WorldNetDaily's teaming up with Herman Cain to distribute his 9-9-9 plan is only the tip of the iceberg.
WND has been fans of Herman Cain for a long time -- after all, it publishes Cain's weekly column, and as far back as July 2010 it was fawning over him as "Obama's worst nightmare" -- so Cain's recent surge in the polls has sent WND's writers into a Cain-gasmic frenzy.
The lead cheerleader, of course, is WND editor Joseph Farah:
It looks like a genuine, home-spun, non-politician, conservative candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is emerging.
His name is Herman Cain.
And the evidence of the threat he represents to a second term of Barack Obama is clear from the attacks being leveled in his direction by the media, by the Democrats and by the sycophantic entitlement mongers who think government's coercive power should be used to get "their fair share" even though they don't work to earn it.
I have to admit, when I first heard from Cain himself that he was going to seek the presidency, long before he made it public, I was, shall we say, skeptical.
It wasn't because I didn't think Cain was a great man, with great accomplishments already under his belt and capable of even more. It was because he was, at the time, virtually unknown across the country – except to tea-party activists who had seen him, heard him and loved him.
But as I examine the polls every day, there is no denying that he is in the midst of a meteoric rise as the favorite candidate of many if not most Republicans who have a stated preference. Cain is for real. And I couldn't be more delighted about that.
Cain has character. He has principles. He loves America. And I have no doubt about the fact that his campaign is based on doing what's right for America more than it is based on ego.
[...]
Herman Cain is every bit the adult we should look for in a president. He can be a fatherly figure to the entire nation – especially young black males who have been deprived of them by government paternalism and a culture gone mad.
It was Obama who sought to "transform" America.
But I suspect that a Cain presidency will be far more transformative in the best sense of the word – and offer far more healing for the nation.
The best news to date is the unexpectedly positive response from the public to Herman Cain's candidacy. He is not just seen as a great new voice in Republican politics – someone who makes the debates more interesting. He is perceived as the favorite candidate among the grass-roots Republican voters nationwide, according to an increasing number of polls.
That doesn't necessarily translate into caucus and primary wins – because that takes campaign organization on the ground. But Cain has done enormously well – and he hasn't received a lick of encouragement from the Republican establishment, which is exactly what we should expect – and which is exactly what makes him so exciting.
Most of WND's columnists are similarly on board the Cain bandwagon. For instance:
In the spring of 1969, Herman Cain and I independently came to the same decision; we would start our graduate studies at Purdue University in the fall.
Although Cain did not know it at the time, by choosing to become a Purdue Boilermaker he was rendering himself an outlier in a political arena that our putative Ivy League betters have come to dominate.
[...]
The ones who survived the ODs and the shoot-outs, the self-immolations and the accidental bombings, these are the people who now run our media.
I think America is ready for a Boilermaker president, but are they?
What makes Herman Cain so interesting is the passion and clarity of his view of American freedom and his Reagan-like ability to communicate and excite grass-roots Americans.
A new Gallup poll on candidate positive intensity – the percentage of those with strongly favorable opinion minus those with strongly unfavorable opinion – shows Cain so far ahead of the rest of the Republican field it is ridiculous.
Any unbiased observer watching the current Republican presidential contest is aware that Herman Cain is causing a great deal of heartburn for the far left. Recently, Cain was verbally assaulted by a college professor and a celebrity. It was an unprovoked assault owing to the fact that Cain had the "audacity" to imply that "brainwashed" blacks should be allowed to "think for themselves."
Rove and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus may want Romney – but if the Party were smart, they'd be on bent knees with crucifixes, rosaries, or whatever, praying that Herman Cain would win. Herman's winning may not be the death knell, but it would deal the left a blow from which they and their minions would never fully recover. It would change the face of conservative politics and elections for the foreseeable future.
More importantly, Herman Cain has the opportunity not to just win in a way that destroys the cookie-cutter campaign models. It's precisely because Cain's model doesn't require raising the monies and having the nationwide organization that he has a chance to empower the people in a way not witnessed in modern history. I'm betting that one or more of the political geniuses thought about that, but dismissed it as impossible. Impossible, because they're too smart to realize that they and their polls don't know what the American people think. They only know what their mirror images tell them we think.
Herman is leading, and it's not because he's the flavor of the week. It's because what he is saying and doing resonates with the people, and many of us believe it was doing so before the Florida debate that supposedly ignited his campaign. The dichotomy between Cain and the other candidates is night and day. Respected economic minds are supporting his 9-9-9 plan.
