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Terrorism

Joel B. Pollak

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has published a report accusing Twitter, the popular social media service, of failing to explain its “indirect support for online jihad” by providing communication services to international terror groups, in apparent violation of U.S. law.

The report, by MEMRI executive director Stephen Stalinsky, notes that several terror groups–including Hizbullah, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahedeen–maintain accounts on Twitter. Members of Congress and the have encouraged Twitter to act against these accounts, and the State Department is reported to be investigating them, but Twitter has not acted and refuses to provide comment to the media.

Hizbullah's Al-Manar News on Twitter (Source: MEMRI)

Stalinsky writes:

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Warner Todd Huston

Tis the season for buying books for your loved ones and as always the The New York Times Sunday Book Review is here to help. And as always the Sunday Book Review is there to help us understand that anything from the right side of the aisle, especially the tea party, is to be put in the worst possible light at all times.

So, what is it this time? Book reviewer Kevin Boyle lets us all know that he thinks that the folks of the tea partymovement are somehow just like the Ku Klux Klan. Nice, huh? That’ll get the holiday season started right!

In his Sunday book review Boyle reviews a pair of books actually on the KKK — meaning that for the first time bringing up the KKK in a New York Times article isn’t wholly gratuitous. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

But what was totally gratuitous was the way in which Boyle opened his review, slamming by inference the entire tea party and analogizing it to a modern day KKK:

Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.

No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to behold.

Yeah, because today’s era and the tea party are so dang similar to the KKK and the era of the 1920s, right? What is a more natural fit, anyway? What left-winger could doubt Boyle’s hatemongering?

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Bob McCarty

A preliminary hearing for Mohamed H. Dawod is scheduled to take place Monday at 10 a.m. Central in Springfield, Mo. The 25-year-old Glendale, Ariz., man is charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the Sept. 8 shooting death of an Ohio man at a Greyhound bus station in the southwest Missouri community.  Now, the BIG QUESTION is:  Will the mainstream media cover it?

Mohamed H. Dawod

Dawod is accused of shooting Justin Hall, 32, of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, during a late-night rest stop for travelers on a St. Louis-bound bus full of passengers from as far away as Amarillo, Texas, point of origin for the bus.

On Sept. 9, I was the first to raise the possibility that the shooting might be a case of terrorism at my website and at BigGovernment.com after officials in the Southwest Missouri community, according to a report in the Springfield News-Leader, were quick to say the shooting appeared random.

A day later, a KSPR-TV report cited Springfield police officials as saying that, because of a language barrier, they only learned Dawod’s name and had asked the FBI to help them with the investigation. That local television report included this telling paragraph:

Ten separate witnesses say they did not notice the men fighting or arguing before the shooting. One passenger said she watched the suspect wander around the terminal until the call to line up to re-board the bus. “She then observed the suspect remove a silver and black handgun from a back pack he was carrying,” the officer wrote. “The suspect then pointed the handgun upward while saying something. The witness could not understand what the suspect said and didn’t know if he was speaking English.” No matter what was said the witness said Hall didn’t react or turn around. Shortly after the witness says Dawod shot him from a few feet away.

I went on to draw information from two other television news reports that seemed to reveal more than the “official” story lets on about the deadly incident that involved a man with a Muslim name allegedly shooting someone he did not know less than 48 hours ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

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Warner Todd Huston

In his recent assessment of his year since he was unceremoniously — and illicitly in many folks’ estimation — fired by NPR, Juan Williams indulged one of those fallacious assumptions that just screams left-wing spin. It is the sort of straw man argument that casts aspersions on others — this time against Christians — while pretending to be the logical adult in the room, not to mention while pretending not to be casting aspersions. It is a logical sleight of hand that many liberals use.

First, let me say that I am 100% on Williams’ side in that his firing by NPR was a real breach of journalistic ethics: theirs. The comments he made a year ago that got him fired did not in any way harm his veracity as a journalist, nor were they racist or even incorrect. Heck, they weren’t even injudicious except when taking the brain dead political correctness that infests the left into consideration.

Though that was the discussion of a year ago and really is not something worth rehashing here, Williams did say something outrageous in his review of that year-old issue that deserves to be highlighted. In essence, Williams made an illogical argument about how we should think of radical Islam, and he did so by assuming that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Bombing could be considered as representative of Christianity as the Saudi 19 were of radical Islam.

