This Week in God (VVS edition: O.M.G. LOL! WTH?)

[ProSense]

This Week in God

By Steve Benen

First up from the God Machine this week is a report on the Values Voter Summit, the nation's largest annual gathering for the religious right movement, which began yesterday in D.C. Despite the truly nutty organizers and guest list, the VVS welcomed a lengthy list of notable Republican speakers, including Paul Ryan and a video address from Mitt Romney.

Of particular interest, though, was a man who calls himself Kamal Saleem. The title he gave himself is "former terrorist."

He had all kinds of unique insights to share, but I found this one especially interesting. According to Saleem, whose real name is Khodor Shami, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is currently working with Islamic countries and the United Nations to "subjugate American people to be arrested and put to jail and their churches and synagogues shut down." All of this, he said, will happen early next year...Values Voter Summit attendees, instead of turning to one another and asking, "What on earth is this strange man talking about?" actually cheered Saleem's bizarre conspiracy theories.

As Rachel noted on the show last night, this is the same right-wing activist who says President Obama is secretly praying Islamic prayers when it looks like he's pledging allegiance to the American flag; insists Americans will be "wearing rag heads" is immigration reform is approved; and argues that the Roe v. Wade precedent leads to "Sharia law."

- more -

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/15/13882411-this-week-in-god

Mittwit and Minitwit should be asked about this immediately.

These people are nuts!

[drm604]

1. He claims to be a former terrorist?

Has he been arrested? If I claim to be a former bank robber, or a former extortionist, or a former murderer, haven't I confessed to a crime?

[Gabi Hayes]

2. remember Joe Bob Briggs? God Stuff, which used to be on the Daily Show. too bad it's not on now:

[Cleita]

7. Back before we had Air America and then MSNBC going sort of left, when

all we had was Fox News and the rest who were trying to be Fox News, I started watching the religious stations just to try to figure out where the nutties were getting their information. I found a treasure trove of really unintentionally funny stuff. I mean the entertainment value was hilarious. Of course, today, with Cenk, Ed, Rachel, Lawrence, Elliott, Jennifer and the rest I don't have time to watch those sillies anymore.

[JHB]

3. Mother Jones article unmasks a huckster

Saleem claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has put a $25 million bounty on his head, and that there have been attempts to earn it: After a 2007 event in Chino Hills, California, he writes in his book, he returned to his Holiday Inn to find his room ransacked and a band of dangerous Middle Easterners on his trail. Saleem describes calling the police to alert them to an assassination attempt. Local law enforcement, however, has no record of any such incident.

That's just one of many of Saleem's tales that don't stand up to scrutiny. (Through a spokeswoman, Saleem refused to comment for this story.) Doug Howard, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Michigan's Calvin College, first encountered Saleem in 2007, when he was invited to speak at the school. Howard quickly became suspicious: For starters, Saleem claimed to be a descendant of the "Grand Wazir of Islam," a position that doesn't exist. Howard dug deeper and discovered that Saleem's original name was Khodor Shami—and that for more than a decade before outing himself as a former terrorist he had worked for Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson's Focus on the Family. (CBN declined to comment. Focus on the Family confirmed Saleem was an employee but would not comment further.)

A former friend also sheds light on Saleem's past. Wally Winter, a nurse in Albuquerque, New Mexico, first met him when they both worked at a hospital in Abu Dhabi in 1979. Two years later, he got a phone call from Saleem; he'd come to the United States and needed help. Winter says he welcomed Saleem into his spare bedroom, opened a bank account for him, taught him how to drive, and helped get him a job at the hospital where he worked near Oklahoma City. When Winter moved to the city, Saleem came along. "He had no money," Winter says. "I had to drive him wherever he was going." The two were close; Winter would bring Saleem to his parents' home on holidays.

Winter recalls his former roommate as a devout Muslim whose yarns often lapsed into wild exaggeration. "He could sell swampland in Louisiana," Winter says. "I really do not believe the story about the terrorism. I totally believe that he would make up something like that to either make money or become well known."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/kamal-saleem-former-terrorist-islamophobia

Emphasis mine. The bold-italic emphasis is important to the timeline: he's been in this country since 1981.

The article also mentions his memoir, where he's apparently the Forrest Gump of terrorism, meeting Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Afghan mujahadeen (which at the time were supported by US, by the way), running a training camp for Khaddafi -- the man really got around! Why was a man with these kinds of connections working in a hospital in 1979? Shouldn't he have been up in Afghanistan fighting the infidel Soviets? Or in Teheran burning effigies of... Jimmy Carter? (ah, that explains why we don't hear about that one!)

At least now he's in the right business: telling eager audiences that all their paranoid fears are true. It's a lucrative field and can move you to the centers of real power. Just ask the neocons. They hyped the Soviet/International Communism threat when in reality it was decaying rapidly (and that's the parts that were real, and not just paranoid fantasy).

They've all done pretty well for themselves. Horror for the country, but we're not their concern.

[ProSense]

4. The thing is

Republicans, including Romney and Ryan, are aligned with this nut.

The Republican candidates chose to be involved in this event, and their appearance will be seen by the lunatics cheering this nut as validation of his credibility by the Republican Party.

[JHB]

5. I'm not dismissing him. Embracing nuts is Republican SOP.

Look at the roster of speakers for any CPAC conference. Party leaders won't hesitate to get behind the same podium used by an entire constellation of nut clusters.

It's another example of how they mainstream the crazy and the fraudulent. And we do our part by pointing out to bystanders what kinds of hucksters and loons these "good people" have glommed onto.

[ProSense]

8. Yes, and we need to do

"It's another example of how they mainstream the crazy and the fraudulent. And we do our part by pointing out to bystanders what kinds of hucksters and loons these "good people" have glommed onto."

...this because crazy ignored ends up in Congress. I mean, look at Akin.

[Cleita]

6. Dude seems to have a phony accent.

He occasionally loses it but quickly recoups back into it.