RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every five minutes the many mouths of the media broadcast, type, post and shriek that President Donald J. Trump is a liar. After months of this treatment, more voters find him truthful than them.

49% of voters believe that Trump and his people are telling the truth. Only 39% believe that the media is.

The media’s war on President Trump isn’t hurting him. It is destroying the media’s own credibility.

After Trump’s win, the media came to the conclusion that its biased attacks on him had been too subtle and understated to connect with the “dumb” voters. So it decided to be far more overt about its smears.

The New York Times, which used to be the best at disguising its biases in the omnipotent voice of professional journalism, called President Trump a liar in its headlines. The media cheered this descent into naked partisanship by the paper of record. But it didn’t hurt Trump. It hurt the Times.

Headlines blasting President Trump as a “liar” are easy enough to find on the internet. The New York Times derives much of its influence from its appearance of serious professionalism. Calling Trump names made it hard to distinguish the New York Times from the Huffington Post.

The first time the New York Times called Trump a liar was during the election. Times editor Dean Baquet insisted that while Hillary Clinton might “obfuscate, exaggerate”, Trump was a liar. And when the Times printed lies about Trump, it too was no doubt merely obfuscating and exaggerating rather than lying.

The Times can’t call its own candidate who lied about landing “under sniper fire” in Bosnia, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland and being kept out of NASA and the Marine Corps by sexism, a liar. And yet it expects someone, anyone, to believe that calling Trump a liar is anything more than a partisan smear.

Before the first debate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Politico all ran stories accusing Trump of being a liar. The coordinated attack failed to accomplish anything at all.

The Washington Post’s ‘hip, tolerant imam’ turns out to be a raving hater—and it’s all on tape.

What did it take for the Washington Post to accuse a Jewish man of racism for exposing a white man as an anti-Semite? That white man’s conversion to Islam.

That’s how reporter Bill Donahue treated Charles Jacobs, the president of my organization, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, in a January 17 puff piece on the influential Muslim convert and cleric, Imam Suhaib Webb: “An unlikely messenger becomes a guiding spirit to young Muslims.”

Jacobs marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and received the “Boston Freedom Award” from MLK’s widow, Coretta Scott King, for his work freeing black slaves in Sudan. But he is now apparently a racist because our organization’s research into the radical Islamic ideology of an Oklahoma-born white male conflicts with the Post’s portrayal of Webb as a cool former hip-hop DJ who knows how to hang with the kids while sharing his religious wisdom and liberal politics in rap lyrics.

I don’t quite get the hipness angle. Webb’s awkward affectations bring to mind Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodic character “Ali G,” a cringe-worthy mix of cultural appropriation, poseurism, and banality that would make Rachel Dolezal blush through her spray tan. But Donahue is a reporter on a mission.
Who’s Slandering Whom Here?

That said, his cool pose isn’t what makes the imam so objectionable, it just distracts from the underlying reality: Webb’s hateful rhetoric towards gays, women, Jews, and American society, and his connections to terrorism. So Donahue had to resort to outright falsehoods in ad hominem attack, claiming that Jacobs “alleged that Webb was anti-Semitic, homophobic and in cahoots with the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, even as Boston’s leading rabbis disagreed and one U.S. attorney, Carmen Ortiz, told the New York Times that Jacobs’s claims were ‘incredibly racist and unfair.’”

Some of these claims are demonstrably false. (Where is the Post’s editor?) Jacobs never accused Webb of being in cahoots with the World Trade Center bombers. In fact, in 1993, when the bombing happened, Webb was just beginning to explore Islam after a youth spent smoking weed and getting involved in drive-by shootings as a member of the Bloods gang.

Worse, perhaps: Ortiz said no such thing regarding Jacobs’ claims about Webb. She did pull that race card when Jacobs embarrassed her by pointing out that Webb’s former mosque, a partner in the Justice Department’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program that she led in Boston, is itself a major source of violent extremism.

It turns out Ortiz is not a credible source on matters of character, and this is not the first time she has slandered people. She resigned in disgrace after bipartisan outrage over her penchant for making baseless claims and “indicting the good guys” soon after Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz committed suicide after Ortiz indicted him on trumped-up charges.

In their zeal to “Jump on Trump,” is our media — not to mention their 9th Circuit cohorts — doing an immense disservice to the American public by obfuscating, effectively censoring, serious discussion of Islamic immigration and what to do about it?

It’s a global problem, surely, and we have a lot to learn from the mistakes of the Europeans who — according to the latest polls — are expressing serious regrets about their open-border immigration policies.

Several countries are beginning to return their migrants, sometimes offering economic incentives. And you can see why, reading last Friday’s report from the Gatestone Institute:

Several young gang-rapists started laughing in a Belgian court while yelling:

“women should not complain, they should listen to men.”

