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… )

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles canceled a lecture it was going to host by Pam Geller (who is Jewish) just hours before it was supposed to be delivered Sunday morning. The Western Region Chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), was sponsoring Geller’s speech, “Islamic Jew Hatred as the Root

Cause of Failure to Achieve Peace.”

The ZOA is a Jewish advocacy organization that claims more than 30,000 members and bills itself as the oldest pro-Israel group in America, involving itself in educating people about the “truth of the ongoing and relentless Arab war against Israel” and fighting things like “Arab propaganda” on campuses. ( continue to full post… )

Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., were once again targeted for their beliefs on Friday when a group of protesters calling themselves the “Bible Believers” confronted celebrants at the city’s annual Arab International Festival with a pig’s head on a spike and signs decrying Islam as a false religion, the Detroit Free Press reports.

In addition to the pig’s head – presumably intended to offend observant Muslims, who do not eat pork – Bible Believers reportedly carried signs calling Islam “a religion of blood and murder” and describing the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a “liar,” “false prophet,” “murderer” and “child molesting pervert.” ( continue to full post… )

As the trial of Muslim-hating Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik enters its third week, a U.S.-based website has published a new essay by a blogger whose work was cited frequently by the man who murdered 77 of his countrymen last July.

In an article posted today on FrontPage, Norwegian blogger “Fjordman” – whose work was mentioned so often in Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto that some bloggers speculated they were the same person – showered praise on Robert Spencer, an American anti-Muslim pundit and hate group leader who Breivik thinks deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Fjordman’s particular interest is Spencer’s latest work, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins, which according to its Amazon page is a “sober but unflinching look at one of the world’s major religions” and includes “many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons” – military conquest among them. ( continue to full post… )

The National Rifle Association (NRA) — the powerful gun lobby that has called federal law enforcement agents “jack-booted thugs,” accused President Obama of having secret plans to strip away Americans’ guns, and been the main force behind the incredibly dangerous “Stand Your Ground” laws being used to justify the killing of Trayvon Martin — is once again flaunting its political extremism.

This Sunday in St. Louis, the NRA plans to host retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, a radical Islamophobe who has said there should be “no mosques in America,” as keynote speaker of a prayer breakfast at its annual conference. Boykin has asserted that “Islam is evil” and “a totalitarian way of life” that “should not be protected under the First Amendment,” among other things. This January, after controversy arose over statements like these, Boykin withdrew from a speech he had been invited to make at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. ( continue to full post… )