The NYT Continues to Push Nonsense

The NYT continues to push nonsense

Posted: 09 May 2011 03:19 AM PDT
An editorial in the New York Times about the Hamas/Fatah unity agreement uses a couple of the usual NYT memes.

We have many concerns about the accord, starting with the fact that Hamas has neither renounced its legacy of violence nor agreed to recognize Israel. The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he remains in charge of peace efforts and the unity government will be responsible for rebuilding Gaza and organizing elections. Whether that is Hamas’s vision is unclear.

Also disconcerting are suggestions that Mr. Abbas may have privately agreed to replace his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who has done so much to build up the West Bank economy and institutions. There are big questions about the future of the two sides’ security forces.

The United States has spent millions of dollars helping the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority create a security force that Israel has come to rely on to keep the peace in the West Bank. Whether Hamas, which has terrorized Israel with rockets from Gaza, can ever be integrated into that force, or even work side by side, is a huge question.

Israel certainly has many reasons to mistrust this deal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suspended tax remittances and is pressing Washington hard to cut off aid to the Abbas government. The Obama administration has reacted warily to the new pact but said its assistance will continue for now. Congress is talking tough.

It’s too early for a cut-off. The money is Washington’s main leverage on the new government. A cut-off would shift the political balance dangerously toward Hamas.

If the US would have clearly warned the PA ahead of time that a government that does not meet the long-standing preconditions of the Quartet will lose all its foreign funding, all of the above problems would never have come up to begin with. Why should the world embrace Hamas now when we saw what happened last time they had "unity" - leading to Gaza turning into Hamastan?

Other reconciliation attempts between Fatah and Hamas have imploded, but Mr. Abbas seems to believe this will advance his push to get the United Nations General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state. Above all, his sudden willingness to deal with his enemies in Hamas is a sign of his desperation with the stalled peace process.

No it isn't. It is proof that Abbas refuses to compromise with Israel and therefore is cunningly using the international community to accomplish by fiat the same goal without his being forced to tell his people that they will need to make concessions. There is no desperation here: just a very smart end-run around his making hard decisions.

Hamas’s goals are far harder to game, although there are reports of new frictions with Syria and a desire for better ties with Egypt’s new government.

The NYT covers world events, but cannot draw a line between the popular revolutions against authoritarianism in the Arab world and Gaza? Apparently, to the Times, the PA is an island of Western-style democracy in an ocean of Arab dictatorships.

In an interview with The Times last week, Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, declared himself fully committed to working for a two-state solution. Just a few days earlier Hamas’s (supposedly more moderate) prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was out there celebrating Osama bin Laden as a “Muslim and Arab warrior.”

Hmmm. How can the New York Times resolve this seeming contradiction? Maybe it should go back and read Ethan Bronner's actual interview with Meshal, without Bronner's unprofessional and frankly dangerous assumptions, and discover that Meshal said no such thing!

Here's a rule to live by: When Hamas seems inconsistent between its words and actions, look for a loophole in their words. This is what a serious journalist must do, and it is something that the New York Times cannot seem to grasp vis a vis Palestinian Arab promises.

Huge skepticism and vigilance are essential. But more months with no progress on peace talks will only further play into extremists’ hands....

After Israel withdrew from Gaza, rocket attacks increased. After Israel killed some 750 Hamas terrorists in Cast Lead, rocket fire went down dramatically and Hamas started stopping other Gaza groups from firing rockets.

There were more suicide attacks in the immediate aftermath of Oslo - even before the second intifada - then there are today, after Israel went on the offensive to destroy the terror infrastructure in the West Bank.

Amazing how peace can result from war - another concept that the New York Times cannot grasp.

Washington needs to press Mr. Netanyahu back to the peace table. A negotiated settlement is the only way to guarantee Israel’s lasting security.

In the funhouse mirror image universe that the NYT resides in, it is Netanyahu who has refused to talk with Abbas, not the other way around. Their meme of an intransigent Likud leader is so ingrained that they cannot even get basic facts right.

The answer, to us, is clear. It is time for Mr. Obama, alone or with the quartet, to put a map and deal on the table. If Bin Laden’s death has given the president capital to spend, all the better. The Israelis and Palestinians are not going to break the stalemate on their own. And more drift will only lead to more desperation and more extremism.

The map and deal have been on the table before. The Palestinian Arabs rejected it, consistently. The Times' editors fantasies that Israel just needs to give a little more to obtain peace reflects nothing close to resembling reality.

