How US-based Middle East Forum fuels Islamophobia, promotes Zionism

By David Miller

The Middle East Forum is well known in the US as a core part of what has been dubbed the Islamophobia network. But it is still not much known in Europe, especially the UK.

The forum is a hardline Zionist and anti-Muslim think tank founded by Daniel Pipes in 1990. Pipes is a notorious Islamophobe, described as one of the leading “misinformation experts”.

According to the organization’s website, its mission is to “promote American interests in the Middle East (West Asia) and protect Western values from Middle Eastern threats.”

It is based in Philadelphia, roughly halfway between New York and Washington DC, and is headed by a former employee of the Israeli ministry of military affairs, Greg Roman.

The forum relies upon its publication, the Middle East Quarterly, and a network of monitoring programs - including Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, and the Legal Project - to inculcate fears of “militant Islam” and to monitor the people and organizations whose views contradict Pipes and his friends.

The Middle East Forum is at the center of the Islamophobia network in the US, spending millions of dollars since 2001, but also internationally, as per available evidence.

It has supported all types of far-right and Islamophobic groups in the EU and UK, including in Switzerland, France, Germany the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Greece.

For example, it has supported the Swiss-based NGO Monitor which harasses pro-Palestine activists and human rights groups, including attacking Christian Aid, Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres among others. 

In 2010, NGO Monitor launched a campaign against a Dutch foundation, ICCO, which was one of the finances of the Electronic Intifada. 

It has provided financial support to Counterjihad activists facing prosecution and those convicted to facilitate appeals. Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders and French anti-Muslim activist Christine Tasin are among those who have received funds.

In the UK, it has funded, among others, these individuals and entities:

• George Igler, a City-based analyst and director of the Discourse Institute. Igler has described himself on Twitter in unambiguous terms, saying he now helps “prevent people from getting their heads chopped off'. He has helped foster the racist idea of Muslim “grooming gangs” in the UK as well as participating in the so-called “antisemitism” witch-hunt.
   
• Samuel Westrop, a British far-right activist involved in many Islamophobic groups, including the British Israel Coalition and Stand for Peace.  He even co-founded the ludicrous and short-lived: British Muslims for Israel
   
• Gatestone Institute: Though it is based in New York, the institute expends most of its energies fostering anti-Muslim hate in the UK and Europe.

And that’s not all.  The forum has also supported the former leader of the English Defence League Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who prefers to go by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson.

Robinson is the poster boy for British Islamophobia. Embarrassed by his double-barrelled, posh-sounding name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon adopted the nom de guerre Tommy Robinson.

He was supported directly by the Middle East Forum. The forum is ferociously Zionist and depends on the largesse of some of the largest Zionist foundations in the US, namely:

• The Abstraction Fund, run by Nina Rosenwald, which also bankrolls the Gatestone Institute. Rosenwald is an influential Zionist. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, she reportedly “spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a non-profit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939.
  
  According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled Fear Inc., Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to 'organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia'.” Rosenwald is the founder-president of the Gatestone Institute and also sits on the executive committee of the Middle East Forum. She is a former director and vice president of the Zionist Organization of America.
   
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the largest conservative foundations in the US, has spent significantly on Islamophobia. From 2001 to 2012, it provided $6,540,000 in funding to the Islamophobia network. These funds went to the David Horowitz Freedom Center ($5,090,000), the Center for Security Policy ($1,020,000), and the Middle East Forum ($430,000).  
   
• Two linked donor-advised funds that disguise the ultimate source of donations (Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust)
   
• Several regional Zionist foundations, including Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Jewish Communal Fund, Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego and the Jewish Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.

MEF acknowledges that it spent about $60,000 (£47,000) on Robinson’s legal fees and demonstrations staged in London in 2018. Yaxley-Lennon also received funds from the extremist Zionist, Robert Shillman, a US tech billionaire.

Yaxley-Lennon famously interviewed Robert Festenstein as “lawyer Rob who we brought with us” in one of his Youtube videos. Festenstein was a representative on the Board of Deputies of British Jews and also part of a then newly established Zionist group called Jewish Human Rights Watch. 

The group was short-lived, though it was intimately involved in the network established by the UK Ministry of Strategic Affairs to combat BDS. It was among a range of British assets of the regime involved in the Digitell18 conference in March 2018 where the network was institutionalised. Festenstein denied acting as a legal adviser for Yaxley-Lennon.

Of course, in English law, everyone is entitled to legal counsel.  But the Zionists do seem to make a habit of sympathising with racism against Muslims.  The Islamophobia has been visible - too visible it seems – at the Board of Deputies and indeed at the Jewish National Fund an institution of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Gary Mond was suspended from the Board of Deputies after referring to “all civilisation” being “at war with Islam”.

Samuel Hayek. chair of the UK Jewish National Fund, promoted the far-right great replacement theory when he claimed that “the white Christian majority” in the UK “is shrinking… to a degree where there is a point it cannot protect itself anymore.“

The JNF was censured by the Board of Deputies for failing to dismiss Hayek.

But is there a general problem of Islamophobia in the Zionist movement? Surely, groups like the Community Security Trust which says it combats racism and claims to oppose Islamophobia are not guilty?  They even directly supported the creation of Tell Mama, a group claiming to monitor anti-Muslim attacks. 

But scratch the surface and all is not well. 

The founder of the CST, the convicted fraudster Gerald Ronson let his Islamophobia show in his memoir where he complained that “possibly most dangerous of all… is the rise of Muslim fundamentalism being stuffed down people's throats in mosques and schools.”

And the CST itself has promoted conspiracy theories about how Muslims - or “Islamists” as it prefers to call them - are responsible for the idea that Zionists are racist against Muslims.

Islamophobia runs all the way through the Zionist movement. Zionists have proactively developed a wide range of Islamophobic concepts - such as “Eurabia”, or the idea of “Islamist” movements - and ceaselessly promoted them to the far right. 

No wonder, Tommy Robinson gets support from Zionist groups. And no wonder he has played to the Zionist imagination by posing on top of an Israeli tank with a rifle in the illegally occupied Golan Heights in 2016.

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