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John Bolton Installs Anti-Muslim Wingnut As National Security Council Chief of Staff
In March 2018, Trump named John Bolton as National Security Adviser. It's been all downhill from there.
Bolton is one of many fringe neoconservatives who’s taken up residence in the alt-right-wing foreign-policy think tanks erected by the Islamophobia industry: Since 2013, Bolton has served as chairman of the Gatestone Institute, an organization that claims Muslims have established hundreds of “microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law” throughout France; that Muslim refugees have brought “a rape epidemic” and “exotic diseases” with them to Germany; and that the United Kingdom is on the cusp of becoming an “Islamist colony.”
Not surprisingly, Bolton is wiping out the prior staff of the National Security Council and remaking it in his racist, xenophobic image. On May 29, 2018, he named Fred Fleitz as his chief of staff. Fleitz is a crazy person and now has power and influence.
Fleitz is a senior vice-president at [the] Center for Security Policy, an Islamophobic think tank....called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center....
....claims the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the highest ranks of the American government — and called.... to investigate the Islamist “Fifth Columnists” that were wielding influence over the Obama administration.... claimed that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing; that Obama incorporated the Islamic crescent into the logo of a new missile-defense group; and that Chris Christie’s decision to appoint a Muslim-American to New Jersey’s state judiciary [was] an act of treason.
Fleitz has called for the U.S. to formally declare war on a broadly defined Global Jihad Movement; suggested that most mosques in America are incubators for subversion or violence; and denounced some interfaith dialogue efforts in America as a move by “stealth jihadists” to undermine the country’s democratic values.
.... said that 80% of American mosques are “incubators of, at best, subversion, and, at worst, violence and should be treated accordingly.”
“The appointment of Fred Fleitz speaks volumes about the administration’s prioritization of fearmongering and racism over actual national security issues,” said Scott Simpson, public advocacy director for Muslim Advocates, a Washington-based group.
Could the recommendations in the report Fleitz co-authored ever become government policy? The first step would likely be designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, something the Center for Security Policy has urged for many years, and which Pompeo and Jeff Sessions both supported while in Congress. If that happened, a zealous Justice Department could target American Muslim organizations, and even mosques, by claiming they have Brotherhood ties.
Americans have yet to see how Trump—guided by advisers like Sessions, Pompeo, Bolton, and Fleitz—would respond to a major terrorist attack on American soil. There’s a parallel between the CSP report’s depiction of American Muslims as closet terrorists and Trump’s own depiction of American Latinos as rapists, criminals, and gang-members. Eighteen months into the Trump presidency, Latino immigrants are suffering that rhetoric’s consequences in brutal ways. The selection of Fred Fleitz makes it more likely that American Muslims could one day too.
Despite a background in the CIA and in the Bush administration, Fleitz is amazingly incorrect on major security matters which is a shame considering he's now the chief of staff for the National Security Adviser.
In 2011, Fleitz insisted that the consensus conclusion among America’s 16 intelligence agencies about the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program was wrong — and that Tehran was actually “on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon,” a claim that has since been exposed as utterly false...
In the Bush’s administration, Fleitz fought viciously with analysts at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency — because they refused to let Bolton publicly claim that Cuba was attempting to acquire biological weapons, on the basis of his idiosyncratic interpretation of intelligence reports.
Sources:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-boltons-deputy-draws-ire-of-jewish-muslim-groups-1527854400