The seven ‘men’ were seen in a video where they are standing around an unconscious girl who is lying on a bed, then seen pulling down her pants and raping her. Also in the video, they are dancing around the victim and singing songs in Arabic.

The gang of perpetrators, aged 14 (!) to 25, consist of five Iraqi nationals, and two who hold Belgian citizenship. At least two of them are currently in their asylum procedure.

I imagine they’ll be getting some “extreme vetting.” Let’s hope so anyway. But does this “extreme vetting” go far enough? In America’s case, it’s complicated by the fact that Trump’s original seven countries in his travel ban are rather circumscribed and arbitrarily limited, despite having been the seven singled out by Obama. As we have seen on multiple occasions, second-generation jihadists come from all over Western Europe, like two of the above un-magnificent seven, not to mention North Africa and the obvious omissions of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They come from Russia and the Far East as well. Shouldn’t they all be on the list? Yes, I realize the seven countries were chosen because at least some keep no verifiable records of who’s coming and going. But I’m not sure that matters. These days identities are more easily forged than ever. The Daily Beast reports you can buy an undetectable UK passport from the Neapolitan Camorra.

So can “extreme vetting” finally do the job it’s supposed to do? What is the real extent of its capability?

President Trump initially said the media didn’t report some terrorist incidents, which was quickly clarified to mean that they underreported them. The New York Times released a long list of terrorist attacks they had covered in their reporting to counter Trump’s claim.

The Times was correct on the very narrow question but totally wrong on the underlying truth.

No one questions whether the Times, and the media, have reported most terrorist attacks. They have. But they report on terrorist incidents the way they report the weather. It is brief, to the point, and usually gone the next day. Most importantly, there is never any examination of the “why” behind terrorist attacks. The Times simply reports “A man shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ went and killed three people. He is now in custody,” expressing no greater interest in what caused the incident than what you would see about what caused rain on a particular day.

The underreporting that Trump is referring to is that total lack of curiosity on the part of the media about the motivations of the attackers. From that list the Times provided, you can see there have been many, many terrorist attacks by Muslims. Why are they committing so many attacks? Is this part of some trend that should concern us? The Times doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.

Contrast that with the story of how a private security guard shot and killed a black man who was trying to pound his head into the pavement. The Times published literally dozens and dozens of articles exploring the possible racist motivations of the security guard. Every time a police officer shoots a black man (which, in a nation as large as 300 million people, can happen from time to time), the Times empties a well of ink trying to draw larger conclusions about the racism of the police.

Not so with radical Islamic terrorist attacks. There are no days and days of follow-up about the ideology that drove an Islamic terrorist. It happened, it’s over, that’s it, like a passing raincloud. That’s the underreporting I believe President Trump is referring to.

In yet another attempt to discredit U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, The Washington Post inadvertently did just the opposite.‎

In a piece on Friday, national reporter Matea Gold revealed that she had obtained a draft ‎of a movie proposal written in 2007 by Bannon — at the time a Hollywood filmmaker — ‎aimed at warning viewers about radical Muslims turning the U.S. into the “Islamic States ‎of America.” ‎

According to Gold, the envisioned three-part documentary, titled “Destroying the Great ‎Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America,” was to open with a scene showing ‎the flag on the U.S. Capitol building emblazoned with a crescent and star, while chants of ‎‎”Allahu akbar” emanate from inside. Quoting from the film’s ‎outline, she said its purpose was to caution not only against jihadists, but against the “enablers among us.”‎

Gold said Bannon wrote that these unwitting Americans, with the “best intentions,” ‎were the media, the Jewish community and government agencies engaged in appeasing ‎Islamism and paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”‎

She made sure to remind readers that the author is the ‎same Bannon who helped Trump forge his executive order restricting entry into the U.S. ‎of citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries. This unsubtle juxtaposition was supposed ‎to give credence to the claim, widely circulated prior to and since Trump’s election, that ‎Bannon is both an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe. ‎

But the stab at a double whammy fell flat on its face. If anything, Gold’s account was ‎cause for optimism about Bannon’s role in the administration that is taking shape in ‎Washington. ‎

Indeed, anybody outside Israel who grasped 10 years ago that radical Islamism was a ‎force not only to be reckoned with but guarded against in the West is a person who has ‎been paying attention. Despite the national trauma caused by the attacks on the World ‎Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, Americans quickly covered themselves in ostrich ‎feathers and put their heads in the proverbial sand, hoping that the war against al-Qaida that was ‎being fought far from their homestead would remain something they might catch a ‎glimpse of on the nightly news, but not feel, smell and taste. ‎

Unlike Israelis — virtually all of whom are soldiers even when in civilian clothes — citizens ‎of the United States are blessed with a choice about the extent of their involvement in ‎matters of national security and defense. As a result, many can and do go through life ‎without ever encountering men and women in uniform, let alone marching alongside them. ‎