Frank Gaffney is a key propagandist and conspiracy theorist for the Islamophobia movement. Gaffney also hosts Secure Freedom Radio and writes a column on the Big Peace blog.
In a report on defeats suffered by Islamophobic elements in the GOP, Tim Murphy and Adam Serwer quote influential Republican tax reformer Grover Norquist as saying, “We have heard back from a bunch of Hill staffers—’We are keeping our guy away from Gaffney and those guys, they’re crazy.'”
Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball has referred to Gaffney as “one of the country’s leading anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists.”
He has advanced a conspiracy theory that a crescent, sometimes seen as a symbol of Islam, in a U.S. military badge was a sign of an impending Muslim takeover of the United States. “Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiative are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte, Gaffney wrote, “They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah. What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency Logo.”
Gaffney has also asserted his belief in the conspiracy theory that President Obama is Muslim, writing “…there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”
Gaffney’s paranoia regarding Muslims has generated criticism from a multiplicity of sources.
The FBI said a Center for Security Policy report is based on “outdated information” and “overstated” any threat Muslim observances pose to America.
David Keene, former president of the National Rifle Association, said Gaffney is “tiresomely obsessed” with his “weird belief” that anyone who does not agree with him is a dupe of America’s enemies.
Frank Gaffney’s conspiracy theories regarding Muslim infiltration of all aspects of American life are so overblown that he was banned from attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 after accusing its top leadership of being infiltrated by Islamists.
Gaffney was a key witness for the plaintiffs in a controversial lawsuit against a mosque being built in Tennessee, where he promoted the notion that mosques want to “destroy western civilization from within.”
Gaffney has also advocated renewing the House Un-American Activities Committee, a discredited McCarthy-era congressional committee that President Truman once described as “the most un-American thing in the country today.” In an interview with the Washington Times dealing with alleged Muslim infiltration of the U.S. Government, Gaffney said “What is needed is a new select committee modeled after the much-vilified, but ultimately vindicated, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).”
Gaffney is fast to convict those he does not agree with. He argued that some senators’ decisions to question the wisdom of the war in Iraq should be treating as a “hanging offense.” During a television appearance, Gaffney opined, “In fact, it is absolutely antithetical, Sharia is, to our Constitution, and the pursuit of it as you said in your comment, Brigitte [Gabriel], is incompatible with the Constitution’s Article VI, and therefore, far from being a protected religious practice, it is an impermissible act of sedition, which has to be prosecuted under our Constitution.”
The Center for Security Policyand Gaffney actively promote the anti-Islam ideology of David Yerushalmi, the center’s general counsel. According to CSP’s IRS tax-filing Yerushalmi was listed as an independent contractor in 2009 and 2011. He was compensated $153,376 in 2009 and $110,823 in 2012. Yerushalmi is discussed in detail in the American Freedom Law Center entry.
