When “New Age Rightist” Stephen Schwartz discovered graffiti calling him “the philosophical whore of North Beach,” the former Trotskyite turned red with rage. In 1987, Schwartz was arrested for malicious mischief in North Beach. The article was criticized by Marc Maron and Mark Riley, who co-host the Air America Radio program Morning Sedition. Thompson, who had committed suicide two days earlier. In the Februedition of the Weekly Standard, Schwartz caused a controversy with an article he authored titled The End of the Counter-Culture, in which he savaged avant-garde writer Hunter S. Schwartz’s objectivity and his understanding of Islam have also been questioned by Ali Sina in Two Faces of Islam?. Amir Butler notes in Understanding Stephen Schwartz that Schwartz described both the Sunni Hamas and the Shia Hezbollahas Wahhabist. Schwartz’s credentials as a scholar of Islam, and particularly of Wahhabism, have been called into question. Most recently, he authored Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook, in which he explores the cultural achievements and histories of Sephardic Jews in the Balkans. He is a regular contributor to such neoconservative magazines as the Weekly Standard and FrontPage. Schwartz has written several tracts on foreign affairs, most notably The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and its Role in Terrorism, which condemns the influence of Wahhabism and advocates Sufism. He worked briefly for Voice of America but was fired. After a stint as an obituary writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and reporter for the San Francisco Faith, a lay Catholic newspaper, Schwartz became a reporter for The Forward, a Jewish-oriented publication based in New York City. In the early 1980s, he professed to be the United States representative of the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary Edén Pastora. Later, he managed a San Francisco punk band called The Dils and penned the words to their song “Class War” (“I wanna war between the rich and the poor/I wanna fight and know what I’m fighting for”). In the late 1960s Schwartz was founder and editor of a surrealist review called Antinarcissus - Surrealist Conquest. In his youth, he was a self-styled surrealist poet and literary hanger-on in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Like many American neoconservatives, Schwartz started out on the far left politically his mother was a member of the Communist Party. Schwartz has published articles under the pen-names Comrade Sandalio (writing for The Alarm) and Nico Ordway (writing for Search and Destroy magazine). Schwartz rejects the term “conversion” because he was not a member of any organized religion before becoming a Sufi. Schwartz does not usually use his adopted Arabic name, Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz, because he published widely under his birth name, although he signed the name Suleyman Ahmad Stephen Schwartz to his conversion letter. Born into a Jewish family, Schwartz is a convert to the Naqshbandi order of Sufi Islam. Stephen Schwartz (born 1948) is an American author and foreign policy pundit.
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