Into the ol’ mail slot, if email could enter slots, came a new piece. I reproduce it below as a screen shot, as I can’t find it on the web and merely copying it is unsatisfactory. To summarize, the piece is from United West (“Uniting Western Civilization for Freedom and Liberty” – note all the keywords selected for emotional content), noting the selection of a mosque in Boca Raton, FL, as a polling station, and presenting a video the claims the mosque is a center for Islamic extremism. A local (to Boca Raton) meeting to discuss the matter is announced for August 17, 2017, where evidence may be presented. Finally, an assertion of United West being a charity is made, and a request for a donation.
I couldn’t find much on this one that isn’t from biased media – which means I skipped reading Breitbart, YouTube, BareNakedIslam, etc. ThinkProgress, obviously slanted to the left, noted the cancellation of using the mosque, along with all the other religious joints being used, etc. This is interesting:
Indeed, while some take issue with using religious spaces as polling locations, churches, synagogues, and other worship halls have served as voting centers throughout American history. A rabbi serving a Reform Jewish congregation in nearby Boynton Beach noted this history while voicing support for using the mosque as a polling center last week, saying, “to suggest that every mosque is pure evil and every other religious institution is pure good is just not accurate and it’s prejudice and it’s wrong.”
Don’t click on the picture for a more readable version – it actually gets smaller.
The Sun-Sentinel also covered it. Neither Sun-Sentinel nor ThinkProgress mentioned alleged extremist activity. Importantly, both of these articles date back to July 2016, more than a year ago – while the meeting sponsored by United West is dated to August 17, 2017. Why such a delay in this meeting? Did it take place?
Snopes doesn’t mention this entire incident. In fact, Google only returned 14 entries on it, so unless you read the fringe-right extremist sites, there’s no mention of it. Which makes it quite suspicious.
And I’ve never heard of a United West charity, which automatically marks THEM as suspicious in my mind – after all, scam-artists are rampant. First I went to Charity Navigator, my first visit ever, since United West notes prominently their “501-c3” status – this is usually specified 501(c)(3). I didn’t find them, but typing United West into the Charity Navigator search engine brings up 124 entries, from United West Valley Firefighters Charities to Hamlin Unit No 11 American Legion AUxiliary Dept of West Virginia. Maybe I missed them. Maybe Charity Navigator doesn’t know about them. It’s not a conclusive search.
Charities must have EINs to claim 501-(c)(3) status. Google was unhelpful. ProPublica makes available a database of EINs, but searching on United West yields 23476 hits. Adding in Civilization was unhelpful. So .. the next step is to interrogate United West directly.
United West has a slick web site, but their search engine yielded nothing useful in response to a request for their EIN, so I cannot prove or disprove their claim to be a charity – and thus cannot check with Charity Navigator to evaluate their performance as a charity.
So I started poking around the United West web site, and discover this, with the headline “Obama funded Hezb’Allah weapons factory being built by IRAN in Lebanon.”
It’s no surprise United West is right-leaning, given the content of the mail, but in my mind, misleading or outright lying headlines pushes them right over the line into the same pocket of hell occupied by the Soviet propaganda masters. Let’s take this apart a little, shall we?
Right from the get-go, Obama funded … this phrase implicitly suggests a voluntary contribution from former President Obama directly to a factory. Well, no. Sorry, kids United West, try again. The money to which the headline refers was an internationally mandated return of funds, by an international court put together by the United States and Iran to decide matters such as these; in fact, this makes it a matter of national honor, involving the return of funds paid for weapons systems never delivered by the United States. Here’s Fortune.com’s[1] coverage of the event, from which I extracted this information. I think Fortune.com is eminently more respectable, since it presents facts and doesn’t distort the issue, so far as I can see.
But there’s more to come. In the body of this press release, the money is referred to as jizya, which is old Islamic term for taxes levied on non-Muslim subjects. While it’s good to see United West pushing back against the old falsehood that Obama is Muslim, this is really a childish twist on cleverness, reinforcing the central falsehood of the article. It acts as a club membership keyword – if you know what it means, then you’re part of the club.
And this is always important when gaining trust from the marks.
There’s little point in going on.
* * *
But what about the rest of the content of the mail? I’d like to make two points in relation to the Sleight of Hand entitling this post.
First, there’s this reference about Sharia law enfolding the United States. Given the brutality reported under Sharia law in Iran and Saudi Arabia (adversaries, by the way), as well as the Islamic State, this is meant to evoke fear, and, in fact, the famous fight or flight mechanism. Why is this important? Because it turns off the rational part of the human mind. Humanity celebrates itself for its capacity for rationality; it’s an intellectual error, however, to believe that this means we’re automatically rational. We’re not. We have a lot of short-cuts we use to achieve positive results, but those short-cuts mean we discard rationality when we use them. We look at a situation and react without rational thought.
This is great when the bushes rustle and we take off running because there might be a lion in the bushes. Make no mistake, the rational part of our brains (sometimes referred to as System 2) can be too slow to assess some situations.
But implanting an automatic reflex doesn’t make it right, and that’s what’s going on here. This group wants to say Sharia in the United States, and then use your automatic reflex of fear to shake out your wallet.
So let’s think about it, together. What does the United States Constitution say? Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This is known as the Establishment Clause, and it sounds like a safeguard to me. But is there concrete evidence that it’s really a safeguard?
Yes. Eugene Volokh covered this last year, which I noted here – a Minnesota appellate court rebuffed just such an attempt. American courts apply American law, as Eugene states the unequivocal obvious. So long as American law includes the Establishment Clause, we need not worry about a theocracy of any sort taking over the American government – and ruining the country.
My second point is very simple. The mail leads off, “Jeeze, what next? Are we still in the US or what?” (In the process of making the mail part of this post, we seem to have actually lost this line. Any reader who wishes to see the mail I received need only send me mail, using the link on the right, asking for the mail and I will forward it on to you.) Now, maybe this was added by a later relayer, but to my eye this seems to be another attempt to gain the sympathy of the reader, to signal mutual regard, and therefore trust, in the sender of the email.
And the rest becomes a wearisome exercise in failed trickery: the request for a donation to support the defense of the homeland, a defense unneeded (you pay enough in taxes for the Department of Defense, doncha think?), as we’ve come to understand here.
The lesson here? Damp down the automatic panic reaction brought on by certain keywords and do some research.
1The section in question from Fortune.com:
The major issue between the two governments was a $400 million payment for military equipment made by the government of the Shah of Iran, prior to the 1979 uprising that topped him. The U.S. banned delivery of the jets and other weapons amid the hostage crisis, but froze the $400 million advance payment. “The Pentagon handled arms purchases from foreign countries,” says Gary Sick, a former National Security Council official who served as the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. “Defense took care of the details. So the $400 million scheduled purchase was a government-to-government transaction. The U.S. government was holding the money. That’s why it was so difficult to resolve.”
