Islamophobia bankroller behind organizer of Israel junket for US “Muslim leaders”
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 01/04/2015 - 21:13
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An image from the Shalom Hartman Institute’s 2011 annual report shows some of the 1,500 senior Israeli army officers who annually go through its training program to reinforce Jewish nationalism in the military.
An organization sponsoring a controversial visit to Israel by a number of American Muslim “leaders” is funded by one of a handful of major financiers of extreme Islamophobic groups in the United States.
Internal Revenue Service filings show that the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute has received generous funding from the Russell Berrie Foundation in recent years.
This foundation was named in the 2011 Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” as one of the top seven donors to anti-Muslim hate groups in the United States.
The Shalom Hartman Institute has received funding from other extremely Islamophobic donors as well.
Major beneficiaries of the Russell Berrie Foundation include Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum.
According to the Center for American Progress, Pipes and Emerson are members of a key group of prominent “misinformation experts” who “are primarily responsible for orchestrating the majority of anti-Islam messages polluting our national discourse today.”
Yet the Shalom Hartman Institute, which has received millions from the same donor, has established the so-called “Muslim Leadership Initiative” which takes “emerging Muslim leaders” on junkets to Israel allegedly to improve their understanding of Judaism and Israel.
The program’s actual goals appear to be to turn influential or potentially influential Muslim figures in North America into advocates or apologists for Zionism based on Jewish religious claims to Palestinian land.
The Shalom Hartman Institute bills itself as “a center of transformative thinking … that addresses the major challenges facing the Jewish people and elevates the quality of Jewish life in Israel.” In practice, it is a major contractor for the Israeli military and works closely with the Israeli government’s efforts to combat the Palestine solidarity movement.
Zionist “education”
A December blog post at JUF News, published by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, revealed that the goal of the Muslim Leadership Initiative “is to empower an elite group of emerging and religious and intellectual leaders – including university chaplains, journalists, academics and cultural figures – to influence the North American Muslim community in reassessing its preconceived notions of Judaism and Israel.”
While a cached version of the post is still visible online, the original has been removedfrom JUF News.
The Muslim Leadership Initiative’s own website is also unabashed about its Israel advocacy goals. It says the program specifically targets “emerging North American Muslim leaders to develop a deeper understanding of Judaism, the Jewish people and Israel” in order to “change attitudes in the North American Muslim community and in Muslim-Jewish discourse in communities and on campuses across North America.”
Over thirteen months, including two twelve-day seminars in Jerusalem, the program aims to give “young Muslim leaders” an “immersive” course in Zionism: “the essential ideas of Jewish peoplehood, the relationship between religion and national identity, the meaning for Jews of the land of Israel, and related issues of ethics, faith and practice.”
The program’s directors are Duke University chaplain Imam Abdullah Antepli and the American-born author Yossi Klein Halevi, a former adherent of Meir Kahane, the founder of the violent racist group Kach.
“Faithwashing”
In an article for Islamic Monthly last July, Sana Saeed dubbed the Muslim Leadership Initiative as “faithwashing.”
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