Hussein Ibish, Another 'moderate' Pro-Terror Anti-Peace, spokesperson for Arab Muslims in America
K. Writes:
Hussein Ibish ...? "Six days after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ibish wrote that 'Rabin was a monster, war criminal, ethic cleanser, mass murderer and terrorist.' Five days later he went even further and essentially stated that all of the Jewish people needed to be murdered."
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Hello
I am addressing my comment to the media who invites Hussein Ibish to lend his grandiosely rubbish point of view on your shows.
in the article http://www.dailystar.com.lb/04_02_04/art22.asp
titled
Arab-Americans go to battle on television news networks
It seems Hussein Ibish is in full gear ready on attacking
Daniel Pipes
I think Hussein Ibish Tantawi and Reghida the carrot head who sports a pock face with bloody mouthed lipstick as afficionadoes on world affairs especially Arab Israeli Iraqi issues
do not assume your viewers arefooled as you keep asking these Marxists Maoists to return to your shows.
Folks you can reach the Ibish idiot at
pmproj@progressive.org,
All of you to whom this email is addressed in the media, must realize in order for you to keep your rating high among your viewers, you must not assume your public is dumb and ignorant
If you are enamoured with low life like Ibish and his partner the Tantawi mouthpiece
I strongly suggest you read the article in Frontpage magazine that makes much sense who Ibish really is
and how he manipulates you all. Another show that proves how naive American media is to arab trickery and YOU the media appear stoopid and fooled
If the current excuse for an anti-war movement has proven anything, it's that preaching "Death to America" makes for strange bedfellows. Attend any "peace" rally, whether in San Francisco, London or Madrid, and you'll be struck by the seamless melding of what were once wildly divergent causes. Anti-globalization zealots no longer favor bandanas or baseball caps but Palestinian kaffiyehs.
Neo-communists and atheists alike revel in guttural chants of "Allahu Akhbar" (Allah is great). And Muslim fundamentalists march brashly in step with homosexuals, feminists, and socialists. With their message becoming increasingly popular in Europe and the United States, all today's fledgling Wahabbi Marxists need to cement their influence is a bona fide spokesperson. And in Hussein Ibish - godless, Maoist, and unrepentantly anti-Semitic - they just may have found their mouthpiece. Intensely fond not only of alcohol and atheistic Chinese communism but also hard-line Islamist regimes, Ibish's multi-faceted militancy has made him indispensable to extremists on both the far Left and Arab street.
Upon first glance, the 39-year-old Ibish seems an unlikely candidate to represent the face of Wahabbi Marxism. Bespectacled, with sunken eyes, bulldog jowls and a portly frame, he is a walking testament to the decadent lifestyle he espouses (one which I will address shortly). But judging the Beirut-born Ibish solely by his unexceptional appearance is a mistake, because few, if any, Wahabbi Marxists are able to articulate the movement's medley of Pan-Arab anti-Americanism, Communist ideals and virulent Jew-hatred quite as convincingly. Through his status as communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a lobby group, Ibish has garnered the kind of mainstream media acceptance of which most Arab radicals can only dream.
Over the past year-and-a-half, he's championed his extremist doctrine on countless television programs (BBC, CNN's Crossfire, The O'Reilly Factor, The Evening News with Dan Rather and Nightly News with Tom Brokaw among them) as well as in a regular column for the Los Angeles Times.
Ibish routinely excels in such forums by talking over or about his opponents, and by levying outrageous charges at anyone who dares besmirch his revolutionary views (Middle East expert Daniel Pipes for instance, has been alternately branded by Ibish "an Arab basher," "fear monger" and "hate peddler"). He also employs the time-honored Leftist tactic of simply changing the subject when confronted with hard facts. One of the most glaring examples of such truth-dodging occurred during a segment on CNN's Talkback Live last August in which Ibish faithfully supported a suspected terrorist, since-jailed University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian. In the segment, Ibish was pressed by Phil Kent of the Southeastern Legal Foundation about a notorious 1991 Al-Arian fundraising letter that read, "Jihad is our path! Victory to Islam! Death to Israel and victory to Islam! Revolution, revolution until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!"
Here was Ibish's doozy of a response when confronted with Al-Arian's anti-Semitic bile: "'Death to Israel' does not necessarily mean violence. Jihad can mean a lot of things. Let me tell you. These are inflammatory statements and I certainly wouldn't have said them. But that's what we have the First Amendment for, and tenure for that matter."
