Debbie Schlussel


Debbie Schlussel 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, among others.
Schlussel writes movie reviews and commentary regarding pop culture, politics, Islamic terrorism, American Muslims, illegal immigration, news, and sports. She has also frequently appeared on The Howard Stern Show and on cable news.

Early life and political career

Schlussel was born in Detroit, 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. Schlussel graduated from Southfield High School in 1986. In 1990, Schlussel ran for the Republican nomination for the 4th District 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 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 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

Professor of Media and Public Affairs William Youmans described Schussel as a "leading right-wing observer of AD 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 described Detroit's Arab Americans as potential terrorists."
In September 2003, a New York Post column by Schlussel reported that Imad Hamad was a former member of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Hamad's FBI award was revoked, however, FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that the change had nothing to do with Schussel.
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.
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 obscene e-mail messages because she is Jewish. He was sentenced to eight months in federal prison
Schlussel has alleged that American politicians, including the late former Republican Senator Fred Thompson and former Democratic President Barack Obama, have connections with radical Islam, In October 2001 she alleged that President George W. Bush was connected to the Council on American–Islamic Relations. CAIR later sued Schlussel of trademark violation when she used their acronym in a web-domain directing readers to Islamophobic webpages. In 2005, she accused Morgan Spurlock of an unbalanced representations of Islam.
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 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 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. She 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.