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.
Above is part one where President Obama ticks off his talking points for five very long minutes. Admittedly, Stewart’s guest is the President of the United States and you have to respect the office and not interrupt (though calling him “dude” is apparently on the table), but wow — has Obama lost his magnetism, or what?
In part two below you’re going to see Stewart assume the role, not of a satirist, but as the symbol of the Disillusioned Left. The left-wing comedian is really, really, really upset that ObamaCare isn’t a complete takeover of the entire capitalist economic system of the Free World.
Also, again in part two, keep an eye out for right around the 7:30 mark when Stewart mocks Obama’s strained “I talked to a woman from Poughkeepsie…” anecdote. This President cannot take a joke.
The “dude” comment comes early in part three but the scariest part of the whole interview comes at 6:38 mark of part three when Obama talks about how the use of the filibuster isn’t constitutional. Preview of a post-2010 wave strategy? Beats moving to the center and compromising with the Will of the People, right? (more…)
Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.
This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber — as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals — are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.
And I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran or drive a New York cab without fear having your throat slashed. Bill and I argued after I said he has to take care in the way he talks about the 9/11 attacks so as not to provoke bigotry. (more…)
“Scum” shouts a passerby at the infiltrators who now feel so emboldened, so confident of their ultimate victory, that on Sept. 11, they feel free to do this absolutely unopposed, with the media lovingly recording their every word:
Was I shocked when I read Andrea S. Lafferty’s article about ABC News sending an undercover photographer into a crowd of Ground Zero Mosque protesters? Yes and no.
Yes, because it’s something a news organization has no business doing. No, because nothing surprises me with the media nowadays.
NBC’s Dateline sent people dressed as Muslims to a NASCAR race shortly after 9-11 to videotape bigotry that they hoped to find. They found none, but that’s not the point here. The fact they thought they would find it at a NASCAR race shows NBC’s bigotry.
In this latest case, ABC needs to explain what it was doing and why it was doing it (of course, we already know, but if they are truly transparent as a media outlet, they would want to explain themselves.) (more…)
Notice the picture which the New York Times is painting of this week’s primary results:
Republican insurgents from the far right did well in Tuesday’s primaries. What their campaigns lack in logic, compassion and sensible policy seems to be counterbalanced by a fiercely committed voter base…
This is an attack on voters thinly disguised as a critique of candidates:
Much of the G.O.P’s fervid populist energy has been churned up by playing on some people’s fears of Hispanics and Muslims, by painting the president as a dangerous radical, by distorting the truth about the causes of the recession. Far too many Republican leaders have eagerly fed that destructive anger.
They make a feint toward the idea that it’s not the voters fault, i.e. it’s the “leaders” who bamboozled them. Of course that only works if the voters are easily bamboozled. The Times‘ arrogance really shines through in a phrase like this one: (more…)
Thursday during the 1 p.m. hour, CNN’s “Newsroom,” this exchange took place between CNN reporter Ali Velshi andTime Magazine’s deputy international editor Bobby Ghosh:
VELSHI: The name Cordoba- some people are associating it with Muslim rule and bloody battles, when, in fact, Cordoba was one of the finest times in relations between the major religions.
GHOSH: Exactly right- in interfaith discourse-
VELSHI: Yeah-
GHOSH: And the great mosque of Cordoba that people are talking about and that Newt Gingrich was talking about- the man who built it, the Muslim prince who built it, bought it from a Christian group- paid money for it and bought it from a Christian group. And there was not a lot of alarm and anger raised then.
These statements are journalistic malpractice—ahistorical, whitewashed drivel—compounded by Ghosh’s ad hominem attack on Newt Gingrich. (more…)
Time Magazine’s blogger Amy Sullivan, who last caught many conservatives’ attention with a post titled “Why does Glenn Beck hate Jesus?” is back with another dishonest attack on the right. She’s upset that some conservatives have a problem with the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. She wrote a post last Thursday titled “Are Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin Secretly French?” which may mark the first time a liberal blogger has complained that conservatives are behaving too much like Europeans:
…ordinary Americans continue to display extremely high levels of religious tolerances, especially compared to their European cousins (and both Palin and Gingrich). A recently released survey from the Pew Global Attitudes Project looked at support for measures that ban Muslim women from wearing full veils over their faces in public places. In France, where the government is close to passing such a measure, 82% approve of a ban. Support is also high in Germany and Britain, with 71% and 62%, respectively, favoring measures to make veil-wearing illegal. But in the U.S.? Only 28% of Americans would support a measure banning Muslim women from wearing veils.
