As pointed out in an April 7, 2011 Salon.com article by Justin Elliott, "One of the more striking things about the current anti-sharia craze is how often state legislators who introduce anti-sharia bills can't answer basic questions about Islamic law or why they see it as a threat."

On March 25, the Anti Defamation League identified David Yerushalmi as the mastermind behind anti-Sharia legislation, in a report titled David Yerushalmi: A Driving Force Behind Anti-Sharia Efforts in the U.S., which noted that Yerushalmi (whom the report characterized as an "Arizona attorney with a record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry") has suggested that illegal immigrants be rounded up and placed in special criminal camps, and declared that liberal Jews "destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite."

For a sample of Yerushami's writing, see his "On Race: A Tentative Discussion" article, originally published 2006 in The Conservative Voice and reprinted in The McAdam Report. Yerushalmi starts the article with,

"This entry addresses the troubling question of race. I choose to do so because several visitors to our SANE Works for US website have commented on the dangerous line they suggest we tread here. What they mean by this in the main, if I may read a bit between the lines, is that a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights, is, if not racist, so close to being so as to be alienating."

Towards the end of the piece, Yerushalmi declares,

"There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?"

Back in December 2007 I wrote a story titled Anti-Semitic White-Supremacist Orthodox Jew Tries To Ban Islam In US, focusing on the uncanny similarity between Yerushalmi's anti-Jewish rhetoric and the narrative of the 1941 Nazi film "The Eternal Jew", probably the most infamous anti-Jewish propaganda film of all time, produced under the supervision of Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels (and some say Hitler was himself personally involved.)

My December 2007 Talk To Action article was the only treatment I've come across anywhere addressing that particular aspect of Yerushalmi's writing but I was by no means the first to cover Yerushalmi as a political force.

In a pair of August 2007 posts, David Yerushalmi: Devout Jewish Fascist, and Yerushalmi: Jew as White Supremacist, political blogger Richard Silverstein covered Yerushalmi and more recently, in 2011, Silverstein revisited the issue, with a March post, David Yerushalmi, Islam-Hating White Supremacist Inspires Anti-Sharia Bills Sweeping Tea Party Nation. Silverstein's story came a day after Mother Jones magazine published its hard-hitting article on Yerushalmi, Meet the White Supremacist Leading the GOP's Anti-Sharia Crusade. Letters from Yerushalmi's law office, to both Silverstein and Mother Jones followed, but as Richard Silverstein wrote in David Yerushalmi Threatens Defamation Lawsuit,

"The anti-jihadi lawyer's claim of damage or losing business is a twisted version of what he attempts to do to his enemies. He knows how difficult it is for an individual blogger to retain pro bono legal counsel and take the years that such cases can involve. So he holds this over one's head as a cudgel to stifle free speech and debate. Well, not this blogger. Not now. Not ever. Finally, I have no personal malice whatsoever against Yerushalmi. I don't know him personally. I don't want to know him personally."

(note: according to Silverstein, Yerushalmi subsequently withdrew his lawsuit threat.)

As noted in the ADL report, David Yerushalmi sits on the board of Frank Gaffney's Center For Security Policy, which these days seems to specialize in anti-Muslim scare-mongering. In a 2009 Washington Times article Gaffney claimed "there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself." Gaffney was recently barred from the arch-conservative 2011 meeting of CPAC, for alleging that Grover Norquist and another CPAC speaker were secret moles for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Well known for favoring the militarization of space, Gaffney served as Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the first Reagan Administration, during which he distinguished himself, according to historian Chalmers Johnson, "by his hostility to all arms control agreements."

On April 26, 2011 Gaffney's Center For Security Policy sent Congress a letter calling for a "rigorous investigation of the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood's stealthy "civilization jihad" has gained access to and influence over the United States government, with grave implications for the national security."

The CFSP letter referred to a Center For Security Policy report put together by the Center's "Team B II", which features, as one of the lead authors, former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin--who has claimed that President Barack Obama's Health Care Reform legislation laid the groundwork for a massive army of Nazi-esque "brownshirts", loyal only to the President, who will control the American population. As Boykin stated in a 2010 Morningstar Ministries video,

"I've studied Marxist insurgency. It was part of my training. And the things that I know that have been done in any Marxist insurgency that are being done in America today... Remember, Hitler had the Brownshirts, and Hitler got scared of the Brownshirts and killed thousands of them. Well, so you say, 'Are there any signs that's actually happened?' The truth is, yes. If you read the health care legislation which, by the way, no one in Washington has read, but if you read the health care legislation it's actually in the health care legislation. There are paragraphs in the health care legislation that talk about the commissioning of officers, in time of a national crisis, to work directly for the president. It's laying the groundwork for a constabulary force that will control the population in America."

Boykin's reference to Marxism has interesting resonance given his participation, as a board member of Morningstar Ministries head Rick Joyner's Oak Initiative, along with fellow board members Nicholas Papanicolaou, described on his Oak Initiative bio as "a co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations" "

Papanicolaou's fellow co-founder of the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations" is a close ally of Vladimir Putin's, current head of the Russian train system Vladimir Yakunin, typically called a member of Putin's inner circle and often described as a possible presidential candidate.

But back to the original subject:

David Yerushalmi is far from the only influential activist on the far right who seems to harbor at least some fondness for the institution of slavery. Another is Mike Huckabee's favorite American history "expert" David Barton, subject of a recent People For The American Way report. Huckabee has joked that all Americans should be indoctrinated with Barton's material, at gunpoint if necessary, and Glenn Beck has given Barton a weekly slot on Beck's show. Republican congressional Representative Michele Bachmann has called Barton "a treasure for our nation."

But as I described in an April 7 2011 story, material that has been posted for years on David Barton's Wallbuilders web site seems to indicate Barton endorses "Biblical slavery" - which is different from the institution of slavery as practiced in the Antebellum South but is slavery nonetheless. There are more data points. For example, in 2010 a nationally prominent Tea Party leader was drummed out of the movement for circulating an allegedly satirical letter that called slavery a "great gig."

Can American conservatism go even further, and get even weirder? Well sure, and it already has. For example, in 2007, a scandal broke out after powerful Republican representative Warren Chisum circulated, in the Texas State legislature, a memo citing a Geocentrist website which claimed the Sun revolves around the Earth and alleged that the Theory of Evolution was based the "Pharisee Religion" of Jewish Kabbalism.

As it turns out, this comes back around to, you guessed it, slavery. One of the main bastions of Geocentrism in the United States (or pretty much anywhere on Earth) has been the Chalcedon Institute, started by Christian Reconstructionism founder R.J. Rushdoony, who was a Geocentrist and also one of the main theorists of "Biblical slavery" (cited six times in the article on David Barton's website I've previously noted.) In 1999, a prominent geocentrist (see linked article, above) named Tom Willis helped revise the Kansas State public school science curriculum.

And so it goes.