Here is what Williams said [my bold for emphasis]:

… we have to keep in mind that America is a country founded on the ideal of religious liberty. We can’t stereotype any group on the basis of the behavior of extremists among them. We don’t indict all Christians because of Timothy McVeigh.

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Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

Is there a better way to bring in the weekend than by chatting with top newsmakers over drinks? Sure, the bar talk and news commentary device has been used before, but that was just a sound stage. Today Accuracy in Media introduces our new video series, Bar Stool Confessions, which offers a closer look at those who break and shape the news.


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Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

In a major blow to Al-Jazeera’s drive for acceptance and respectability in the West, the government of Israel says that one of the channel’s correspondents has confessed to acting as an agent of the terrorist group Hamas. The Israeli government also claims to have uncovered a network of Hamas operatives using Al-Jazeera as a cover.

The U.S. State Department designates Hamas as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and states that it “was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Hamas does not recognize Israel and its founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The group considers Israeli settlers and civilians legitimate military targets.

Samer Allawi, a Palestinian who ran Al-Jazeera’s Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau, was released, sentenced to time served, and agreed to pay a $1,400 fine. He was arrested on August 9 and held in an Israeli prison. Various press freedom groups had clamored for his release.

Some commentators are saying that the treatment of the Al-Jazeera correspondent is evidence of a tougher policy by Israel toward Qatar, an Arab dictatorship which completely finances Al-Jazeera and selects its news and editorial personnel. A classified report prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and leaked to the Israeli media in August outlined Qatar’s more radical stance in the Arab and Muslim world and noted evidence of more frequent Hamas visits to Doha, the capital, and funding by Qatar of Hamas.

A story on the Israelnationalnews.com website about the report also indicated that Israel may start restricting the activities of Al-Jazeera correspondents inside Israel. It said, “Qatar is also the home of Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, which the Foreign Ministry considers extremely anti-Israel. As a result, the Ministry has worked in recent months to prevent reporters from the network from operating in Israel, and has stopped giving them visas. Currently, the only way for an Al-Jazeera reporter to enter Israel is using a passport from a country that has full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, but the Ministry is seeking ways to keep these individuals out of Israel as well.”

Although the emir of Qatar pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the channel, making it effectively a propaganda machine for the regime, he prohibits a free press and free elections at home. Bloggers critical of the royal family are simply taken away and tortured, while Al-Jazeera turns a blind eye and deaf ear to their fate.

But because the country hosts a U.S. military base, it enjoys a moderate and even pro-Western reputation. Qatar uses expensive public relations and lobbying firms like Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR) and Brown Lloyd James.

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Bob McCarty

A preliminary hearing for Mohamed H. Dawod is set to take place Oct. 12. Now, one question remains: Will the mainstream media show any interest in the case that involves a man with a Muslim name shooting a man he didn’t know in a public place on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States?

Mohamed H. Dawod

A 25-year-old man from Glendale, Ariz., Dawod pleaded not guilty Monday to charges of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the Sept. 8 shooting death of Justin Hall, 32, of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, at a Greyhound bus station in Springfield, Mo.

On Oct. 12, Dawod will appear before Judge Mark Fitzsimmons at 9 a.m. inside a courtroom at the Greene County (Mo.) Courthouse to answer charges that he shot and killed Hall in front of a crowd of fellow passengers on the bus traveling from Amarillo, Texas, to St. Louis.

Now, especially for members of the mainstream media, I’ll offer some background on the case.

In my first report on the shooting, published the morning of Sept. 9, I wondered whether or not this was a case of terrorism but reported it as only a possibility after officials in the Southwest Missouri community quickly said the shooting appeared random.

In an update several hours later, I cited a local television station report that raised questions about the alleged randomness of the shooting when it quoted Springfield police officials as saying that, because of a language barrier, they had only learned Dawod’s name and had asked the FBI to help them with the investigation. In other words, I wondered how they could declare a shooting “random” if they were not able to communicate with the suspect.

In the same update, I shared a telling paragraph from the same television station report:

Ten separate witnesses say they did not notice the men fighting or arguing before the shooting. One passenger said she watched the suspect wander around the terminal until the call to line up to re-board the bus. “She then observed the suspect remove a silver and black handgun from a back pack he was carrying,” the officer wrote. “The suspect then pointed the handgun upward while saying something. The witness could not understand what the suspect said and didn’t know if he was speaking English.” No matter what was said the witness said Hall didn’t react or turn around. Shortly after the witness says Dawod shot him from a few feet away.

