The ConWeb loved Walid Shoebat when he surfaced in right-wing circles a few years back.

WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah featured him on his radio show (more than once) and wrote a fawning profile of him, a story that dovetails nicely with the typical conservative view of the Middle East:

Walid Shoebat, born in Bethlehem, began attacking Israelis when he was 8 years old, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.

He was, Shoebat says now, an Islamic terrorist in the making – a product of his environment, including schools, media and mosques that preached hatred of Jews.

"I never actually met any Jews," he said. "But in school we were taught from the Quran that they were pigs and monkeys.''

By 15, he had already served time in a Jerusalem prison for participating in an anti-Israel riot. While there, he was recruited into the Palestine Liberation Organization.

At 16, he was chosen to take a loaf of bread, packed with explosives, to blow up the Bethlehem Bank Leumi. His instructions were to place it in a garbage can near the door of the building. But seeing Arab children playing nearby, he decided to throw the bread on the roof where it did little damage.

He once blinded a man during a fight and was "so happy" to learn he was a Jew.

He was also involved in the near-lynching of an Israeli soldier. Though Shoebat and his friends took the soldier's gun and beat him, he managed to escape.

His motivation?

"I wanted to die as a martyr," said. "We were indoctrinated to look forward to heaven.''

[...]

Now Shoebat has turned his activism in a completely different direction. He calls himself a Christian Zionist, giving speeches around the country and in Canada, where he made an appearance this week. His ultimate dream, he says, is to go to Israeli prisons to teach Palestinian youngsters Jewish history – a dream he understands is fraught with danger from the people who think as he once did.

WND also spun travails with speaking events and getting into Canada his way. WND columnist Mychal Massie even cites him in an April 2007 column.

But WND isn't the only ones in the ConWeb to have promoted Shoebat:

• Newsmax, in a lengthy July 2006 profile, declared him a "terror expert" and "a man with a tough message" -- "a former fundamentalist Islamic terrorist who, incredibly, reformed." It printed an interview with Glenn Beck touting that Shoebat would appear in a segement of his TV show called "Exposed: The Extremist Agenda."
• An October 2006 CNSNews.com article touted a speech by Shoebat and another former terrorist. A CNS "Fact-O-Rama" repeated highlights from Shoebat's bio.

But was Shoebat really the badass terrorist he claims to have been? The New York Times writes of Shoebat and two other purported ex-terrorists with whom Shoebat has done speaking tours:

Academic professors and others who have heard the three men speak in the United States and Canada said some of their stories border on the fantastic, like Mr. [Kamal] Saleem’s account of how, as a child, he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights. No such incidents have been reported, the academic experts said. They also question how three middle-aged men who claim they were recruited as teenagers or younger could have been steeped in the violent religious ideology that only became prevalent in the late 1980s.

[...]

Arab-American civil rights organizations question why, at a time when the United States government has vigorously moved to jail or at least deport anyone with a known terrorist connection, the three men, if they are telling the truth, are allowed to circulate freely. A spokesman for the F.B.I. said there were no warrants for their arrest.

The Times article also notes that the speeches by Shoebat and the others are little more than Muslim bashing and Christian prostletyzing; according to one critic, "It was just an old time gospel hour — 'Jesus can change your life, he changed mine.' ... That is mixed in with 'Watch out America, wake up America, the danger of Islam is here.' "

The Village Voice adds:

In response, the men have spent significant time trying to prove that they actually did kill people, and that they used to hate Jews as much as the next Muslim extremist. "I planted a bomb in a bank!" insists Shoebat, whose handler, Keith Davies, has threatened a libel suit against The Times over the article that questioned his claims.

That's right: Shoebat is claiming libel against anyone who says he wasn't a terrorist -- as Richard Bartholomew notes, the most absurd libel threat ever. Bartholomew noted that Shoebat has issued a similar libel threat against a blogger who claimed to have talked to a relative of Shoebat, who called his terrorist story "a manufactured fabrication," adding that "The biggest act of 'terror' he ever committed was to glue Palestinian flag on street posts."

