Muslims and their places of worship “are clearly under attack,” says the president of one of the country’s largest mosques, which was heavily damaged four days ago in an arson fire.

“We’re actually reeling in disbelief,” Dr. Mahjabeen Islam, president of the Islamic Center of Toledo in Ohio, told Hatewatch today in describing the devastation caused by a fire deliberately set in the mosque’s prayer area on Sunday afternoon, just minutes after worshippers had left the building.

“This is a hate crime and it’s very significant it was started in the center of the prayer area, right under the dome,” said Islam. The mosque she heads is the third largest in the United States, a 70,000-square foot landmark, visible for miles, with 3,000 members who will celebrate the center’s 32^nd anniversary on Friday. ( continue to full post… )

Steve Klein, the California ex-marine identified as a consultant for the anti-Islam film that apparently triggered violent protests in northern Africa and the Middle East, is finally seeing the fruits of his labor.

For years, Klein has been cultivating relationships with Middle Eastern Christians in California – in particular, Joseph Nasralla, a California Coptic Christian who spoke at an anti-Muslim rally hosted by hate group leaders Pam Geller and Robert Spencer on Sept. 11, 2010. ( continue to full post… )

Yesterday, we posted a run-down of some of the anti-LGBT speakers who are appearing at this year’s Values Voter Summit (VVS), a gathering of social conservatives that begins tomorrow in Washington, D.C., and is attracting a number of high-level public officials from the GOP, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan.

In addition to the usual gay-bashers, the summit hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC) also provides a public platform for rabid Islamophobes who promote an array of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and propaganda. ( continue to full post… )

Steve Klein, the leader of a California hate group, says that Islam is a “penis-driven religion” whose followers have “no choice but to hunt Jews and Christians down, torture us and murder us.”

Klein of Hemet, Calif., who has a long history of ties to militant Christian organizations, has been identified as one of the brains behind the anti-Muslim film that triggered violence in northern Africa, including a rocket attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. ( continue to full post… )

Steve Klein, who served as a consultant for the Islam-bashing film that sparked the deadly assault on a U.S. Consulate in Libya, is a longtime religious-right activist who has helped train paramilitary militias at a secretive church in California.

Four American citizens, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed by mobs enraged by the depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the film “Innocence of Muslims”  produced by Sam Bacile, a California real estate developer.

Klein is a Marine veteran who served in the Vietnam War and is based in Hemet, Calif. He believes that his state is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can,” according to an article in the Spring 2012 issue of the SPLC Intelligence Report. ( continue to full post… )

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and a coalition of human rights groups have written to several public figures, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, asking them not to speak at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit in Washington. The event is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC), which the SPLC lists as a hate group for its dissemination of false and demonizing propaganda about the LGBT community.

The FRC has engaged in repeated, groundless demonization – portraying LGBT people as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation, the letter says. One of its officials has gone so far as to say homosexuality should be criminalized. Perhaps the FRC’s ugliest lie is its claim that gay men molest children at a far higher rate than heterosexual men – that pedophilia “is a homosexual problem,” in the words of Tony Perkins, the FRC president. ( continue to full post… )

Kris Kobach, the immigrant-baiting attorney behind a raft of “attrition through enforcement” laws designed to make unauthorized immigrants’ lives so miserable that they choose to “self-deport,” is letting his Islamophobic colors fly.

Talking Points Memo reported last week that the Republican National Convention (RNC) has amended its platform to include a ban on “foreign law.” Kobach introduced the plank, saying, “I’m not aware of any court that’s actually accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Shariah Law.”

Shariah law is Islamic religious law, and the far political right has spent much of the last two years ginning up groundless fears that it will be imposed on the United States — an impossibility under the Constitution. Already, two states have banned “foreign law” based on those fears, and close to two dozen others have considered such statutes despite Oklahoma’s law being struck down last January. ( continue to full post… )

Pamela Geller, American Islamophobia’s shrillest voice, is planning yet another demonstration of anti-Muslim hate – this time, in Europe.

According to her blog, Atlas Shrugs, “the world’s leading freedom action organizations” (read: anti-Muslim hate groups) will rally in Stockholm, Sweden, tomorrow to launch a “worldwide counter jihad alliance.” ( continue to full post… )

We used to think the $20 million-a-year American Family Association (AFA) acted as crazy as it does mainly because it allowed mostly free rein to its best-known spokesman, the truly nutty Bryan Fischer. Fischer, after all, spends his days raving about how gay people were behind the Holocaust, how black people on welfare “rut like animals,” how the cure for promiscuity is to kill the promiscuous, even the idea, completely contradicted by science, that the HIV virus doesn’t cause AIDS.

Sure, there was wacky old Don Wildmon, who founded the Tupelo, Miss.-based group back in 1977 and was given to an occasional anti-Semitic diatribe about how Jews control the media and hate Christians. But that was mostly forgotten years ago, and Wildmon and his son generally sound a little calmer these days.

But the extremist bench at the AFA turns out to be deeper than that. ( continue to full post… )

The Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-gay hate group that claims LGBT rights advocates want to “recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” announced on Friday the appointment of retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin as its new executive vice president.

The press release accurately describes Boykin as a veteran who spent 36 years in the Army, serving in the elite Delta Force and, later, as deputy undersecretary of defense and intelligence in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

What it does not mention, however, is Boykin’s troubled history of making  damaging, controversial statements; his work as a radical anti-Muslim propagandist; or his close involvement with the New Apostolic Reformation, a theocratic evangelical movement that believes demons control LGBT people, Catholics, Muslims and freemasons. ( continue to full post… )