I also asked another question:

Could it be that, when the man pointed the handgun in the air, he shouted, “Alluh Akbar,” the cry that’s been heard coming from the mouths of so many Islamic extremists moments before they suffer from so-called “sudden jihad syndrome”?

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Joel B. Pollak

The most memorable article in the New Yorker issue devoted to 9/11, “Ten Years Later,” is Paul Goldberger’s review of the new World Trade Center.

Goldberg dislikes the new buildings going up around Ground Zero, particularly the Freedom Tower, which he calls “not much more than a big version of a typical New York developer’s skyscraper.” But he likes the 9/11 memorial itself, designed by Michael Arad where the twin towers stood. “Arad figured out how to express the idea that what were once the largest solids in Manhattan are now a void, and he made the shape of this void into something monumental,” Goldberger writes.

It’s a sincere and eloquent review. And yet the fact that Goldberger prefers the memorial to the new commercial and residential structures around it neatly summarizes the posture the New Yorker itself has adopted toward 9/11.

The magazine is not only mournful about the past, but morose about the present and gloomy about the future. The dark cover is more optimistic than the appropriately stark “black on black” cover after 9/11–but only just, depicting the Twin Towers descending into the waters around Manhattan. The featured articles by Adam Gopnik (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America Going Down?”) and George Packer (“Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot”) leave little room for new hope.

The “Talk of the Town” section is extended to make room for the reflections of a dozen authors–many of whom are still hung up on “Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, bin Laden” (Colum McCann), or blame America for the attacks. Author Lorrie Moore even attacks J.K. Rowling for creating a “gruesomely cheering” generation of “‘Harry Potter’ readers” that celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden this past May.

The fear and loathing that drip from the pages of the New Yorker are a striking reversal of the “hope and change” with which the New York literary elite greeted the election of President Barack Obama. They are also a dramatic contrast to the reality of life in New York today, which seems almost as lively today as it did before 9/11–perhaps not quite as self-confident, but every bit as spontaneous, bizarre, steamy, stinky, and beautiful.

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Warner Todd Huston

Barack Obama is nothing less than a hypocrite on his admonitions over public discourse and the latest example of this truth lies in his refusal to condemn the violence-tinged language of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa not to mention his similar silence on the obscene rhetoric of many of the leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

While Obama has tsk tsked folks on the right like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and told the nation that we need to start “talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” he has turned a blind eye to his own vice president calling political opponents “terrorists,” members of Congress saying that Republicans and Tea Partiers can “go straight to hell,” and just this week walked on stage grinning like a Cheshire Cat immediately after Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa told a Detroit crowd that they intended to “take those sons a bitches out.” Tonight he hosts AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka in the box next to the First Lady, the same Trumka whose union members this morning stormed a port and took hostages. (MSM was careful to not report this until later today so as not to overshadow the President’s address.)

Obama loves to sound as if he’s somehow above old fashioned, boilerplate rhetoric or the mudslinging that is associated with down-and-dirty politics. He not only claims to avoid such rhetoric himself but acts the national scold and wags fingers at others that do indulge such tactics. Well, he does if it happens to be his political opponents indulging that sort of rhetoric, that is. When his side does it, the scold in chief is suddenly silent.

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Accuracy in Media

From the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism:

After years of spreading the lie that Gaddafi’s “adopted daughter” had died in the 1986 American bombing raid on Libya, many in the media are finally admitting it was all a hoax. Will Andrea Mitchell of NBC News now apologize and resign for passing off terrorist disinformation as “news?”

As we noted in a column earlier this year, Mitchell went on the NBC Nightly News to say that Libya was “accused of bombing a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers” and that “Ronald Reagan retaliated, ordering an air strike against Gaddafi’s tent, accidentally killing his young daughter. Gaddafi escaped unharmed.” Mitchell even showed Gaddafi visiting a hospital. It was pro-Gaddafi and anti-Reagan propaganda.

The facts, which we have consistently provided, are that there were no public media reports of Gaddafi having a daughter at the time of the raid, and so it wasn’t possible that she was killed.  Now it appears that Gaddafi did have a daughter with the same name, Hana or Hanna, who may have been born around the same time as the raid, and is said to be very much alive.

