Rep. Allen West, R-Fort Lauderdale (Photo: Facebook/Debra Todd)

Rep. Allen West, R-Fort Lauderdale, does not like the fact that a strong majority of Americans disapproves of Congress and is pinning the blame on Republicans. According to a recent interview with Politico, West thinks the Democratic Party’s messaging is the reason for the belief — messaging he says Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would be impressed with.

Politico reports:

“If Joseph Goebbels was around, he’d be very proud of the Democrat Party because they have an incredible propaganda machine,” West told reporters in the Capitol. “I think that you have, and let’s be honest, you know, some of the people in the media are complicit in this, in enabling them to get that type of message out.”

…

The freshman Republican, whose district is in heavily Jewish South Florida, said his reference to Goebbels wasn’t designed to link Democrats to the overall Nazi party.

“I’m talking about propaganda, OK,” he said. “Don’t start taking my words and twisting it around. I’m talking about propaganda. And I think that’s a very important thing. When you tell me that everyone thinks that the only people on Capitol Hill are House Republicans, it’s because that’s what’s being portrayed, is that there’s nobody else up here.”

“Once again, you guys will take whatever I say and you will spin it to try to demonize me or demagogue me,” West added. “What I’m talking about is a person that was the minister of propaganda. And I’m talking about propaganda. So please. I’ll be prepared to wake up tomorrow and you guys make up some crazy story. Whatever.”

West added that Republicans “need to do a better job of being messengers.”

West has earned national criticism for speaking aggressively when discussing or talking to political opponents. He once sent an email to colleague Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Pembroke Pines, calling her “vile, unprofessional, and despicable,” “a coward,” “characterless” and “not a Lady.” He demanded that the current Democratic National Committee Chairwoman “shut the heck up.” West has also called supporters of President Obama “a threat to the gene pool” and has claimed that liberal women “neutering American men” were to blame for the country’s growing debt.

His attitude toward his opponents is already being used against him. One of his Democratic opponents, Patrick Murphy, has presented his candidacy as a foil to West’s “extremism.”

West’s 2012 reelection bid is expected to be one of the most competitive races in the country. West, a tea party favorite, is a firebrand who is known for his extreme rhetoric, making him a favorite in right-wing circles and an easy target for the left.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The tea party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

Mother Jones reports that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has received an endorsement from former Rep. Fred Grandy, R-Iowa, an anti-Islam activist.

Via Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:

Since leaving the House, Grandy has reinvented himself as an anti-Islam activist, delivering dire warnings of the threat of what he calls “galloping Shariah” law. At a tea party event in Maryland in October, Grandy warned that Occupy Wall Street was being propped up by the Council American Islamic Relations—which, according to Grandy, is in turn a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Is #OWS part of an Islamist plot to take over the United States? In the eyes of Gingrich’s newest endorser it is.

Grandy’s pet issue is the perceived creep of Islamic law into American courts—in October, he wrote that there had been “attempts in 23 states to use shariah law either in trial or appellate cases.” After losing his job as a talk radio host in March (in part because his wife, who co-hosted the show, had warned that the government had been infiltrated by “Shariah-compliant” officials), Grandy embarked on a ”Shariah Awareness Tour,” culminating in a  appearance at the national Constitution or Sharia Conference in Nashville last month.

Grandy is not the only anti-Islam activist claiming the Muslim brotherhood is behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tom Trento, a Florida-based activist and ally of U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner, claimed his team found what it considered evidence that Occupy Orlando is part of a “move by a Muslim activist to take over control of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ in the ‘spirit of the Arab Spring.’”

Gingrich, however, is the latest in a revolving list of candidates who have floated to the top of the party’s primary contest as an alternative to effective frontrunner Mitt Romney. PPP recently reported Gingrich leading Romney among Colorado Republicans 37-18, partly due to the fact that Gingrich is drawing the lion’s share of Herman Cain supporters left in the lurch when their man dropped out of the race in the wake of horrifically managed spiraling sex scandals.

That Newt is leading here is an obvious problem for the state GOP. Unaffiliated voters make up roughly a third of the Colorado electorate and Obama is polling way out in front of Gingrich in that demographic. PPP surveyed roughly 800 voters this week in Colorado and found Obama leading among independents by a 56 to 32 point spread.

PPP reported a plus/minus 3.5 percent margin of error in the week’s survey. Director Tom Jensen seemed to be having fun writing up the polling results.

