the brilliant max blumenthal on the oslo freedom forum’s founder’s ties to the islamophobia industry:
We uncovered some remarkable things that were unfamiliar to me, because you associate the Islamophobia industry with a small coterie of funders and activists who are very open about their opinions, but we found some more insidious groups who are playing still an effective role in pushing what I consider to be a right-wing, reactionary agenda.
And it started when I saw the interfaith ceremony after the Boston bombings, it was nationally-televised, Barack Obama spoke there, and the Muslim representative was supposed to be Iman Suhaib Webb, who is one of the foremost Islamic religious figures in the country, and he was replaced at the last second with someone named Nasser Wedaddy, who’s a Mauritanian internet activist who has really no … he’s unknown in the Muslim community. He works for a group called the American Islamic Congress. And I’d looked into who they were, got their funders, realized they were funded by people like Sheldon Adelson, the Bradley Foundation — which is a right-wing foundation behind Daniel Pipes and the whole Islamophobia industry that had Zuhdi Jasser, who testified at Peter King’s hearing, on their board — so we did a report for EI about this group that was clearly being put forward to create a wedge in the Muslim community and undermine mainstream Muslim organizing, also to take Palestine off the table.
This is a group that was heavily involved in promoting the Iraq war and received grants from the Bush administration, still receives grants from the Obama administration, and then it rolled into this next investigation into the Human Rights Foundation, which is this kind of shadowy human rights group run by figure named Thor Halvorssen. He’s a Venezuelan oligarch, he’s the son of an oligarchic family heavily-connected to the Venezuelan anti-Chavez opposition. More here.