But it does reflect that they believe Mahmoud Abbas' lies completely and uncritically. They believe he is a moderate, that he is willing to compromise, that his hands are tied, that he desperately wants peace with Israel. All of those assumptions - each demonstrably and provably false, as has been documented over the years - are what informs ridiculous NYT op-eds like these.

It certainly isn't based on fact.

(h/t David G)
Elder of Ziyon

Some Sober Analysis of "Arab Spring"

turmoil in the Middle East is not unique. Half a century ago, a similar series of revolutions shook the ground beneath the Arab rulers. The immediate catalyst was the Suez crisis. After Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the charismatic young Egyptian ruler, nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, the British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to topple him. They failed; Nasser emerged triumphant.

...In the 1950s, the dominant ideology, pan-Arabism, focused on external threats: gaining independence from imperialism and confronting Israel. In contrast, today’s revolutionary wave is driven by domestic demands: for jobs and political representation. Yet the underlying ethos of both revolutionary waves is very similar. Then, as now, the people in the street believed that the existing order was dominated by corrupt cliques that exploited the power of the state to serve their own interests. In addition, then, as now, the revolutions tended to topple leaders aligned with Washington.

Although there is no personality like Nasser towering over the revolutionary events, there is one state taking a leaf from Nasser’s book: Iran. Under Nasser, Egypt opposed British and French imperialism, which it worked to associate in the public mind with Israel. Iran is taking a similar stand today against Britain’s “imperial successor,” the United States. And like Nasser, Iran has created an anti-status-quo coalition — the resistance bloc which includes Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The bloc’s strategy seeks to turn the anarchy of the Middle East to the disadvantage of the United States. As the revolutionary wave expands political participation, the bloc will insinuate itself into the domestic politics of its neighbors. In countries divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, it will use terrorism and work closely with partners on the ground who are willing to make direct alliances, as we have already seen in Iraq and Lebanon. In more homogeneous countries, such as Egypt, the bloc will resort to more subtle and insidious means — for example, inciting violence against Israel through Hamas, in an effort to drive a wedge between Cairo and Washington.

Although the resistance bloc may not be as influential as Nasser was, it is nevertheless poised to turn the turmoil of the region to the detriment of American interests.


And from John Bolton in the WSJ:

Since the "Arab Spring" began four months ago in Tunisia, U.S. media have focused constantly and generally optimistically on the turmoil in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the rising threat of an Iranian Winter—nuclear or otherwise—is likely to outlast and overshadow any Arab Spring.

Iran's hegemonic ambitions are embodied in its rapidly progressing nuclear-weapons program and its continued subversion across the region. In a case that emphasizes the fragility of aspiring democracies, Iranian Winter has already descended upon Lebanon, where Iran's influence has helped replace a pro-Western government with a coalition dominated by Tehran's allies, including Hezbollah. Last week, departing Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri condemned Iran's "flagrant intervention" in his country.

In Syria, despite substantial opposition to the Assad dictatorship, regime change is highly unlikely. Iran will not easily allow its quasi-satellite to be pried from its grasp, and is reportedly helping the Assad regime quell this week's protests.

Then there's the Victoria, a ship containing tons of weaponry bound for Hamas that the Israeli navy seized last month. The episode recalls the Karine A, a weapons shipment from Iran to the Palestine Liberation Organization seized by Israel in 2002. Clearly Iran has a penchant for arming Sunni and Shiite terrorists alike.

...America's failure to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions—which is certainly how it would be perceived worldwide—would be a substantial blow to U.S. influence in general. Terrorists and their state sponsors would see Iran's unchallenged role as terrorism's leading state sponsor and central banker, and would wonder what they have to lose.

The Arab Spring may be fascinating, and may or may not endure. Sadly, Iran's hegemonic threat looks far more sustainable.


I touched on these themes in an earlier post that concentrated on how a resurgent Muslim brotherhood can only help Iran, despite the Shi'a/Sunni rift.

Read both articles (you need to find the Bolton article in Google in order to read the whole thing - the title is "Iranian Winter Could Chill the Arab Spring" so search for that.)