Whatever the ultimate truth about this girl, who may have studied to be a doctor in Libya, the dead “adopted daughter” story was a pure lie, as we have maintained for years.

The revelations are a big black eye for Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of an all political hour from 1 to 2 p.m. EST on the MSNBC cable channel. Her bio says: “Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence and national security issues, including the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for all NBC News properties.”

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Joel B. Pollak

In the ignoble quisling tradition of “Hanoi Jane,” Max Blumenthal recently traveled to Lebanon to trash the American media, denounce Israel, and reinforce conspiracy theories about the power of the “Israel lobby” in U.S. politics.

Blumenthal, who is linked to Media Matters for America, told the host of “Transit” on Lebanon’s Future TV that the American media censors criticism of Israel: “There’s no mainstream American television program, cable program, that would allow me to speak as freely as I’m speaking to you right now about some of the issues that I talk about.”

He added, gratefully, that he’s reached a global audience through Al Jazeera, which “everyone watches in the United States.”

Shortly thereafter, Blumenthal slammed Israel: “[D]uring the Second Lebanon War, when Israel was attacking this country, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister at the time, went to Jewish groups in the United States and said: ‘Every Jew in the world is fighting this war.’” (My emphasis.)

Blumenthal did not mention that the war was started by the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which targeted Israeli civilians, Jewish and Arab, throughout the war.

There are two reasons for Blumenthal’s bias and cowardice: first, his own far-left agenda; and second, the fact that Hezbollah dominates Lebanese politics and media today. Blumenthal had the “courage” to attack the American media and American democracy on Arab television, but didn’t offer the slightest criticism of Hezbollah or terrorism in general on television in a society where he knew he could suffer real consequences. (Hezbollah members were recently indicted by the UN in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, who founded Future TV.)

The rest of the interview is filled with lies, demonstrating Blumenthal’s willful ignorance of the peace process and his enthusiasm for tales of “extremely radical” Jewish political donors who he claimed are “sheep for the directors of AIPAC” in U.S. congressional elections.

Blumenthal told viewers in a country whose politics are overshadowed by a tottering Syrian dictatorship, a murderous terrorist mafia and a meddling Iranian theocracy that American democracy is a sham in which the “Israel lobby” writes legislation that the Congress hurries to pass on its behalf. Along the way, he slandered Christians who support Israel and referred to George W. Bush as “the most white president” in American history.

Blumenthal also proudly proclaimed that he will never work as a “staffer” in the American media. Perhaps he could join Cynthia McKinney as a contributor to Iranian state TV?

Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

A journalist for Al-Jazeera has been arrested on suspicion of being an agent of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. The journalist, Samer Allawi, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Afghanistan, is a Palestinian. He was apprehended by Israeli authorities as he attempted to leave the West Bank.

The detention of Allawi, a major development in the media wars over the future of the Middle East, is not the first time that Israel has detained journalists from the channel. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, several Al-Jazeera journalists working in Israel were apprehended and warned about providing military information to Hezbollah, another terrorist organization. The accusation was that Al-Jazeera journalists were reporting the specific location of Hezbollah rocket strikes on Israel, enabling the terrorists to more accurately aim their weapons. In total, Hezbollah rained an estimated 3,970 Katyusha rockets and longer range missiles on military and civilian targets in Israel. The rockets have no internal guidance system and needed to rely on spotters or media coverage of their strikes to increase their accuracy.

This kind of activity earned the channel a lawsuit, filed by the Israel Law Center in the U.S., accusing Al-Jazeera of facilitating the deaths of Israeli and American victims of the war. Judge Kimba Wood dismissed the suit, claiming that the victims had failed to show Al-Jazeera had the specific intention of aiding Hezbollah.

Since its inception, however, Al-Jazeera has functioned as a mouthpiece for terrorist organizations, including but not limited to al-Qaeda. Tayseer Alouni, the channel’s Afghanistan correspondent during the 9/11 attacks, was apprehended by U.S. military authorities and turned over to Spain, his native country, where he was prosecuted, convicted, and jailed as an agent of al-Qaeda. Al-Jazeera defended him and paid his legal fees.

