Topic: WorldNetDaily
Is anybody at WorldNetDaily capable of mounting an intellectually and morally honest defense of themselves? It seems not.
First, it was Joel Gilbert. Now it's WND's resident race-baiter, Colin Flaherty, who can't be honest with, or about, his critics.
Flaherty's Oct. 26 WND column is headline "The psychos from Salon" -- a phrase he repeats in his opening paragraph -- so you know he has immediately ceded any moral high ground to any argument he makes.He goes onto claim that "Salon has ganged up with the Guardians of the Liberal Universe known as the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that I am peddling White Nationalism."
In fact, all Salon did is reprint an SPLC article about Flaherty, which notes that Flaherty went on a "white nationalist" radio show to promote his work and that "Several articles from his WND series have been picked up by American Renaissance, a white nationalist hate group that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites."
Flaherty insists he's not a racist nor a "white nationalist," insisting that "Their only evidence of me peddling 'White Nationalist propaganda' is me saying I was not a White Nationalist." But he doesn't explain his obsession with "black mob violence" or express any concern that his work has found an audience in the "white nationalist" circles he purports to abhor.
Flaherty also fails to mention that the SPLC has debunked his and WND's assertion that so-called "black mob violence" is being ignored by the media (the subtitle of Flaherty's self-published book):
As it happens, the “liberal media” has had much to say about the subject of violent “flash mobs” consisting of mostly black youths – particularly after several members of a such a group were arrested for attacking white people at 2011’s Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee.
The New York Times, which WND frequently holds up as a leading light of the “liberal media” conspiracy, has repeatedly covered (for instance, here and here) violent flash mobs consisting of black youths whose targets were primarily white people and their property.
So has The Root, a blog owned by the Washington Post that examines news “from an African-American perspective.” There, columnist Nsenga Burton wrote approvingly of a message delivered by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is black and who said the mostly black teens who formed a series of mobs that wrought havoc on his city in 2010 and 2011 were “damaging the race.”
In June, We Are Respectable Negroes, a left-leaning blog that specializes in tackling sensitive racial issues, published two pieces on the issue of “black youth mob violence” (here and here) and the tricky politics of addressing it in writing. So, for that matter, did Hatewatch’s own Robert Steinback, in a blog post published a week after the attack in Milwaukee.
Flaherty concludes:
So here I stand. Willing to be judged by what I have written and said. Not who heard it. Not what it appears to mean.
What it is.What I cannot figure out from Salon and SPLC is this: Are they unhappy with me for being wrong?
If so, show me. It should be simple.
Or are they mad at me for being right?
How about being mad at Flaherty for his strategic obtuseness in pretending that his fearmongering about "black mob violence" doesn't find an audience in "white nationalist" circles?