It should be no surprise that the controversy over Shoebat's veracity can be found nowhere on the ConWeb. It's mentioned nowhere on the websites that have touted him -- WorldNetDaily, Newsmax or CNS -- even though the story first surfaced two months ago.

Posted by Terry K. at 1:15 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, March 31, 2008 1:25 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

A March 16 NewsBusters post by John Stephenson howled that Barack Obama's church, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (which Stephenson called "Trinity Baptist"), "removed the 'black values' from their about us page! the new pastor bringing a new vision and vaules system? Lets hope so, but lets not forget the values they adopted before and are rooted in."

A March 16 WorldNetDaily article similarly claimed: "A black Chicago church attended by Democrat presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has removed from the "About Us" page of its website a section outlining a radical belief system for blacks."

Both Stephenson and WND failed to note that the "Black Value System" can be found on its own page on the church's website. (h/t Media Matters)

Phil Brennan, in a March 18 Newsmax article, also misleadingly claimed that "a racially-charged section on the 'Black Value System' from the church’s Web site (www.tucc.org) and its 'About Us' page," then sorta got it right: "However, the church’s Web masters apparently neglected to remove a link to the Black Value System at the bottom of its home page." Who said it was neglect?

It's rather amusing to see WND in particular describe the "Black Value System" as "radical," since among its components, as WND itself listed them, are "Dedication to the Pursuit of Education," "Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence," and "Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect." What's so "radical" about that?

Posted by Terry K. at 9:19 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

A post at Campus Watch states thusly about an earlier post of ours:

This blog post incorrectly describes Campus Watch as a "conservative-funded website that attacks liberal college professors."

In fact, Campus Watch's funding is not tied to any particular political ideology, nor do we critique (not "attack") academics on the basis of political proclivity.

Rather, Campus Watch critiques Middle East studies academics where, as indicated in our mission statement, one of the following five issues come into play: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students.

Media Transparency lists only two major conservative foundations as donating to Campus Watch's parent, the Middle East Forum, so we're willing to concede the assertion on funding -- that is, pending further information on the Middle East Forum's funding sources, about which the Campus Watch post curiously fails to offer any detail.

The post's suggestion that "political proclivity" does not play a part in Campus Watch is a tad disingenuous. Campus Watch's general agenda -- aggressively pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, and arguably anti-Muslim -- parallels that of conservatives. If Campus Watch doesn't attack liberals, why does a search for the word "liberal" on its website reveal the following, for example:

• "Liberal bias in colleges bleeds into classroom" 
• "Colleges Score Perfect Grade In Liberal Bias" 
• "[T]he liberal, anti-God establishment is trying to silence the conservative voice altogether." 
• "Since I was a freshman in college, I have despised the overwhelmingly leftist — I won't dignify it by calling it liberal — bias among a majority of professors."
• "Juan Cole is Pond Scum"

Further, note who wrote that Campus Watch "correction" on us: Cinnamon Stillwell. That's right -- the person we outed a couple years back as a terrorist sympathizer (or, in Campus Watch jargon, an "apologetic"). If Campus Watch truly has no political agenda, shouldn't it be watching her instead of letting her write for it?

Posted by Terry K. at 12:13 AM EST

Updated: Friday, February 1, 2008 1:40 AM EST

Share This Post

Permalink

Looks like another memo came down from on high at ConWeb World Headquarters: Barack Obama must be attacked! And lo, the ConWeb complied.

A Jan. 7 Newsmax article by Ronald Kessler attacked Obama's "racist church" because it claims to be "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian" with a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa” and a "Black Value System." But Kessler ignores that the church's pastor has stated that the church's philosophy does not "assume superiority nor does it assume separatism." Kessler claimed by way of comparison: "Imagine if Mitt Romney’s church proclaimed on its website that it is 'unashamedly white.' The media would pounce, and Romney’s presidential candidacy would be over." He doesn't mention that the Mormon church has arguably been for a good part of its history "unabashedly white," with a history of anti-black racism. 