Our new Colorado poll is more evidence that the Newt surge could be disastrous for GOP hopes of beating Barack Obama next year….

As weak as Obama is in Colorado, if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich it doesn’t look like it matters. Obama leads Gingrich 50-42 in the state, including a whooping 56-32 advantage with independents. Gingrich is a reviled figure with only 32 percent of voters seeing him favorably to 55 percent with a negative opinion, including a 25/59 spread with independents…

The GOP’s move toward supporting Gingrich is seriously endangering its chances of winning in the fall.

Jensen writes that Romney is running roughly neck and neck with Obama and that, if Republican primary voters can hold their noses and vote to nominate him as their general election candidate, Colorado could “go back into the swing state category.”

“Or it could be another easy Obama win as it was in 2008.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Late last week, national Democrats announced they would be launching a campaign responding to laws across the country that may decrease access to the polls for many for the 2012 election.

U.S. News reports:

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused Republicans of launching a “full-scale attack on the public’s right to vote.” She said that GOP efforts in states to curb instant voter registration and early voting and require photo identification at the polls to fight alleged fraud could push minorities, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, away from voting. She claimed that repeated investigations into voter fraud have found very little evidence that it occurs.

…

The Republican National Committee rejected the charges, however. Officials said there is evidence of voter fraud. In just one popularized case, for example, they note that ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—in 2008 was accused of handling 400,000 fraudulent registrations.

The website, protectingthevote.com, states that “in 2011, a new movement to change the way we vote is under way. Unlike past reforms that sought to expand access to voting, this effort aims to restrict voting purely for partisan gain.”

The website runs through some of the most restrictive new laws in states across the country. The DNC points to laws that “target voter registration drives, cut early voting, repeal election day registration, and create citizen challenges” as the biggest culprits of voter suppression.

The website also has a link to a 73-page report written by the Voting Rights Institute, with help from the DNC. The report singled out Florida as passing some of the most restrictive voting laws, including one law that targets voter-registration drives and another that cuts early voting.

According to the report:

The GOP enacted restrictions on voter registration drives in Florida and Texas, and proposed similar measures in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi. The new legislation in Florida was by far the GOP’s most extensive effort. In 2010, Republican Governor Rick Scott rode a wave of Tea Party support to victory in the state’s gubernatorial race, joining Republican majorities in the Florida House and Senate. A pinnacle of their collaboration in this year’s legislative session was HB1355, a 158-page omnibus elections overhaul that—in addition to early voting cuts—enacted draconian restrictions on all nongovernmental entities that conduct voter registration.

Under HB1355, any group or individual that conducts voter registration must now (1) register their organization with the Florida Division of Elections prior to conducting registration activities and regularly file onerous reports on all their activities; (2) track and account for voter registration forms using a specially generated number for each document; (3) submit completed voter registration forms to the state within 48 hours (a significant decrease from the previous deadline of 10 days); (4) subject themselves to fines between $50 and $1,000 for registration forms returned to the state after 48 hours; and (5) submit to new enforcement authority from the Florida attorney general.

These restrictions encumber even large and experienced organizations; immediately after HB1355 was passed, the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its voter registration activities. But these restrictions fall heaviest on small organizations that conduct neighborhood voter registration, lack the capacity to abide by the state’s reporting requirements and tight deadlines, and could be virtually bankrupted under this penalty structure. Already, there are reports of public school teachers who may face huge fines under the new law—all for the supposed offense of helping students register to vote without following each minute requirement of the new law.

Fewer voter registration drives mean fewer voters. But cutting back on voter registration drives does not have the effect of limiting the political participation of all citizens equally. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates that African American and Hispanic voters are more than twice as likely to register through voter registration drives as are white voters in Florida.

Democrats have also sought congressional investigations in order to address these laws. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.,requested congressional field hearings into the new laws, asking Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to schedule them. Nelson also sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department launch an investigation into whether the “new state voting laws resulted from collusion or an orchestrated effort to limit voter turnout.”

Florida is currently waiting for a ruling on the most controversial aspects of H.B. 1355 from a court in the District of Columbia.

Photo: Flickr/hjl

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, who has been called “weak” by immigration-enforcement supporters, has picked up the support of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, notorious for his immigration-detention measures and his birther conspiracy theories.