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Frank Gaffney

On Sunday July 31, 20011, the front page of the New York Times featured a lengthy article– “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement”– that recounted the Center for Security Policy’s successful four-year educational campaign to educate the public on the anti-semitic, totalitarian, misogynistic doctrine of Shariah law (Islamic law), and Shariah’s threat to America’s national security and liberties.

This detailed New York Times article validates the success of the Center’s groundbreaking effort, started in 2007, to inform the public, media and policymakers about the growing threat of Islamic Shariah doctrine. There is a growing awareness across grassroots America that Shariah is a threat to our Constitution and way of life. With our team of policy experts on national security, Shariah law and the Constitutional law, the Center has published books on the terrorism-funding risks of Shariah Compliant Finance, the risks to our national security in Shariah: The Threat to America, and  the risks to our liberties in the study of fifty “Shariah-compliant” state court decisions.

The front-page article illustrates some of the great successes of the Center’s work to educate this fast-growing popular movement, attracting Tea Party Constitutionalists, pro-family conservatives, civil libertarians, feminists, legal experts and religious leaders.

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Ron Futrell

The media should be destroying Joe Biden right now. There should be a countdown clock on his resignation.

The Vice-President of the United States of America said that tea party Republicans “acted like terrorists” during the recent budget and debt ceiling discussions.

Where’s the “wall to wall” stories, live shots, commentary and demand of accountability here?

Terrorists.

This administration doesn’t call terrorists, terrorists.

Biden has denied making the comments, but Politico is sticking by its story, they also say Pennsylvania Democrat Mike Doyle used the same phrase.

In this post 9/11 world it’s unthinkable that the White House would so blatantly attack its own citizens by using that phrase. Terrorists killed my son’s high school language teacher on the Flight 77 that was forced in to the Pentagon. I drive by the memorial for Barbara Edwards at least 2 or 3 times a day and there is not a time that I go by that I do not recall those horrific attacks of that day.

Personal note here to Biden: I can get creative with words, Joe, but unlike you, I am not a plagiarist. I can think of a lot of things to call you right now, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting me, I will use them. For now, you can use your imagination. You are not worth getting into a pissing match with.

These are fellow American that Joe Biden is calling terrorists. You and me. In using that phrase towards Republicans in Congress, Biden uses it against each of us who called for Representatives who would vote for fiscal responsibility in Washington DC and not blow our money and lead to Homeland Insecurity.

Personal note to the media: Where the hell are you on this?  You patronize by your silence. I’m waiting for one of you to refer to this a just another Biden “gaffe.” Enablers. You have made careers out of trying to destroy Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, but you will find no story here. Speak truth to power. You don’t get much more powerful than the White House. Bob Woodward, where are you?

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P.J. Salvatore

From Fox Nation:

The New York Times downplayed the arrest of an AWOL Muslim soldier charged in connection with a plot to attack Fort Hood soldiers. The newspaper all but ignored the role Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo’s religious faith may have played in the alleged plot.

Abdo was arrested in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. He was found with weapons, explosive, and jihadist materials. Sources said he was attempting to purchase more weapons at the same gun store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased weapons allegedly used to gun down 13 people and would 30 others in a 2009 terrorist attack at the military base.

But the New York Times downplayed Abdo and Hasan’s Muslim faith – and ultimately the entire story.

The foiled plot appeared on page A-11 of the newspaper’s print edition. The word “Muslim” was mentioned once – in paragraph nine of the 13-paragraph story. The newspaper’s top national story was a feature piece about a boy who is following his dream to be a circus clown. That story had 28 paragraphs.

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Bob McCarty

Has The New York Times shouldered any of the blame for injecting into the public square the possibility that Muslims were to blame for the recent terror bombing in Oslo? Of course, not! The newspaper has, however, attempted to foist some of the blame for the bombing upon conservative, “counter-jihad” writers — including yours truly — in the United States and Europe.

In case you missed it, the “Old Gray Lady” of newspapering — note, I didn’t use the word “journalism” — ran a piece Saturday which, on page two, including the following paragraph about who might be responsible for the deadly attacks at the Norwegian government building and on the island of Utoeya that, combined, left more than 100 dead:

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

The article ended with the following “insightful” commentary from John D. Cohen, principal deputy counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security:

“What happened in Norway,” Mr. Cohen said, “is a dramatic reminder that in trying to prevent attacks, we cannot focus on a single ideology.”

