Another Year of Joseph Farah's Lies

The WorldNetDaily editor spent 2016 telling new falsehoods and repeating old ones. That's what he does.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/25/2017

We never thought we'd get so much use out of it.

Farah has been perhaps the most consistently prolific generator of falsehoods at not only WND but in the ConWeb as a whole. ConWebWatch has already devoted two articles solely to Farah's falsehoods (plus two more dedicated to Farah's inability to gracefully deal with criticism and another one on all the hateful things Farah said about President Obama in 2014 alone).

It's too the point where Farah is recycling his falsehoods, repeating stuff he's been lying about for years. A lot of that is birther stuff, such as denying that he and WND ever claimed that Obama was born in Kenya, which he claimed again in a January 2016 column. We first debunked that claim in 2010.

In his Sept. 18 column, Farah asserted that "Obama refused to release his birth certificate during his entire first term in office." In fact, Obama released a birth certificate before the 2008 election; WND simply refused to recognize it as real. And the second, long-form certificate was, in fact, released during his first term, in 2011.

Then there's his March 29 assertion that WND is "pledged, first and foremost, to telling you the truth," contradicted by the simple fact that this is the third compilation of Farah's lies to be published by ConWebWatch.

But Farah told plenty of other lies last year as well.

In the midst of yet another anti-Obama screed in his May 8 column, Farah wrote:

Let’s get this straight: There’s nothing compassionate about whining for more benefits someone else has to pay. Furthermore, every time a business is mandated to pay extra for new services to its employees, it hires fewer people.

I will also say there is nothing compassionate about raising the minimum wage. It’s a job killer – and America needs jobs with nearly 100 million people not working.

In fact, the reason there are "nearly 100 million people not working" is that most of them are either retired or in school. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute agrees that the labor force participation rate, which is the number Farah is citing, is a meaningless gauge of unemployment.

Farah then ranted: "Obama is a user, a leech, a demagogue, a phony who never lifted a finger even to assist his own impoverished relatives in Kenya. He did, however, see to it that you increased foreign aid to that country so Americans would live more like Kenyans in the future."

In fact, as ConWebWatch documented, WND reporter Steve Peacock's evidence-free attempt to attribute all spending initiatives in Kenya directly to Obama obscures the fact that, as Peacock eventually admitted, U.S. aid to Kenya actually decreased under Obama, from a high of $830 million in fiscal year 2009 to a low of $460 million in fiscal year 2013. While Peacock claimed aid to Kenya was budgeted to rise to $630 million in 2016, that's still about 25 percent less than was spent under the final budget approved under George W. Bush.

Farah devoted his June 21 column to complaining that people are waiting for all the evidence to come in on the Orlando massacre and aren't rushing to solely blame Muslims for it. Farah rants:

I’ve never seen one Big Media story suggesting that Christians should not be coerced into celebrating what they consider to be sinful behavior. Apparently, that’s not a “complicated” or “nuanced” matter at all.

To its credit, the NBC story does point out: “No fewer than 40 out of 57 Muslim-majority countries or territories have laws that criminalize homosexuality, prescribing punishments ranging from fines and short jail sentences to whippings.”

Is there even one Jewish or Christian country in the world that does this?

No. The story left out that little factoid.

Farah is wrong -- numerous Christian countries have legal punishments for being gay. And if he read his own website, he would know that.

Farah's friend, virulent anti-gay activist Scott Lively, reportedly influenced the good Christian people of Uganda -- a Christian-dominated country where homosexuality is already illegal -- to propose a law that would punish it further, even permitting the death penalty for homosexuality. WND has given Lively a platform to smear gays as "murderers" who have "fixed their malevolent gaze on Christian Uganda." Is it any wonder that Ugandan officials wanted the death penalty for gays after hearing such rhetoric? And that's just what Lively has said in public; we don't know viciously he has slandered gays in Uganda behind closed doors, though he's facing a lawsuit over his alleged role in helping to incite violence against gays there.

Meanwhile, a commenter on Farah's column had his own way of calling out Farah's falsehood:

Why yes, glad you asked. Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Russia, Belize, Guyana, 9 Caribbean countries. Many states in the U.S. until 2003. Ireland until 1993. Germany until 1969. UK until 1967. Christian adherents have never, to put it politely, been in the forefront of decriminalizing homosexuality in any country.

Remember, Farah is weirdly proud of the fact that his website publishes misinformation.

Farah's disdain for facts continued in his July 19 column explaining why blacks should vote Republican, in which he pulled off a falsehood trifecta. Lie No. 1:

You’ve heard of the Ku Klux Klan?