Not to burst Amy’s bubble, but maybe this is because Americans have relatively little experience with women wearing burqas in the street and children wearing veils to elementary school. Europeans, having seen a lot more of it, like it a lot less.
In any case, this rather tame attack on Newt and Palin apparently wasn’t enough. So yesterday Sullivan returned to the subject in the following way: (more…)
Terrific piece here by Lee Smith in the Weekly Standard, filling in the background on the recent firing of Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese Christian Arab, by CNN for her Twitter expressing admiration for one of Hezbollah’s recently deceased ayatollahs:
… why is Nasr being singled out for openly expressing the U.S. media’s default position on Hezbollah, Fadlallah’s one-time colleagues? For instance, does anyone doubt that the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh “respects” the late cleric’s even more vicious rival, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, whom he interviewed in the pages of the New Yorker?
The Western press delights in rattling the bourgeois sensibilities of its audience by showing the multifaceted aspects of Hezbollah–it’s not just a militia with an appetite for slaughtering Jews, it’s also a social welfare outfit that provides educational opportunities!–and even collaborates with the Party of God by publishing doctored photographs of Israeli “war crimes.” The op-ed pages of America’s dailies are replete with articles promoting Hezbollah’s “pragmatism” and “moderation” (which also happens to be the position of the president’s counter-terrorism czar John Brennan, and a recent CENTCOM analytical exercise), while reported pieces from Lebanon pass along Party of God press releases as objective analysis. If every U.S. journalist who quoted Hezbollah mouthpiece Amal Saad Ghorayeb as a respected “scholar” was fired, the bars of East Beirut would lose 25 percent of their business.
Smith, an expert on the Middle East whose views and insights deserve a wide audience, goes on to lay out the cozy relationship between the western media and Hezbollah, which is often romanticized as Third World freedom fighters by the Lawrence of Arabia wannabees in the press corps: (more…)
Gay rights activists equating their modern-day fight for ‘equality’ to post-slavery oppression of blacks. Muslim activists equating justified terror law enforcement investigation to racial profiling of blacks. The obese even formed a group complaining they were being discriminated against like blacks. When it comes time to beg for attention, victims choose black people to compare their woeful experiences to, even though the comparisons are insultingly inaccurate.
They gather on statehouse steps with signs and bullhorns, risking arrest. They attend workshops on civil disobedience and personal storytelling, and they hold sit-ins and walk out of class in protest. They’re being warned that they could even lose their lives.
“… they could even lose their lives.” Just who could we be talking about? (more…)
The important issue prompted by the Rolling Stone article isn’t Gen. McChrystal’s defiance or rank insubordination. It’s the announced deadline for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, an insane move that guarantees defeat, as well as other war-losing moves. Would you ally yourself with foreign forces that you know are going to exit, and the day they do, you know you and your family will be beheaded?
All the talk about whether Obama firing McChrystal is a sideshow important to the Leftist media because they want Obama to look tough. But bad war-running from the oval office will continue a path to defeat. The real question is whether we are going to stop telegraphing our intentions to the enemy and get serious about the enemy.
The administration won’t even define the enemy beyond saying al Qaeda. Al Qaeda? What’s al Qaeda? A bunch of guys in caves who drill in the desert? Is that our only enemy? If we eliminate them, the war is won? Who does the administration think they are kidding? The real enemy is a religious philosophy held by extremist Muslims which says anyone who doesn’t believe as they do should yield or die. Yes, not every Moslem believes that. But so what? (more…)
Having been caught doctoring pictures during of the violence aboard the guerilla flotilla boat, Mavi Marmara, Reuters is circling the wagons and looking for other ways to discredit Israel.
Officially, Reuters says the elimination of the IHH terrorists holding knives in the pictures it originally published to its wire was an editing error.
Reuters is committed to accurate and impartial reporting. All images that pass over our wire follow a strict editorial evaluation and selection process. The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges.
“Committed to accurate and impartial reporting?” Gee, if that was the case why did they add biased captions to the pictures when they posted the non-cropped versions? As reported by Omri Ceren on Big Journalism earlier today the wire service added a political message to the pictures.
Pro-Palestinian activists hold down an Israeli commando on the Gaza-bound Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea early May 31, 2010. Israeli marines stormed the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a diplomatic crisis and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.
I didn’t realize that it would become such a huge deal.
Friday morning I received an email from a friend, Rabbi David Nessenoff which provided me my first look at the video of the now famous explosive interview with Helen Thomas. David had sent the video to a friend at a newspaper who didn’t think it was a big story. My response to David was, give me a few hours and the video would become viral, and given some luck the video would have a half of million views before the end of the weekend (there were a million).
