Brigitte Gabriel Wants You To Fight Islam

Brigitte Gabriel Wants You To Fight Islam

The anti-Islam group ACT for America has a direct line to Donald Trump. Now, it has seized on allegations of a hideous crime in Idaho’s Magic Valley to spread its reach among regular Americans.

Brigitte Gabriel, the most influential leader in America’s increasingly influential anti-Islam lobby, is a master of tonal contrasts. It’s part of what makes her a gifted public speaker: She’ll charm you before she terrifies you.

And Gabriel is, if nothing else, in the business of terrifying people. When she took the stage in Twin Falls, Idaho, in early August, it sounded like the opening track to a live rock album: “Hello, Idaho! I love you too!” she yelled, while the crowd of nearly a thousand whooped and cheered. Then things got dark, fast.

“All of us know something is not right with our country,” she said. Gabriel is 51, with thick black hair and heavy-lidded eyes, and she speaks her staccato sentences with a slight Arabic accent. Part of what has entranced Gabriel’s audiences over the years is that she looks and sounds, superficially, like the people she calls the enemy: She was born and raised a Maronite Christian in southern Lebanon, where, in her telling, radical Muslims destroyed her bucolic childhood at the onset of civil war in 1975. As a speaker and pundit, Gabriel bills herself as an expert on national security, a credential she bases partially on her experience as a “survivor of Islamic terror.” In the Idaho town, population 47,468, she explained how the seeds of war were sown when Lebanon — multicultural, open-minded, misguided Lebanon — welcomed refugees from Palestine. A man in the crowd growled under his breath: “Screwed yourselves.”

Gabriel told of roving Islamists finding Christian families cowering in bomb shelters. “They would take the baby, tie one leg to the mother and another leg to the father, and pull the parents apart, splitting the child in half,” she said. Someone groaned in disgust; people shifted in their seats. “As ugly and uncomfortable as these stories are, we must hear them to understand the barbarity that is coming our way.”

For the audience that evening, this notion of “barbarity” had recently become less of an abstraction. Gabriel was invited to Twin Falls by the local chapter of ACT for America — the grassroots organization she founded in 2007 — in the thick of the most heated political controversy to have visited the small agricultural city in decades. On June 2, two months before Gabriel’s speech, three boys aged 7, 10, and 14, Muslim refugees from Iraq and Eritrea, were accused of sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl in the laundry room of a low-income housing complex called the Fawnbrook Apartments. All were charged with felonies. In concert with a smattering of other groups, members of ACT for America launched a publicity campaign around the Fawnbrook case, accusing the local government of covering up the assault. (In truth, officials had sealed the case, as they would with any incident in which both victim and perpetrator are juveniles.) The story caught fire in the right-wing press, where it served as a shocking index of the dangers posed by Muslim refugees.

In Twin Falls, Gabriel laid out her conspiratorial vision: Refugee resettlement is one weapon in a vast scheme by radical Islam, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and with the complicity of the United Nations and the US government, to colonize and destroy America from within. “You think you are an isolated situation here in Twin Falls, Idaho. I am here to tell you that you are not alone,” Gabriel said.

As she spoke, people in the audience shook their heads contemptuously in the direction of a row of empty seats near the front, which had been reserved for officials in the City Council and local law enforcement. None had shown up. “Shame on those who are covering up what happened to this little girl,” Gabriel said, to huge applause. “You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

In this Dec. 8, 2015 photo, Rick Martin, the head of the Committee to End the CSI Refugee Center, works to gather petition signatures in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Much has been made of Donald Trump’s ties to the far fringes of the American right. Nowhere is the connection more direct than with ACT for America, which is considered a hate group by organizations that track extremism — such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Center for New Community — and which has nevertheless contributed two board members, one former and one sitting, as national security advisers to the Trump campaign. The sitting board member is retired army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has become Trump’s top military surrogate and who recently called Islam “a cancer” at an ACT chapter meeting. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. From the early months of his campaign, Trump’s positions on Islam and national security have drawn directly from the work of the anti-Islam lobby. This clique of activists and intellectuals preaches that violence and terror are inherent to Islam, and that “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim,” as Brigitte Gabriel said in an interview in 2007. Trump, for instance, supported his first big pronouncement on Islam (that the US should ban Muslim immigrants from entering the country until we “figure out what is going on”) by citing a specious poll produced by the Center for Security Policy, run by Frank Gaffney, another of the anti-Islam lobby’s central figures.

Trump’s positions on Islam and national security have drawn directly from the work of the anti-Islam lobby.

