Hope Not Hate on Trump’s Links to the Counter-Jihad Movement

Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, yesterday published a piece giving further details of Donald Trump’s links to the ‘Counter-Jihad’, anti-Islam movement. The article notes that several of Trump’s advisors, such as Walid Phares and Frank Gaffney, are members of the movement. Frank Gaffney was one of those responsible for the smear that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim intent on Islamicizing America. Other versions of the same basic paranoid nuttiness are available. He was also claimed to be a Nazi and Communist. As one internet graphic pointed out, ‘Come On, He Can’t Be all Three’.

Gaffney’s part of an anti-Muslim group called The Centre for Security Policy, which has been designated a hate group by Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Centre. Trump also appears in a photo published by the Gates of Vienna blog from 2011 with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff at the launch of The United West, another ‘counter-jihad organisation. Two years earlier, in 2009, under its former name, the Florida Security Council, it organised a Free Speech Summit, at which Geert Wilders, the notorious anti-Muslim Dutch politico, was not only invited, but was actually given an award to his services to free speech. Despite the fact that he wishes to ban the Qu’ran.

As for Sabadisch-Wolff, she’s the leader of the Osterreich Burgerbewegung Pax Europa, or Austria Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa, the Austrian branch of the Burgerbewegung Pax Europa, a German anti-Muslim organisation. She’s also a member of ACT! for America, an American anti-Muslim organisation. In 2011 she was sentenced by a court in Austria to pay a fine of 480 euros for comments she made about Mohammed and Muslims at a conference organised by the Freiheits Partei Osterreich, the extreme-Right anti-immigrant Austria party.

For further information, see the article at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/nick/donald-trump-s-long-standing-links-with-counter-jihad-movement-revealed-4889

Trump’s notorious for his policy of banning Muslims from entering the US. This shows just how deep his connection to the anti-Muslim right actually goes. His stance is not isolated, but is part of a broader movement of which he is an active member.