"Death to Israel" doesn't mean violence? Harangued further by Kent on this point, a visibly rattled Ibish resorted to outright falsehood and, yes, changing the subject. "Jihad could mean a lot of different things, struggles of many kinds. 10 years of investigation have been going on. [Al-Arian] hasn't been charged.[Al-Arian] is not necessarily advocating violence, but I'll tell you who is advocating violence. It is Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who advocated torturing people. And he urged the Israelis to destroy one Palestinian village for every suicide bombing."
Although Dershowitz is known to make outrageous statements, there is no record of him uttering the "Palestinian village" comment that Ibish alleges. As for advocating the torture of terrorists to get information to save the lives of intended innocent victims, Dershowitz has a point. Ibish's most preposterous assertion, however, came when he stated, "[Al-Arian] is not necessarily advocating violence." This is the same Sami Al-Arian arrested last month for his role in directing the United States operations of the militant terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian's indictment accused him, along with seven other men, of operating a criminal racketeering enterprise supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad and also with conspiracy to kill and maim people abroad, conspiracy to provide material support to the group, extortion, visa fraud, perjury and a litany of additional charges. Yet not only did Ibish defend Al-Arian, he branded authorities' investigation of this real-life nutty professor "a political witch hunt, a vendetta, and a kind of very, very ugly post-9/11 McCarthyism. It's a throwback to the ugliest days of the Red Scare and the McCarthy era." This is vintage Ibish: vociferously support any deranged Jihadist with half a pulse and then throw out conversation-stoppers like "McCarthyism" and "racism" to silence opposition. Ibish's casual response to Al-Arian's calls of "Death to Israel" was another pet ploy out of the rotund rabble-rouser's debating arsenal, which includes everything but a wink and a nod where condemnation of Jews is concerned.
Based on his current work, it would appear that Ibish only qualifies for the "Wahabbi" side of the Wahabbi Marxist sect. But an examination of his writings as a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in the late 90's reveals a chilling fascination with hard-line Communism, binge drinking and casual sex. Ironically, these vices would get Ibish skinned alive by many of the fundamentalist Muslim regimes he supports. To the inherent disappointment of mullahs everywhere, Ibish has gone so far as to state that he is "not a religious man," and is in fact "an ardent secularist." As Pipes wrote in the New York Post, "Unlike most of today's prominent Muslim spokesmen, Ibish does not advocate militant Islam. Instead, he pushes a set of far left-wing views." Views that were on full display during Ibish's time as a contributor to the Massachusetts Daily Collegian and as co-editor of the Graduate Voice newspaper at UMass in the mid-to-late 90's.
-In an article last year for thepolitburo.com, the site's editor, Michael Moynihan, wrote, "Hussein Ibish and I attended the same university.he was a notorious campus figure, known for his pro-Palestinian militancy and radical politicization of the graduate student newspaper. Ibish was the ubiquitous campus progressive, ruminating on unions, America's 'genocide' in Iraq and the evil Americans' supposed 'imperial ambitions' in the Middle East.all of this was standard fare at Amherst, but Ibish was an anomaly even by Amherst standards, earning the nickname, 'Insane Rubbish' from the small cabal of Ibish-haters on campus."
-Ibish put in long hours to earn his "Insane Rubbish" moniker, as evidenced by an article he wrote in 1997 for the Daily Collegian entitled "A Death in the Family." Incredibly, the "Death" Ibish's screed grieved was that of Chinese leader (and Communist butcher) Deng XiaoPing! Wrote Ibish:
"During the years of revolution and the first three decades of communist government in China, Deng and his colleagues in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under the leadership of Mao Zedong, liberated China from centuries of foreign domination and disunity. Mao, in effect, erected the national edifice by creating modern China as an independent, sovereign power built on the foundational principles of nationalism and socialism."
If "liberation" means torture, genocide and backwardness, then Mao's China was indeed the most "liberated" place on earth. Ibish's twisted love letter continues, "The achievements of Mao can hardly be overstated, given that China was liberated, united, made self-sufficient and militarily secure in only a few decades."
After worshipping a bit longer at the feet of Mao's murderous carcass, Ibish moved on to Deng: "Deng's success in combining rapid economic growth with continued socialism and total national independence from western hegemony are quite unique in the contemporary international scene.it is within this context of astonishing success and achievement that Deng's 'domestic' style of leadership emerges as all the more remarkable."
