The moderate image was also belied by recorded remarks of the imam that appeared as a multimedia sidebar on the Times’ own website. Asserting that recent U.S. history has been marked by injustice, the imam says, “Anything about the conduct of Muslims can be used as an excuse to make threats or give punishment. . . . They find us inferior so they target us. They find us so inferior they are unjust to us. . . . Injustice, injustice, injustice. If it strikes a nation and misfortune and disaster starts spreading, then beware, beware people of the Lord of Heavens.”
In an interview, Elliott maintained that Sheik Reda “didn’t fit into facile categories like ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative.’ He’s a complex person whose views about Islam in America were still being formed and whose ministry was a work in progress.”
The series on Sheik Reda won the Pulitzer Prize. Elliott’s editor, Joe Sexton, echoing the imam, said it helped to subtract a few bricks from “the wall of hatred.”
But “An Imam in America” had a disturbing coda. Almost a year later, Andrea Elliott wrote a piece headlined “A Cleric’s Journey Leads to a Suburban Frontier.” It described how Reda Shata had been forced to relocate to New Jersey after receiving threats from more rigid Muslims who objected to his “liberal” teachings that married couples could have oral sex and that a Muslim could sell pork and alcohol if no other work could be found. “In Bay Ridge, the Pulitzer-winning articles prompted a fistfight outside a Dunkin’ Donuts,” Elliott reported. “Fliers warned in Arabic that the imam was ‘a devil.’ . . . After weeks of defending himself, Mr. Shata felt worn down.” He had already been courted by a mosque in Middletown, New Jersey, and the controversy and implied threats influenced his decision to move.
The fact that it took months for this bit of the story to get into the newspaper suggests a reluctance to admit that much of the Islamic community is filled with intolerance and violence. Instead of the innocuous headline it was given, this report could just as easily have been called “Violent Muslims Play Role in Driving Iman out of Bay Ridge,” and it could have examined the distance between the American ideal of tolerance and Islamic norms. When I asked Elliott about this at a panel discussion in New York in March 2010, she said the news value of the attacks on the cleric was “debatable,” and in an interview I did with her, she said that other factors aside from intimidation were behind his relocation.
With its hypersensitivity toward Islamic immigrants, the Times offers consistently soft-edged reporting about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which presents itself as “an Islamic NAACP.” The communications director of CAIR, Ibrahim Hooper, says its official mission is “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” CAIR’s real aim, however, is Islamic hegemony. In 1998, its cofounder and former board chairman Omar Ahmad told a Muslim audience that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. . . . The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” A Washington representative of CAIR has said that Muslims “can never be full citizens” of the United States “because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”
Yet the New York Times has consistently produced articles on CAIR that are little more than repurposed CAIR press releases. As criticism of CAIR mounted on Capitol Hill in the spring of 2007, Neil MacFarquhar came to its defense in a piece headlined “Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in the US.” He criticized “a small band of people who hate Muslims and deal in half-truths,” and maintained that “more than one” government official in Washington “described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.”
MacFarquhar went to bat for CAIR again when it was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Dallas, Texas, beginning in 2007. Under the headline “Muslim Groups Oppose List of ‘Co-Conspirators,’” MacFarquhar quoted Muslim activists who claimed that naming the organization as a co-conspirator could “ratchet up the discrimination faced by American Muslims since the Sept. 11 attacks.” The legal brief he cited says that the list of co-conspirators “furthers a pattern of the ‘demonization of all things Muslim’ that has unrolled in the United States since 2001.” MacFarquhar did not mention that an FBI agent testified during the trial that CAIR was “a front for Hamas,” or that conclusive FBI evidence has its executive director, Nihad Awad, participating in a planning meeting with Hamas fundraisers in 1993.
Following a mistrial, a second trial against the Holy Land Foundation ended in November 2008 when five of its officials were convicted on charges of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas. Another outcome was that the FBI, after years of including CAIR in its Islamic outreach efforts, severed its ties to the organization in late January 2009—which was news by any definition of the word. But the Times did not report this, nor did it take notice when a federal grand jury subpoenaed CAIR’s records in December of that year.
Coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States carries an even softer journalistic edge. The group operates in secret through such organizations as the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim American Society. Its intent is to spread Islam throughout various American institutions with the goal of establishing Sharia. An “explanatory memorandum” captured by the FBI in 1991 read: “The Ikhwan [brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In September 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an exposé on the origins and operations of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American branch. But in the forty years it has existed in the United States, the New York Times has never once taken on the subject.