(h/t David G)


Elder of Ziyon

NYTimes calls Hamas Missiles "Errant"

The travel section of the New York Times gives us this gem:

I had eagerly gone to every new Indiana Jones movie, but had never longed to venture on an archaeological dig. Nor had I been to Israel. So when my wife and I were invited by a friend to tag along for a week last summer, we more or less leaped at the opportunity. (Any lingering doubts were dispelled when we were told that the hotel room reserved for us in Ashkelon faced north, which meant that it was less likely to incur a direct hit by errant missiles occasionally fired from Gaza, about a dozen miles to the south.)

Errant? You mean, Hamas and Islamic Jihad aren't aiming these missiles at people, but they just occasionally fire them accidentally towards civilian targets?

Now it is true that there were not many missiles last summer when the author went to Ashkelon, but characterizing the Qassams and Grads (which have better targeting capabilities) as "errant" is outrageous.

Outraged, Outrageous and Unhinged

As expected, the New York Times did an extraordinarily nasty and fallacious piece on me. It is full of distortions, inaccuracies and lies from beginning to end.

Geller times Referring to me using terms like "socialite," "dilettante," and other words invoking silly, superficial, purposeless women, is downright farcical. Show me a socialite who is fighting for American values 20 hours a day. I don't even have lunch, let alone gala charity events. The only thing worthwhile in this piece is the actual interview, which is, frankly, all that really matters. But let's have a cursory look at this piece, shall we?

The numbers quoted from my divorce settlement are grossly, wildly inaccurate. I don't want to air dirty laundry in public, but there is absolutely no truth to what Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer "reported" about this. And although I do not want to get into personal matters, how do they know that my deceased ex "didn’t always agree" with what I was saying? Did they employ a ouija board? Just for knowing, this claim also is patently false.

Of course they hold up my lack of journalistic "credentials" as a disadvantage. Clearly we see how this "advantage" has rendered the New York Times and the rest of the fraternity of credentialed journalists hopelessly inaccurate and incapable of objectivity and responsible journalism. Why no piece like this on Daisy Khan, or Feisal Abdul Rauf, or Sharif El-Gamal?

Here is credentialed journalism: they say without explanation that I "posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet." They don't bother to mention that the Kagan photoshop came after it was revealed that Kagan had cited in her thesis a German Marxist who became a Nazi when Hitler took power. They claim that I said that "a young Barack Obama slept with 'a crack whore,'" without mentioning that in that post I was making a point about unfair journalists (like these Times writers), constructing a reductio ad absurdum about media bias.

Just to show how avid and careful they were in their quest for the facts, they have me video blogging from an Israeli beach. Won't Fort Lauderdale be surprised to find out that the Zionist war machine is now occupying Florida beaches? Richer still was their reference to "arching her bikini-bared back provocatively." Please. I was submerged in the water with my kids in the background. Talk about easily titillated! I never arched my back except to swim away. They've been spending too much time with the Taliban. And they fault me for equating Palestinians with Hamas. The Palestinians elected Hamas, but who cares?

I know they spoke to Pamela Hall, but she is not mentioned in the article. They asked her what my worst traits were, but she must not have given them any grist for their mill.

It's revealing how many times they refer to my "Long Island-accented voice" and upbringing. It says more about them than it does about me. It's elitist, it's snobbish, and it's condescending.

But while they have room for that, you'll notice that the Muslim Brotherhood is nowhere mentioned in this piece, although I referred to them extensively. Even when they referred to the halal Campbell's Soup story, they declined to mention ISNA or the Muslim Brotherhood, only referring to a nameless Islamic group. Why is the New York Times so solicitous or afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood, that they won't mention its name? Nor do they mention the mega-mosque's earlier name, Cordoba Initiative, although it was only known as such for many months.

They refer to my work as a "crusade," but never refer to the supremacists' jihad as anything nefarious. They refer to my work as waging "a form of holy war," but never, ever discuss the real holy war against the West.

They say Paypal branded me a hate site. I know that facts are irrelevant, but they didn't.

In talking about my role in the mosque controversy, they say:

Two days later, Ms. Geller invited readers to protest the “9/11 monster mosque being built on hallowed ground zero,” in a post that was among the first to spread the misimpressions that the project was at the World Trade Center site and would solely house a prayer space.

Who's misimpressioning here? The site of the building is Ground Zero. You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts. That building was hit by the landing gear from one of the planes, and destroyed. It is part of the Ground Zero attack site. And I never said that the building would solely house a prayer space. (Note "prayer space": the Times can't bring itself to call it a mosque, even though the prayer space in this building will be a mosque.)