He speaks from the core of his being. His detractors have to come up with new phrases and political verbiage to define him. Their problem, in the final analysis, is they're married to the old way of doing things. There is a synecdoche of the Constitution to the people and between opportunity and the person that is clearly understood in Cain's message. His speeches don't come across as canned or contrived. He's not saying what he thinks we want to hear – he's saying what needs to be said.
Herman Cain would make a great president of the United States. He is my candidate, and he has a good chance of becoming the candidate of the Republican Party.
Cain's only weakness is political inexperience, and that leads to mistakes in his campaign, but it is not a disqualification for the office. In fact, in the eyes of most voters, it is more a blessing than a curse.
[...]
Herman Cain is electable precisely for the reasons many pundits dismiss him: He is not a professional politician. That's a good thing. He is instead a professional manager of strong character and conservative values, and that is exactly what the voters want in 2012.
A couple of WND columnists, though, are not fully on board with WND's Cainiac agenda. Vox Day delcared in May that, as a former Federal Reserve regional official, "Herman Cain is far too financially and economically dubious to be given any serious thought as a conservative presidential candidate."
Alan Keyes is not happy with Cain either, asserting that "Herman Cain's professed beliefs are not deeply rooted or thought through enough to stand strong against the storm. He falls far short of being the person the nation needs in the White House to help us do so." Keyes was also put out by Cain's supposed joke that he would electrify a border fence: "Since from its beginning, America has acknowledged God as the source of human rights; joking about measures that affect the unalienable right to life comes dangerously close to mocking Him."
But they are in the decided minority at WND. Joseph Farah's Cain bandwagon will happily leave them behind.
NewsBusters Excludes Most of The Media In Complaint About 'The Media' Topic: NewsBusters
In an Oct. 19 NewsBusters post, Ken Shepherd writes:"In a front-page story today, Politico's Darren Samuelsohn relayed the ire of liberal think tanks and blogs 'bemoaning the "out of proportion" Solyndra coverage' in the media. We at NewsBusters are not sure what planet these folks are living on."
We wonder what planet Shepherd lives on, where everything outside the three broadcast networks is not part of "the media."
Shepherd selectively focuses only on ABC, CBS and NBC in claiming that they ran "just 19 stories" on Solyndra. Such a deliberately narrow focus ignores the fact that major newspapers have been pushing the Solyndra controversy, while ignoring other scandals, such as military contracting fraud, that cost the government much more money than Solyndra has. Further, Fox News has been practically obsessed by Solyndra, devoting a whopping eight hours of broadcast time to it in September alone.
It's a peculiar definition of "media" Shepherd is using, which happens to exclude most of it.
WND's Rush Delves Deeper Into Birther Conspiracy Territory Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last week, we noted how WorldNetDaily columnist Erik Rush had latched onto the conspiracy theory that Malcolm X is Barack Obama's father (as well as the discredited claim that Obama ordered a bust of Winston Churchill to be removed from the Oval Office because England once planned to ban Malcolm X from the country). Rush is back, this time at the birther-centric website the Post and Email with an expansion of the Malcolm X lunacy, co-written with Martha Trowbridge.
Rush declares that a photo of a young Stanley Ann Dunham picturewith a toddler Obama "was falsified to deceive us" by making her hair longer and by "futzing with the corner of her mouth, in order to widen it." His proof that this is happened? There's another picture of "his mother, Stanley Ann, in February 1965, at the wake / funeral of militant black leader, Malcolm X." No, really:
Why not? Because though he claims his mother was thousands of miles away in Hawaii, the fact is, there Stanley Ann was in New York City, February 1965, there, right there, at Malcolm X’s wake and funeral.
So it just may be that Barack Obama’s father isn’t Barack Obama “Sr”, after all.
The Truth lies in the long and short of it. Of Stanley Ann’s Hair, that is.
[...]
America is starved for answers, ravenous for Truth. America, where the media is more afraid of printing Truth than they are of printing lies.
Why?
And why would Obama hide his origins?
Because having a biological father like Malcolm X – a radical black nationalist – would have impeded Obama’s chance for election.[emphasis in original]
The big question is, why isn't Rush publishing these astonishing revelations at WND? You'd think they, of all people, would be receptive to such an Obama-denigrating conspiracy theory.