The Phoenix New Times reports:

According to multiple national news outlets, Arpaio will campaign with Perry in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he will give the Texas governor a political tip of the cap.

Neither the Sheriff’s Office or Perry’s campaign responded to New Times‘ request for confirmation of the reported endorsement, and none of the news outlets reporting the political nod are naming names — ABC News cites “a source with knowledge of the endorsement” as the source of the information. CNN is equally vague, attributing its report to a source within the “governor’s campaign,” while NBC cites a “a source familiar with the matter.”

Arpaio was heckled as he spoke at “Choose Liberty,” a recent event organized by the Eastern Orlando Tea Party and Americans for Prosperity.

Numbers USA — an organization that supports “Attrition Through Enforcement” immigration policy and wants “lower immigration levels” — blamed Perry’s poor showing in the Florida straw poll on his weak stance on immigration enforcement.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has criticized Perry for supporting in state college tuition for undocumented students in Texas. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports immigration enforcement measures like Arizona’s controversial S.B. 1070 has said “Perry cannot run on is his very questionable, liberal immigration record.”

The New Times adds that “Perry isn’t exactly the hawkish border bully we’d expect Arpaio to support — given some of the sheriff’s other options,” and “in a recent debate between GOP presidential candidates, Perry made what many consider to be a political misstep for a candidate hoping to woo Conservatives: he showed a little compassion.”

A group of tea party activists have formed a group called Ohioans for Workplace Freedom, and plan to put a measure on the 2012 ballot that would amend the state constitution by making Ohio a right-to-work state, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

“Currently, Ohio is not among one of 22 right-to-work states in the U.S. In those states, unions may not reach agreements with employers that require union membership or payment of union dues as a condition of employment,” The Dispatch reports.

A similar measure was on the ballot in 1958. Ohio voters rejected the proposed constitutional amendment by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent, and, in the process, propelled Democrats to victories in both the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate race that year. At the time, it was the largest defeat of a statewide ballot issue in Ohio’s history.

On Tuesday, Ohio voters rejected Issue 2, a statewide referendum on union-busting legislation known as Senate Bill 5, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent.

SB5 would have ended the practice of “fair share payments,” which public employees that choose to be non-union members are currently required to pay for the costs of negotiating and administering a contract from which they derive benefits.

Gov. John Kasich, who after watching his signature piece of legislation go down in flames on election night, declared “the people have spoken,” did not entirely rule out getting behind this latest effort.

“Kasich, the primary pitchman for Senate Bill 5 and Issue 2, has previously stated that he did not believe Ohio needed to become a right-to-work state. This morning, Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said ‘job creation is Gov. Kasich’s top priority and we need to continue to work hard to create a jobs-friendly climate in Ohio,’” The Dispatch reports.

Before going on the ballot, likely in time for the 2012 presidential election, the group would have to get the language approved and collect 386,000 valid signatures in support.

“Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders,” writes Campaign chief and right-wing politics public relations consultant Joe Wierzbicki in a release announcing a new campaign ad.

Wierzbicki points readers to poll data from Quinnipiac suggesting Americans now view the Occupy movement unfavorably.

The new poll finds that support for the violent Occupy Wall Street mobs has fallen further, and since Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders, it spells trouble for him as well….

The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time highlighting this vulnerability for Obama, but that is where you come in.  We urgently need your help to raise the money to launch our new TV ad campaign that shows how Democrat leaders shamelessly have championed the Occupy Wall Street mobs that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and created considerable damage in cities across America.

Look at this picture below and see what the scene was like this week in Oakland, California.  Are we going to let these mobs and their Democrat champions do this to America, or are we going to fight back?

The language in the ads and the release is exaggerated and the facts are cherry-picked. The larger narrative strategy of the campaign also comes with some risk.

Voters may not love recent more-aggressive Occupy tactics, but they still sympathize to a significant degree with the main message of the movement, which centers on the need to address the inarguable fact of expanding inequality in the country tied to the finance industry and corporate America and the way the two dominate Washington DC.

Although it’s true recent polls report dipping popularity for the Occupy movement, they also report greater sympathy for the movement than for the Tea Party and much greater sympathy for the movement than for Wall Street and large corporations.

Wierzbicki, however, isn’t looking to provide that kind of context. He’s a longtime pitchman for Republican Party-associated firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. He helped sell George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq and wrote the memo that led conservative establishment figures to backdoor-finance the national Tea Party bus tour during the 2010 campaign season.