The "domestic" style Ibish refers to, of course, is the same repressive barbarism that led to the Tiananman Square massacre of 1989 (which Deng stoically presided over). But this infamous event has apparently fallen deep into the abyss of Ibish's memory hole, as he states, "The 'domestic' leadership style gave Deng an image of intimacy and familiarity with the nation, reflected in a series of casual and affectionate slogans and banners greeting or praising him at public rallies."
As a final token of affection for Deng's totalitarian madness, Ibish closed the article with this memorable nugget: "Deng was a remarkable success as a caretaker and developer of the national home.throughout all his extraordinary career, as a general in the Red Army and as national leader, Deng remained single-mindedly devoted to the welfare of the Chinese people. His passing will deservedly be mourned as a death in the family."
-In a five-part series for the Collegian "analyzing the emergence of a New Puritanism" at Amherst, Ibish decried the university's attempts to curtail, among other things, campus drunkenness, unrestricted cigarette smoking and sex between students and university employees. Ibish explained his personal crusade against decency with typical bluster: "The idea is to recuperate the sense that pleasure is good in and of itself, that bitter resentment of other peoples' enjoyment is perverse, and that guilt attached to having a good time in public is neurotic."
Ibish trumpeted this Epicurean outlook in his Collegian article, "The Demon Rum," writing, "What the neo-prohibitionists argue is that intoxication is and of itself bad, and that the use of alcohol as a mind-altering substance is wicked and sinful. So, out goes that vast aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual legacy of civilization which is tied to intoxication in general and alcohol in particular. Redemption through intoxication is modernism's earliest, and perhaps, most important lesson."
Ibish has obviously never heard of moderation, and in crediting intoxication as a vital source of civilization, one suspects that he may have been inebriated when writing such drivel. As for smoking, Ibish defiantly references another of his hellish heroes, Fidel Castro, stating, "I console myself with the determination that, before I graduate, I will burst into the Chancellor's office as a counter-exorcist, fire up one of Comandante Fidel's magnificent Bolivar Royal Coronas, and drive out the foul stench of Puritanism with the sweet scent of glorious sin."
Perhaps the most disturbing issue addressed by Ibish's five-part exercise in journalistic futility (due in part to the image of him without clothes) was sex on campus. "It had to happen," he wrote. "After issuing their pious edicts against smoking, drinking and talking, how long could the neo-Puritans resist an all-out assault on f**cking?"
The "assault" Ibish refers to is an Amherst regulation forbidding sexual relations between faculty and students. Since Ibish was a 33-year-old teaching assistant at the time, this restricted him from drunkenly seducing unsuspecting coeds. Not surprisingly, he took the edict as a personal affront to his pagan lifestyle.
"Those of us who smoke, drink, speak feely and have unauthorized sex," bragged Ibish, "occupy both the intellectually sound position and the moral high ground."
The ultimate mirror into Ibish's ancient Roman depravity, however, came when he referred to "the neo-Puritan logic of the Clinton era." If Ibish thinks the Clinton years-presided over by the famously corrupt, horndog-in-chief himself-were neo-Puritan, then he probably regards porn kingpin Larry Flynt as a candidate for canonization.
-In a Collegian article titled "The Real Anthony Lake," Ibish skewers Lake, a fellow Leftist who worked in both the Clinton and Carter administrations, for being "drenched in blood yet smelling like a rose." This was a reference to Lake's role as an assistant to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon years, a post that Lake actually resigned in pacifistic protest of the Vietnam War's expansion into Cambodia.
Ibish goes on to call the Kissinger era "the greatest academy of mass murder and cold-blooded cynicism in recent history," and damns the "insane attempt" in 1993 by "Lake and company" to "take over internal Somali politics by murdering Mohammed Farah Aideed, leading to the deaths of thousands of innocent Somalis and a humiliating defeat for the United States."
By "innocent Somali civilians," was Ibish referring to the bloodthirsty mongrels that gleefully dragged the dead bodies of U.S. servicemen through the streets of Mogadishu? As for the Somali incident being "a humiliating defeat for the United States," while the operation was indeed questionable Clintonian interventionism, it would have accomplished its primary goal - removing Aideed from power - if only Clinton had the gumption to stick it out. Rest assured U.S. troops (who, severely outnumbered, sustained only 18 casualties compared with over 1,000 dead Somalis) were ready and willing.
