"This story needs to be read by all. It is my honor to
reprint it for any and all who may fall upon my blog,
and thereby be enlightened to this truly incredible issue.
Protecting those who follow radical Islam, who
indoctrinate others into it, and encourage them to
murder the innocent, must be addressed and stopped,
before it is too late...ImJusSayin'..."
February 15, 2013
The Boston Globe vs. Free Speech
A
troubled young man plans to go on a shooting rampage at a local mall. A devoted
fan of other mass murderers, he gets pleasure watching videos of cruel and
graphic violence: actual beheadings, disembowelments, maimings. He hates his neighbors
and wishes for their deaths. He's been taught to hate by religious extremists
who dominate his community while intimidating their opponents into silence. The
FBI catches him before he can go through with his plan to machine gun shoppers
at the mall, though the Bureau ignores the people who indoctrinated him. The
extremists, meanwhile, are demanding that the would-be murderer be released.
They teach their children that he is a hero, and that those who stopped him
from slaughtering innocent people are the true villains. A local newspaper
journalist knows all this but for motives unknown, she refuses to report this
story.
This is
not a fictional account. On November 10, 2010, we met with Boston Globe's
religion reporter Lisa Wangsness and briefed her for over two hours on a
troubling story. A year before, the FBI had arrested Tarek Mehanna, an Islamic
extremist from Sudbury, Massachusetts whom it accused of providing material
support to Al Qaeda and plotting a shooting spree at the Emerald Square Mall in
North Attleboro, MA. In intercepted conversations, Mehanna celebrated the 9/11 hijackers as heroes. According to the
indictment, "Mehanna and his coconspirators, who shared videos and took
real pleasure in the deaths of American servicemen, seemed to delight in the
most horrific atrocities." Watching Iraqi terrorists tearing open a dead
U.S. Marine's rib cage and setting it on fire with gasoline, Mehanna gloated: "heh yeah... nice juicy BBQ...
Texas BBQ is the way to go." Trial documents show that Mehanna and his
co-conspirators referred to themselves as the American wing of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Mehanna
was convicted on all charges last year and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
We also
shared with the Globe's reporter evidence of an intense campaign by local
Islamic extremists to pressure the Justice Department to release Mehanna back
into the community that he had planned to attack. The extremists insisted that
the twisted mind revealed in FBI-recorded conversations was actually a gentle
soul who loved children and playing with his cat. Claiming that Mehanna's
arrest was nothing but a witch hunt by the FBI, which they accused of hating
Muslims, they incited their followers against the U.S. government by painting
the ghoulish would-be killer as the victim.
We showed
Ms. Wangsness that well-known religious leaders with connections to Massachusetts political
and civic leadership were involved in this campaign. Among them was Imam
Abdullah Faaruuq, then the Muslim Chaplain at Northeastern University
and a frequent preacher at the largest mosque in the Northeast, the Islamic
Society of Boston Cultural Center. (Faaruuq was dismissed from his position at
Northeastern after we exposed his actions in support of Mehanna and
other convicted terrorists.) Her own newspaperreported that another respected local Muslim leader
supporting Tarek Mehanna was a medical doctor named Abdul Cader Asmal,
co-chairman of communications for the Islamic Council of New England. In 2011,
Dr. Asmal was stripped of his medical license by
disciplinary action from the Massachusetts Board of Medicine.
At our
meeting with Ms. Wangsness, we traced for her a timeline of Mehanna's trajectory from a Sudbury, MA
teenage son of Egyptian immigrants to a budding Al Qaeda terrorist. Mehanna had
been radicalized at the Islamic Center of Worcester and the Islamic Center of
New England in Sharon, Massachusetts. We showed her documents
revealing that these mosques were led by imams who happened to be the brothers
of one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, Hafiz
Saeed. Saeed, who
had visited the Boston
area when Mehanna was 12, is the Pakistani mastermind of one of the world's
deadliest mass mall shootings: the 2008 Mumbai Massacre. According
to the Times of India,
his Massachusetts-based brothers raised money and recruited members for his
terrorist group in the Bay
State.
Ms.
Wangsness learned how the Islamic Center of Worcester, in particular, actively
engages in youth indoctrination. During Mehanna's trial, the mosque's
elementary schoolchildren were tasked with drawing "Free Tarek
Mehanna" posters and then carted off to the Federal Court building in Boston to chant
anti-American slogans.
We shared
with Ms. Wangsness interviews with moderate Muslims who reached out to us
asking for help in fighting the extremists who had hijacked their community and
are brainwashing their children. We showed her a vicious and threatening letter
that local extremist leader Nabeel Khudairi sent to a moderate Muslim who dared
challenge the extremists in his mosque.
She
looked at all our evidence, thanked us politely, and reported nothing. Now
perhaps we can understand why.