Yes, CNSNews.com actually devoted an entire article to this:
When CNSNews.com asked U.S. Secret Service Spokesman George Ogilvie on Friday how many miles per gallon the service gets from the $1.1-million bus it has been using to convey President Barack Obama on his recent "jobs" tours, Ogilvie said he was declining to comment on the question for "security purposes."
Hemphill Brothers, the Tennessee company that provided the motor for the bus, also declined to answer any questions about it.
Why did Penny Starr write such a time-wasting, intellectually insulting article? She proves herself to be fully on board with CNS' anti-Obama agenda -- after all, she's an egregiouslybiasedwriter who hates Democrats to the point of portraying Harry Reid as a baby-killer like King Herod. It's also a cheap attempt at links from Drudge Report and elsewhere in the right-wing echo chamber, something CNS has become lessashamed about doing lately.
Ask yourself: Would Starr be asking this stupid question if a Republican is president? Probably not.
Aaron Klein's Publicity Stunt for His New Book Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein has a new book coming out: "Red Army," a compilation of his guilt-by-association attacks at WND drawing tenuous links to anyone he doesn't like to commies, Marxists, and George Soros. Interestingly, Klein managed to move up the right-wing food chain for this book -- it's being published by HarperCollins' right-wing imprint Broadside Books instead of WND's vanity imprint.
Like any good shameless self-promoter, Klein has a stunt planned for his book: He'll hold a press conference about it at Zuccotti Park in New York, home of the Occupy Wall Street protests. According to an Oct. 19 WND article, "The exact time of the press conference is being held back until the last minute for security reasons."
It's funny that Klein will face down protesters in a self-promotional publicity stunt but is still scared of us -- he won't acknowledge our existence or even allow us to follow his Twitter account. Sad, isn't it?
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Cable News Cheerleading Topic: NewsBusters
Jack Coleman works up some outrage in an Oct. 17 NewsBusters post over Ed Schultz's declaration that he's going to feature the Occupy Wall Street protests on his MSNBC show "every night. I'm going to put it on TV every night until the last protester goes home." Coleman denigrates Schultz as a "rodeo clown" and complains that he will "provide plenty of unpaid ads for Occupy Wall Street."
Funny, we don't recall Coleman complaining when Fox News provided plenty of unpaid ads for the tea party, providing it with near-blanket coverage on most of its shows, not just one.
Just put that on the already long list of NewsBusters double standards.
WND Giving Away Copies of Cain's 9-9-9 Plan (And Building Cain's Mailing List) Topic: WorldNetDaily
The top of front page of WorldNetDaily carries a link to a page carrying the logos of both WND and Hermain Cain's presidential campaign:
The page itself makes this offer:
Herman Cain's 9-9-9 economic plan has become the focal point of the Republican presidential debate. This is your opportunity to get the plan FREE - so you can examine it without the media spin.
WND.com, one of America's leading websites and top online news sources is offering information FREE about this important issue from the Herman Cain for President Campaign.
You must sign in to get this download. Don't miss this opportunity to be fully informed!
And at the end is this notice:
I understand I will be signed up for FREE WND alerts and the FREE information from the Herman Cain for President Campaign. I can unsubscribe at any time.
Curiously, there's no disclosure that Cain's campaign is paying for this advertising, as required by law. There's also no disclosure that this is a donation by WND to Cain's campaign -- which is also what this appears to be.
MRC Hates That GOP Presidential Candidates Are Being Fact-Checked Topic: Media Research Center
An Oct. 18 Media Research Center "Media Reality Check" by Matt Hadro complained that CNN's Anderson Cooper is holding Republican presidential candidate accountable for what they say.
Huffing that "Anderson Cooper 360" "often looks like it’s trying to keep Republicans away from the White House," Hadro grumbled that "Since July, a review of 'Keeping Them Honest' segments found 24 reports tagging the Republicans with dishonesty, compared with just three for Democrats – a ratio of eight to one." He continued:
Cooper's "Keeping them Honest" segments have targeted Republicans and conservatives at all levels of power, including the presidential candidates, congressional Republicans, and even state and local officials. Yet Cooper's nightly fact-checking has been far lighter on the President and administration that’s currently in power, providing little coverage of the ongoing Solyndra scandal or other administration foibles.
