RUTHFULLY YOURS

If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist. The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose this dogma before their own news comes under attack. Again, the most serious problem with attempting to eliminate hate speech, fake news or terrorist content by censorship is not about the efficacy of the censorship; it is the very premise that is dangerous.

Under the guidance of faulty algorithms or prejudiced Silicon Valley programmers, when the New York Times starts to delete or automatically hide comments that criticize extremist clerics, or Facebook designates articles by anti-Islamist activists as “fake news,” Islamists will prosper and moderate Muslims will suffer.

Google’s latest project is an application called Perspective, which, as Wired reports, brings the tech company “a step closer to its goal of helping to foster troll-free discussion online, and filtering out the abusive comments that silence vulnerable voices.” In other words, Google is teaching computers how to censor.

If Google’s plans are not quite Orwellian enough for you, the practical results are rather more frightening. Released in February, Perspective’s partners include the New York Times, the Guardian, Wikipedia and the Economist. Google, whose motto is “Do the Right Thing,” is aiming its bowdlerism at public comment sections on newspaper websites, but the potential is far broader.

Perspective works by identifying the “toxicity level” of comments published online. Google states that Perspective will enable companies to “sort comments more effectively, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information.” Perspective’s demonstration website currently allows anyone to measure the “toxicity” of a word or phrase, according to its algorithm. What, then, constitutes a “toxic” comment?

The organization with which I work, the Middle East Forum, studies Islamism. We work to tackle the threat posed by both violent and non-violent Islamism, assisted by our Muslim allies. We believe that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Perspective does not look fondly at our work:

Google’s Perspective application, which is being used by major media outlets to identify the “toxicity level” of comments published online, has much potential for abuse and widespread censorship.

No reasonable person could claim this is hate speech. But the problem does not just extend to opinions. Even factual statements are deemed to have a high rate of “toxicity.” Google considers the statement “ISIS is a terrorist group” to have an 87% chance of being “perceived as toxic.”

Or 92% “toxicity” for stating the publicly-declared objective of the terrorist group, Hamas:

Google is quick to remind us that we may disagree with the result. It explains that, “It’s still early days and we will get a lot of things wrong.” The Perspective website even offers a “Seem Wrong?” button to provide feedback.

These disclaimers, however, are very much beside the point. If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that figure is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist.

The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Two disturbing videos have surfaced involving California-based Muslim preachers in which both are heard spewing anti-Semitic vitriol as well as issuing implicit calls for violence against Jews. The videos, which are not dissimilar in content and shrill to those which have emerged from Gaza, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab Mideast, reveal the extent to which anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in large segments of the American Muslim community.

The first video features Egyptian-born preacher Ammar Shahin, who is the imam of the Islamic Center of Davis, northern California. The sermon was delivered on July 21. Shahin, who delivered the sermon in both English and Arabic, is heard invoking an anti-Semitic hadith in which Muslims will do battle with the Jews and the Jews will be forced to take shelter behind rocks and trees. Shahin then says that the trees and rocks will call out to the Muslims and say, “Oh Muslim…come, there is someone behind me – except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

Shahin refers to Jews as “filth” and calls on Allah to, “annihilate them down to the very last one; do not spare any of them.” Not content with merely the annihilation of Jewry, Shahin chillingly beseeches Allah to, “make this happen by our hands.” Apparently, a depraved Shahin wants to feel the knife plunging into his victim and derives perverse satisfaction from that feeing.

When confronted with the video, Shahin, who likened Jews to “filth” and called for their “annihilation,” among other sordid gems, alleged that his words were “taken out of context.” It’s funny how Jew-haters always claim to be “taken out of context” once they’re caught. Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour and Keith Ellison, have all resorted to this same tired excuse, once exposed.

The second video, which was also delivered on July 21, features Sheikh Mahmoud Harmoush. The Friday sermon was delivered to congregants at the Islamic Center of Riverside, California.

Harmoush is heard telling his congregants that the immigrant Jews took advantage of Muslim hospitality and conspired to steal the “beautiful land…with killing, crime and massacres.” More ominously, Harmoush invokes “Jihad” and urges his flock to “wake up; it is time to be a Muslim. Prayer is not the only thing.” He further urges them to “resist and fight back” claiming that in addition to “Palestine” the Jews are seeking to seize “most of the Middle East…even Mecca and Medina.” Harmoush completes his screed with the obligatory, “destroy the [Jews] and render them sunder.”

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Harmoush “holds educational and leadership positions at several institutions in Southern California, teaches Arabic at UCLA San Bernardino, and is a member of the leadership council of the Syrian American Council.”

In 2010, Harmoush was embroiled in legal battle involving the expansion of his mosque in Temecula, California. Residents opposed to the expansion cited traffic concerns but others pointed to fears of radicalism and terror. At the time, Harmoush was quoted by the New York Times stating that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to.”

CNN is already King of Fake News and now has crowned itself Queen of Leftist Indoctrination.

In a stunning exploitation of American children CNN partnered with PBS and IRC to bring Sesame Street’s Elmo on screen to “educate” the youngest American children on refugees.

