Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein and his "Manchurian Presdident" co-author and researcher, Brenda J. Elliott, are two of the most shamelessly dishonest reporters ever.
Just a week after deliberately cherry-picking a report issued by a George Soros-funded think tank to falsely distort its conclusions and recommendations, Klein and Elliott do it again. From a Feb. 15 WND article by Klein, with "research" by Elliott:
An international "crisis management" group led by billionaire George Soros long has petitioned for the Algerian government to cease "excessive" military activities against al-Qaida-linked groups and to allow organizations seeking to create an Islamic state to participate in the Algerian government.
The organization, the International Crisis Group, also is tied strongly to the Egyptian opposition movement whose protests led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.[...]
In a July 2004 ICG report obtained by WND, the ICG calls on the Algerian government to curb military action against al-Qaida-affiliated organizations, particularly the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, GSPC, which, like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, aims to establish an Islamic state within Algeria, and an armed Islamic terrorist group known as Houmat Daawa Salafia, or HDS.
Soros' ICG names the two Islamic groups in its recommendations to the Algerian government.
"Give top priority to ending the remaining armed movements, mainly the GSPC and HDS, through a political, security, legal and diplomatic strategy," states the ICG report.
"Avoid excessive reliance on military means and do not allow these movements' purported links to al-Qaida to rule out a negotiated end to their campaigns," continued the ICG's recommendation to the Algerian government.
As before, Klein refuses to link to the ICG report in his article, even though it's easily avabilable. And as before, his apparent reason for that basic journalistic failure is because he's pulling statements out of context.
Klein didn't mention that the ICG report also stated that the main "Islamist" parties in Algeria have rejected violent fundamentalism:
While these persistent difficulties may suggest little real change over the last decade, Algerian Islamists have revised their outlook and discourse in important respects. Islamic political activism has abandoned its brief but intense flirtation with revolution and reverted to essentially reformist strategies. The Islamist parties now accept the nation-state and have either tacitly abandoned the ideal of an Islamic state or reconciled it with democratic principles. They no longer advocate fundamentalist positions on Islamic law and have begun to accept equality of the sexes, including women's right to work outside the home and participate in public life. These changes represent a partial recovery of the outlook of the "Islamic modernism" movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. True fundamentalism -- hostile to democracy and the national idea, resistant to innovative thinking, conservative on the status of women -- is today confined to the Salafiyya current from which Islamist parties now explicitly dissociate themselves.
The armed rebellion is now reduced to the Salafiyya's jihadi wing. Its initial scale owed much to the involvement of a variety of ideological currents, including movements derived from or at least partly inspired by Algeria's nationalist and populist traditions. But today only groups derived from the Salafi current remain active and they have no representation in the party-political sphere. As the armed movements' political and social bases have contracted, their connections with local "mafias" involved in illicit economic activities, notably smuggling, have become more pronounced. Links to al-Qaeda underline the narrowness of their domestic constituency and reliance on external sources of legitimation.
Abandonment of fundamentalism by mainstream Islamist parties means the two oppositions that structured party-politics in the early 1990s, polarising and paralysing debate -- Islamism versus secularism and Islamism versus the nation-state -- have been largely overcome. Inclusive, constructive debate on reform between the main political tendencies -- including Islamists -- should now be possible.
For good measure, Klein repeats his previous false distortion about the ICG's recommendation that "pave the way for the regularization of the Muslim Brothers' participation in political life" without mentioning that the ICG also recommended that the Muslim Brotherhood moderate some of its more extreme views as well.
This isn't just bad reporting -- it's dishonest reporting. But do we expect anything else from Klein and Elliott?
