Writing in The Nation, “journalist” Ali Gharib accuses Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism of “Islamophobic outbursts.” Ali Gharib accusing Steve Emerson of “Islamophobia” is like David Duke burning a cross on a black family’s lawn and then accusing them of littering: contrary to Gharib’s claims, it is not Emerson who vilifies Muslims, for he merely reports (and quite well) on the activity of jihad-linked organizations in the U.S. It is actually Gharib who has made a career out of vilification and defamation: he has a long record of gleefully smearing, through guilt by association, tendentiously misinterpreted quotes, and outright lies, anyone who opposes jihad terror, and particularly those who oppose jihad terror against Israel.
Gharib has defended the idea that Israel causes anti-Semitism; claimed that there is no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program (two years after Barack Obama acknowledged that they were); approvingly quoted discredited anti-Semitic propagandist Max Blumenthal accusing Israel (and Texas) of genocide; defended Iran’s brutal intelligence agencies as “normally very professional”; defended the jihad flotilla against Israel on which people were chanting a genocidal jihad slogan vowing the murder of Jews; and denied the massive extent of anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian Authority textbooks.
His virulent anti-Semitism has not gone unnoticed. In 2012, Gharib had to apologize after “asserting that American Jews and a non-Jewish Republican senator serve the interests of the Israeli government over the security of the United States.” Similarly, he interviewed discredited Israel-hater Henry Siegman, fawned obsequiously over him, and gave him lavish space to make the preposterous claim that “the U.S. is captive to Israel’s plans.”
Gharib’s work has been featured on IkhwanWeb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website, which is not surprising since his articles reflect the Muslim Brotherhood point of view with no deviation: he even claimed in 2013 that the U.S. had a “moral imperative” to cut aid to the Egyptian military that had toppled the repressive Brotherhood regime.
In an interview with Mosa’ab Elshamy, Gharib sounded like a Hamas apologist: “For those viewers who don’t know, HAMAS is the ruling authority in Gaza. They won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and then were immediately put under sanctions by Israel and the west, because Israel and many countries in the west, including my country, the US- consider Hamas to be a terrorist group. So sanctions were immediately imposed on Hamas.” Gharib complained that “Israel considers everyone from Hamas org, whether they have a civilian role or not, to be a military target because Hamas as a whole is a terrorist organization, so that leads to them bombing the finance ministry and so on.” He asked Elshamy: “Are they afraid that even if they are in civilian jobs they might be targeted?”
Gharib has never written anything about Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians, including yesterday’s jihad stabbing spree that Hamas enthusiastically praised.
All this makes it abundantly clear that Ali Gharib is not a journalist. He is a hit man for Hamas and its allies — one who wears a shirt and jacket instead of a ski mask and an AK-47. He is an apologist for the evil that jihad entities do. He doesn’t hesitate to use the term “Islamophobia,” a trumped-up term designed to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to resist jihad terror. In smearing Emerson he cites “Fear, Inc.,” an enormously misleading propaganda piece that was produced by anti-Semites and financed by hard-Left billionaire George Soros. It’s noteworthy that in The Nation piece, Gharib accuses Emerson of making “anti-Arab” and “anti-Palestinian” statements, but doesn’t quote even one; instead, he just linked to another Leftist smear site. Gharib can’t quote Emerson making such statements, because he hasn’t. But Gharib has never hesitated to repeat false charges about those whom he fears and hates.
Gharib’s article claiming that there were no no-go zones and that Emerson was an “Islamophobe” was approvingly retweeted by another hard-Left smear merchant, Matt Duss. About Duss, Adam Kredo wrote in 2013:
Duss earned notoriety in 2011 when he and several other ThinkProgress bloggers were engulfed in a scandal surrounding their writing on Israel and Jews, with some critics saying the language was borderline anti-Semitic. That prompted a rare rebuke by the Obama administration of the think tank, which has close ties to the White House.
Articles penned by Duss and other CAP Action Fund bloggers were said “to be infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel,” according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which combats anti-Semitism.
Duss wrote that Israel’s naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was like “segregation in the American South” and a “moral abomination.”
The scandal began when one of Duss’s colleagues came under fire from numerous Jewish groups for using the term “Israel firster,” which originated in the white supremacist movement and is considered by some to be anti-Semitic.
“It follows from classical anti-Semitism, with inferences of dual loyalty and foreign policy control and should have no place in American political discourse,” Gerald Steinberg, president of the watchdog group NGO Monitor, told the Jerusalem Post in December 2011 at the height of the scandal.
A White House representative, speaking to the Washington Post, called the inflammatory writings “troubling.”
Most of the writers involved have since apologized and left the organization. However, Duss himself has remained at CAP and continues to blog for the CAP Action Fund.
