Joseph Farah, Minuteman Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has declared his fealty to the Minutemen border-watcher group, proudly proclaiming in an Aug. 1 column that "I volunteered to join this courageous band of American patriots as a volunteer border watcher this fall."
Is Farah aware that he will be spending his Minuteman stint with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? David Neiwert tells all about it.
Perhaps Farah should spend a column explaining why he has chosen to associate with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
New MRC Blog Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has a new group blog, NewsBusters, headed by Matthew and Greg Sheffield, described on the "about" page as "the creators of the creators of the influential web site RatherBiased.com." Um, OK...
We can see that ol' MRC bias slipping in already: Dead conservative-friendly journalists are getting a better sendoff than dead journalists the MRC doesn't like. Thus, NewsBusters serves up headlines like "Pro-war Iraq journalist Steven Vincent, RIP" ("Unlike many (most?) journos covering the war in Iraq, Vincent supported the invasion," poster Clay Waters of MRC's TimesWatch noted) and "David Shaw, RIP" (Shaw wrote a series claiming that news coverage of abortion was tilted toward the "pro-choice" view), the death of ABC's Peter Jennings gets only the headline "Peter Jennings Dead."
Apparently, the MRC doesn't want Jennings to rest in peace.
Logrolling In Our Time Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 8 WorldNetDaily article pimping WND managing Editor David Kupelian's new WND-published book "The Marketing of Evil" claims on the front-page link blurb that the book has received "widespread, rave reviews."
Kupelian, you may recall, wrote the loopy "Media Matrix" essay that somehow overlooked WND's own matrix of lies and deceptions presented as truth, as ConWebWatch has noted.
WND Hides Identity of Shooting Victims Topic: WorldNetDaily
From the Washington Post, we learn something else that WorldNetDaily Jerusalem reporter Aaron Klein has not told WND readers about the case of Eden Natan Zada. Of the four people that AWOL Israeli soldier Zada killed on a bus in Gaza Aug. 4 (whom Klein has described only as "Arabs"), two of them were Christians.
WND Breast Alert Topic: WorldNetDaily
Another WorldNetDaily article on something overly sexy, this time an Aug. 6 article about a large-breasted mermaid sculpture. With a picture, of course. And a bonus shot, too: a picture of former attorney general John Ashcroft standing in front of a topless statue at the Justice Department.
Condemnation Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily article by Art Moore notes the Council on American-Islamic Relations' condemnation of the killing of four people and wounding of a dozen others on a bus in Gaza by AWOL Israeli soldier Eden Natan Zada -- then quotes two "terrorism experts"-cum-bloggers, Robert Spencer (last seen around these parts trying to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the death of a family that turned out not to be Islamic-related at all) and Steven Emerson, attacking CAIR for not sufficiently condemning Islamic terrorism to their satisfaction.
A quick check of these so-called experts' blogs, Jihad Watch and Counterterrorism Blog, shows that neither Spencer nor Emerson have condemned the Zada killings.
CNS Spin-O-Rama Topic: CNSNews.com
Today's CNSNews.com "Fact-O-Rama" is a sidebar to a surprisingly balanced article by Jeff Johnson on financial improprieties at a New York City Boys & Girls Club that have a link to Air America Radio. Unlike the article, the Fact-O-Rama manages to be quite misleading.
The headline is "Left's Silence on Air America Scandal." The front-page promo claims that the B&G Club scandal "has received almost no attention in the establishment media." Of course, "the left" and "the establishment media" are not the same thing, no matter how much CNS' overlords at the Media Research Center think they are.
But the actual "Fact-O-Rama" has an even greater disconnect between headline and copy. It has the same "Left's Silence on Air America Scandal," but instead, it discusses the ownership of Air America's New York affiliate, citing a only a "CNSNews.com Commentary" as a source; more precisely, the source is an Aug. 3 column by Michelle Malkin. Whoever copied-and-pasted the "Fact-O-Rama" out of Malkin's column gives some infor on someone named "Jackson" but failed to give the guy's first name. Presumably, it's Jesse.
WND Perpetuates Killer As Victim Topic: WorldNetDaily
Another Aug. 4 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein portrays Eden Natan Zada, the AWOL Israeli soldier who shot and killed four people and wounded a dozen others on a bus, then later killed by a mob responding to the deaths, as a victim of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
While Klein doesn't claim in that that Zada was "murdered" by the mob as he did in an earlier Aug. 4 article (a designation he did not apply to the four people Zada killed, as ConWebBlog noted), he does state that Zada "was killed when he was assaulted by a mob of angry Arab bystanders and witnesses."
But Klein continues the lionization of Zada as a victim of Gaza withdrawal, using the following quotes:
-- "Had he not been enlisted, had they not forced him to be scheduled to uproot Jews, there wouldn't be any deaths."
-- "[Eden] was a quiet kid. Withdrawn. But very nice. We certainly were in shock when we heard what happened. But when [the IDF] made him serve and then sent him to jail for refusing, something in him changed."
-- Zada was "a humble and very shy Jew. The disengagement really broke him."
A third Aug. 4 WND article by Klein repeats the quote, from a purported friend fo Zada's, that "Had he not been enlisted, had they not forced him to be scheduled to uproot Jews, there wouldn't be any deaths." But not until the very last paragraph does Klein quote someone -- for the first time anywhere in the three stories he wrote Aug. 4 on the incident -- as noting that Zada "took the lives of innocent people."