Even the links they provide are deliberately deceptive. When deriding me for calling Sharif El-Gamal a thug, they don't link to his rap sheet or his threatening of a moderate Muslim. They only link to the post about his being a tax deadbeat, which is not about his thuggishness.

They minimize the mortal threat to Rifqa Bary's life, mischaracterizing her father's death threat to her for leaving Islam for Christianity as Rifqa having "accused her parents of abuse." They say I helped draw "vociferous objectors to a hearing this summer on a since-scrapped proposal for a mosque on Staten Island." Here again, they make no mention of the fact that it was a Muslim Brotherhood mosque. "Vociferous objectors" is Times-speak for patriots and defenders of freedom.

As far as the public school madrassa in Brooklyn goes, I referred extensively to Pamela Hall's seminal work. She was responsible for taking what should have been a Pulitzer-Prize-winning picture of the Almontaser-sanctioned "Intifada NYC" t-shirt. They quote the head of the school, Dabah Almontaser, saying: “New York is the cosmopolitan city of the world. They figured that if they could do it here, they could do it anywhere. And sadly, they did.” Do what? Fight for justice? Stand up against the jihad against Israel? Stand up against a public school being made into a madrassa? I would do it again. And going to Almontaser for her take on the madrassa is like going to the fox for his take on the henhouse.

They gave space to hit-and-run insults from anonymous people at the New York Observer, which was swarming with doctrinaire leftists like Mike Tomasky and Joe Conason, and note: they made no mention of the fact that I worked all my life, from the time I was thirteen. I worked full-time from the time I was seventeen. My high school was on split session; I got out at noon and worked til eight. I worked through college, and never stopped working until I left to raise my children in my late thirties. "Socialite," my eye!

The New York Times said: "And Ms. Geller said, without evidence, that the center’s financing might be tied to terrorists." We know that Rauf is a leading member of the Perdana Organization, the single largest financier of the Turkish terrorist group's jihad flotilla against Israel. Rauf and Daisy Khan have received funding from the Xenel Corporation. The connection between Xenel and al Qaeda, according to the Orlando Sentinel, was persuasive enough that the city of Orlando decided to cancel the contract it had previously awarded to Xenel. The involvement Bin Laden-tied Xenel led to the cancellation of a different 100-million-dollar project in Florida. If such ties would cancel a convention center, why not a 100-million-dollar Islamic supremacist mega mosque at the site of largest attack on American soil by these same players? And yet the Times says I have no evidence.

They ridicule the idea of taqiyya, calling it "the hiding of true beliefs, religiously sanctioned for Muslims, usually minority Shiites, under hostile rule." They don't mention that the idea of religious deception in Islam is not just held by Shi'ites, but is founded on the Koran, which tells Muslims that they can pretend to be friends with unbelievers to "guard themselves against them" (3:28). A hadith explains this as meaning "We smile in the faces of some people, but behind their backs we curse them." That sounds like Rauf, with his love for religious dialogue in English and rejection of it in Arabic, to me.

They claim that I am branding Rauf a "radical Islamist," when in fact his own words are those of a radical: "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it." Referring to jihadis, he says: "How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism? It's hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?" Rauf calls Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi "a very very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world" -- Qaradawi has approved of Palestinian suicide bombings and genocide of the Jews. It was on Qaradawi's authority that Hamas began to use women in suicide attacks. He has called for "drastic" punishment of homosexuals. (Video here.)

They refer to the pain expressed by those who oppose the Ground Zero mega mosque as "heckling." And I had to laugh, of course, when the New York Times said that Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin were getting their talking points from me. Has anyone told Rush yet?

Barnard and Feuer write, "Opposition to Park51 grew — and with it, antipathy for Islam." It wasn't "antipathy for Islam" -- that is more of that racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim nonsense. It was outrage at the lack of compassion and sensitivity to the pain and the grief the mega mosque organizers were causing. To suggest that I provided the vocabulary to express this grief, under the guise of "worries about Islam," is laughable. It is justifiable concern about slaughter in the name of jihad, Islamic supremacism, the subjugation of women, and gender apartheid. The dead can't speak.

They're snarky about anyone who goes off the reservation, but they actually refer to the disinformationalists and propagandists of Media Matters as a "media tracking group," and not the left-wing propaganda hate site that it is, void of facts -- like this article. They say: "Her claims were disputed often enough that the liberal media-tracking group Media Matters called on stations (ineffectually) to stop presenting her as an expert." They do not and cannot, however, cite one example where I was actually wrong; instead, they just resort to ad hominem attacks. The Times is implying in this that I was so inaccurate that the smear machine Media Matters called on stations to stop featuring me in the interests of accuracy, when actually Media Matters was afraid that some of the truth was getting out to the public despite their best efforts. That they mention Loonwatch, a Goebbels-style hate site, speaks volumes.