Meanwhile, Cooper responded to the accusation he was disproporionately targeting Republicans in an interview at Politico:
I think we are looking more closely at a Republican field that has a number of candidates. There’s a lot more to talk about with nine different Republican candidates out there. If it was a Democratic primary, we’d focus on Democrats. And there are certainly plenty of times when we’ve focused on President Obama or the Congressional Black Caucus.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that we are just focusing on Republicans, but there is a very heated and very interesting Republican primary going on, where you have a number of Republican candidates making statements. As you get more into the general election, the focus will change.
This response as been appended to Hadro's article, but it has since been ignored. Hadro followed up with a Oct. 20 NewsBusters post complaining that Cooper "scrutinized Republican presidential candidates for statements they made in Tuesday night's debate, but has not reported controversial statements made this week by President Obama and Vice President Biden." Hadro made no mention of Cooper's response the day before.
It seems that Hadro's real complaint is not that Republican claims are being questioned disproportionately, but that they are being questioned at all. After all, the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, has made no such effort to delve into the claims Republicans have made, since editor in chief Terry Jeffrey apparently cares only about bringing down the Obama presidency.
Occupy Wall Street Derangement Syndrome (WorldNetDaily Division) Topic: WorldNetDaily
NBC New York reported that Brookfield Properties told police that it had received "hundreds of phone calls and emails from locals complaining about lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use, the lack of safe access to and usage of the park, ongoing noise at all hours, unsanitary conditions and offensive odors."
NBC also reported: "Protesters will be allowed to return to their designated areas after cleaning is complete."
This poses the question: Why in the name of common sense is the city allowing these hell-raising and publicly urinating and defecating nutballs to return after the scheduled clean-up of the same place they so dirtied?
And were they ever evacuated so that the clean-up could take place? No, they were not.
So when I see the mostly young people of Occupy Wall Street – a mixture of the bored, the nihilistic, the seekers of excitement, the left-wing true believers, the confused idealists and those hoping to engage in violence – railing against the rich capitalists on Wall Street, I get worried. Because the hatred they express toward the rich is similar to that expressed against the rich by Stalin, Mao and Pot Pot. Of course, these people are not comparable to those killers. But class hatred must lead to bad things. That is why President Obama is playing with fire with his attacks on the rich.
Communists, socialists and "occupiers" of various locations finally quit screwing around with the absurd "science" of Marxism-Leninism, "Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis" and hopeful blueprints for impossible creatures such as the "New Soviet Man," and realized, "We outnumber them 99 to 1. If they won't hand it over, we'll just take it!"
These scruffies stealing headlines worldwide are united by the same pathetic fallacy. They can't see a fat man standing beside a thin man without concluding that the fat man got that way at the thin man's expense. And they refuse to let the repeated historical failure of their vision blunt their confidence that "This time it will work!"
At least now the lofty rhetoric and high-minded battle cries of "justice" and "equality" are mercifully absent. A reporter once asked the founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, "What does labor really want?" Gompers briefly, bluntly and brilliantly answered, "More!" If anyone in this naked, drug-besotted mob, which can't tell a police car from a defecatory-appropriate toilet, had the sharpness of a Gompers, then when asked what they really wanted, he'd reply, "Yours!"
[...]
Not all occupiers are failures. They've just allied with them. Many occupiers are undoubtedly sincere. Sincerity is no excuse for stupidity.
Most of them likely feel they could perform well in any of those multi-million dollar jobs they're protesting. After all, success is nothing but luck, right?
Not that far from the U.N. we have Wall Street, where thousands of young zombies have been congregating for some time, apparently in the belief that a rock concert is about to begin. I can only imagine that they were heading for Woodstock and got turned around when they found themselves stuck in Manhattan traffic.
Even though these demonstrations have caught on like a virus and are taking place all around the country, I'm actually getting a kick out of them. That's because I am imagining the parents – well-intentioned idiots who forked over thousands of dollars to send these young saps off to academia, where left-wing Dr. Frankensteins, posing as professors, could replace their brains with those of parrots – sitting home and watching the inevitable play out on their TVs.
Again, if I were in charge, I would round up these young idiots, together with Obama and all of his enablers in Congress, the public sector unions and the media, and send them off with one-way tickets to live in Greece. There they could experience firsthand the glories of socialism that they've espoused for decades.
While anger over unemployment, corporate welfare and crony capitalism are certainly understandable, it was painfully evident from the beginning that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in New York and their comrades in other cities were not part of a movement at all, but an orchestrated phenomenon. This is in part because high-profile American communists had been very publicly encouraging it for months.