The two dominant themes of Times reporting on Islam in America—that Islam has a moderate face and that America is deeply Islamophobic—fused together in coverage of the controversy in 2010 over the plan to build a Muslim cultural center and mosque near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. The Times responded to the debate surrounding the “Ground Zero Mosque,” as it is popularly called, with one of the most demagogic pile-ons in its history, with glaring examples of reportage echoing opinion, and with the condescending elitism that has alienated so many Americans.
According to Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the project, the Islamic center would promote cross-cultural bridge building and represent the “common impulse of our great faith traditions.” Supporters said it would symbolize American tolerance toward Islam as well as the constitutional right to freedom of religion.
Opponents of the plan, including family members of 9/11 victims, said it was a sacrilege to put a mosque two short blocks away from “hallowed ground.” In fact, the roof of the building to be torn down on the site was pierced by wreckage from the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center, and according to some New York firefighters who worked at Ground Zero after the attack, body parts of victims were found as close as a block away. Victims’ families were joined by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and some Republican political figures, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Some prominent Democrats, such as Harry Reid and Howard Dean, also objected to having a mosque on that site, as did some journalistic free-speechers such as Nat Hentoff and Christopher Hitchens.
Some opponents of the mosque said it would feed Islamist triumphalism, since militant Muslim forces have a history of building mosques on the holy sites of their conquests. Opponents also took exception to some of Imam Rauf’s past statements, including his claim that America bore complicity for the 9/11 attacks, and to evidence that his tone was less moderate when he addressed a
udiences outside the United States. There was also the project’s murky finances. Rauf had little money to develop the site, and what he did have came from a Muslim who had given money to Hamas and had been dunned by the government for fraud. Some critics thought the project might attract Saudi money and Wahhabi extremists.
The Times could have stepped back from the fray and parsed the competing claims of supporters and opponents in a neutral way. It might have examined why, according to some polls, between 65 and 70 percent of Americans objected to the mosque, and why elite opinion was so divergent from popular opinion. It might have examined how its own soft reporting on Islam may have contributed to popular distrust.
Instead, the Times produced shrill, scolding editorials, as well as reporting skewed in favor of the project. Additionally, almost every Times op-ed and Web columnist wrote favorably about the mosque, throwing shallow and unfair charges of bigotry against dissenters. Supporters of the mosque, such as New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, were hailed as heroes of conscience, while opponents, such as the New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, were smeared as craven opportunists. Imam Rauf was the subject of puff pieces that airbrushed the more dubious facets of his ideology and finances. “For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act” was the headline of a piece by Anne Barnard, who breezily dismissed the opponents’ claims about Rauf. “Some charges, the available record suggests, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas,” she wrote. “In any case, calling him a jihadist appears even less credible than calling him a United States agent.”
There were numerous reports on the resistance that other mosque plans were encountering around the country, which painted Americans who objected to these mosques as small-minded Archie Bunkers. When Judea Pearl, father of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, announced his opposition to the mosque in an interview with an Israeli news service, it was ignored; he had previously thanked Rauf for his words of solidarity at his son’s memorial service in 2002. The Times’ coverage had its share of victimology, too. A report by Laurie Goodstein was headlined “American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?”
In a column headlined “Mosque Madness,” Maureen Dowd slammed the “moral timidity that would ban a mosque from that neighborhood.” Wrote Dowd: “Our enemies struck at our heart, but did they also warp our identity? . . . By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for.”
The most overwrought opinion columns were those by Nicholas Kristof, who wrote four times about the nativism and bigotry he perceived behind the opposition to the mosque. “We’re seeing extremists, but not the Muslim kind,” read the pull quote of one column, headlined “Is This America?” In another, “America’s History of Fear,” Kristof maintained that the screeds against Catholics in the nineteenth century “sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque,” and that historically, “suspicion of outsiders” had led Americans to “burn witches, intern Japanese and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.” In still another column, he apologized to Muslims around the world for American behavior.
In early September, the Times op-ed page featured a piece by Imam Rauf in which he made veiled threats of violence and expressed a repugnant moral equivalence. America’s national security and “the personal security of Americans worldwide” were at risk if the project was scuttled, Rauf claimed. “This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse, and essentially our future, to radicals on both sides.” At that point, the Times’ own polling showed that 60 percent of New Yorkers were against the mosque. The size and the diversity of the opposition made Rauf’s assertion about “radicals on both sides” particularly tendentious.
In late August, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told interviewers from ABC radio and MSNBC that the mosque was “a real affront to people who lost their lives on 9/11” and said it should be moved. Political and media elites, he said, should recognize that “sixty-five percent of the people were not right-wing bigots.” Dean’s remarks were eminently newsworthy, as was the furor they set off in the left-wing blogosphere. Other news organizations did stand-alone news stories on the comments; the Times did not.
