Who is Charles
Jacobs? [and why are
they saying those terrible things about him?]
Who is Charles Jacobs? - by
Karin Friedemann, Boston
A Polish immigrant armed with only a BA from
Rutgers and a Masters in Education from Harvard
has proven exceptionally effective in
manipulating the US government and major American
institutions into following policy blueprints
created by his Israel advocacy organization, the
David Project. Charles Jacobs, like Charles
Krauthammer and Richard Perle, obtains speaking
engagements through a PR firm called Benador
Associates, which specializes in pro-Israel
campus events focusing on Islam and terrorism.
Like Alan Dershowitz, Charles Jacobs considers
himself a progressive liberal. Fareeha Iqbal, a
student at MIT, disagrees.
"Dr. Jacobs’ talk expressed
blatantly racist and anti-Islamic views. In fact,
I have never seen Islamophobia exuded so
blatantly at a public forum at MIT, nor such
racist views aired at a panel discussion on human
rights.”
CAMERA
CAMERA, co-founded by Jacobs in 1982, is a
media-monitoring organization dedicated to
enforcing pro-Israel, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic
bias in the news. It was a pioneer in the
technological aspects of mass-marketing hate. One
of the first media pressure groups to invest in
the software necessary to create database
capabilities for email blasting tailored messages
to specific target groups, CAMERA sends out
action alerts instructing its members to
overwhelm newspaper and politicians’ offices
with hundreds of emails and threatening phone
calls to complain and argue about any media
coverage critical to Israel or friendly to Islam.
Columbia Unbecoming
In 2002, a network of national Jewish
organizations met to evaluate what they saw as an
alarming rise in anti-Israel activity on campus.
From those meetings emerged the Israel on Campus
Coalition (ICC), which is founded in a
partnership of Hillel and the Charles and Lynn
Schusterman Family Foundation. (The three
organizations share a building in Washington.)
The David Project is an affiliate member of the
ICC. In October 2003, the David Project agreed to
provide funding for a film, produced by Ralph Avi
Goldwasser, to slander professors Rashid Khalidi,
Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, and Georges Saliba
of Columbia University's Department of Middle
East studies. Joseph Massad became known as
"one of the most dangerous
intellectuals” on campus. Calls for the
professor’s dismissal were issued by
Congressman Weiner and by the editors of the
Daily News and the New York Sun, and the
propaganda film was shown in Israel before a
government minister at an anti-Semitism
conference.
Sheikh Zayed/Harvard
The David Project regularly placed racist
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim speakers on Harvard
campus, but its first major accomplishment was
blocking a $2 million donation from the late
president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh
Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, for a chair in
Islamic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.
The Project's 2003 smear campaign was coordinated
with the ADL, By preventing Zayed from
contributing to Harvard, Jacobs sought to
minimize future input from Arabs and Muslims into
discussions of developments at Harvard
University.
American Anti-Slavery Group
The American Anti-Slavery Group grew directly
out of Jacobs' pro-Israel advocacy. The group
supports the Sudan People's Liberation Army
(SPLA), which has been employed by the US in
order to destabilize the Islamic Republic of
Sudan and is believed to have trained along with
Israeli forces at Otis Air Force base in
Massachusetts.
The American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) is
based in Boston and works closely with Christian
Solidarity International. The organization has
been closely involved in filming fraudulent
"slave redemptions." Jacobs was
presenting the issue as one of northern Arab
"slavers" and African Christian
southerners. In addition to claims of slavery,
Jacobs has also described Sudan as a
"terrorist, genocidal" state engaged in
a "holy war."
Charles Jacobs and his American Anti-Slavery
Group's carefully designed "PR puff
pieces" have managed to secure national
media coverage. This campaign to vilify Arabs and
Muslims is a multimedia effort that supplies huge
quantities of lurid, both popular and
pseudo-academic hate material.
Save Darfur
JCRC sponsored organizations that are staffed
by Israel advocates trained by the David Project
have further poisoned human rights discourse with
the dishonest Save Darfur campaign aimed at
divesting from Sudan as well as from any country
which does business with Sudan. The David Project
has proven uncommonly effective at changing US
policy in a matter of months to listing Sudan as
a terrorist nation and barring all trade with the
country. While pro-Palestine activists have
struggled for years to slow the stream of US
public funds to Israel, Jacob’s anti-Sudan
campaign is probably the quickest divestment
success in US history. Thanks to the ongoing
efforts of JCRCs and affiliated groups, Sudan
divestment resolutions have become law in Iowa
and are in the process of approval in 12 states.
Although US involvement in Sudanese politics can
only be a disaster for the Sudanese and for
America, this sort of propaganda serves the
purpose of turning Arab and African Americans
against each other in order to prevent them from
mounting any jointly organized political efforts.
The David Project and the JCRC, who have had more
than one director in common, work hand in hand to
minimize the potential political influence of
groups who might oppose continuing US funding of
Israel.
Muslims Sue the David Project
In 2006, after the David Project was found
instigating a lawsuit against the City over the
construction of a new mosque, Dr. Yousef
Abou-Allaban, chairman of the board of the
Islamic Society of Boston, addressed Charles
Jacobs in an open letter that was quoted in the
Boston Globe.
"We would like to know why you and
others at the David Project appear to be so
intent on inflaming relations between our
communities," Abou-Allaban wrote. "Do
you really hate us that much?"
In a landmark defamation suit, the ISB
detailed "a concerted, well-coordinated
effort to deprive ... members of the Boston
Muslim community of their basic right of free
association and the free exercise of their
religion." Discovery materials from the ISB
lawsuit have exposed a network of Neocons in the
establishment, pro-Israel organizations, the mass
media, and Islamophobic academics, working
together to make the public fear the Muslim
community.
The list of defendants in the lawsuit include
Steven Emerson, a self-proclaimed 'expert' on
radical Islam whose documentary, “Jihad in
America," has been widely discredited,
William Sapers, a director of the Combined Jewish
Philanthropies, the Boston Herald, Boston's FOX
TV station, the David Project, and Citizens for
Peace and Tolerance (CPT), whose president is
Dennis Hale, a speaker for the David Project.
Some Jewish groups have distanced themselves
from the conspiracy to deprive Muslim Americans
of their constitutional rights, which is a
federal crime, but Nancy Kaufman, executive
director of the Jewish Community Relations
Council of Greater Boston stated, "None of
those organizations [who signed statements
supporting the mosque] are members of the
organizations of the JCRC. We don't consider them
to be a part of the mainstream Jewish
community."
Conclusion
Much of the mainstream media’s negative
coverage of Muslims arises from the continuous
stream of poisonous accusations and racist
insinuations distributed as press releases by the
David Project and its affiliates. Until recently,
Israel advocacy organizations, which have been
heavily engaged in subverting US foreign and
domestic policy, have remained mostly invisible
to American political scientists, who focused on
traditional political lobbies like AIPAC.
Karin Friedemann is editor of World View
News Service, focusing on the Islamic world.
Please visit
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/.
|