Clearly American pre-schoolers are not watching CNN but this shocking interview exposed what they will be watching when they tune into Sesame Street.

Early childhood education is arguably the most powerful influencer and indicator of the direction of society. Palestinian children are being indoctrinated to hate Jews and to destroy Israel. Muslim children are being taught Islamic supremacy and hatred of infidels (all non-Muslims). The purpose of propagandizing Palestinian children is to produce Palestinian adults who will fight to achieve the destruction of Israel. The purpose of propagandizing Muslim children with Islamic hate education is to produce Muslim adults who will fight for re-establishment of the caliphate and imposition of sharia law worldwide.

So what are American children being taught and what is the purpose of their education?

Since the end of World War II, American children have been indoctrinated in left-wing liberal tenets of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism courtesy of Tavistock Institute and its principles of mass psychology for social engineering. The purpose is to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Socialism, the necessary condition for cradle-to-grave control by the government, will be replaced by an internationalized globalist elite dream of one-world government.

American children are being tutored in passivity and collectivism while Middle Eastern children are being tutored to be warriors. In The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris’ stunning analysis of the existential threat of Islam to the West describes the conflict between the tribal mind and the enlightened mind. The book jacket provides a concise summary:

“The Suicide of Reason shows how modern liberal societies, whose political theories are born of the Enlightenment are unfamiliar with the nature of mass fanaticism. The West, so accustomed to thinking of history as an inevitable progress toward enlightenment, can only think of fanaticism as a social pathology, a failure to modernize, rather than what it is: a variety of social order that is not only fully viable in the modern world but that possesses weapons to which the West is uniquely vulnerable. A governing philosophy based on reason, tolerance, consensus and deliberation cannot defend itself against a strategy of ruthless violence without being radically transformed – or worse, destroyed.”

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Imagine if one of America’s largest and most-respected pro-life organizations tweeted birthday greetings to Robert Dear, the terrorist who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015. Imagine the reaction if an allegedly mainstream conservative organization said “happy birthday” to Dylann Roof, the white-supremacist murderer who slaughtered nine innocent people in Charleston.

How would the media respond? What would the tweets reveal about the character and intentions of the people running the organization? Should well-meaning Americans continue to support groups that applaud violent, vicious terrorists?

The answers are obvious. Of course the media would and should absolutely roast any conservative group that applauded “pro-life” or white-supremacist violence. Of course well-meaning Americans should shun and withdraw support for groups that celebrate terrorists. And of course support for terrorists would reveal a moral corruption at the heart of even the most popular organizations.

Unless, however, those groups are on the left, their leaders are progressive radicals, and the terrorists they applaud are cop-killers. Then, the media ignores the outrage, elevates the outrageous, and maintains the charade that key elements of the progressive #Resistance represent nothing more than a spontaneous, reasonable, and virtuous response to a dangerous and authoritarian president.

Doubt me? Consider the reverence reserved for the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter.

Mainstream media coverage of both organizations has been fawning, and their leaders have been subject to heroic profiles. As a result, millions of well-intentioned, reasonable liberals have been duped into supporting and elevating both groups, which do things like this:

Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur! Today’s #SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor, is by @Meloniousfunk. pic.twitter.com/V66au1dRnl
— Women’s March (@womensmarch) July 16, 2017

Yes, that’s an official Women’s March tweet delivering birthday greetings to one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists. Shakur (born Joanne Chesimard) is a convicted cop-killer who now lives in Cuba after escaping an American prison. Here’s the FBI summary of her crimes:

Joanne Chesimard is wanted for escaping from prison in Clinton, New Jersey, while serving a life sentence for murder. On May 2, 1973, Chesimard, who was part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army, and two accomplices were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two troopers with the New Jersey State Police. At the time, Chesimard was wanted for her involvement in several felonies, including bank robbery. Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range. Chesimard fled the scene, but was subsequently apprehended. One of her accomplices was killed in the shoot-out and the other was also apprehended and remains in jail.

After relentless attacks from Trump and his allies, a series of journalistic problems, and in the shadow of a possible merger, the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker, is feeling the heat. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said one employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”

CNN regularly welcomes members of the Donald Trump White House to appear on New Day, its morning show. When the administration sent word last Monday evening that White House adviser Sebastian Gorka was available the following morning to discuss the retaking of Mosul from ISIS, CNN producers readied the script. New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota handled the interview, and spent the first portion of the conversation on the scheduled topic. But when the discussion inevitably turned to Donald Trump Jr.’s recently revealed “I love it” e-mail to the Russian attorney, Gorka had his opening to change the topic. He made CNN, and its coverage of the Russia investigation, the story. Gorka scoffed at Camerota, deriding “the amount of time you spend in desperation on a topic that has plummeted you to 13th place in viewership ranking across America.”