A New York Times editorial from 1982, “Immigration and Purity,” articulated a realist view of the subject, saying: “Unlimited immigration was a need, and a glory, of the undeveloped American past. Yet no one believes America can still support it. We must choose how many people to admit, and which ones. That can be done only if we can control the borders.” By 2004, when a new push began for tough, enforcement-driven immigration reform, the Times had changed its perspective markedly.
When the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 was introduced in Congress, the Times showed its bias by failing to report the bill’s various “hidden bombs,” as one critic called them. For example, it would have replaced the entire immigration bench with activists, since it required that lawyers proposed for immigration judgeships have at least five years practicing immigration law and that existing judges give up lifetime spots on the bench after seven years. The bill had an amendment called the “Dream Act,” which would have allowed illegals to attend college at in-state tuition rates, while U.S. citizens from out of state have to pay full freight. The bill also called for a massive granting of citizenship, but did not give the Citizenship and Immigration Service the budget or infrastructure to handle its new responsibilities—which many saw as simply implementing “amnesty” for up to twelve million illegal immigrants. The bill was premised on the idea that the documents that illegals would be filing to prove residency would be authentic, an unrealistic expectation given the easy availability of counterfeit Social Security cards, counterfeit visas, bank statements, tax returns and other fraudulent forms of documentation. Supporters of the bill said that no illegal would be allowed to cut in line ahead of someone patiently waiting in another country for approval to immigrate. Yet they did not specify if illegals who applied for what was nebulously called a “path to citizenship” would have to go home first or could remain here while they were being processed, which was virtually the same thing as cutting the line.
While hesitant to discuss these issues, the Times charged into the fray against those calling for felony penalties for facilitating illegal immigration. One editorial claimed, falsely and sensationally, that such penalties could lead to jail for church groups running soup kitchens, or neighbors taking an illegal to a hospital or a pharmacy.
Opponents of the bill flooded Capitol Hill with so many telephone calls, faxes and emails that the Senate switchboard had to be shut down. On this, at least, the Times headline writers were honest. “The Grassroots Roared and an Immigration Plan Fell,” read one headline. But some of the columnists almost choked on sour grapes. Timothy Egan, a former reporter turned website columnist, blamed conservative radio and television talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. “Pragmatism is being drowned out by bullies with electronic bullhorns, who’ve got their [Republican] party leaders running scared.” Egan said.
The bitterness continued in Times analyses where opposition to the liberal view was equated with rank nativism. David Leonhardt, a business columnist, wrote that the backlash “had a familiar feel to it.” He went on to associate the tidal wave of illegals entering the United States over the previous two decades with other great eras of immigration into the country—in the 1850s, 1880s and early 1900s. He noted that they too caused a hysterical reaction, the most famous being the rise of the Know-Nothing movement. History looked as if it would repeat itself, suggested Leonhardt—ignoring the fact that this latest group of immigrants, unlike the previous generations, did not come legally through Ellis Island.
The editorial rhetoric from the Times got increasingly nasty. Although the editorial page called for civil discourse, it hardly practiced wha
t it preached, instead issuing juvenile insults far more frequently than dependable insights. Even as it denounced the “demagoguery” of the opposition, it practiced its own form. Conservatives who were concerned about enforcement first were said to hold a view of immigration reform that was equivalent to “pest control.” Editorialists illogically likened opposing amnesty to favoring segregation. Other editorials indulged in victimology that sounded like self-parody: Hispanics are the new gays; Hispanics are the new Willy Horton; sending them home is immoral and a human rights violation. One editorial, “Ain’t That America,” said:Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature—skin color, religion, nationality, language—and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.
An especially rich target was the Minutemen, a group of armed volunteers patrolling the southern border with the aim of providing information to the Border Patrol on the movements of illegals trying to sneak into the country. The reporter James McKinley called them “self-proclaimed patriots” whose planned “vigilante watch” along the border was “alarming.” Sarah Vowell called them “a nutty experiment” that sprang from America’s “violent nativity,” further maligning them as “grown men playing army on the Mexican border” because they had nothing better to do. One Times story characterized the Minutemen as “anti-immigration,” which the paper later had to retract, admitting that they are only against illegal immigration.
The Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was trying to speak at Columbia University in October 2006 when campus radicals stormed the stage. A melee ensued, as security had to whisk Gilchrist off-stage, ending the event. The Times reported some of what happened but omitted some incriminating details, such as students shaking their fists and chanting “Si se pudo, si se pudo,” Spanish for “Yes we could!” Others unrolled a banner that read “No one is ever illegal,” in Arabic as well as English. But these bits of color were left to other news organizations to report.
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