RNA - Steve Bannon, whom President-elect Donald Trump chose this week as his chief strategist and senior counselor, has a history of claiming that certain anti-Muslim extremists are in fact experts on Islam.
Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News ― a site that regularly airs white nationalist viewpoints ― used to host a Sirius XM radio show called “Breitbart News Daily.” According to a September report from Mother Jones and the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, Bannon conducted dozens of interviews with anti-Muslim extremists on the show in the past year. These guests offered paranoid accusations and false conspiracy theories about Muslims, all of which went unchallenged by Bannon.
During these interviews, Bannon often praised his guests as esteemed experts on a religion they hate.
Pamela GellerPamela Geller appeared on Bannon’s show seven times, according to the Mother Jones/Nation Institute report. Bannon called Geller “one of the top world experts in radical Islam and Shariah law and Islamic supremacism,” “the top leading expert in this field” and “one of the great American patriots.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, calls Geller “probably the best known — and the most unhinged — anti-Muslim ideologue in the United States. She is the movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead and a woman who is relentlessly shrill and coarse in her denunciations of Islam.”
Geller, a co-founder of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which the SPLC defines as a hate group, came to prominence with her opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” ― actually a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, near the site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Geller said the center would be a “victory mosque” for Muslims on “conquered land” to celebrate the attacks.
“In the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man,” she told The New York Times in 2010. “If you don’t lay down and die for Islamic supremacism, then you’re a racist anti-Muslim Islamophobic bigot.”
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