“More people watch Nick at Night cartoons than CNN today,” Gorka continued, before suggesting that his appearance was revenge for a long, contentious interview the previous day between Camerota’s co-host Chris Cuomo and Kellyanne Conway. “They called us to offer that he come on the show,” Camerota told me, regarding her interaction with Gorka. “Why do they do that if he doesn’t think anyone watches us and that we don’t practice good journalism? It makes no sense.” The tactic nevertheless played very well with its most important audience. “Did you see Gorka?,” Trump reportedly told his advisers. “So great, I mean really, truly great.” It’s a tactic that CNN’s own anchors have grown accustomed to. “When the light goes on, to me, it’s like hearing the bell sound the beginning of a round,” Cuomo told me later. “When the show starts, it is ding ding ding, who is coming at me and with what kind of weapon today? Is it a personal insult? Is it questioning our reporting? Is it a false narrative? Is it whataboutism?”

This is the strange theater of Donald Trump’s battle with the media, often making for riveting television, and fantastic for ratings, but operating on multiple levels. It’s more than just theater, however, and CNN is at the center of it. The president has targeted the network more vocally than even The New York Times and The Washington Post, the outlets that have delivered the most harmful journalistic blows to his administration. Partly, this is because, with CNN, it’s personal. The network’s president Jeff Zucker greenlit the Apprentice back when he was running NBC, and the two were friendly before they found themselves as bitter adversaries after the election.

And for Zucker and CNN, the circus is already having dangerous consequences. Despite all his flaws and unpreparedness for office, Trump is good at one thing: throwing people off their game. His war with the media has kept him afloat politically while he and his family have been dogged by increasingly damaging information about their connections to Russia. As the Republicans’ latest stab at a health-care bill falters, and the Trump administration fails to rack up a single significant legislative achievement, the president has thrown much of his public commentary into trashing CNN. He rewards surrogates, such as Gorka and Conway, who denigrate CNN on its own airways, even as the network pays other Trump surrogates, such as Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany, to defend the administration’s talking points. “He’s gone full war with the media, no doubt about that,” said one editor with close ties to the White House. “It is full-on full-scale warfare with CNN.”

The struggle is coming at a time when there are backstage pressures. Zucker’s bosses at Time Warner are now preparing to merge into telecom behemoth AT&T, a deal that requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice, and a deal Trump has said he doesn’t like.

For both Zucker and CNN, the pressure is distorting. “We may look back in five years and find that CNN was fundamentally changed because of Trump,” one CNN employee told me. “Maybe it will turn out that Trump changed the brand” through his battle with the network. “We think we’re the middle. What if there is no middle anymore?” (A CNN executive told me that the network has conducted extensive research on its brand, which has “found zero diminution in the brand as a result of the attacks on us.”)

“Russia is a fierce rival of the U.S. and has been for generations. What politician jumps in bed with Russia? For advisers to a would-be President to take at face value an offer of clandestine assistance from Moscow is foolish at best, reckless for sure and potentially treasonous in the worst-case scenario.” (“Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and J. Edgar Hoover were all limp-wristed pinkos compared to this week’s Time magazine.)

Yet this very same Time magazine hails the Soviet Russians’ most faithful devotee/agent in the Americas as “Hero and Icon of the Century.”

“The solution to the world’s problems lies behind the Iron Curtain.” (Che Guevara.)

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses (the U.S.) annihilated!” (Che Guevara.)

“I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin.” (Che Guevara.)

“If the nuclear missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of Atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, 1962.)

“What!? Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba…But that is insane!…Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” (Nikita Khrushchev Oct. 28th 1962.)

As documented above, had an aghast Butcher of Budapest not yanked the missiles from their “hero and icon” and his sidekick in the nick of time, the cinders representing New York’s Time-Life building along with its staff would today fit in a milk carton.

In 1999 when Time magazine hailed “The 100 Most Important People of the Century,” Che Guevara was among them, which at first glance seems reasonable. The term “important,” after all, can be construed as morally-neutral.

But Time placed Che in its “Heroes and Icons” category of the Century’s Most Important People, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. Sean Hannity’s former partner, the late Alan Colmes, scoffed when I pointed to Time’s classification of Che’s “heroism” as a classic example of the ignorance (if not outright insanity) of the mainstream media’s treatment of the mass-murdering terrorist. Colmes flat-out refused to believe me, smirkingly implying to his huge TV audience that I was a typical “right-wing Cuban-American crackpot!”

When Megyn Kelly publicly defected to NBC from Fox News following the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal, it was pretty much assumed by her new employer (and former fans) that Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly would be a major player in the broadcast news magazine space. And on paper, it looked exactly like that: It promised hard-hitting interviews, a more conservative-friendly target audience, and big-name guests like Vladimir Putin.

But ever since that first interview—and most notably after Kelly decided to feature conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on the show—the show’s ratings have been in free fall.

As The Hill tweeted out last night, Kelly’s latest show was beaten out by a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos. And Ad Age TV reporter Anthony Crupi provided the crippling data points:

Through 6 episodes, the show is averaging just 941,332 members of the target demo (adults 25-54). This experiment ends w/ the new a.m. show.

NBC has a tough decision ahead if their would-be star doesn’t start producing better numbers on Sunday nights. That said, Kelly has nothing to worry about at the moment, though, as she’s still tapped to launch a morning show this fall.