And they say this about the EDL: "Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)" They don't mention that the EDL unequivocally supports Israel, waves the Israeli flag, has a Jewish division, has Hindu and Sikh members, and does have an ongoing problem with leftist infiltrators joining their rallies in order to try to discredit them by making racist or neo-Nazi statements.

They expose themselves completely when brushing over the death of Aqsa Parvez. They never mention why she didn't have a headstone in the first place (because she brought dishonor to the family, which is why she was murdered, and that dishonor did not merit her being remembered after death). They put "honor killings" in quotes, as if it were something I made up. In all their combing through my site, they seem to have missed this post. Is it any wonder that these reporters don't understand the whole idea of compassion and decency in regard to the Ground Zero mosque, when they put the term "honor killings" in quotes?

One thing the Times got right: the picture of me accompanying the article is accurate!

NYTimes Likens 70% of Americans to Muslim Murderers

In an incomprehensible moral equivocation, The NY Times is equating our rally against the 15-story mega mosque to be built on the site of a building that was partially destroyed in the attacks on September 11 in the name of Islam, with the slaughter and persecution of Christians and the church in Indonesia.

Insane? Yes. Moral rot? Yes. Regular Atlas readers are painfully aware of the merciless attacks on Christians in the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. Go here for more.

In another bloody, savage attack, Muslims seriously injured two leaders of a small congregation of Indonesian Christians. A church elder was stabbed in the stomach, and a female priest was hit in the head with a plank.

Here is how the NY Slimes framed it:

Last week, one day after Americans opposed to the construction of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan pledged to “Stop the Islamization of America,” a group of Islamists rallied in Bekasi, outside the Indonesian capital, to fight the “Christianization” of Indonesia, by blocking the planned construction of a church.

The Times is literally equating us with them. Yes, according to the NY Times, SIOA is just like these murderers in Indonesia against the church.

Tens of thousands joined Robert and me in appealing to the extreme Imam Rauf to be sensitive and tolerant and human, something Islamic supremacists are incapable of. The NY Times is comparing the 70% of Americans opposed to the Ground Zero mega mosque with bloody murdering jihadists. NY Times reporters were trained by Rauf, so this is hardly surprising.

The hatred of the good for being the good -- Ayn Rand.

Indonesian Islamists Fear ‘Christianization’ by ROBERT MACKEY
Romeo Gacad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Members of Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders’ Front, or F.P.I., at a rally in Jakarta in January.

Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, is engaged in a debate about religious tolerance that might seem familiar to Americans.

Last week, one day after Americans opposed to the construction of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan pledged to “Stop the Islamization of America,” a group of Islamists rallied in Bekasi, outside the Indonesian capital, to fight the “Christianization” of Indonesia, by blocking the planned construction of a church.

Two leaders of the small congregation of Indonesia Christians in Bekasi were seriously wounded when the rally against their planned church by vigilantes from the Islamic Defenders’ Front, or F.P.I., turned violent. Murhali Barda, who leads Bekasi’s chapter of the Islamist vigilante group, was arrested on suspicion of leading the attacks on a church elder, who was stabbed in the stomach, and a female priest, who was hit in the head with a plank.

In June, the Bekasi F.P.I. leader told The Jakarta Globe, “All Muslims should unite and be on guard because … the Christians are up to something.” He also suggested that it might be necessary for mosques to establish militias and be prepared to fight a “war” to prevent “Christianization.”

As Al Jazeera explained in a video report last week, the small Christian group said that it had obtained all the necessary signatures from local residents who agreed to allow them to build their church, but then the Islamist vigilantes pressed people to withdraw their approval.

F.P.I. vigilantes have attacked a wide range of targets in the past, throwing rocks at members of minority Muslim sects, beating gay people, destroying bars and vowing to track down the editor of Indonesia’s short-lived version of Playboy magazine, Erwin Arnada, who is now in hiding.

As Reuters explained in June when the vigilantes attacked a group of Indonesian legislators, the F.P.I. “attracts limited support in moderate, majority Muslim Indonesia, but fear of being seen as defending vice means politicians and police often turn a blind eye to their attacks on targets, such as transvestites, which are deemed un-Islamic.”