While I didn’t quote Cohen in my Saturday afternoon piece about the attacks, I did mention the alleged claim of responsibility by the Muslim group and was careful to cite the Times as having published that alleged claim.

Still, it didn’t take long for loyal readers of the Timesin particular, one chap from the United Kingdom who anonymously posted a dozen or so comments (most of which I deleted) — to come after me. “For what?” you ask. Allegedly blaming Muslims for the dirty deeds in Norway and, ergo, wanting to kill them in revenge. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Dave Reaboi

Yesterday’s poorly reported National Public Radio Morning Edition story, “Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee,” demands a fact-check critique. The NPR report alleged that the head of Ohio’s Muslim outreach program Omar al-Omari was wrongly terminated due to a law enforcement briefing on political Islam. We needed to issue several corrections:

NPR Claim #1: “Federal officials familiar with the case say Omari was singled out because he distinguished between extremist Muslims and mainstream Muslims in his outreach and training programs.”

Fact Check #1: Many of the materials Omari had written, including his Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture, and a brochure titled ‘Agents of Radicalization’ were slanted towards a pro-radical Islamic view and support a revisionist history which blames America for many of the Middle East’s problems. In the Guide, Omari defines jihad as:

Jihad doesn’t mean holy war, as many people are led to believe. It actually means a struggle to achieve excellence. It’s the struggle Muslims face in life which varies from the Greater Jihad where a person is obliged to struggle within him/herself to overcome evil and establish good, to the Lesser Jihad which is the struggle in daily life. As Muslims are obliged to maximize their potential in order to be the best citizens they can be, jihad is the vehicle that lifts them to the challenge. The term holy war is a European concept that began with the Crusades and was extended to Islam by the West.

In an interview with The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Zuhdi Jasser, Muslim President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was highly critical of Omari’s publications:

Jasser describes the two publications as “full of factual inaccuracies” including the assertion that 66 percent of American Arabs are Muslim (close to three-fourths are Christian). Alomari also “misses the core problem: political Islam.” Instead, he indulges in “bizarre revisionist history” which “seeks to portray Muslims as victims.”

The United States is engaged in “a war of ideas” with radical Islam. Regarding jihadists, “you would hope that [Alomari] would say that these are corrupt thugs who have hijacked our faith,” Jasser told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. But instead he “describes [terrorism] as a response to what the West has done.”

The material Alomari’s agency is putting out is “classic Islamist propaganda” which suggests that “these thugs who kill people in restaurants and shopping malls will stop if we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jasser said. “In fact, they’ll find another grievance in a year or two.”

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Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Abdirizak Bihi, director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center, testifies during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community and the community's response, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 10, 2011. UPI/Kevin Dietsch

In the “better-late-than-never” department, The Washington Post has devoted 3,783 words to Abdirizak Bihi, a Muslim activist trying to counter radical Islamic activities in Minnesota and the recruitment of Muslim youth in America by a “shadowy network of recruiters.” This is the same individual who got little attention from the Post when he testified on March 10 before Rep. Peter King’s Homeland Security Committee.

The Post is finally confirming in dramatic detail the nature of the internal terrorist threat in the United States.

But you may recall that the liberal media tried to demonize King for even holding the hearings.

This is how the Post then reported on Bihi: “Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali American from Minnesota, described how a nephew turned radical and left to fight with an Islamic militia in Somalia. He said religious leaders had discouraged him from going to the authorities, warning that ‘you will have eternal fire and hell’ for betraying Islam.”

We noted at the time that the media, including the Post, had focused on Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony, during which he broke down in tears, but that Bihi, Director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, had been offering something more newsworthy—an indictment of Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, himself.

As noted in advance by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Bihi has been publicly critical of Ellison’s handling of the disappearance of some 20 Somali youths recruited by a Jihadist group in their native country.” Bihi’s nephew Burhan Hassan was killed in Somalia after traveling there to join al-Shabab, a terrorist organization working to overthrow the Somali government.