It is somewhat ironic that the OWS zombies decry many of the same things the tea-party movement cites, but the OWS protesters are too stupid to recognize it. Obviously, in addition to their insistence upon placing blame in the wrong place, there are vast ideological differences between them and the tea party. It is also an irony that the racism, anger and penchant for violence in which these types so eagerly accuse the tea party of engaging are readily practiced among the "Occupy" protesters.
There are at least two conflicting views of the Occupy Wall Street mob(s). One is that the media are overplaying the protests and that they are much to do about nothing. The idea is that the protesters are primarily a bunch of idealistic kids living out their fantasies of the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out crowd of the '60s.
At the other extreme is the view that the protests are the start of a worldwide left-wing revolution promoted by communists, union Mafiosos and a variety of down-with-the-rich misfits. While I believe that the goofy, confused kids – who can't seem to coherently explain why they're protesting – are being used by the heavyweight, behind-the-scenes players who are funding the protests, that's beside the point.
And you can basically illustrate the divide this way: Roughly half the country identifies with the tea party, and the other half identifies with the flea-baggers you see occupying Wall Street and other select targets.
I know you can argue the numbers. Right now, I would say significantly more than half of the conscious people in the country actually would choose the tea party over the flea party. But that's just because we are all so uncomfortable living under the leadership of Barack Obama, the patron saint of the flea party.
I told you he would govern not as a commander in chief but as community organizer in chief – and that's just what he has done.
Without Barack Obama there would be no "occupations." He has ginned up this whole thing – he and his friends George Soros and the children of Saul Alinsky. If you didn't have millions of overgrown children attending universities that inculcate them in a Godless, state-worshipping religion, you don't have a flea party. If you didn't have tens of millions of smaller children being groomed as future agitators by National Education Association goons posing as "teachers," you don't have a flea party.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is now entering its second month. I guess I can't blame the protesters for sticking around so long. It's exciting, isn't it? All the media attention, the celebrities and politicians fawning over them, the free food and goodies … Hey, if all it takes is camping in a park, pooping on police cars and waving signs – especially if I didn't have to show up to anything as restrictive as a JOB for a month or more – then I might consider joining the protests, too.
But this campaign apparently is not raising the IQ of any of the protesters, because they are still incapable of coherently explaining WHY they should receive something for nothing. When asked to pinpoint specific objectives, they wilt under logical questioning about how those objectives should be accomplished.
The ugly language used by many of the Occupy Wall Street activists and by liberals such as radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann to describe bankers is disgraceful and dangerous. When one replaces the word "banker" with the word "Jew" in the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, one glimpses at the true nature and intent of the assault. Simply put, the Nazis and the German Communists portrayed Jews in virtually the same light as Occupy Wall Street activists are now portraying bankers. In reality, this is the same assault on private ownership today as was the one that was engaged in by the 20th century's two great socialist experiments, Nazism and Communism.
Jeffrey: Kagan Should Recuse Because She Appointed Someone Else To Handle Health Care Reform Topic: CNSNews.com
With CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey's recent attempt to revive the Elena-Kagan-should-recuse bandwagon, you had to know that a column restating it would soon follow. And it did. Let's just skip to the summary of Jeffrey's Oct. 19 column:
Five months before Obama nominated Kagan to the Court, Kagan assigned her top deputy to do work that made him a "legal adviser" on the anticipated Obamacare cases. That deputy went on to argue some of those cases in federal court.
Can Kagan's impartiality in these cases be reasonable [sic] questioned? It would be unreasonable not to.
That's all Jeffrey has -- that then-solicitor general Kagan appointed someone else to handle health care reform. After all, those emails Jeffrey has been obsessing over for months offer no evidence whatsoever that Kagan was otherwise involved in forming a legal strategy over challenges to health care reform. So Jeffrey must invent a conflict.
Needless to say, Jeffrey does not mention the much more obvious conflict-of-interest issues regarding Clarence Thomas, whose wife is a a right-wing activist who has attacked health care reform as unconstitutional. Thomas also failed to disclose his wife's income from activist groups for several years.
WND Defames Arab Journalist Who Has Denounced Bin Laden As 'Bin Laden's Second in Command' Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Oct. 21 WorldNetDaily article is nothing but a borderline-libelous smear job against an journalist involved in a joint venture with Bloomberg.
