Quick Facts
Biography
Debbie Schlussel (born April 9, 1969) is an American attorney, author, political commentator, movie critic, and blogger. She has been published in the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and The Jerusalem Post, as well as many other publications.
Schlussel writes movie reviews and commentary regarding American Muslims, sexual assault victims, Polish people, illegal immigrants, female athletes, and Holocaust survivors (see below). She also frequently appears on The Howard Stern Show and Fox News Channel.
Early life and political career
Schlussel was born in Southfield, Michigan to a family of Polish Jewish descent. She received a BA from the University of Michigan and later earned a JD and MBA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1990, Schlussel ran for the Republican nomination for the 4th District (Oakland County) of the Michigan House of Representatives. She was defeated by Barbara Dobb by a single vote from around 8500 cast.
Schlussel claimed voter fraud led to her defeat, making allegations of impropriety against the family of her opponent and the judge who ruled on the issue. The judge previously represented her opponent in a criminal matter. In 1998, she lost in the same district (now renamed the 39th) against Marc Shulman.
Professional life and views
Schlussel is a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, who reviews films for both radio and her web site. She is the official movie critic of the Larry The Cable Guy show on Jeff & Larry's Comedy RoundUp Channel/Great American Comedy XL Channel on SiriusXM.
The New York Times described her in 2010 as, "a kind of all-purpose film critic, political commentator and Web opinion spinner." Her columns (mainly about politics) have been published in the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and The Jerusalem Post, amongst others. She was a talk show host at radio station WXYT-FM, then known as WKRK, in Detroit from 2002-03.
Muslims and Islam
In September 2003, a New York Post column by Schlussel exposed an upcoming FBI award to Imad Hamad, a former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist. As a result of the column, Hamad's FBI award was revoked.
In July, 2007, Robert Mustaq John, a Muslim immigrant and resident of the Bronx, New York, was sentenced to four months in federal prison for sending Schlussel an anti-Semitic death threat featuring a picture of Daniel Pearl being beheaded and telling Schlussel she would be next. John pleaded guilty in the case, United States of America v. Robert Mustaq John, Case No. and Docket No. 06-CR-854, but Schlussel believed the sentence by Judge Azrack was inappropriately lenient.
On May 7, 2008, Mohamad Fouad Abdallah, a resident of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, pleaded guilty in United States Federal Court to sending Schlussel anti-Semitic death, rape, and torture threats in the name of Hezbollah. He admitted in his plea agreement to sending Schlussel the obscene e-mail messages because she is Jewish and he is Muslim. Abdallah was prosecuted and sentenced to eight months in federal prison in United States of America v. Mohamad Fouad Abdallah, Case Number 2:08-cr-20223.
William Youmans (then a PhD student) described Schussel as a "leading right-wing observer of AD [Arab Detroit, whose] blogging, articles, and op-eds inform other right-wing activists, who mobilize against government-community relations when they seem too cozy. This group has called for greater scrutiny of Arab and Muslim Americans by government officials, and officials they consider pro-Arab are frequent targets of their protests. Consistently, Schlussel and her allies have sought to expose the 'true nature' of Detroit's Arab Americans as potential terrorists."
Schlussel has alleged that certain American politicians, ranging from Republican Fred Thompson (now deceased) to Democrat Barack Obama, have connections with radical Islam,
In October 2001 she criticized President George W. Bush for alleged ties to the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a group with which she would tangle in court a decade later.
In 2005, she wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal accusing Morgan Spurlock (who produced the documentary series 30 Days and film Super Size Me) of unbalanced and faulty methods in preparing a documentary about Islam.
In 2005, Schlussel opined that "WNBA players are bad role models for young girls", citing as one example Anna DeForge, who is a lesbian. She was criticized for these statements by player Kayte Christensen in an Arizona Republic column.
During and following the 2006 captivity of American journalist Jill Carroll in Iraq, Schlussel said that Carroll hated Israel and the U.S. When objections were raised, she responded to her critics as "blind worshippers of Jill Carroll" in need of "LASIK". In 2007, she stated that atheists are intolerant of Christians, and wrote that American Muslims are no more moderate than those in the Middle East; that blog post of hers was read aloud on The Rush Limbaugh Show.
After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Schlussel wrote on her blog, "1 down, 1.8 billion to go", referring to the world's total Muslim population.
"As I’ve repeatedly said before, American Muslims are NO different than Muslims on the streets of Riyadh, Cairo, Benghazi, and Bint Jbeil. They are just as extreme, and the American border is a fiction of convenience for them, NOT something that magically moderates them."
In 2011, she was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as one of 10 people in the United States' "Anti-Muslim Inner Circle".
Controversies related to comments on the Holocaust
On May 30, 2012 Schlussel wrote a blog post commenting about a speech by President Barack Obama, in which he mistakenly used the phrase "Polish death camps" referring to the German death camps in occupied Poland. Schlussel said Obama owed no apology for his remark, and she criticized ...
the feigned shock and fake moralizing over his comments, yesterday, about German Nazi death camps in Poland being a Polish death camp...Poles murdered millions of Jews, they maintained several death camps, and they wiped out almost all of both sides of my family, as well as those in hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families. This wasn't just the Nazis. It was tens of thousands of eager Poles and more.
In addition to discussing Polish collaboration with the Nazis, she said that a "majority were all too happy for the Judenrein". She discounted the Polish Righteous Among the Nations by stating that only a "very tiny few" gentile Poles aided the Jews. Her commentary provoked protest in Poland. The chairman of the Polish Parliament's Foreign Affairs Commission, Grzegorz Schetyna, called her commentary a pack of lies. In its daily news release, the Polish government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance dubbed Schlussel's commentary as defamatory.