Topic: CNSNews.com
We've documented how CNSNews.com managing editor Michael Chapman has a peculiar obsession with documenting every last word right-wing evangelical Franklin Graham says. But it turns out Chapman's fixation with Graham has its limits -- when his words conflict with the agenda of Chapman's employer.
On the May 6 edition of "Fox & Friends," Graham denounced the Muhamma-cartoon exhibit in Texas where two would-be gunmen were killed, saying the attendees "were wrong" to mock Muslims:
"As a Christian, I don’t like it when people mock my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ, and what this event in Garland, Texas, was doing was mocking the Muslims. And I disagree with Islam, I don’t believe in Islam, but I’m not going to mock them and make fun of them," Graham said on "Fox and Friends."
Graham said that the cartoon contest, organized by Pam Geller's anti-Islam group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, was offensive.
"I’m discouraged that people would do this. We live in a society now where there’s no civility, there’s no respect, we don’t honor people who have differences. We only attack each other. And so I agree that the folks in Garland, Texas, were wrong," he said. "They had the right to speak. I have free speech, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go around and cuss people just because I have the freedom to do that."
He later added that even though he did not approve of the event, responding with violence was "wrong."
Even though Chapman has devoted dozens of articles in the past several months to Graham's various utterings over the past several months, he has yet to report this one, according to his article archive.
Why? Presumably because it runs counter to the expressed agenda of the Media Resarch Center, which own CNS, to support Geller.
The same day Graham made his remarks, CNS published a column by Chapman's boss, Brent Bozell, and Tim Graham expressing their support for the "exercise of free speech" at the Muhammad cartoon contest, insisting that while it was "provocative... it wasn't meant to result in two Islamic extremists showing up with assault rifles."
They don't know that, of course; it's entirely possible Geller wanted to provoke a violent response in order to justify her anti-Muslim agenda. Instead, Bozell and Graham complain that some in the media described Geller as "relentlessly shrill and coarse in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam." They don't dispute the accuracy of the claim, however.
Bozell and Graham go on to blame the Southern Poverty Law Center for an "assassin using their "hate map" to go to FRC's building and open fire, seriously wounding a security guard, with the intent to kill as many staff as possible, before being subdued." They add: "The leftist media know that. And still use SPLC as their source."
Funny, we don't recall Bozell or Graham running away from the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue after Scott Roeder had contacts with the group and later murdered abortion doctor George Tiller. In fact, the MRC has pretended there was no link at all between Roeder and the anti-abortion movement, and Bozell himself effectively endorsed Tiller's murder, calling him "a monster who personally murdered 60,000 babies."
If the MRC can't be bothered to unequivocally denounce a group for its links to a murder, Chapman certainly isn't going to challenge that sort of agenda.
UPDATE: Chapman added a post quoting Graham bashing ISIS. He's still ignoring Graham's statement denouncing Geller.