The curiously unbylined article (we're guessing F. Michael Maloof was involved somewhere) begins:
"I met Osama in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), and ever since, I developed a close relationship with him."
Who said this? Bin Laden's second in command? No, it's New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's new business partner.
His name is Jamal A. Khashoggi, and he's heading the recently announced joint media venture between Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Bloomberg News.
That's right -- WND is portraying Khashoggi as "Bin Laden's second in command."
In a recent Arab press interview, Khashoggi revealed he grew up in Saudi Arabia with the late al-Qaida leader inside the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive movement whose credo is "Jihad is our way; Death in the cause of Allah our highest ambition."
He says he spent time with bin Laden in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and later in Sudan. The close friends shared a dream of a pan-Islamic nation.
"We were young Muslim activists who believed in our responsibility to support Islam and create an Islamic state," said Khashoggi, who previously worked for Saudi's intelligence minister (who also met with bin Laden in Afghanistan before 9/11).
"I was a Muslim Brotherhood type (and believed that by) establishing the Islamic system throughout, it will lead to the (return of the) caliphate," explained Khashoggi, who now calls himself a "neo-Islamist." "Now, I believe this is the work of God. If God wants (the caliphate) to happen, he will make it happen."
Note the vague reference to "a recent Arab press interview." That refusal to specify where the interview came from (or a link to it) is a clear indication that WND has something to hide.
And what is WND hiding? The fact that Khashoggi stopped being a "Muslim activist" long ago, has had no contact with bin Laden for years, and has denounced bin Laden's extremism. From the interivew, conducted in January with a magazine called Majalla:
Q: When did you last see or speak with [bin Laden]?
It was in 1995 in Khartoum. In that time, he was in the opposition. He had turned against his country. And I went with coordination with his family in order for him to denounce violence in Saudi Arabia. So we could break the ice and start a reconciliation which could lead him to come back to Saudi Arabia.
And he did denounce the terrorist acts in the discussion I had with him. But he would not let me have it on the record … and I flew back to Jeddah. That was the last time I saw him or spoke to him.
Q: What did you believe in when you were active in the Islamic movement?
I was a Muslim Brotherhood type [and believed that by] establishing the Islamic system throughout, it will lead to the [return of the] caliphate.
Now, I believe this is the work of God. If God wants [the caliphate] to happen, He will make it happen. But it is not really my work.
Why did I come to this conclusion? I saw how Muslim activists and Muslim leaders, how they fight, they assassinate, they lie, just like any other politicians. The other conclusion I came up with [is that] creating an Islamic state will lead to forcing people into accepting God, accepting a certain role, certain practices. And that defies the freedom which God wants us to enjoy. I will never enjoy my prayer if I am forced to go to the mosque to pray.
Q: Was this a gradual change in your ideas?
It was a gradual process…in my 30s. I would say it started after 1992 when the Afghans began killing each other in a very brutal way. [Then came] the events of Algeria, the failure in Sudan.
I still have a great respect and I think there should be always a role for religion in our life. And a role for Islam in our life. But I will never work for a state run by clerics and religious people.
I think most Islamic movements see the Turkish [Islamic] movement as the example because it is a success story. And the Turkish model is the model which will allow the Egyptian [Islamic] movement, for example, to claim victory. Let’s assume that one day the Ikhwan won in Egypt. They will have a serious problem with the economy, what to do with the tourist industry. The Turkish model has the solution.
Look, we cannot reverse history. The women in Syria 60 years ago were under the veil. No way are they going to go back there. That tradition of the past which some Islamists have nostalgic views of, when women were totally separated from the men and men were dominant, this will never come back again. This is a different time. If anybody of the Islamic movement anywhere will try to do that he will start immediately an opposition among the people and he will have to subject the people by force and by jail, like what the Iranians are doing.
Khashoggi is repeatedly on record as denouncing bin Laden. Froma May 2 Arab News article:
Khashoggi said he felt sorry that Bin Laden chose the wrong path when he was at the crossroads of history. “He hijacked our religion and chose the path of violence. I remember how we were all in the grip of violence in the early and mid-2000s, here in Saudi Arabia, Algeria … there were suicide bombings, bomb blasts, killings. His ideology did not conform with my understanding of Islam,” he said.
