Meet Rudy's Unfriendly Friends

Meet Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisors.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

These guys are like Dick Cheney with a shotgun. Someone is eventually bound to get shot with these warmongers around.

Podhoretz is a longtime member of the neoconservative movement. This is is full statement on why he wants to bomb Iraq.

“Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will. We’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.”

Podhoretz prays that America will bomb Iraq. Think about the madness of that statement.



Michael Rubin was adviser on Iran and Iraq for Donald Rumsfeld. That alone should disqualify him from future public service. He will most likely serve in a Giuliani administration.

Daniel Pipes is against the Khalil Gibran International Academy being allowed to teach the Ababic language in Brooklyn. His reasoning is that the school will become a breeding ground for terrorism. His blog post is filled with faux-intellectual xenophobia. Which is what drives the neocon movement. It certainly isn't logic or reason.

Also, learning Arabic in and of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria. Comparing students taught in French and in Arabic, he found that "Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and greater mistrust of the West." Those Arabized students, he notes, more readily believed in "the infiltration into Algeria of Israeli women spies infected with AIDS … the mass conversion to Islam by millions of Americans," and other Islamist nonsense.

Pipes can not put his head around that America isn't Algeria. The United States is a democracy that does not have the social and economical problems of a third world nation. If this school really is a hotbed for terrorism the FBI would shut it down in a minute. It most likely already is being monitored by the feds.

No one should be surprised by Rudy's choice of advisors. He believe torture depends on which country performs the heinous acts.