What the Post failed to report on, at the time of King’s hearings, was Bihi’s statement, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”

The Post now seems to be taking the problem seriously. It reports:

“There have been 51 homegrown jihadist plots or attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to law enforcement reports, and their frequency is increasing. Nowhere else is the problem of radicalization so concentrated as in Bihi’s section of downtown Minneapolis, where about 10,000 Somali immigrants live in a collection of faded apartment towers bordering the freeway. At least 25 young men have disappeared from here to fight for al-Shabab in the past three years, and dozens more are being investigated on suspicion of recruiting or fundraising on behalf of the terrorist organization. None so far have tried to attack in the United States, but intelligence gathered by law enforcement suggests that they will.”

Notice how the number of missing youth has gone from 20 to 25.

Yet, in its Sunday follow-up article, there is no mention of the role of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in discouraging a legitimate inquiry and solution to the problem in America’s Muslim communities.

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Larry O'Connor

Jorge Ramos is the most famous and respected Spanish-Language television journalist.  He is often invited to participate in the political roundtable on ABC’s “This Week” program and last election cycle he was given the honor of moderating debates between the Presidential field.  When candidates Obama and McCain made their last appeals for the Latino vote, it was Jorge Ramos who had the honor of interviewing them on Univision.

There is no denying that Mr. Ramos is the most influential television journalist in the Latino-American community and this Sunday he interviewed Andrew Breitbart for Univision’s version of “Meet the Press”, “Al Punto”.  The following exchange was not only an example of typical “gotcha” journalism but unfortunately for Mr. Ramos, it also shows that he or his staff might be getting their talking points from the sad clowns at Media Matters for America.

RAMOS: In one of your websites, in “Big Peace,” there was an article written by Jason Bradley titled “Terror Babies: A Growing National Security Threat.” Do you share Mr. Bradley’s point of view?

BREITBART: I didn’t even read that article but I can tell you this, I created the Huffington Post in the United States of America which is a left of center blog. I created my blogs which are mostly right of center and I believe in open debate in our society. That’s why I believe so strongly in the first amendment, so I don’t know the specifics of that article, had I known going into this interview, I would’ve read it and we could have talked about the specifics.

RAMOS: Well the specifics is that Mr. Bradley’s view is that children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies.

BREITBART: I’ve never read that, I’ve never heard that and I’d have to see the context of that to give you an opinion. I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies.

There have been 3,607 posts at Big Peace,  3,659 posts at Big Journalism, 8,039 posts at Big Hollywood, 7,329 posts at Big Government and 35,422 posts at Breitbart.tv.  For Ramos to ask Breitbart about one post from March of this year, that didn’t exactly make headlines from coast-to-coast is unfair on its face.  But then for Ramos to characterize the post as saying “children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies” is the kind of mis-representation that could only have been made if his staff only read the Media Matters lies about the post instead of the post itself.  Ramos not only slandered the post and its author with that statement, he also misinformed his audience about an article that most of them probably did not read.

Breitbart’s answer to Ramos’ fabricated mis-characterization of the post was “I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies” and of course, neither did Mr. Bradley or anybody else in the Big Peace post in question.

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Ron Futrell

I’m writing this column, hoping to avoid something tragic or horrible before it happens.

The media loves telling us how they are there to protect us from everything awful or dangerous. Okay, time to put up.

Conservatives are under attack from the left and you sit there on the sidelines.

I was in Chicago last year with Andrew Breitbart when an unruly crowd of leftists attacked him verbally and viscously. He stood strong. He had every right to be there, and it’s clear the instigators were from the left.

We’ve all seen the recent video of Breitbart in the lobby of the hotel at the gathering of leftist bloggers. Had I not already known the outcome of that encounter, it would’ve been easy to fear for his safety at that time as well. This was as close as you can get to a physical attack. Fortunately it was just verbal, but what is the next step after a verbal attack like that?

Now, the Glenn Beck situation. He takes his family to a play in New York and is accosted by a gang of leftists going after his wife and daughter. Beck travels with security—I’ve seen them and chatted with them. By all accounts, security could not have done much to help with this incident. Wine was kicked on Beck’s wife and an evening out with his family ruined. Leftists punks acted like paparazzi, taking pictures of Beck’s family and posting them on a left-wing web site.

My media friends, who are always so quick to point out conservative violence where there is none, are virtually ignoring this activity that is right at the edge of busting out into something much more serious.

The activist old media work overtime to bring cameras to tea party rallies hoping to spot violence, or the least bit of incivility, and lead the newscast with the result. They have been shut out. Now, we have documented evidence of conservatives under attack, and the media give us crickets.

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