I quickly posted it on my site The Lid, wrote it up for Big Journalism, gave it to Scott Baker who posted it on Breitbart TV , and sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites. Before I left on a five hour car ride to my brother’s house for the weekend the video was posted on the Big sites on the net. By the end of the day it was on radio and TV and the calls Thomas’ head were all over the place.
Strangely, though I think that Ms. Thomas’ comments were horrible and very anti-Semitic, I do not necessarily agree that Ms. Thomas should be fired for her anti-Semitic rantings. Helen Thomas is merely a symptom of the problem, not the disease. Firing her would be like treating HIV with a band aid.
The mainstream media, which is politically correct about every other ethnic group, feature anti-Semites all of the time without barely a peep about their hatred. I wonder if there would be the same calls for Thomas’ head if she hadn’t already been considered something of a joke by the press corps, someone who has stayed on long past her time. (more…)
Just weeks after Comedy Central executives censored a program because of its depiction of Muhammad, the network has announced it has a new cartoon series in development that could not be more disrespectful of Christianity. Entitled “JC”, the show will depict Jesus living in contemporary New York City trying to “escape his father’s enormous shadow.”
Thirty little buses in New York City…my, how they roll. Through our organization Stop Islamization of America, Robert Spencer and I have placed ads on New York City buses, offering help to Muslims wishing to leave Islam. Our ads ran previously on buses in Miami, but in New York they’ve received international notice. The religious liberty bus ad campaign was covered in the last few days by every major network: ABC, NBC, CBS (New York), CNN and FOX, as well by Associated Press, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Britain’s Daily Mail, Russian television, and many more–too many news outlets to list here.
The latest attempt to excuse or minimize the evils committed in the name of Islam comes in a new book by University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. In an interview with the Telegraph, the author says:
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.
This doesn’t even make any sense. If Muslim hatred of the Jews was “religiously inspired,” i.e., inspired by Islam, then why did it need to be “articulated” by the Nazis, who despised all religion? In reality, it is “articulated” in the Qur’an, which says that the Jews are accursed (2:89), are the Muslims’ worst enemies (5:82), and should be fought against (9:29). Muhammad says in a hadith that the end times won’t come until Muslims kill Jews wholesale, and when Jews hide behind trees, the trees will cry out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me – come and kill him!”
Muslims were not and are not inspired by Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by Islam – just as modern-day Muslims hate Jews because the Qur’an and Islam tell them to. Islamic scholar Robert Spencer explains: (more…)
In light of the Obama Administration’s new drive to sanitize the image of Islam and Muslims by purging the new National Security Strategy document of all references to such outmoded concepts as “Islamic terrorism,” it’s worth going back to a press event from 2008 to look at this exchange in a fresh light:
ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT WITH REGIONAL REPORTERS
Cairo University
Cairo, Egypt
(June 4, 2009)
Q Thank you, President Obama. Of course, as an Indonesian, my first question would be when will you come to Indonesia?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I need to come to Indonesia soon. I expect to be traveling to Asia at some point within the next year and I would be surprised if when I came to Asia I did not stop by my old home town of Jakarta. And I’ll go visit Menteng Dalam and have some bakso — nasi goreng. These are some special dishes here that I used to eat when I was a kid.
Q Actually I live only 300 meters from your old house.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in the U.S. and met with Barack Obama in the White House, but you won’t find any photos of Netanyahu with Obama on the wire services. There aren’t any. Obama wouldn’t allow it. Politico reported:
But the meetings were shrouded in unusual secrecy, in part because U.S. officials, who just ten days earlier called the surprise announcement of new housing in East Jerusalem an ‘insult’ and an ‘affront,’ made sure to reward Netanyahu with a series of small snubs: There were no photographs released from the meeting, and no briefing for the press.
He bows to the Saudi king, he shakes hands warmly with his “amigo” Chavez, but he won’t be seen with the leader of the only democracy in the Middle East, and our only reliable ally there.
And this comes after he has put unprecedented strain on the U.S./Israel alliance by pressuring Israel for allowing Jews to build homes on Jewish land, and blaming Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians Muslims.
Obama is not a passive, weak or naive player in the Muslim/Jewish conflict. He was wet-nursed on Jew-hatred. He grew up in a Muslim country and studied the Koran. He knows what is prescribed for the Jews in Islam. He knows that the Koran says that the Jews are the Muslims’ worst enemies (5:82) and that “ignominy shall be their portion wheresoever they are found” (3:112). (more…)
During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives "tea baggers" on CNN and remarked about "teabagging." The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those...
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