Indonesians who want to ban the group have launched a Facebook campaign to do so. Others have taken to mocking the vigilantes through posts to a fake Twitter account set up in the group’s name.

The same month, Yenny Wahid, of Jakarta’s Wahid Institute — which “is committed to the exchange and dissemination of progressive Muslim thought to promote tolerance and understanding” — told The Jakarta Globe, “Anarchism on behalf of religion is increasing, and the government seems to fear any group that uses Islam.” She added, “We do not want to be like Afghanistan under the Taliban.”

NYTimes Distorts to Support Muslim Lies

New York Times Soils Itself Again with Ground Zero Bus Coverage

I read the New York Times coverage on the Ground Zero bus campaign and had to laugh. They are so crippled by their liberal bias, they are incapable of reporting a simple story in a responsible, intellectually honest or accurate way. Journalism is dead if these jokers are the template.

Michael Grynbaum writes...........

The group behind the advertisement had sued the authority last week, alleging that the advertisement had initially been rejected as inappropriate.

Wrong. Not "inappropriate." The position was 911 images were banned -- which is shocking. But nowhere in the article do they report that. Do New Yorkers and/or Americans know that 911 images have been embargoed? And it was not alleged, it was rejected, four times.

They run, unchallenged, the MTA's nonsensical position that they never saw the ad until Friday, unchallenged. The ad was rejected four times -- hellooooooo.

And of course I am misquoted. When asked if I was "concerned that the image of the flaming twin towers might upset some New Yorkers," The Times reports

Ms. Geller, in a brief interview on Monday, replied: “Not at all. It’s part of American history.”

This is untrue. Clearly, the reporter with an agenda needed to twist my quote in the hopes of making me seem .......somehow cavalier about the issue. What I said was, "it's part of American history, and not nearly as offensive as a 15-story mega mosque looking down on the cemetery of Ground Zero." Which is what I said earlier that day here.

It's amusing to watch the cold-blooded try and paint the passionate as ............cold-blooded.

They have no shame.

City Buses to Get Ads Opposing Islam Center NY Times

In the suit, the ad’s sponsor, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller, a prominent right-wing blogger, claimed that the firm that handles advertising for the transit agency had infringed on its right to free speech by repeatedly requesting changes to the ad, like removing the image of the plane.

In a short statement issued on Monday, a spokesman for the authority, Kevin Ortiz, said the advertisement as originally submitted had been deemed acceptable under the agency’s “advertising guidelines and governing legal standards.”

The authority, which must approve advertising in the transit system, said it had not made a final decision on the advertisement before the lawsuit was filed.

John H. Banks III, a mayoral appointee to the authority’s board, said he supported the decision, despite his personal objection to the advertisement. “The wonderful thing about our country is that people have a right to express themselves, as long as it doesn’t endanger anyone’s life,” Mr. Banks said. “I support it, even though I disagree with it vehemently.”

Whose life is in danger? I mean, really. Who gets the death threats for opposing Islamic supremacism?

The planned mosque, which received final city approval last week, has been at the center of a fierce national debate about religious freedom and the legacy of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Asked if she was concerned that the image of the flaming twin towers might upset some New Yorkers, Ms. Geller, in a brief interview on Monday, replied: “Not at all. It’s part of American history.”

Not what I said.

The Undue Persecution of ACORN

ACORN was prematurely and inappropriately tried and convicted in the press and in Congress, without so much as a single hearing, vis a vis a grotesque and shameful word-of-mouth propaganda lynch job unseen since the days of Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced, right-wing demagogue who misused his powerful perch in the U.S. Senate to smear "loyal Americans as disloyal" and who falsely "charged that the government was being undermined from within"...

Tried and convicted by partisan hoax

ACORN was tried and convicted in the press and in Congress based on propaganda videos which a former MA Attorney General exposed months ago as a heavily edited hoax. Yet without waiting on a single investigation, or holding a single hearing, U.S. House and Senate Resolutions were passed in an attempt to strip a presumed guilty ACORN of federal funding. Fortunately, those measures were found by a federal judge to be, in all likelihood, unconstitutional bills of attainder. But the finding comes too late for the group which depends on private funders for the vast majority of its work, many of whom have withheld their support following the Republican operatives' extremely successful smear job.