With their relentless hatred for Israel and support for its jihadi enemies, are Gharib and Duss celebrating the spate of jihad terror attacks in Israel today?
That a Leftist publication such as The Nation would stoop so low as to publish Gharib’s screed shows how far the American Left has fallen, and abundantly illustrates why The Nation is going bankrupt.
Also, in his attempt to smear Emerson, Gharib has discredited himself. He wrote in The Nation about so-called no-go zones in Europe, purported Muslim enclaves where governments dared not go,” and asserted that “they don’t exist”; the same day, the MailOnline reported that “Austrians fear parts of Vienna are becoming no-go areas after a father was attacked by a ‘Sharia patrol’ when he told them to stop threatening his wife and daughter for not being correctly dressed.”
That’s by no means all. Evidence for Gharib’s claim that no-go zones “don’t exist” simply doesn’t exist, and the evidence that they do is abundant. Several of the jihad terrorists who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had come from Molenbeek, an area of Brussels with a high Muslim population. The New York Times reported on November 13, 2015: “Belgium’s home affairs minister said that the government does not ‘have control of the situation in Molenbeek.’”
There are other no-go zones elsewhere in Europe. Soeren Kern reported in the Gatestone Institute on August 1, 2015: “Spiraling levels of violent crime perpetrated by immigrants from the Middle East and the Balkans are turning parts of Duisburg, a key German industrial city, into ‘areas of lawlessness’ — areas that are becoming de facto ‘no-go’ zones for police, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.” And in Sweden, according to a Breitbart report on October 27, 2015: “A Swedish journalist attempting to make a movie about the residents of a Swedish no go zone and their habit of throwing stones at police has herself been attacked and had stones thrown at her as she attempted to film. ‘They thought we crossed the limit and that we were standing on their land,’ journalist Valentina Xhaferi told Swedish newspaper Expressen.”
French no-go zones have been reported about in mainstream publications for over a decade:
- David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post on April 26, 2002: “Arab gangs regularly vandalize synagogues here, the North African suburbs have become no-go zones at night, and the French continue to shrug their shoulders.” This was reprinted in the New York Times the following day.
- Christopher Dickey reported in Newsweek in November 2005: “According to research conducted by the government’s domestic intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major reinforcements into some 150 ‘no-go zones’ around the country–and that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27.”
- Around the same time, the Associated Press reported about riots in France that French officials “suspect the unrest that reached into Paris proper early Sunday has in part been instigated by gangs hoping to turn their neighborhoods into no-go zones for police so drug trafficking and racketeering can thrive.”
- On December 11, 2005, the New York Times reported that the French town of La Courneuve was “branded by France’s police intelligence agency as one of the country’s 150 ‘no-go zones’ where police officers should enter only with major reinforcements.” La Courneuve, said the Times, “has become a symbol of France’s failure to integrate millions of Arab and African immigrants – many of them Muslims – and their French-born children and grandchildren.”
- Nine years later, the New Republic wrote on January 8, 2015: “The word banlieue (‘suburb’) now connotes a no-go zone of high-rise slums, drug-fueled crime, failing schools and poor, largely Muslim immigrants and their angry offspring.”
- The French government and media have taken note of these areas as well. Soeren Kern in the Gatestone Institute has documented many instances of French journalists and government officials noting that there were no-go zones in the country:
- The French magazine L’Obs (formerly known as Le Nouvel Observateur) has reported on the deteriorating security situation in Roubaix, a city in northern France that is located close to the Belgian border. The magazine reported that local citizens are “exiled within their own country” and want to create their own militia to restore order because police are afraid to confront Muslim gangs.
- In August 2014, the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles (Contemporary Values) reported that “France has more than 750 areas of lawlessness” where the law of the French Republic no longer applies. Under the headline “Hell in France,” the magazine said that many parts of France are experiencing a “dictatorship of riffraff” where police are “greeted by mortar fire” and are “forced to retreat by projectiles.”
- Separately, Valeurs Actuelles reported on the lawlessness in Trappes, a township located in the western suburbs of Paris, where radical Islam and endemic crime go hand in hand. “Criminals are pursued by Islamic fundamentalists to impose an alternative society, breaking links with the French Republic,” according to local police commander Mohammed Duhan. It is not advisable to go there, he says, adding, “You will be spotted by so-called chauffeurs (lookouts for drug traffickers) and be stripped and smashed.”
- Valeurs Actuelles has also reported on no-go zones in Nantes, Tours and Orléans, which have turned into “battlefields” where the few remaining native French holdouts are confronted with “Muslim communalism, the disappearance of their cultural references and rampant crime.”
- A graphic 20-minute documentary (in French) about the no-go zone in Clichy Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris, can be viewed here. At around the 3-minute mark, the video shows what happens when French police enter the area….