Never lacking in revolutionary rhetoric, Ibish spewed further venom about a "U.S.-coordinated ethnic cleansing of 700,000 people from Krijena [in Bosnia]" and even alluded to "our government in Beirut." With this, the Lebanon-born Ibish made clear where his true loyalty rests-amongst Hamas rebels somewhere north of Israel.
-Six years after his departure, the memory of Ibish's extremism still lingers at UMass. The school's Minuteman newspaper, dismayed by the mainstream media's open-armed acceptance of the tubby terror, named him "Jackass of the Month" for April 2002. The paper gave a damning explanation for Ibish's much-deserved selection: "Ibish represented the absolute worst of GEO, the Graduate Senate and the 'UMass Hamas.' It was Ibish's Developing Nations page in the Collegian that featured the infamous Arabic poem entitled 'Rita and the Rifle,' that ran paintings of terrorists with raised knives and hatchets, and described Hamas as being activists in the freedom struggle." It gets worse.
"Six days after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ibish wrote that 'Rabin was a monster, war criminal, ethic cleanser, mass murderer and terrorist.' Five days later he went even further and essentially stated that all of the Jewish people needed to be murdered."
This is the same Hussein Ibish treated with kid gloves by commentators, network chiefs and editors nationwide. The Minuteman article continues, "As the well-paid editor of the Graduate Voice, 'Insane Ibish' turned that paper into such an open attack on all things Jewish that UMass literally had to establish an anti-Semitism task force and hire a Jewish Affairs director." No wonder Ibish identifies so proudly with the violent coercion of Mao, Deng and Fidel.
-Ibish also figured prominently in the 1997 Goodell Hall takeover at UMass, in which 180 students seized the university's financial center. The five-day takeover protested the university's failure to honor the 1992 ALANA (Asian, Latino African and Native American) agreements. Ibish and his cronies demanded that 20 percent of the UMass student body be minority and also called for more minority faculty and aid. The ongoing sit-in left most of the office's workers at home and severely disrupted the flow of university purchasing, bid processing and paychecks.
-Ibish returned to the sight of his early radicalism last year when he delivered a hate-dripped lecture before an overflow crowd at UMass. Some of his more notable gems that night included, "I don't think that we know about the religious zealotry of Bush, we don't know how far gone he is," and "Ashcroft is gone, he is stark, raving mad, a fundamentalist, mad and certainly bad." Dick Cheney was branded "a very dangerous man" and Israel was dismissed as "a domestic lobby similar to the corn lobby."
Since Ibish never turns down an invitation to hear himself deliver snide condescension, he's provided plenty of anti-American and anti-Israeli sound bites during his frequent television appearances.
-As a guest on MSNBC's now defunct "Alan Keyes is Making Sense" program last May, Ibish launched into a tirade when Keyes questioned the wisdom of United States aid to the Palestinians ($232 million last year alone, probably half their annual total income for people who regularly pour into the streets to cheer on Saddam Hussein).
"You know, you can cut [the aid] off, really," said Ibish. "I don't think any Palestinian is going to lose any sleep. It's purely symbolic as it is. The effect of this very small amount of aid spread among 3.5 million people is really not felt. So you can cut it off, go right ahead. The only thing you'll be doing, really, is making the United States look even worse in the eyes of the world, taking sides even more with Israel and cutting off this very limited amount of humanitarian aid.at the same time, we're giving Israel $5 billion a year and all the military hardware they need, to maintain tens of thousands of troops in someone else's country, steal their land and destroy their cities."
As if these comments weren't inflammatory enough, Ibish continued, "Members of Congress are not willing to stop at any level to pander to the pro-Israel lobbies, to search for funding and money. And [the U.S.] is willing to debase itself continuously in order to hug Israel and identify with its colonial occupation.the constant giving of aid to Israel when our money is being used to slaughter people living under occupation has really destroyed our reputation in the Middle East.the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation are the least democratic place in the world."
In terms of countries that actually do have despotic regimes, Ibish told Keyes: "Look, the last thing we've seen from the Saudi Arabians is them, the Egyptians and the Syrians, once again committing themselves to peace with Israel, once again stretching their hand out.and this outstretched hand is being rebuffed by Israel."
Ibish seems to be taking his physical resemblance to Dom DeLuise to heart, because this is truly wacky stuff. For good measure, he threw in the obligatory (for him) accusations that Israel is "not a military ally but a military albatross", and is "no help at all" to the United States.
-Ibish unleashed further vitriol in an online chat last June for USA Today.com's "Talk Today." When asked to explain his castigation of "the Jewish lobby," Ibish managed to drag Christians through the mud along with his favorite "Zionist" target.