Had Congress looked before leaping, they would have found that an independent analysis [PDF], furnished by former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, disabuses much of the misinformation that has been propagated about the entire ACORN "pimp" hoax. While the analysis was commissioned by ACORN as an external review, and returned some rather harsh condemnations for some of the groups organizational procedures, Harshbarger found no pattern of illegalities by the organization itself, or any of those low-level employees ensnared by the O'Keefe/Breitbart set up.
Source: Brad Blog

Your Very Own Climate Change Victory Garden

In "Why Bother?" Michael Pollan's newest Sunday New York Times Magazine essay, the Berkeley writer urges us all to start vegetable gardens in our backyards as a way not just to combat climate change, but to break the stranglehold of consumerist society and actually do something real.

It's a good read, especially if you're a Berkeleyan with a backyard who is constantly worrying about how to live and eat properly in a world beset with incalculably huge challenges. I swear, Michael Pollan (author, most recently, of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") simply owns that beat. His point about his "evil" Chinese doppelganger who will eat whatever meat and burn whatever gas that the virtuous Pollan eschews is well-taken. If everyone in Berkeley drove a Prius, but everyone in Shanghai buys an SUV, what good, quantitatively speaking, has been done?

But that's a separate thread, and Pollan does a nice job, in the end, of justifying why we should bother. And yet I'm uncertain about his call for everyone to plant their own climate change Victory Garden.

(For simplicity's sake, I'm going to sidestep the whole what-if-you-don't-have-a-back-yard class warfare morass. In this blog post, everyone is landed gentry, or at the very least, can plant basil in a windowbox.)

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, opposed to vegetable gardens in principle. On the contrary, I have, in the past, taken great pleasure in my own micro-farming. A well-tended garden is both aesthetically satisfying and productive. I agree with Pollan, a late-summer tomato plucked by your hand from the vine is fantastically delicious. I have been known to take perverse pleasure in weeding -- don't get me started on the awesome summer I spent eradicating my running bamboo with nothing more than a mattock and the sweat from my brow. But for two years now, I have stood back and watched the weeds grow.

There are two reasons.

The first reason is sunlight, or rather, the lack of it due to three large redwoods in my backyard, planted in 1980 by a previous owner of my house, named, no lie, Sequoia Lundy. Redwoods grow fast -- a sapling can grow as much as six feet in a year, and in the ten years I've lived in my house, the three redwoods have gradually created their own private canopy. I've considered having one or two of the mighty trees removed, but the irony of clearcutting my own backyard forest for the purposes of agricultural production does not escape me, and my daughter is dead-set against it. She speaks for the trees.

The second reason is more important: leisure time, or rather the lack of it. Because there are patches of sunlight where I could still plant lettuce and tomatoes and beans, and yes I know, gardening can give you a good workout. Perhaps I even agree with Pollan that such a workout is morally superior to running in place on a treadmill at the gym. But I also like to spend my weekends going for long bike rides, and I have found it difficult to balance the time requirements of serious gardening with biking, not to mention a couple of other nagging time-wasters, like parenting and working.

Sometimes, it is possible to take great pleasure in weeding oxalis. Sometimes, it just feels like more work in a life that is already full to the brim. And make no mistake: growing your own food is work -- ask any peasant. To be able to enjoy it as play, or as an almost spiritual exercise that connects you more deeply to the earth and all living things (some of which you must kill: Die, all aphids and snails!) can be a tough call after a long day or week at the office. It can also be an affectation that is only accessible to those who spend their Sunday mornings working their way through the New York Times, before deciding where to put their snap pea trellis.

Pollan concedes that without the specialization facilitated by the division of labor that makes modern economies so rich and diverse, he would not be paid to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. That, for better or worse, is the story of civilization. I'm happy to have other people grow my food for me, and I'll do my best to pay the price premium that ensures it is sustainability produced. But sometimes I'd just rather go for a bike ride, than weed or hoe or water.

-- Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

John McCain Owes the NY Times a Favor

John McCain Owes the New York Times a Favor

Apparently, John McCain had an intense relationship with an attractive lobbyist thirty years his junior. The affair affected his votes on campaign contribution reform and several other issues.

It was a refreshing departure from the norm taking bribes from men and expecting sex from boys.

The New York Times had the story in December when its disclosure would have ended the Senator’s chances in the primaries. Instead, the Times waited until he was the front runner before they endorsed him. Since the story of the affair would have emerged anyway, there was no reason for the Times to forgo the scoop.

To me, it is a wonderment why the Times endorsed anybody at all.