Mauri'
Saalakhan, director of the Peace through Justice Foundation in Washington D.C.,
spoke to Press TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday regarding who benefits from the
demonization of Islam and Muslims through propaganda campaigns that are well
funded.
"Unfortunately,
there is a growing host of people that appear to be benefitting from these
campaigns. This report that was just released, titled, Fear, Inc. The Roots of
the Islamophobia Network in America prepared by the Center for American Progress
is a very very revealing report," Saalakhan said.
"According to
it, there are five principle contractors and these are Frank Gaffney of the
Center for Security Policy, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for
National Existence … Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Robert Spencer of
Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America and Steven Emerson of the
Investigative Project on Terrorism. Now three of these names are very familiar
to many within the Muslim community," he added.
Saalakhan
continued that what he found most interesting about the report and revealing was
that it was stating that "these are five key people within this overall network
that are benefitting directly from the funding they are receiving from a number
of foundations. In fact, according to the report and this is really staggering.
These five individuals and their organizations have received an estimated $40
million from just seven foundations over a ten year period. At the end of the
day, the benefit to these individuals is coming at the expense of a lot of
innocent people and it's also coming at the expense of the better of the two
Americas. And so you have again these private contractors and subcontractors
that are benefitting financially from basically exploiting fear. For doing their
best to magnify fear both here in this country and internationally and just
exploiting it for their own personal gain."
"So you have
that benefit that is coming to them, then you also have politicians in many of
these countries here in the West that are also benefitting from exploiting the
fear factor in their campaigns, with heavy emphasis on national security both in
the micro- and in the macro-sense both within the countries themselves as well
as vis-à-vis its foreign policy abroad," he added.
Saalakhan
concluded that "you have this political exploitation. Then you also have sorry
to say a religious exploitation of this fear of this industry that has emerged
post-9/11 in the global community. You have these very extreme fanatical
ideological bent religious leaders that are also fanning the flames of fear
within their congregations both domestically and internationally for the sake of
expanding their respective church and their churches agenda. So you have all of
these elements that are exploiting this fear factor that is being generated by
the ugly propaganda that is being spewed globally in the wake of these tensions
created by these manipulators, these fear exploiters and then the folks who are
funding them for their own nefarious reasons."
SM/KK