- A four-minute video of the most dangerous neighborhoods of France in 2014 can be viewed here. A three-and-a-half-minute video of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Greater Paris Metropolitan Area can be viewed here. A two-minute video of a no-go zone in Lille can be viewed here. A five-minute video about life in the suburbs of Lyon can be viewed here.
- A Russian television (Russia-1) documentary about no-go zones in Paris can be viewed here. The presenter says: “We are in Paris, the Barbès quarter, a few minutes from the famous Montmartre. Finding a European here is almost a mission impossible. Certain Paris streets remind one of an oriental bazaar.” He continues: “The Paris banlieues have become criminal ghettoes where even the police dare not enter.” Hidden cameras record widespread lawlessness and drug dealing in the area.
- A 120-page research paper entitled “No-Go Zones in the French Republic: Myth or Reality?” documented dozens of French neighborhoods “where police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even enter without risking confrontation, projectiles, or even fatal shootings.”
These are not just high-crime areas where large numbers of Muslims live. They are areas in which Islamic law increasingly prevails. Kern also quotes French journalists speaking about the prevalence of Sharia in these areas:
- Fabrice Balanche, a well-known French Islam scholar who teaches at the University of Lyon, recently told Radio Télévision Suisse: “You have territories in France such as Roubaix, such as northern Marseille, where police will not step foot, where the authority of state is completely absent, where mini Islamic states have been formed.”
- French writer and political journalist Éric Zemmour recently told BFM TV: “There are places in France today, especially in the suburbs, where it is not really in France. Salafi Islamists are Islamizing some neighborhoods and some suburbs. In these neighborhoods, it’s not France, it’s an Islamic republic.” In a separate interview, Zemmour — whose latest book is entitled, “The French Suicide” — says multiculturalism and the reign of politically correct speech is destroying the country.
Regarding Britain, the existence of Sharia patrols in London was widely reported:
- On February 8, 2013, the Telegraph reported this in an article subtitled, “What do East Enders locals think of the rising religious and racial tension in the area highlighted by vigilantes calling themselves the Muslim Patrol,” and using the phrase “Sharia Zone”: Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman “has been accused of presiding over an administration that is seeking to Islamicise’ Tower Hamlets by, among other things, clamping down on strip clubs and a gay bar.” The report added: “In the past few weeks, footage has emerged of gangs of vigilantes calling themselves the Muslim Patrol, prowling the streets and intimidating those who ‘disobey God’. In a series of shocking incidents filmed on mobile phones and posted on YouTube, the hooded extremists confiscated alcohol from residents in Whitechapel, calling it a ‘forbidden evil’ and harassed a white woman late at night for wearing a short skirt. They also launched a tirade of homophobic abuse against a man who appeared to be wearing make-up, ordering him out of the area and calling him a ‘bloody fag’….Maajid Nawaz, chairman of the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation, suggested last month that the ‘Muslim patrols’ could be ‘a sign of things to come’ as a pattern of extremism spreads across Europe.”
- On June 12, 2011, Andrew Gilligan noted in the Telegraph: “Victims say that officers in the borough of Tower Hamlets have ignored or downplayed outbreaks of hate crime, and suppressed evidence implicating Muslims in them, because they fear being accused of racism. The claims come as four Tower Hamlets Muslims were jailed for at least 19 years for attacking a local white teacher who gave religious studies lessons to Muslim girls. The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered more than a dozen other cases in Tower Hamlets where both Muslims and non-Muslims have been threatened or beaten for behaviour deemed to breach fundamentalist ‘Islamic norms.’…Teachers in several local schools have told The Sunday Telegraph that they feel “under pressure” from local Muslim extremists, who have mounted campaigns through both parents and pupils – and, in one case, through another teacher – to enforce the compulsory wearing of the veil for Muslim girls. “It was totally orchestrated,” said one teacher.”
- The Daily Mail, May 13, 2011: “Paul Burston edits the gay section in the London listings magazine Time Out. ‘In the past few years there have been more and more reports of homophobic incidents in Tower Hamlets, often involving attacks on gay men by gangs of young Bangladeshis,’ he said. ’A large number of people have contacted me to tell me about all kinds of incidents, ranging from being stopped outside mosques and handed literature that is really horrible, to being verbally abused and physically attacked. But if you talk about it publicly then you are accused of fuelling Islamophobia.’”
- On January 3, 2009, the Birmingham Mail ran a story entitled, “The area of Birmingham that are no-go areas for white people” – that is, non-Muslims, as the British press routinely frames conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims as between “Asians” and “whites.”
It is no surprise that a thoroughly compromised propagandist such as Ali Gharib would ignore all this data.