A Jan. 9 WorldNetDaily article by Ron Strom claimed that "it is the strong African-centered and race-based philosophy of the senator's United Church of Christ that has some bloggers crying foul." By "some bloggers" Strom means one blogger, some guy named "Ric," whom Strom doesn't identify further or even bother linking to.

A Jan. 8 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr quoted four "pro-life experts" claiming Obama's "pro-abortion stance make him a danger to the black community" while giving Obama no real opportunity to respond (as we've noted).

A Jan. 9 WND column by Jill Stanek attacks Obama's "fence-sitting votes as Illinois state senator for the Born Alive Infants Protection Act"; Obama's "present" vote on the act, Stanek claims, was "a tactic they devised to show liberal senators a way out who were squirmy on voting to support aborting babies alive and letting them die in hospital soiled utility rooms, which is what a vote against Born Alive meant."

A Jan. 9 CNS column by Terry Jeffrey called Obama "the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever," citing claims made by ... Jill Stanek.

A Jan. 9 CNS article by Jeffrey features former Bush aide Karl Rove bashing Obama as "a smarmy, prissy little guy."

Posted by Terry K. at 12:58 AM EST

Share This Post

Permalink

It seems that Catherine Moy's history of shabby and misleading "reporting" continues: A Nov. 4 column by Ray Duke in the Vacaville (Calif.) Reporter, where Moy pens a weekly column, details how Moy stated in a Reporter column and elsewhere that "A Code Pink supporter wearing an orange mask charged at some veterans with a knife" during a "pro-troop" rally and counterprotest. This purported incident was mysteriously never reported to police -- perhaps, Duke writes, because the protester wasn't trying to knife veterans at all but, rather, trying to cut down a Marine flag, something much different than what Moy described. (That, of course, is its own punishment for hacking off a group of Marines.)

Duke also notes that Moy never disclosed in her Reporter column that she is acting executive director of Move America Forward, the organization that sponsored the "pro-troop" rally -- a clear conflict of interest.

It seems that Moy is getting busted on a regular basis by her own readers: A Nov. 4 letter to the Reporter notes that Moy "was revealed in these pages to have relied for 'facts' on an obscure, ultra-conservative Christian Internet site to support her pro-Bush notions. Mostly her columns amount to venting, and her observations both locally and nationally, smack of vindictiveness." Ouch.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:58 AM EST

Share This Post

Permalink

An Oct. 8 American Thinker article by Randall Hoven lists 101 instances of "media dishonesty" -- a list almost entirely devoid of conservatives. Hoven writes:

I did receive a few complaints for not having "conservatives" on the list. There turns out to be a good reason for that: there just aren't that many who pass the criteria for clear dishonesty in the public debate. It is probably also related to the fact that so few journalists are conservative. Some people did send me "conservative" candidates for my list, but they told me more about the submitters  than the people on the list. I suspect Media Matters was the ultimate source of most or all of them.

So, to help Mr. Hoven out, here are some examples of conservative media dishonesty that we've documented, using the same criteria Hoven cited on his list:

1. Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily, plagiarism, undisclosed conflict of interest (2005). More than half of a WND article written by founder and editor Farah was copied without attribution from a Reuters article; the other half features a company Farah didn't disclose was a WND advertiser.

2. WorldNetDaily, fell for hoax (2005). WND reported that Terri Schiavo's husband sold the rights to his story to CBS for a TV movie. Turns out WND got its information from an April Fool's post on a blog.

3. WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2004). Claimed that  Teresa Heinz Kerry, donated millions to "radical, anti-American groups" through an organization called the Tides Center. In fact, Heinz's donations were earmarked for specific environmental causes. Called on the falsehood, WND then peddled the logical distortion that "it is accurate to say that donors to Tides are indeed supporting all of its causes" because "donors to the Tides Foundation pay approximately 10 percent above and beyond the amount grant recipients get for administrative fees and overhead to Tides."

4. Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2004). Klein falsely suggested that the charity Islamic Relief had ties to terrorists and that the orphans for whom it was raising money didn't exist. WND was forced to retract the article and apologize to the charity.

5. Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2002). Wrote a seven-part WND series suggesting that James Kopp was innocent of killing abortion doctor Barnett Slepian and was framed by liberal government officials "determined ... to protect the abortion industry." Six months after the series ran, Kopp confessed to killing Slepian.

6. CNSNews.com, misrepresentation (2005). An article asserted that when Democratic strategist said at a Democratic gathering that "They want to kill us, particularly in this city, and New York, and some other places," he was referring to Republicans, not -- as is clear from the context of Begala's remark -- Islamic terrorists. When Begala tried to set the record straight, then-CNS editor-in-chief David Thibault essentially called Begala a liar.

7. Dan Riehl, NewsBusters, fabrication (2006). Riehl asserted that S.R. Sidarth, the target of George Allen's infamous "macaca" statement, was "making fun of an Hispanic William & Mary student's death" on a University of Virginia discussion board; in fact, the person posting under Sidarth's name did not "make fun" of the students, merely linking to an article about it and offering no other comment.

8. Media Research Center, misrepresentation (1994). The MRC pasted quotes together -- one ellipsis represented a 28-page span -- from a book by former New York Times editor Howell Raines to falsely portray him as insulting Ronald Reagan's intelligence by the statement "Reagan couldn't tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it." In fact, Raines was referring to Reagan's fly-fishing skills.

9. Christopher Ruddy, NewsMax, fabrication (2000). Claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton were selling their Chappaqua, N.Y., house because their neighbors have put the home under 24-hour video surveillance on the off-chance of being able to sell something to supermarket tabloids. His source? Anonymous sources "at some of America's most notorious supermarket tabloids."

10. James Hirsen, NewsMax, fabrication (2005). Claimed that U2 was "[t]eaming up with the legendary rock group U2 for a one-night only appearance." In fact, Santorum's campaign had merely purchased tickets for the concert to resell to donors. NewsMax then corrected the article without alerting readers to the fact that it had been changed or apologizing for its error, then misleadingly claimed that "NewsMax had never claimed that U2 or Bono were holding their concert for Santorum."

Posted by Terry K. at 12:31 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

Here's a shocker: Fox News actually takes a stab at telling the full truth about Peter Paul!

An Oct. 26 FoxNews.com article features Paul's new Hillary-bashing documentary, "Hillary Uncensored," but instead of merely regurgitating Paul's dishonest spin, the article actually details Paul's criminal history and lack of credibility, noting that "The allegations in the film are not new." Still it doesn't go far enough to counter all the false claims Paul made.

For instance, the article states one claim made in the film:

The Clintons later made sure Paul was kept in a Brazilian prison for 25 months, including 58 days in a maximum security cellblock nicknamed the "Corridor of Death," while the Justice Department waited to extradite him.

In fact, as the Department of Justice stated, Paul did not flee to Brazil until February 2001, and he refused to return after the United States Attorney's Office informed him that he was the target of a criminal investigation. Paul was arrested in Brazil in August 2001. Notice anything about those dates? They all occur after Bill Clinton left office, making it extremely unlikely that "the Clintons" had any direct hand in bringing Paul to justice. Further, the only reason Paul "was kept in a Brazilian prison for 25 months" was his own actions, not that of "the Clintons"; as the DOJ pointed out, Paul "contested" his extradition proceedings.