NewsMax, True to Form Topic: Newsmax
Once again demonstrating that there is apparently no conservative misdeed NewsMax will not try to minimize by claiming that a Clinton did it worse, an Aug. 5 NewsMax article compares Robert Novak's profanity-laced departure from a live CNN interview with something Bill Clinton did.
New Article: Joseph Farah's Current Bitterness Topic: WorldNetDaily
A new exhibit in the Out There section: The WorldNetDaily editor seems unusually bitter about Al Gore's new TV channel. It must be that defamation lawsuit filed against WND by a Gore fund-raiser. But why won't Farah give us the full story on that lawsuit? Read more.
A mob of Palestinians tonight murdered a Jewish Israeli man in a police uniform after he opened fire on a bus and killed four Arabs, allegedly in protest of the Gaza withdrawal plan.
Klein does not describe the four victims the man killed anywhere else in his article as being "murdered," just the killer himself. In fact, he quotes several people calling the man, an AWOL Israeli soldier named Eden Natan Zada, as a victim of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
A guy who shot four people to death is a victim? Hey, it's keeping with WND's theme of the day, in which Israelis are apparently not to blame for criminal behavior (a strange stance given that WND is normally a law-and-order kind of website). WND also serves up another sympathetic article by Klein on convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, whose release WND has previously agitated for.
What WND Doesn't Cover Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's front page currently features an outside link to an article on a raid of property belonging to a Democratic congressman. We don't recall seeing even an outside link at WND to a similar raid on the house and yacht of Repubican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
Farah Hangs With FrontPageMag Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah did an Aug. 2 interview with FrontPageMag.com. The interview with FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov is essentially a fluff piece; FrontPageMag's two modes are either fluffing conservatives (the treatment Farah gets) or attacking people and organizations that don't agree with it. As ConWebWatch has noted, a number of the claims Farah is pushing come from a guy trying to sell a book, while others come from a discredited source who claims to be a "former Israeli counterterrorism intelligence officer."
The main focus in this interview is the claim promoted at WND and sister site G2 Bulletin that Osama bin Laden has nuclear weapons and plans to detonate them in the U.S. in what is being called the "American Hiroshima" plan.
One thing Farah plays up is the use of significant dates, noting in particular Aug. 6, the date of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. Farah adds: "No year has been set, but it is worth noting that this Aug. 6th is the 60th anniversary of that attack." Also worth noting (though Farah apparently doesn't think so) is that Aug. 6 falls on a Saturday this year, minimizing the amount of disruption and carnage (and thus attention) that can be caused since nobody will be commuting to work that day. An Aug. 2 WND article does not this, but adds: "Others point out that Aug. 6 arrives in Japan while it is still Aug. 5 in the U.S. Does that raise the threat level this Friday?"
Farah makes the following interesting statement: "I have had what I consider to be credible sourcing on 95 percent of this for quite awhile." That means 5 percent of what he claims is not credibly sources; perhaps Farah will tell us sometime what those claims are.
Farah also slips into conspiracy-mongering, claiming that illegal immigration in the U.S. is part of a plan: "There is a master plan for global governance being plotted in meetings of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations."
And if you need any more evidence of the fluff job this is intended to be, check out Glazov's parting words: "Mr. Farah, it was a pleasure to have you here with us today. Thank you for coming to share this vital and traumatizing information. We won’t blame the messenger. Take care my friend."
Blaming the Victim Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 3 WorldNetDaily column by Jill Stanek plays blame-the-victim in criticizing the National Organization for Women's highlighting of individual cases of women who died as the result of illegal abortions. In the case of one woman NOW cites, Becky Bell, Stanek writes:
It turned out Becky had been promiscuous since age 15 and was a known drug user. Her parents placed her in drug rehab earlier in 1988 for several weeks. The weekend before Becky died, she was, according to the coroner's report, "reportedly at a party where various drugs were being used [cocaine, 'speed,' and LSD] ... and later claimed that someone had put 'speed' in her drink."
Stanek adds: "And what about the faces of death due to legal abortions? There are four timely faces NOW could showcase – four who have died just since 2003 from legal RU-486 abortions." As ConWebWatch has noted, the number of deaths allegedly linked to RU-486 is much smaller than the number attributed to liver failure induced by taking Tylenol, as well as smaller than the number of men killed by taking Viagra. But we don't see Stanek rallying the troops to take Tylenol or Viagra off the market.
And somehow, we suspect Stanek won't be painting the purported victims of RU-486 as sluts and druggies like Becky Bell. (Not that we have any knowledge of that.)
What CNS Won't Tell You Topic: CNSNews.com
An Aug. 2 CNSNews.com article by Melanie Hunter touts the results of a report by the American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund alleging that "paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election."
Hunter describes the American Center for Voting Rights merely as "a voting rights group"; in fact, the group is a conservative group (which explains the focus on alleged Democrat voter fraud). The group's leaders have a Republican background: The group's legislative counsel, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, was a national election counsel for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, and the center's publicist, Jim Dyke, is a former communications director for the Republican National Committee. (BradBlog has more.)
CNS knows all this, by the way; it did a story back in March on criticism of the group's Republican ties. Interestingly, the article, by Kathleen Rhodes, doesn't actually detail what those ties are, merely paraphrasing Dyke acknowledging that "the group includes a number of people formerly involved in Republican politics" and noting the "apparently partisan edge" and the "pretty anti-Bush" posts found on BradBlog.