Wierzbicki’s 2011 Campaign to Defeat Obama PAC shares a Willows, California, PO Box address with his Our Country Deserves Better PAC and with TeaPartyExpress.org. All three organizations reportedly share the same treasurer as well, a Kelly Lawler, who was a former staff member at the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Still, as political analysts of all stripes will tell anyone who will listen, broader contexts can matter not at all in the world of campaign strategy, which is partly tied to the fact that the public doesn’t always overly concern itself with the work histories of the partisans behind most political media campaigns.

As the “OWS as Democratic Party-backed public menace” ads hit the airwaves, a blogger for the Economist underlines exactly why bad-acting Occupiers might pose a major political problem for Democrats.

“As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behaviour of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes.”

The blogger points to CBS coverage from clashes in Oakland.

“You see the problem? Who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don’t cotton to this sort of shenanigans and who vote in droves.”

The Massachusetts Republican Party recently launched a nearly identical campaign targeting Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as the “matriarch of mayhem.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

This weekend’s Florida Tea Party Convention failed to draw many of the GOP candidates invited to participate: Out of the eight GOP presidential candidates, only Rick Santorum showed up to speak.

Convention organizers invited a slew of speakers to talk about tea party-favored topics, such as Agenda 21 and the supposed “radicalization of Islam” in the U.S., and had scheduled a discussion among GOP presidential candidates. However, only one candidate showed up.

According to the Huffington Post:

Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich all called in and were patched into the venue’s speakers. Portraits of the candidates who called in were splashed on a large screen while they answered questions.

During his question-and-answer session, Santorum made light of his opponents’ absence.

“Since I’m the only one that’s going to be here, I’ll fill up the glass of water so no one else has to take it,” he said in reference to a glass and pitcher laid out only for him. The line elicited laughter and applause from the audience. “You’re welcome,” a happy Santorum said in response.

In a swipe at candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, who neither telephoned in nor appeared in person, cardboard cutouts of the two men were placed on stage and asked questions by the town hall’s moderator.

Ron Paul and Rick Perry did not address the convention in person, over the phone, or in cardboard form.

There was also a low turnout among GOP U.S. Senate candidates, who earlier in the year all made it to a conservative town hall hosted by the Florida Family Policy Council and others.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that Deon Long, Mike McCalister, Ron McNeil, Craig Miller and Marielena Stuart all showed up to speak at the convention. Adam Hasner, Connie Mack and George LeMieux were no-shows.

Other big Florida conservative names were also absent from the convention. Both Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., declined invitations to the event.

Among the right-wing speakers invited to address the crowd were former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, anti-Islam blogger Pam Geller and G. Edward Griffin. Griffin is an anti-Federal Reserve, anti-United Nations and anti-communist conspiracy theorist who describes himself as a “life member” of the John Birch Society — a historically infamous anti-communist group. Geller is best known for her blog Atlas Shrugs, which has been described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.”

The attendance of Geller, and other anti-Islam activists, caught the attention of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-FL), which said the event would “feature a presentation by anti-Islam extremist Pamela Geller and another Islamophobe.” Bill Warner, CAIR said in a statement, was another featured “anti-Islam activist.” This eventually resulted in a feud between members of CAIR and tea party organizers.

Some are saying the retreat of big names was due the inclusion of speakers such as Geller. On her blog this weekend, Geller claimed that such claims were an example of the media “taking their talking points and their cues from the Muslim Brotherhood, pimping their anti-American hate and spinning it into ‘news reportage.’”

Geller did, though, criticize the GOP candidates who did not show up to the event.

She wrote:

I told the convention, “You dance with the one what brung ya,” and that applies to a lot of the politicians who were absent yesterday: the Tea Party elected them, and if they had any sense of honor, any sense of gratitude to the ones who elected them, they should have been there. Those politicians have the Tea Party to thank for their offices.

The convention was sponsored by Freedom Works, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Craig Miller’s U.S. Senate Campaign and the Oath Keepers.

While tea party organizers say it was because CAIR “disrespected” one of its speakers, CAIR members say it was because an event organizer was called out for trying to shut down an upcoming CAIR convention while he was reaching out to the group.

Shibly and Nezar Hazme of CAIR’s Florida chapter tell The Florida Independent that an organizer of the convention, Geoff Ross, had invited Shibly to attend the convention after the group had expressed disappointment over the participation of Pamela Geller.