Yet in terms of sheer influence, Gabriel stands apart. Since 2007, following the model set in the 1990s by the Evangelical right, she has assiduously built a bona fide grassroots organization, mobilizing thousands of Americans around the premise that ordinary Muslims living among them constitute a covert threat. “Our enemy is not an organization of people living overseas plotting to attack,” Gabriel writes in her 2006 New York Times best-seller, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. “Our enemies are the neighbors next door, the doctors practicing in our hospitals, and the workers who share our lunch break.”

With ACT for America — often styled ACT! for America — Gabriel brought to the masses what was once a set of ideas confined to a cadre of conspiracy theorists in Washington, New York, and California. Today, the group has an annual budget of more than $1 million and claims 300,000 members in 1,000 chapters across the country. Even if these numbers are inflated or represent a largely idle membership, as some observers believe, the group has a substantial and dedicated core that has translated into political clout. The organization has recently taken to calling itself “the NRA of national security.” Gabriel is reliably invited to comment on national television after every terrorist attack, including, most recently, an appearance on Fox News’ The Kelly File in the wake of the bombings in New York and New Jersey.

“They embody this idea that Islamophobia is not fringe,” said Kalia Abiade, advocacy director for the Center for New Community, which monitors what it calls “organized bigotry” and has tracked ACT for America nearly since its inception. “Their positions might be extreme, but they are not a fringe movement. They have really good relationships with lawmakers. They’ve got members of Congress speaking at their briefings. In terms of direct impact, I don’t know who else would compete with them.”

Gabriel dismisses her critics as naive and blinded by “political correctness.” She declined to be interviewed for this story, in keeping with her organization’s general approach to the media. ACT for America’s manual for local chapter founders, The Art of Chapter Leadership — an internal document that was not made public before now — has strict instructions never to give interviews that can be edited in any way. “The vast majority of ‘stories’ done on the subject of radical Islam and Sharia law are very unfriendly to the truth. The average reporter comes from a world view that fundamentally opposes ACT! for America’s mission,” the manual says. “Rarely will a media interview result in making a positive difference.”

"Patriotism is not hatred, and we do not concern ourselves with the opinions of those who believe it is."

Gabriel did, however, provide written responses to a letter detailing the contents of this story, in which she said that she and her organization “do not consider ourselves anti-Islam. We are anti-radical Islam and the political ideology behind terrorism.” (In other contexts, Gabriel regularly conflates the two; in her 2008 book They Must Be Stopped, she writes of the roots of terrorism: “It’s not radical Islam. It’s what Islam is at its core.”)

Gabriel also rejected the extremist label pinned on ACT for America by hate-tracking organizations. “Ad hominem attacks from anti-American groups such as these are as baseless as they are cliché,” she said. 

“Patriotism is not hatred, and we do not concern ourselves with the opinions of those who believe it is.”

Continue Reading:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Here

Share your thoughts with the world by posting a message on the Liberty Tree.

Tell Us What Liberty Means To You 

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)

TRY THE LIBERTY TREE AD FREE

THE LIBERTY TREE FRIENDS & PATRIOTS

 "FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY"

and is protected speech pursuant to the "unalienable rights" of all men, and the First (and Second) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, In God we trust

Stand Up To Government Corruption and Hypocrisy

                                                                                                    

NEVER FORGET THE SACRIFICES

BY OUR VETERANS 

Note: We at The Liberty Tree cannot make any warranties about the completeness, reliability, and accuracy of this information.

Don't forget to follow the Friends Of Liberty on Facebook and our Page also Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Me We and Google Plus PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks.

LibertygroupFreedom    

The Patriot is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with the mission to Educate, protect and defend individual freedoms and individual rights.

Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter.

WE THE PEOPLE

TOGETHER WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 

Join The Resistance and Share This Article Now!

TOGETHER WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Help us spread the word about THE LIBERTY TREE Blog we're reaching millions help us reach millions more.

‼️️ ♻️ PLEASE SHARE ♻️ ‼️️

Please SHARE this now! The Crooked Liberal Media will hide and distort the TRUTH. It’s up to us, Trump social media warriors, to get the truth out. If we don’t, no one will!

Share this story on Facebook and let us know because we want to hear YOUR voice!

Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' news feeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share with your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you

❦❧❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦

For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

  Coningsby: Or The New Generation And, The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings, and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans. — Benjamin Disraeli, Speech at Aylesbury, Great Britain, September 10, 1870

◈ ◈ ◈ ◈ ◈ ◈ ◈ ◈