Topic: WorldNetDaily
In 2005, WorldNetDaily was forced to retract an article falsely attacking the relief organization Islamic Relief of supporting terrorism, as well as raising money to aid nonexistent children, presumably under threat of a lawsuit from the group.
Now WND's Leo Hohmann is taking another factually questionable shot at the group:
Rack up a win for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a network of other U.S. Islamist organizations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Not only has the Brotherhood thus far managed to avoid the Trump White House designating it a terrorist organization, but its U.S. affiliates still hold enormous sway over the Republican-dominated Congress.
The latest evidence of that fact played out on Capitol Hill last Thursday, in a stunning turn of events that received no coverage from the national media and elicited nary a peep out of the conservative media.
Islamic Relief Worldwide, or IRW, a United Kingdom-based humanitarian relief agency with a U.S. chapter, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. federal grants in recent years, including $370,000 for the fiscal years 2015 and 2016. Quite naturally, IRW wants to keep the spigot of federal dollars flowing, despite the charity’s links to the terrorist group Hamas.
U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., introduced an amendment to the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Act that would have banned all federal funding of IRW and its affiliates.
When they got wind of DeSantis’ amendment, CAIR and other Islamist groups blitzed members of Congress with a last-minute lobbying effort to vote against the amendment. House leaders capitulated, withdrawing the amendment last Thursday before it was even brought up for a vote.
As a result, Hamas terrorists will continue to have access to federal tax dollars.
IRW is an Islamist charity that has funneled money to Hamas and has ties to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, according to the highly respected Islamist Watch project of Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum.
The Washington Free Beacon has also reported on the money flow from IRW to Hamas.
Hohmann doesn't say who considers the Middle East Forum "highly respected," but we suspect that respect is limited to Muslim-haters like Hohmann, given that Pipes is given to conspiracy theories like claiming that President Obama is a Muslim. Hohmann goes on to assert that "Islamic Relief Wordwide has a long history of promoting extremist ideology across both America and Europe," but he makes no effort to prove it.
At no point does Hohmann bother to contact anyone with Islamic Relief for a comment on attacks of his fellow Muslim-haters. If he had, he would have known that the group has long denied any links to terrorism and that it conducted an audit of itself that similarly demonstrated that. Hohmann also fails to mention that DeSantis' amendment was opposed by numerous relief groups around the world and in the U.S.
This is the kind of biased, one-sided story filled with dubious -- if not outright false -- allegations that tends to draw attention from libel lawyers. Hohmann and WND may want to brace themselves and start drafting that retraction, using that 2005 retraction as a model.