"If you wish to be blind to the power of the pro-Israel lobby, including major Jewish groups.you are free to do so," he spouted. " I can only tell you that no one in Washington questions how influential this power is in shaping both executive and congressional behavior.the coalition of special interest groups that demand unconditional support for Israel and its colonial occupation includes as a major player the evangelical Christian right. These fundamentalists yearn for Armageddon, and support only the most extreme Israeli positions.they are, in my view, very dangerous fanatics and anti-Semitic to boot."
If you're wondering how the Christian Right can supposedly "support only the most extreme Israeli positions" and still be anti-Semitic, you're not alone. Yet Ibish has made a career out of delivering such head-scratching prattle in a self-assured, well-spoken manner that belies his profound ignorance. Regarding America's role in the Middle East conflict, Ibish told the USA Today.com chat room audience, "The U.S. has refused to let any other 3rd party get involved.no, the world's
only superpower (or hyperpower) will not allow that at all.we prevent international intervention as a means of protecting Israel from having to obey international law and security council resolutions."
With this statement, Ibish conveniently dismisses the continued role of the United Nations, European Union and Russia in trying to establish a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Peace, however, seemed to be the furthest thing from Ibish's mind when one chatter asked him if he thought Israel had the right to defend itself.
"Of course, as do the Palestinians," said Ibish. "Resistance to occupation is a form of self-defense, by the way, although obviously not attacks on civilians of any kind. Please understand that Israel's basic posture in the occupied territories is not self-defensive.of course, the dreadful suicide bombings give the Israelis the illusion that they are acting in self-defense when they enforce the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, but this is still just an illusion. Along with their inherent immorality, the worst aspect of the suicide bombing is just that-that they give the ordinary Israelis a measure to justify to themselves the most outrageous colonial brutality. This is a gift no occupier should ever receive."
Before hearing Ibish's take, I thought the worst aspect of the suicide bombings consisted of innocent Israeli women and children being blown to bits.
-Although insistent that he holds no enmity towards Jews, Ibish makes comments (reprinted by the New Jersey Jewish Standard) such as the "bread and butter" of the "American Jewish press" is "inciting anti-Arab sentiment" and "every single Israeli leader has made anti-Arab comments." But Ibish's conspiracy theory-laden view of Israel was probably best summarized when he wrote in a paper for the ADC,
"The exodus of Palestinians from their border in 1948 was largely the result of a calculated Israeli plan of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale enforced by numerous massacres."
-In a New York Post article last year, Daniel Pipes highlighted Ibish's "deep antagonism to the U.S. government." Wrote Pipes, "[Ibish] believes Washington has imperial ambitions in the Middle East. To achieve these, he says, Washington relies extensively on terrorism. First, it has stitched together a system of puppet rulers who 'terrorize the region.' Second, it 'has the ability to murder and rampage at will' and sometimes does just that-as during its 'terrorist' 1986 air strike against Libya.Ibish apologizes for many groups the U.S. government deems terrorist, starting with Osama bin Laden. 'I'm skeptical' was his reaction after a federal grand jury indicted bin Laden for bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa."
Pipes adds, "President Bush calls Hamas 'one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world today' but [Ibish] touts its accomplishments 'running hospitals and schools and orphanages.'" And terrorist training camps.
-In light of Al-Jazeera's reprehensible showing of U.S P.O.W.s being tortured in Iraq, it's interesting to note Ibish's opinion of the incendiary Arab-language network: "Al-Jazeera represents the best trends of openness and democratization in the Arab world. It is a long-overdue two-way street.it should be celebrated and encouraged."
At times, it almost seems as if Ibish is operating in a parallel universe, where fawning over dictators, railing against Jews and engaging in gluttonous, gratuitous behavior is harmless and even commendable. The effortless manner in which this U.S.-hating Wahabbi Marxist has gained acceptance in media circles should raise alarms among rational Americans everywhere. Daniel Pipes, Ibish's frequent opponent on the talk-show circuit, hit the target when he wrote, "Anti-American, anti-Semitic, inaccurate and immoral, Hussein Ibish makes for a peculiar choice to serve as the public face of Arab-Americans. More broadly, the media, think tanks and politicians should consider Ibish's record and close their doors to someone so far removed from the mainstream of American debate."
It is all needless to [say] repeat:
If this is already their best, their neck & tie ... no wonder why the Islamo Arab militant menace is so obvious, so monstrous.