Khashoggi said had Bin Laden been a good reader of history and if he had had a chance to go on air he would have definitely admitted defeat after the people’s revolution in Tunisia and Egypt. “The Arab youth took the path of nonviolence to effect change in their countries. Nonviolence is in total variance with the Al-Qaeda ideology … Osama and his men believed in violence … nothing but violence — no reconciliation — no dialogue.”
In an interview on CNN after bin Laden's death, Khashoggi said that bin Laden "did a damaging effect to Islam, two important things. The indiscriminate killing of innocent people, which is a big taboo, a big mistake in Islam, and the other thing is suicidal attacks. Suicidal attacks, suicidal bombings is killing us, we the Muslims, damaging us the Muslims. And I just don't understand how he could tolerate sitting in his house in Islamabad and hear about a young Muslim entering a mosque in Peshawar and blowing up himself. That is totally absurd in Islam, it is totally absurd. By killing the innocent Muslims at the mosque and killing yourself, it's just -- I would never imagine sitting with Osama bin Laden in 1985 or up to '95 that he would allow or justify something as ugly, as horrific as that."
At no point does WND report any of this about Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was fired last year as editor of Saudi Arabia's leading newspaper reportedly for criticising Saudi Arabia's conservative application of Islam and the religious police who enforce adherence to it -- which further undermines WND's smear job.
WND also plucked out of context Khashoggi's praise of Wahhabism; in fact, he was demonstrating how his own Wahhabi beliefs differ from the more extreme version Saudi Arabia is notorious for, and how they played a role in his firing from the newspaper:
Q: What led to your second departure from Al-Watan?
[There was an] article which was addressing the concept of sufism and salafism and respecting shrines. It dealt with a sensitive issue in relation to our salafi indoctrination background. I wasn’t in the paper that day, and if I saw that article, I would have stopped it from publishing, even though I still say it is some writer’s reflection on the issue. He wasn’t calling for respecting shrines.
Why would I not have published it? Because it’s not crucial to the debate. It’s not crucial to the development of Saudi Arabia. I’m willing to stick my neck out for an issue like women’s driving or women’s empowerment or reforming the [school] curriculum because that will have a positive impact on Saudi life. But really, what we think about shrines has no positive impact. In fact I am against shrines. I don’t believe in shrines. What I admire the most in Wahhabism is that it empowers me to reach God directly without the need of anybody else. And I like that and I call that positive Wahhabism.
WND also takes a couple low blows at New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the joint venture, which is being funded in part by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is also a major shareholder in Fox News parent News Corp.The article asserts that "Critics fear the venture could serve as a platform for bin Talal's notoriously anti-Israel agenda" and that "Critics say the mayor is chasing Arab petrodollars as his own business empire struggles amid the U.S. recession" -- but nowhere are the "critics" named. Indeed, there isn't a named source for any of the article's major claims, just reference to anonymous "critics" and "sources."
WND's reckless and dishonest attack has all the trappings of a defamation lawsuit in the making -- and possibly even a libel lawsuit.
WND Seeks (Biased, Obama-Hating) Washington Reporters Topic: WorldNetDaily
Do you know how to inject right-wing bias into a "news" story? Do you hate President Obama with the burning passion of a thousand suns? Are you a birther? Then you too can be a reporter for WorldNetDaily!
WASHINGTON – WND is looking for a few good men and women, preferably with reporting experience, to cover major events, hearings, protests and meetings in the nation's capital.
The positions are part-time, contractor positions, but can expand into full-time staff reporting jobs based on a track record of success.
Those interested in applying their skills and talents in this area are encouraged to send their resumes and cover letters to Sheila Ryan – at sryan@wnd.com.
The bias and Obama-hating is not specified in the job requirements, of course, but it's hard to imagine that anyone who's not fully on board with that agenda would be hired, since the rest of WND's staff already conforms.
On top of that, WND won't even consider you a real employee. The "part-time, contractor positions" being offered -- and the presumably paltry pay commensurate with such glorified-temp status -- are hardly inducements into the wonderful world of journalism, especially the highly defective version of it that WND offers.
MRC Absurdly Likens Solyndra to Enron Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center complained in an Oct. 11 "Media Reality Check":
A study by the Media Research Center finds that the three broadcast networks are providing virtually no coverage of the Solyndra scandal, a solar energy firm that went bankrupt after getting more than $500 million in taxpayer money from the Obama administration. This is not the approach the networks took after the collapse of Enron, an energy company with Republican ties. In just the first two months of 2002, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts cranked out 198 stories on the Enron debacle, compared to just eight so far on Solyndra, a 24-to-1 disparity.
