John Bolton Is a Raging Islamophobe

As is the case with almost all Trump-era stories, the panic over John Bolton’s appointment to the Trump administration has ebbed away. That particular fear was neatly filed away into the bulging drawer of the million other desperately terrible things we have to worry about right now, any one of which is sufficient to cause major anxiety.

But let’s bring this particular edition of We’re Fucked! out of the drawer for a moment, though: NBC News reported on Monday that Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, chaired an anti-Muslim non-profit called the Gatestone Institute until just last month. The organization “promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news,” according to NBC, just one member of a “cottage industry” of Islamophobic content on the internet.

A senior fellow at Gatestone appeared on Fox News in 2016 and warned that “Germany will never be the same” thanks to Muslim immigrants being allowed to make their homes in the country. The institute has also sounded the alarm about the “jihadist takeover” of Europe leading to a “Great White Death.”

Another member of the organization’s list of “distinguished senior fellows”: Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s very favorite defenders and a Fox News regular. Bizarrely, Dersh penned a piece for Gatestone in February arguing that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should recuse himself from the Mueller investigation, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with the looming threat of Islam.

Bolton was still listed as a former chairman of the group as of Monday afternoon. As recently as March, Bolton’s work was still appearing on Gatestone’s website, when his Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea was reprinted on the site.

While Bolton was still leading Gatestone, it published an article by Dutch racist Geert Wilders on why the Olympics are good, into which he shoehorned the argument that “Islam is totally alien to this central idea of our Western civilization”:

Islam is not nation-centered but globalist by nature. That is why our cosmopolitan elites with their globalist dreams of supranational institutions like it so much.

[…]

The Olympics, however, reflect the Western ideals. It is no coincidence that they originated in ancient Greece with its many states.

It’s long been known that Bolton has ties to anti-Muslim extremists like Pamela Geller, who claimed that Barack Obama sough to appease his “Islamic overlords” and is the “love child” of Malcolm X. Bolton rewarded her efforts by writing the foreword to Geller’s book.

Anyway, just another fun thing about the world we live in now. Pop it back in the drawer and think about something else as this man is out there advising the president on what nation of brown people to bomb next.