On
January 30, 2013, Wangsness spent part
of the day with
Abdul Cader Asmal -- the disgraced medical doctor and supporter of Tarek
Mehanna; with officials from the Islamic Center of Worcester -- which was the
incubator for Mehanna's hatred and still may be for dozens of young children;
and with Nabeel Khudairi -- the intimidator of moderate Muslims. Their goal,
according to leaked
emails, was to
pressure the Catholic Diocese of Worcester to cancel a talk by Robert Spencer,
a well-known critic of Islamic doctrine, especially its treatment of
non-believers, whom they falsely accused of hating Muslims.
They
succeeded. The Worcester Diocese cancelled Spencer's talk without the courtesy
of informing him directly. He had to learn about it from Wangsness, who reached
out to him for comment in a series of emails whose line of questioning followed
the "have you stopped beating your wife?" formula. The article she
published in the next day's Boston Globe ("Catholic
event cancels talk by Islam critic") was a foregone conclusion: Spencer was portrayed as
a villain, while Wangsness's extremist associates were made to look like
sympathetic victims. Though the article quoted Abdul Cader Asmal positively as
a doctor, it made no mention of his permanent removal from practice through
disciplinary action.
Robert
Spencer is a controversial author and speaker, yet in some ways, his views on
Islam tend to be more scholarly than many of the atheist critics of
Christianity, who, without much fuss, populate American universities and
cultural institutions. Spencer forcefully makes the point that, as with all
religions, adherents range widely -- from the absolute literalists to the
largely secular "cultural" Muslims. Spencer says he is not against
Muslims, but against the political aspect of Islam, which demands that its
followers act -- violently if necessary -- to subjugate infidels and establish
a theocracy.
Disagreeing
with Spencer is simply not a valid reason to prevent people from hearing his
arguments and his warnings. A pluralistic and open society must always favor
the free exchange of all ideas to the intolerant suppression of dissent. It is sadly ironic, though
no longer surprising, that a member of the press would join Islamist extremists
in trying to suppress free speech, and -- in Wangsness' case -- go as far asto
effectively censor information related to extremist activities.
Why would
Ms.Wangsness behave this way? Surely she doesn't share the radical Islamic
ideological hatred toward America
espoused by the people she's protecting. Much more likely, she believes in the
political dogma adopted by the 'social justice'-seeking media and civic elites.
It is based on the false narrative that American Muslims constitute a
"vulnerable minority," which deserves protection from criticism --
even if such protection involves the suppression of facts and the repression of
critics. Sadly, too many journalists and political leaders collaborate with this
crusade against the truth, and too many newspapers make it a matter of
editorial policy. Journalists like Lisa Wangsness of the Boston Globe have largely become instruments of a
truly illiberal orthodoxy. Its fetishes and myths -- that Western culture is
racist, that Islam is the religion of peace, that Muslims are always victims,
and that anyone who says otherwise must be denounced and silenced -- can never
be questioned. It is through this dogmatism that the radical Islamists have won
from the media and political elites a special set of protections.
Commenting
on the infamous YouTube video criticizing Islam's prophet Mohammed, which
resulted in Muslim mobs rioting and killing around the world, President Obama
expressed a strange view on the concept of dissent in a free society. He said:
"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of
Islam." With this statement, Obama attacked the right to criticize Islam,
and he was in effect targeting not only YouTube provocateurs, but also people
like Robert Spencer.
Not
enough significance has been paid to the implications of the president's
bizarre pronouncement. Obama left unsaid what he thinks should be done with
those who criticize Islam in order to ensure that "the future must not
belong" to them. However, the subsequent arrest of the producer of the
offending YouTube video on charges that posting the video violated his
probation, speaks louder than words. Will Robert Spencer and other authors and
scholars who find sufficient reason to criticize any aspect of Islam have to
worry about special scrutiny that could lead to prosecution or face other, more
subtle, government sanctions?
Amazingly,
such threats to freedom of expression seem not to bother those who otherwise
make criticism of those in power the key element of their profession.
This is not a new phenomenon. In his essays, "Writers and Leviathan"
and "The Prevention of Literature," George Orwell seems to speak from
the grave directly to Lisa Wangsness and journalists like her:
Freedom
of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and
oppose... To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a
group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer... If you possess
information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected
either to distort it or to keep quiet about it... Even a single taboo can have
an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger
that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
A modern
literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread -- not, indeed, of
public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group.
As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment
there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which needs a thick skin... To
accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions... In every
such case there is a conclusion which is perfectly plain but which can only be
drawn if one is privately disloyal to the official ideology. The normal
response is to push the question, unanswered, into a corner of one's mind, and
then continue repeating contradictory catchwords.
Ms.
Wangsness has redefined the role of the journalist from providing true
information to promoting a group's dominant orthodoxy, which in this case also
requires blacklisting, silencing, and employing neo-McCarthyism against those
who violate its taboos. The ultimate victims here are the people of New England, who are kept ignorant of the potential
dangers in their community. Welcome to the New Journalism -- serving private
ideology against the public interest.
The writers are,
respectively, Research Director and President of Americans for Peace and
Tolerance (www.peaceandtolerance.org)
