Right Web

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The Gatestone Institute is a New York-based advocacy organization that is tied to neoconservative and other right-wing networks in the United States and Europe.[1]  Gatestone’s website describes the institute as “a non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank [that] is dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report.” It cites the following core subject areas: “Institutions of Democracy and the Rule of Law; Human Rights; A free and strong economy; A military capable of ensuring peace at home and in the free world; Energy independence; Ensuring the public stay informed of threats to our individual liberty, sovereignty and free speech.”[2]

According to one account, the institute was founded sometime around 2011 by Nina Rosenwald, an heiress of the Sears Roebuck empire who has been a key philanthropic backer of anti-Muslim groups and individuals in the United States. Describing Gatestone’s origins, journalist Max Blumenthal writes: “Through her affiliation with the Washington-based Hudson Institute, where Norman Podhoretz is an adjunct fellow, Rosenwald established a branch of the think tank in New York City. Operating under the Hudson banner, Rosenwald brought [the controversial anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders] to town in 2008 to warn against the Muslim plot to ‘rule the world by the sword.’ Wilders’s tirade during that visit against the prophet Muhammad, whom he described as ‘a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile,’ was strident even by the standards of the hawkish Hudson Institute. By 2011 … Rosenwald separated Hudson New York City from Hudson’s national branch, changing her organization’s name to the Gatestone Institute.”[3]

Among its activities, the institute holds what it calls “Briefing Council events,” which are “invitation only, exclusively for our members,” and require a minimum donation of $10,000.[4] Events in late 2012 included a presentation by Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, on the “battle for the soul of Islam” and a talk by former CIA director James Woolsey titled “War on America.” Also in 2012, Gatestone hosted a presentation by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens on the topic “Russia, China & Co.,” and a discussion on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which featured “pro-Israel” hardliners Daniel Pipes, Steven Rosen, and Anne Bayefsky.

The institute also hosted a second presentation by Geert Wilders that year, during which the controversial polemicist declared that “Islam is primarily a dangerous ideology rather than a religion. This is the truth. This violent ideology wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the whole world, including us—the Kafirs, the non-Muslims…. Islam is the largest threat to freedom which the world is currently facing.”[5]

Commentaries

Gatestone’s flagship activities include red-carpet events for personalities like Wilders and policy briefings by sympathetic speakers. The institute has also announced plans to publish books. But the bulk of the organization’s day-to-day output consists of blog posts offering neoconservative commentary on current events. Frequent topics include Israeli security, purported Palestinian malfeasance, Iran’s alleged nuclear program, and the supposed threat of Sharia law in Europe and North America.

In February 2013, for example, contributor Khaled Abu Toameh accused the Palestinian Authority of “seeking to escalate tensions in the West Bank ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama's visit” in March. “By encouraging a ‘popular intifada,’ the Palestinian Authority leadership is hoping to bring the Palestinian issue back to the top of the agenda of the US Administration and Israel,” he wrote. “The Palestinian Authority leadership is hoping that the anti-US protests will scare Obama and force him to exert even more pressure on Israel.”[6]

Abu Toameh left unmentioned at least two major drivers of renewed protests in the West Bank during the period: the death of Palestinian prisoner Arafat Jaradat in Israeli prison, allegedly as a result of torture, and an ongoing hunger strike by a Palestinian prisoner who had been detained at length but not charged with any crime.

In a separate post that month, Abu Toameh accused unnamed Palestinian terrorists of infiltrating Syria and several other countries with the goal of creating an Islamic state in the Levant. “The Palestinians who are heading to Syria have been told their ultimate mission is to liberate Palestine ‘from the river to the sea,’” he claimed. “Once they get rid of Assad, they are told, they will move to their next station—Jordan. From there, their jihad will take them to Israel, where they and their friends in Jabhat al-Nusra [The Support Front] hope to create a pan-Islamic state ruled by Sharia laws.”[7]

In other recent postings, Gatestone contributors asserted that it was “obvious” that North Korean nuclear weapons technology would “be shared with the Mullah's [sic] regime in Iran”[8] and, citing Spanish deference to Moroccan laws regarding the religious upbringing of Moroccan children adopted to Spanish parents, fretted that “Islamic Sharia law could easily become a permanent reality in Spain and across the [European] continent.”[9]

During the 2012 election season, the institute ran several articles discussing the policy positions of leading Republican candidates. In a November 2011 article, for instance, Gatestone contributor Andrew Bostom penned a piece titled “Romney vs. Gingrich on Jihad and Sharia: A Yawning, if Unappreciated, Gap.” The article criticized the November 2011 GOP debate organized by CNN, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute, which according to Bostom had failed to “highlight the yawning gap between [Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich] on the existential threat doctrine of our Islamic enemies: jihad and its motivational, sacralized religio-political ‘law,’ Sharia.”[10]

Bostom ridiculed Romney’s statement that “Jihadism is one of [the major threats to America], and that is not Islam,” calling it “a bizarre observation about the living Islamic institution of jihad.” By contrast, wrote Bostom, Gingrich has maintained “an irrefragably accurate, if blunt characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam's living, self-professed mission: to impose Sharia, its totalitarian religio-political ‘law,’ globally.” Bostom pointed to a July 2012 speech by Gingrich at the American Enterprise Institute, at which the former congressman said: “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.”[11]

In another Gatestone publication, notorious “pro-Israel” hardliner Alan Dershowitz derided the argument that Romney should return campaign donations by one of his key financial backers, the controversial casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, because Adelson’s fortune is connected to controversial foreign gambling businesses.[12]

Leadership and Contributors

Gatestone’s president is Nina Rosenwald. Its board, as of early 2013, included chairman James Woolsey, Zuhdi Jasser, Douglas Murray, Lawrence Kadish, conservative journalists Christine Williams and Amir Taheri, Georgette Gelbard, Naomi Perlman, Ingebord Rennert (spouse of the controversial junk bond investor Ira Rennert), Rebecca Sugar, and author Elie Wiesel.[13] Former Pentagon official Harold Rhode was listed as a senior fellow, along with Soeren Kern, Guy Milliere, Khaled Abu Toameh, Samuel Westrop and Mudar Zahran.[14]

At one point Gatestone listed “Fjordman (2013)” as a distinguished scholar,[15] using a pseudonym for Peder Jensen, a far-right Norwegian blogger whose writings were featured in the manifesto of mass-murderer Anders Breivik.[16] The listing has since been removed.

The website has also mentioned dozens of “contributors,” including foreign policy hawks like Anne Bayefsky, Kenneth Timmerman, former UN ambassador John Bolton, MEMRI president Yigal Carmon, Alan Dershowitz, Steven Emerson, former Pentagon official Doug Feith, neoconservative firebrand David Horowitz, Hudson Institute president Herbert London, the right-wing group NGO Monitor, Daniel Pipes, Emergency Committee for Israel spokesman Noah Pollak, former AIPAC director Steven Rosen, American Enterprise Institute fellow Michael Rubin, Natan Sharansky, Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Lee Smith, and anti-Islamic writer Robert Spencer.[17]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.