Katherine Kersten vs. the ‘See No Evil Gang’
Katherine Kersten’s reporting on the ‘Flying Imam Fiasco’ has been one of the few bright spots for the Strib in ages. Consider her latest article, titled “Suspicion about Imams Grows as Terror Links Pile Up“.
As usual, Ms. Kersten pulled together a wealth of information from a ton of different sources to give her readers as much pertinent facts as possible. Here’s a sampling of that information:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the imams’ legal representative, is an organization that “we know has ties to terrorism,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in 2003. And the Muslim American Society, which is also supporting the imams? It’s the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Chicago Tribune, which called it “the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group.”
How about Omar Shahin, the imams’ spokesman and also president of the North American Imams Federation? He is a native of Jordan, who says he became a U.S. citizen in 2003. From 2000 to 2003, Shahin served as president of Islamic Center of Tucson (ICT), that city’s largest mosque. The ICT is well known. The mosque has “an extensive history of terror links,” according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who testified about terrorist financing before the Senate Banking Committee in July 2005.
So her readers appreciated this information, right? To be fair, many did. Others, however, simply chose to not put the pieces of the puzzle together. To put it in 9/11 Commission terms, the people who didn’t want to learn didn’t connect the dots. That’s because they don’t want to connect the dots if the information is coming from anyone remotely close to being a conservative. That’s why I’m giving them a nickname that fits their mindset: the ‘See No Evil Gang’. Here’s a sampling of what some of these ‘gangsters’ said:
TheMostAncient says:Steven Emerson? Terrorism Expert?
His critics have accused him of claiming that the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the work of Middle-Eastern terrorists (domestic groups were later determined to be responsible for the attack). By his own account he only claimed that federal authorities were investigating a connection to Islamic extremists regarding the Oklahoma City bombing. [5] …from Wikipedia.
Next, KK will quote terrorism experts Glen Beck or Benjamin Netanyahu…as of now, this is all a great big mess o’ guilt by association.
Then there’s this one:
shinto_tanuki says:
I thought we had managed to get the whole “CAIR is a terrorist front” thing settled when KK attempted to smear Keith Ellison for his friendship with several of it’s leaders, but apparently she ignored all the documentation on the group and, bizarrely, took the word of a liberal Democratic senator that they’re linked to terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, George W. Bush brought various Islamic leaders to the Rose Garden, among them several leading CAIR figures. The subsequent press conference focused entirely on how the US was going to war with terrorism, not Islam, with moderate Muslims on hand as proof. The group did have links to Hamas when that organization was founded, but very emphatically severed those links when Hamas moved out of the political arena into terrorism, and publicly disavowed and criticized the new tactics.
It seems like there certainly was cause for concern with these imams. But KKs seeming attempt to brand them as bin Laden’s hand-picked strike team is just as ludicrous as Ellison’s assertion that anyone concerned about terrorism is an Islamo-phobe. In this country we need to hammer out where the line falls between our freedom and our safety. It’s a debate with valid points all around. Treating it as a black-and-white, no grey area topic, as KK and my new congressman seem intent to do, does nothing to enhance freedom or security and in fact endangers them both.
Then finally this:
The War is a Lie says:5 columns on this? Krazy Katherine owes the Imams a thank you card, for so much milage.
My favorite comment, though, was this one:
EdwinHJ says:I am very sad — because I am agreeing with yet another one of this generally hateful woman’s columns.
At least Edwin had the integrity to admit that, though he’s a hateful liberal, he agrees with Katherine Kersten’s reporting.
The point to all this is that, though we’re living in a post 9/11 world, many people refuse to even look at the information. Many of the commenters chose to immediately descend into name-calling; others said that Katherine Kersten and the posters who agreed with her were trying to smear people by playing the “guilt by association game”. That last one got me laughing. If a group of imams are part of the same mosque and they’ve met known terrorists like Hani Hanjour and whose mosque was built by funds provided by ISNA, the Saudi version of the Muslim Brotherhood, reasonable people might conclude that, given the amount of ’smoke’ that’s there, there’s also fire.
To the ‘See no Evil Gang’, though, this is just the latest conservative conspiracy theory.
Technorati Tags: Katherine Kersten, Connect The Dots, 9/11, Conspiracy Theories
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
December 12th, 2006 at 3:32 am
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