Geller is best known for her blog Atlas Shrugs, which has been described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.” The attendance of Geller, and other anti-Islam activists, caught the attention of CAIR.

Ross says he wanted to offer the opportunity to have “both sides” air their views at the convention, and protect the group’s “First Amendment rights.”

However, around the time that Ross extended the invitation to CAIR, he also emailed catering staff at Jungle Island in Miami, asking them to decline to host a CAIR fundraising banquet set for Nov. 12.

This is the email that Ross sent to the vice president of food and beverage at the hotel where CAIR’s event will take place:

It has been brought to my attention that your facility will be hosting a fund raiser for the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Saturday November 12th 2011.

I respectfully request that you cancel this event with CAIR. This is an organization that does not recognize the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. It has tried numerous times to place political pressure on U.S. politicians by trying to stop them from speaking at various freedom loving Constitutional events across Florida and the United States. This attempt by CAIR to muzzle the 1st Amendment rights of American citizens cannot go unanswered.

Please be advised sir that your facility is now being boycotted and placed off limits by members of my Tea Party Coalition across the state of Florida. This boycott of your facility will be lifted when your event with CAIR is cancelled. Thank you.

Ross admits that he did try to orchestrate a tea party boycott of the hotel in an effort to have the event shut down. However, he claims that happened before he extended the invitation for CAIR to speak.

Shibly and Nezar both say it was immediately after.

“On Oct. 29, Ross sent me an invitation to speak at their event,” Shibly says. “On the very following day, Oct. 30, unbeknownst to me, he emailed the hotel asking them not to host our event.”

Upon hearing this news, Nezar confronted Ross. In an email to Ross, he wrote:

While I am encouraged by your invitation and your commitment to our Constitution, your hypocrisy is troubling. Below is an email you sent to Jungle Island requesting they cancel our event next weekend.

Please help me understand how we can possibly believe one word you tell us.

Ross says he emailed the hotel because he was frustrated with CAIR “putting political pressure on hotels” and trying “to shut down” events that are hosted by people they disagree with. “Sharia law is what they are using to shut us down,” he says.

“If they can’t handle what they dish out,” he says, “then they should pick other tactics.”

Ross claims the main reason he “kicked [CAIR] out of” the Tea Party Convention was because they “disrespected” Geller.

In an email to CAIR’s D.C. headquarters inviting the group to the event, Ross wrote:

Under the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution, The Counsel of American-Islamic  Relations CAIR is very welcome to speak at our State Tea Party Convention  in Daytona Beach this Sunday. The invitation stands. We will protect your rights to speak. We also have the right to protect the 1st Amendment rights of those people you disagree with. Ref: Ms. Pam Geller and Ms. Brigitte Gabriel.

If CAIR chooses to place political pressure on facilities and hotels and to get these said facilities to disinvite speakers that CAIR disagrees with (Ref: Hutton Hotel Nashville) then you are interfering with the Constitutional rights of the American people. This falls in line with Sharia Law. Companies that capitulate to your demands are actually capitulating to Sharia Law. [Emphasis mine.]

A communications person at CAIR D.C. took issue with the accusation that CAIR was responsible for Hutton Hotel severing its contract with an anti-Islam group.

The D.C. communications person responded to the email and asked, “What is your evidence that CAIR contacted the hotel in Nashville?” He added, “Please don’t cite Pam Geller’s unsubstantiated rantings.”

Ross told Sunshine State News that a “CAIR leader in Washington called Geller ‘a ranter’ and ‘a liar,” thus prompting him to disinvite CAIR.

Shibly later learned from a press release that he was no longer invited to the convention.

Ross says he has “never said anything negative about CAIR,” but was just “getting sick and tired of their tactics.”

Shibly tells the Independent that he is not surprised, but is very upset with what has happened. “Apparently free speech is only protected by the tea party if it means inciting hatred against Muslims,” he says. “Free speech used to expose such hatred is unacceptable to them.”

“It just amazes me that they claim to honor the Constitution and freedom of speech so much and criticize us for ‘infringing’ on free speech,” Shibly says, “and yet they do the exact same thing.”

The Tea Party Convention will take place at the Volusia County Ocean Center Nov. 4-6. According to the convention’s website, sponsors of the event include Freedom Works, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Craig Miller’s U.S. Senate Campaign and the Oath Keepers.