Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

The money has been followed

Although hardly anybody is paying attention. Kenneth P. Vogel and Giovanni Russonello, in Politico, of all unlikely suspects, run it down. I'm linking to page 3 because they are fair and balanced: they spend most of the first two pages on who is financing Cordoba House (not a problem, as it turns out) in order to bury the lede:

But there’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit Jihad Watch — the website run by [Robert] Spencer “dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world” — and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.

Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, POLITICO has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.

A onetime trustee of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network that made its name partly with hawkish pro-Israel commentary and of late has kept up a steady stream of anti-mosque postings, including one rebutting attacks by CAIR against Spencer — who Pajamas Media CEO Roger Simon called “one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror.”

So, okay, that's the money. But that's separate from the question of who the money is being used to manipulate.

1 comment:

David K said...

From what you have said, the apparent "benficiaries" of this carefully stoked islamophobia include: The state of Israel, the US (and other) Christian EndTimers, the Department of Defence(Attack?) plus a veritable cast of thousands. From what you have cited, it seems the common thread is an "us vs them" ideology, brewed up in a soup of increasingly irrational fear. Nothing new here, just more extreme consequences. Different millenium, same silliness. Maybe I will patent the concept of "unintelligent design". The evidence for a collective insanity thus presented is pretty convincing :-)