It was the military wing of the Democratic Party for 150 years.

The KKK was founded in 1866, meaning that Farah is claiming it's the "military wing of the Democratic Party" right now. Which, of course, is a lie.

Additionally, the KKK was not a creation of the Democratic Party. According to PolitiFact, "historians generally agree it was founded by a handful of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tenn. as a social fraternity and it quickly changed into a violent group that terrorized newly empowered black and white Republicans in the South." While many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats and a smaller number of them joined the KKK, that doesn't make the KKK a Democratic creation.

While Farah went on to rant about the Democratic Party's racist past, PolitiFact added that "It should also be noted that the anti-black Democratic Party of the 1860s and 1870s bears no similarity to the party of today."

Lie No. 2:

The worldview of the Democratic Party is still responsible for victimizing blacks and systematically reducing the population of African-Americans in a number of ways – albeit more covertly.

First, the Democrats’ friends in Planned Parenthood target black and minority communities for abortions.

In fact, NPR points out that 60 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are in majority-white neighborhoods, and that the percentage of Planned Parenthood patients who are black is roughly the same as the American population as a whole.

Lie No. 3:

In addition, who is it that promotes the doctrinaire teaching of Darwinism in American schools and universities? The Democrats, who insist evolution is not a theory, but a fact. What are the ramifications of that?

It was Darwinism in the 19th century that promoted the notion of superior and inferior races – and justified the genocide that led directly to the Holocaust. (See from “Darwin to Hitler,” “Darwin’s Racists: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” “The Darwin Effect” and “The Dark Side of Charles Darwin.”

Who’s defending Darwinism today? Only one political party – the Democrats.

As ConWebWatch has documented, what is now known as social Darwinism -- which, taken to its extreme, became eugenics -- is not Darwinism and actually preceded Darwin.

Nope: As Snopes points out, Clinton and Mezvinsky were married "at the Astor Courts in Rhinebeck, New York, an historic property owned by Kathleen Hammer and Arthur Seelbinder."

Farah also uses his column to push lies by proxy, writing:

You might also recall that Hillary Rodham Clinton served on the staff of the [Richard Nixon] House impeachment inquiry, but she was fired for ethical breaches by her boss, the late Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat and general counsel, not to mention a friend of mine in his later years.

As ConWebWatch first documented back in 2008, when Zeifman first surfaced to oppose Hillary's presidential bid, he's on record as saying he didn't have the power to fire Hillary from the impeachment inquiry, which makes anything else he has to say highly dubious. That also includes the fact that fact-checkers have found no evidence Hillary was fired from that inquiry -- she apparently remained on the inquiry panel until Nixon resigned from office.

Zeifman's lack of truthfulness also applies to his claim of being a "lifelong Democrat," which he appears to be trading on solely to get published on right-wing websites as a "Democrat" who bashes other Democrats. Plus, the fact that Farah is declaring that Zeifman is "a friend of mine" is a dead giveaway that he's not a real Democrat, or even a Democrat at all.

Nevertheless, Farah repeated the Zeifman falsehood in his Oct. 23 column.

Farah demonstrated his disregard for the truth yet again in his Oct. 28 column, which is devoted to ranting about how "Hillary Clinton hates America and Americans." He adds:

However, thanks to the 2016 presidential campaign and WikiLeaks emails, we now know that even Hillary Clinton’s top aides agree that Hillary hates America and Americans – especially “average Americans.”

That deliciously and brutally honest email came from John Podesta, her campaign manager, in a moment of candor to another member of her campaign team. It said: “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans.”

That is an incredible indictment and one that needs to be in the ears of every everyday American as he or she makes his or her way to the polls Nov. 8.

Actually, it's a lie. As Media Matters explained, there is context to that email that Farah (and WND reporter Bob Unruh two weeks earlier) ignored. The reference was to the "everyday Americans" slogan that Clinton used when she first launched her presidential campaign; when Podesta wrote "I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans," he was saying she hated the phrase in relation to her campaign.

But Farah doesn't let the facts get in the way of his Hillary-hating bile, going on to rant: "Who in their right mind would vote for a president who hates everyday Americans? What other qualification could possibly overcome such contempt for those she is supposed to serve? That’s clearly not the kind of “first” we can afford in 2016 – electing a president who hates not just Republicans, not just conservatives, not just independents, not just Democrats who don’t vote for her, not just Bernie Sanders supporters, but plain, old “everyday Americans,” according to no less an authority than her own campaign manager – with tacit confirmation from her other staff, who understood exactly what he meant."

Farah's wearing out our "LIAR" image. We may have to build a new one if he can't stop telling falsehoods.