Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 10 WorldNetDaily column by Joseph Farah noting a "United Kingdom court ruling smacking down Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' as shameless political fantasy unfit for schoolchildren" praised the person under whose name the suit was filed as "the UK parent-hero, Stuart Dimmock," who is "one obscure parent who battled, like David vs. Goliath, the national education establishment in the United Kingdom and won!"
This continued a theme Farah established in his Dec. 8 column, in which he called Dimmock "the father of a secondary school student who would have been victimized by the decision of the education bureaucrats. May God increase his flock."
Farah then attacked Gore for pointing out the forces behind Dimmock's lawsuit:
[W]hat Al Gore did was to make scurrilous and unsubstantiated accusations about the concerned parent who brought the case to court, at some personal sacrifice, to protect his child from the mental abuse of being forced to watch "An Inconvenient Truth."
Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider questioned in a Washington Post online blog whether Dimmock paid for his legal expenses himself or got help from others. Since she could not determine the answer to this question puzzling her, she determined that Dimmock's "motives are quite suspect."
If this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don't think I've ever seen one.
But as we've pointed out -- and Farah didn't -- Dimmock did, in fact, have some powerful interests behind him: The UK Observer reported that Dimmock's case was supported by a powerful network of business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies, as well as conservative British politicians.
Farah also fails to note that the British judge who ruled on the scientific "errors" also found (as we noted) that "An Inconvenient Truth" is "broadly accurate" in its presentation of climate change and that "four main scientific hypotheses" put forward in the film are "very well supported by research published in respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the latest conclusions of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]." WND similarly failed to note this in its original report on the ruling, which erroneously claimed that 11 inaccuracies were found (only nine were).