That's an absurd comparison -- the two companies are nothing alike.
Solyndra is a small company making solar panels that fell victim to a change in the market -- a rival method of building the panels suddenly became much cheaper than Solyndra's. Enron was a huge company using impenetrable and deceptive accounting methods to obscure massive corruption and market manipulation. As Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, authors of "The Smartest Guys in the Room," wrote: "Enron’s wash swamped the entire U.S. energy industry, wiping out hundreds of billions in stock value. It destroyed the nation’s most venerable accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. And it exposed holes in our patchwork system of business oversight—shocking lapses by government regulators, auditors, banks, lawyers, Wall Street analysts, and credit agencies—shaking faith in U.S. financial markets." Numerous Enron officials pleaded guilty to corruption charges. No one has alleged similar corruption in Solyndra's business dealings.
Such patent aburdity, though, didn't keep MRC chief Brent Bozell from repeating it in his Oct. 19 column:
Most Americans could still be fooled into thinking Solyndra is a new laundry detergent, not a failed solar energy company that took a half-billion dollars in Obama "green job" loans and went belly up. It's another Enron.
Yet Another WND Columnist Likens Obama to Hitler Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily loves to liken Obama to Hitler and the Nazis, and it happens again in an Oct. 19 column by Craige McMillan:
There is a widespread misconception that the German people elected the Nazi government.
They didn't.
The German's elected a man who – during troubled economic times that followed a flawed peace settlement at the end of World War I – told ordinary German's it wasn't their fault. The reason that worked is that Hitler found somebody else to blame.
That "somebody" turned out to be Jewish shopkeepers and small-businessmen. They were the ones who raised prices for consumers as the government printing presses gathered steam and inflation took hold. To most German's the Jews were "the rich."
Once the guilty were identified, the solution to Germany's economic woes became clear. The Jews were forced to turn over more and more of their money, property and businesses to the state, or place them under state control. The state would allocate resources to those who needed them. These people on the receiving end became the Nazi's strongest supporters.
Sound familiar?
[...]
German's did elect a talented orator to fix their problems. Hitler was quite fond of ejecting hecklers from his speeches, which were then devoted to "firing up the base," in today's vernacular. His propaganda outlets demonized the opposition. He seized on the violence the communists stirred up to consolidate his power. One by one he brought the various elements of German culture under his control, including the schools and the churches.
And the Germans, who had elected an orator to solve their problems, ended up with a god in human form at the helm of the state. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Of course, this is America. And such things could never happen here. The estimated 60,000 TSA employees are not an illegal federal police force that can set up at train stations and bus stations as well as airports. Secret lists and secret kill orders for American citizens don't exist. Constitutional protections still apply. Congress doesn't fund undeclared wars. Government gunrunning operations found selling weapons to Mexican drug gangs never happen. The federal government doesn't use the EPA to control business, or the taxpayer golden goose to pick winners and losers in auto manufacturing and solar panels. Unions and other supporters haven't gotten waivers from Obamacare's rationing and death panels. And Harry Reid really does understand the economy.
But I digress. We don't teach history anymore. After all, how can what happened so many years ago really matter today?
McMillan doesn't use the word "Obama," but the inference is unmistakable.
In case you're wondering, WND devoted almost no original coverage to the story of Hank Williams Jr. likening Obama to Hitler -- the only mention is in a column by Kathy Shaidle repeating Sean Hannity's hypocritical whining about "the liberal media's double standard."
An Oct. 19 CNSNews.com article by Matt Cover highlights how "Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who are seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said at Tuesday night's CNN-Western Republican Leadership Conference debate in Las Vegas that the religious faith of a candidate matters."
Both Santorum and Gingrich are Catholic; Cover identifies Santorum as such, but not Gingrich.
For an article that purports to discuss how a candidate's faith matters, Cover curiously made no mention of the biggest currently controversy regarding a candidate's faith: A supporter of Rick Perry, Rev. Robert Jeffress, delcared that Mitt Romney is "not a Christian" because "Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity."
Indeed, a search of the CNS archive indicates that only one original CNS article has mentioned the Jeffress-Romney controversy, an Oct. 10 article that was focused on Santorum.
CNS has been carrying water lately for both Catholics and Santorum. Makes sense since Jeffrey (near as we can tell) and his boss, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell, are Catholic.
So much for its purported mission to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."
