The New York Times Holds a CAIR Wash

“Gray Lady Uses Skirts To Hide CAIR” is how Captain’s Quarters terms the current article on CAIR in The New York Times.

As usual, the NYT piece is a smooth, bland piece of PR which covers over the radical mission of CAIR with supposed allegations that haven’t been proved:

A small band of critics have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling the group an American front for the two.

Ah, the spirit of Walter Duranty lives on in the bowels of the Times. The Duranty tapeworm. No wonder this paper is so anemic.

Meanwhile, Investor’s Business Daily asks what CAIR is afraid of:

The first Secular Islam Summit [held last week] was a success if for no other reason than it intimidated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the PR machine of militant Islam.

The Washington-based group that boycotts airlines and bullies radio personalities and politicians into toeing the Islamist line is clearly worried about the message from Muslim reformers.

It dispatched its henchmen to Florida to shout the reformers down at their confab earlier this week. CAIR also posted on its Web site no fewer than four stories bashing the event and its courageous speakers, many of whom are women calling for an end to inequality and mistreatment under radical Islam.

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CAIR declared the summit illegitimate because few of the participants are ‘practicing Muslims,’ and those who are, it claims, are merely pawns playing into the hands of ‘Islamophobes.’

‘In order to have legitimate reform, you need to have the right messengers,’ asserted CAIR spokesman Ahmed Bedier.

And who might that be? The four CAIR executives who have been successfully prosecuted on terrorism-related charges? The CAIR co-founder who said the Quran should replace the U.S. Constitution as ‘the highest authority in America’?

True voices of moderation are the delegates to the Secular Islam Summit, who insisted in their declaration that mosque and state should always be separate. They also called for tolerance for non-Muslims, and an end to violent jihad. CAIR should take notes.

So what if many of them are ex-Muslims? They risked their lives to leave Islam and now dare to openly criticize an ideology that everyone else is afraid to criticize. What these brave souls have to say carries far more weight than anything said by CAIR, which couldn’t even bring itself to condemn Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, Bedier argued, but the summit’s ‘funding is coming from the neoconservatives.’ An article posted by CAIR suggests ‘Israeli intelligence’ is behind the movement.

In CAIR’s kooky world, the Zionists are behind everything, even 9/11.

But if anyone was behind 9/11, it was the Saudis. And guess who bankrolls CAIR? Right: the Saudis.

Fittingly, CAIR’s Bedier balked when summit delegate Tawfik Hamid, a former terrorist, challenged him to denounce Saudi sharia law for ‘killing apostates, beating women and stoning women.’

‘This is not about Saudi Arabia,’ he huffed. ‘We condemn any nation that misuses Islam, but we’re not going to condemn an entire nation. That’s like condemning London (sic).’

It’s disgusting how the NYT panders, postures, and lies by half-truths. Take this one, for instance:

Government officials in Washington said they were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group. More than one described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.

“Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares,” said Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. official who directed counterterrorism in the Washington field office from 2002 to 2005.

Somehow the Times missed the speeches of CAIR’s co-founder, Nihad Awad. Here are some choice quotes:

“After I researched the situation inside and outside Palestine, I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO... I know that this movement as an Islamic movement has not been objectively reported in the United States...” (stated at symposium at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, March 22, 1994)

“The arrest, detention and extradition is politically motivated... [and] this campaign has been orchestrated to serve as a wedge between America and Islamic countries.” (stated at May 10, 1996 press conference organized to support U.S. detained Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook)

“They [the Jews] have been saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ — we say ‘Next year to all Palestine.’“ (stated at Al-Awda rally at Lafayette Park in front of the White House, September 16, 2000)

“Hollywood is not our friend. Hollywood has distorted the facts. Hollywood has shown freedom fighters as terrorists. Hollywood has done the work that Zionists cannot done [sic].” (ibid)

Awad refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization. (Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, ‘CAIR Play?’ December 29, 2006)

The real motto of the Times: “All The News We Think You Should Know and Not One Idea More”

Feh. McCarthyism has nothing on Durantyism


NB: I forgot to quote Joe Morrisey's post on this disgraceful piece of "journalism(see his CQ link above)--

That’s not all that makes critics suspicious of CAIR. Several of its officers have involvement in terror, including the founder of CAIR’s parent group and the man who ran the Holy Land Foundation, Mousa Abu Mazook. The US deported Mazook in 1997 for his work with Hamas. Ghassan Elashi helped found the Texas chapter and served on its board until 2002 -- when the US deported him for selling forbidden computer technology to Libya and Syria. Rabih Haddad worked as a CAIR fundraiser until his deportation in 2003, as well as launching the Global Relief Fund that fed al-Qaeda and Hamas. Joe Kaufman included these specifics in a Front Page article three years ago -- again, something MacFarquhar [the author of this NYT ‘wash’ -D] apparently missed in his journalistic investigation.

In short, the Times has published an ass-kissing paean to the poor, misunderstood folks at CAIR and smeared its critics. It’s practically a textbook example of hackery; spend all of an article rebroadcasting the complaints of one side and none of it covering the specifics of the other. MacFarquhar apparently couldn’t disprove these specifics, and so pretended they didn’t exist. The result should be an embarrassment for the New York Times, if they weren’t already so incapable of shame.

Now there's an adjective I forgot to tack on to this piece of gar-bage: "shameless." Yep, just another Duranty characteristic.