare?
The haters only need look at their own religions to conclude how they got where they got. What seems to be the clear common denominator with the haters is women and girls, and the dominance they feel they have over them. Their fear and hate of women is overwhelming. Sharia Law is one example in Islam, but Christians are no better http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/losing-my-religion-for-equality-20090714-dk0v.html The doctrine of the Baptists differs only by religious groups. That apple thingy in the garden, typifies how the belief that women are not to be trusted comes into teachings at very early ages and why they should be feared. Women followers of this hate are trying to prove themselves worthy of being with the men because of abusive relationships they feel their men were justified to give them. The sad part is that men still hate them for their gender while the women are enabling.
Also, this anti-Islam is just another example of another form of hate, racial hate. See, what these white folks have a problem with is that there are millions of white Muslims that are not Arabic or Black, so lumping them all together just does not work out so good for them. Haters got to hate while feeling sorry for themselves. Their misery of failure, is the pouting they did as children. Poor pitiful me sitting on the pity pot.
Good one, Jerry. Womenphobia does seem to be an underlying theme of religious persecution, doesn’t it? Probably because, as Harry Belafonte sang, “Women are smarter.”
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/harrybelafonte/mansmartwomansmarter.html
PS … someone noted earlier that who these haters are really hating is themselves.
Cory you should do some checking at your local PD and see if they’ve run into any radical islamists up in Aberdeen ready to die for Allah and what not.
Porter, I would put this to the test, who finances these for hire Christians for Putin? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/why-the-christian-right-shares-trumps-affection-for-putin.html The so called Christian Right is just a front for Putin and Russia’s coup against all that America is supposed to stand for. Not only are these women haters, they are also true American value haters that hate our freedom.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/how-russia-became-a-leader-of-the-worldwide-christian-right-214755
Fauxknee kristians crawl into bed with Putin because of his anti-gay stance.
Right, Jerry and MFI ….. And, how about this Liberty Pr**k, huh? Bet he’s one of those half-educated haybillys that think they can live without government when he lives on the welfare that we liberals in our liberal states send to South Dakota out of our paychecks, every month. Without our money and our government he’d be dead in less than two years.
The funniest thing is that radical Islam does not give a F about anything going on in South Dakota. They know they can’t expand their culture into rural old white guys, but rural Christians still shutter in their boots like the bunch of paranoid cabin fever suffering quasi-believers when they are asked to look at or listen to a Muslim.
Lora, I don’t ‘believe’ Chistrians BS nor phony Islamic BS. When believers try to tell me that Liberals just want to kill babies, ruin everyone’s marriage, and make government rule over God, it doesn’t even pass my first sniff test. You people got your brains hacked by BS (y’all took the blue pill) and live in The Matrix.
Hope all you bigots never have to get medical care from out of state. There are plenty of Muslim doctors practicing Medicine at places like Mayo Clinic, and plenty of Muslim RNs and transgenders also, so y’all can just stay in South Dakota with your bigotry.
The outside world would be just fine with that.
Lora, I do believe that some Muslims believe some of the things you ascribe to them as a whole. I vigorously oppose any effort such people would make to impose their religion on me by public means, to write their religion into favored status in our laws, to oppress or kill their own female relatives, or to spread lies to spread their political agenda.
Dang: when I put it that way, short of the killing, the concerns you raise sound like concerns I could raise about Big Horn Ministries, the GOP, and the other Christianist sponsors of this adulterer’s dog-and-pony show. Care to join in me in reaffirming our commitment to truth and the separation of church and state?
In the meantime, we now know this to show what a bunch of frauds these guys are involved in. More dangerous paid protests for their bosses. http://www.newsweek.com/flynn-russia-nuclear-energy-middle-east-iran-saudi-arabia-qatar-israel-donald-623396?spMailingID=1942165&spUserID=MzQ4OTU4Nzc5ODUS1&spJobID=810400968&spReportId=ODEwNDAwOTY4S0
Lora,
I strongly recommend that you read David Newquist’s latest blog on Northern Valley Beacon and read what kind of anti-democracy American you have become.
I doesn’t matter anymore who you hate as long as you can hate someone and have a feeling superiority and security.
Great piece, Professor Newquist. “Sometimes the children are very wise.”
Lora, AFA, and FHA are sinners, and yet they attempt to cast the only stones against others who may not ever commit the past sins of the radicals within their religion.
Jesus Christ, Himself, told His people to win hearts of others through compassion and patience, not through anti-Islam rally’s, nor threat if stoning (literal nor figurative).
Fortunately, better Christians, and angels, are amongst us than the nutbags.
More bigotry in action. “March Against Sharia” going on, supposedly nationwide today. I didn’t see any coordinated events on their web page, for South Dakota…..but….you know, maybe Ravnsborg or some other ill informed people in this state are doing something. Makes me shake my head.
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/10/532254891/march-against-sharia-planned-across-the-u-s?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170610
LibD, I haven’t seen anything in the local police blotter about terrorist activity by any theocrats or other ne’er-do-wells. Our Muslim neighbors must be too busy working for a living to wage jihad.
I have thought that South Dakota would be a great target for terrorists. Lots of open doors and soft targets in America’s heartland. Yet strangely, we’ve probably had more sightings of Bigfoot than of terrorists in South Dakota.
A presentation at the DEC on the dangers of Bigfoot. Now that’s what I want to see.
Sibson is throwing a tantrum.
Roger, the New England Journal of Medicine has a article out just now that proves the election of trump has driven many to madness, Sibby is proving the point of the article. A very good read and something that shows what a depressive hole we have fallen into.
Thanks Jerry, I saw that you posted that on the Newquist thread and will get around to reading it.
South Dakota certainly has had more gubmint related suicides? than terrorist attacks/killings.
Where is the hue and cry to deport jihadist wingnuts?