CNN to Air Report on Taxpayer Funded Fake Former Terrorist
Tonight on CNN, Anderson Cooper will be doing "a special investigative report about a self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorist who is making good money from American taxpayers with a story that just doesn't add up."
This self-proclaimed terrorist, Walid Shoebat , was one third of a traveling anti-Muslim sideshow called the "3 ex-Terrorists," and is now a very popular solo act on the Islamophobic fear-mongering speaking circuit. The other two members of Shoebat's trio were Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem.
In between his many tax-payer funded speaking engagements, Shoebat is a popular speaker at events such as Tim LaHaye's Pre-Trib (Pre-Tribulation) Research Center conferences and John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI) events. Anani is a Lebanese-born Canadian citizen who claims to have killed 223 people while a Muslim terrorist. Saleem, under his real name, Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for sixteen years, was hired by James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 2003, and founded Koome Ministries in 2006 to "expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world."
As the research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), I first became aware of Shoebat, Anani, and Saleem back in early 2008, when they were invited to speak at the U.S. Air Force Academy's 50th Annual Academy Assembly, on the topic "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today's Plague of Violence," for a fee of $13,000.
After demands by the MRFF for equal time to counter the anti-Muslim screed of the Shoebat and his fellow self-proclaimed ex-terrorists turned evangelical Christians, the Air Force Academy eventually allowed MRFF founder and president, and Academy graduate, Mikey Weinstein, MRFF Advisory Board member and Islam expert Reza Aslan, and MRFF Board member and former Ambassador Joe Wilson to speak to (deprogram) the cadets.
According to Tom Quiggin, Canada's only court-qualified expert on global jihadism, and a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence and national security expert, "Mr. Anani's not an individual who rates the slightest degree of credibility, based on the stories that he has told."
Among other things, Quiggin points to Anani's claim of killing hundreds of people after joining his first militant group in Lebanon at age 13. Anani, now forty-nine, would have been 13 in 1970. However, the fighting in Lebanon did not begin in earnest until 1975, and religious-based terrorism was practically unheard of there until after 1979. According to Anani, he left Lebanon for Egypt to attend Al-Azhar University at age 18, three years earlier.
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Tonight on CNN, Anderson Cooper will be doing "a special investigative report about a self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorist who is making good money from American taxpayers with a story that just doesn't add up.
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'Ex-terrorist' rakes in homeland security bucks – Anderson Cooper ...
Rapid City, South Dakota (CNN) - Walid Shoebat had a blunt message for the roughly 300 South Dakota police officers and sheriff's deputies who gathered to hear him warn about the dangers of Islamic radicalism.
Terrorism and Islam are inseparable, he tells them. All U.S. mosques should be under scrutiny.
"All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them," he says.
It's a message Shoebat is selling based on his own background as a Palestinian-American convert to conservative Christianity. Born in the West Bank, the son of an American mother, he says he was a Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist in his youth who helped firebomb an Israeli bank in Bethlehem and spent time in an Israeli jail.
That billing helps him land speaking engagements like a May event in Rapid City - a forum put on by the state Office of Homeland Security, which paid Shoebat $5,000 for the appearance. He's a darling on the church and university lecture circuit, with his speeches, books and video sales bringing in $500,000-plus in 2009, according to tax records.
"Being an ex-terrorist myself is to understand the mindset of a terrorist," Shoebat told CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."
But CNN reporters in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian territories found no evidence that would support that biography. Neither Shoebat nor his business partner provided any proof of Shoebat's involvement in terrorism, despite repeated requests.
Back in his hometown of Beit Sahour, outside Bethlehem, relatives say they can't understand how Shoebat could turn so roundly on his family and his faith.
"I have never heard anything about Walid being a mujahedeen or a terrorist," said Daood Shoebat, who says he is Walid Shoebat's fourth cousin. "He claims this for his own personal reasons.
RT : OH! You are also going to need this video/audio of Anderson Cooper reading from Snooki's book. 
RT : If CNN spent as much time on all stories as they do Casey Anthony, Anderson Cooper wouldn't have time to do his "Ridiculist."
Fraud shoebat exposed by ac360
Anderson Cooper. 'Ex-terrorist' rakes in homeland security bucks 
RT : If CNN spent as much time on all stories as they do Casey Anthony, Anderson Cooper wouldn't have time to do his "Ridiculist."
RT : If CNN spent as much time on all stories as they do Casey Anthony, Anderson Cooper wouldn't have time to do his "Ridiculist."