The article further states that "the securities fraud plea that he agreed to cop in March 2005 was to get out of jail after 43 months in Brazilian and New York prisons." The article doesn't mention, as the DOJ did, that at the time of Paul's plea, two of Paul's co-defendants, Stephen Gordon and Jeffrey Pittsburg, pleaded guilty to similar charges.

We've previously documented the efforts of WorldNetDaily and Newsmax to whitewash Paul's criminal history and pretend that Paul is someone who should be taken seriously.

UPDATE: The U.S. attorney who prosecuted Paul, Roslynn Mauskopf, was appointed by President Bush, further discrediting Paul's claim to be a victim of "the Clintons."

UPDATE 2: Media Matters has even more details. 

Posted by Terry K. at 4:10 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, October 26, 2007 11:12 PM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

Last week, Cal Thomas wrote a column challenging Media Matters' (my employer) new study depicting how the political balance of syndicated op-ed columnists in America's daily newspapers skews conservative. Specifically, he complained that the number of daily newspapers Media Matters counted regularly running Thomas' column doesn't comport with his own numbers:

Media Matters claims just 306 carry mine (it says 328 carry Will's), ignoring the real numbers by imposing the weekly or monthly frequency standard. Media Matters also apparently didn't count overseas newspapers or USA Today, America's largest circulation newspaper, in which I co-author a column twice monthly with my liberal friend, Bob Beckel. Media Matters asked for my client list to prove my claim. Nice try. Liberals would love to have such a list so they can conduct letter-writing campaigns to remove conservatives, in the name of tolerance, of course. While some columnists have been "rumored" to inflate their numbers (imagine that!), mine are accurate and have been since I started writing this column. 

As Media Matters' Paul Waldman responded: "Thomas makes a claim, then refuses to provide evidence. We at Media Matters prefer to stick to the facts."

Thomas' egomania about the number of papers in which his column is printed is nothing new. Back in 2002, we detailed how Thomas teamed up with CNSNews.com and then-reporter Marc Morano to depict one newspaper's cancellation of his column as part of a a nefarious "house cleaning of conservatives at the paper" (even though the paper canceled a liberal columnist at the same time). Morano went on to quote anonymous sources as claiming that "all new hires by the paper have been 'non-conservatives' " and made no apparent effort to permit the newspaper respond to all the claims forwarded against it.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:26 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, October 1, 2007 2:42 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

In January 2006, we noted that conservative blogger Cinnamon Stillwell, in embracing right-wing Jewish extremists and whitewashing their violent backgrounds, was acting not unlike WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein.

Now, as Sadly, No! reports, Stillwell has fulfilled her destiny by serving up a fawning review of Klein's new WND-published book detailing his gimmick of talking to terrorists who just happen to say things that rile up his conservative readers.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:21 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink

Those Shirts specializes in shirts that appeal to conservatives. The company loves to advertise on the ConWeb; ads for them have recently been spotted at NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and NewsBusters. (At least one NewsBusters poster endorses the sentiment.)

One of the shirts Those Shirts sells reads: "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required." Regardless of the background of this shirt -- created by the conservative blog Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, whose writers love the idea so much they want to apply it to the Supreme Court and certain politicians as well -- it's an unambiguous incitement to violence. This has been discussed previously in the liberal blogosphere as the eliminationist discourse that it is, but the shirt is still for sale. Any alleged humor behind it is not detectable.

So we wonder: Do NewsMax, WND, and NewsBusters -- some employees of which consider themselves to be journalists -- aware of the message that Those Shirts is trying to profit from? Do they endorse it, even though it applies to them as well? (After all, the shirt excludes no journalists from its fatwa.) And are they offended enough to pull Those Shirts' ads until the shirt is withdrawn from sale?

UPDATE: We've previously noted that WND's Joseph Farah objects to "disgusting" advertising on his website. Does he think that a death threat against journalists is "disgusting," or not? 

Posted by Terry K. at 1:33 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, August 26, 2007 10:11 AM EDT

Share This Post

Permalink