Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project was the subject of a nasty mainstream media hit piece in The Tennessean Sunday. Here, he sets the record straight — as is necessary, since this story is being picked up gleefully by all the mainstream media flacks for Islamic supremacism. One of the worst is TPM Muckraker, where pseudo-journalist/hardcore Leftist ideologue Rachel Slajda titles her version “Jihad Alarmism Proves Lucrative For Leading Anti-Muslim Advocate.”
Slajda interviewed me awhile back for a story on the stealth jihad, and also wrote a sneering but inaccurate piece on the Campbell’s halal soup controversy.
Slajda’s vicious piece on Emerson calls him a “self-proclaimed expert on Sharia law” and accuses him of “jihad alarmism.” So I wrote this to her this afternoon:
Rachel Slajda:
I am working on an article about how Leftist “journalists” carry water for Islamic supremacists, and so given the perspective you’ve displayed in the article below and the others (Campbell’s Soup, the stealth jihad threat) that you have written about this topic, I wonder if you’d be so kind as to answer a few questions:
1. Where exactly did Steve Emerson proclaim himself an “expert on Sharia law”? [The IPT website says, accurately, that Emerson is “an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and national security.” It doesn’t say anything about Sharia.]
2. What investigations are you conducting into the funding sources and salaries of the leading figures of groups with links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, such as CAIR, MPAC, ISNA, MAS, and NAIT?
3. On what basis have you determined that Steve Emerson’s work amounts to “alarmism” and not to amassing information about a genuine threat, of which Americans should be aware?
Many thanks for your time and attention to this.
Kindest regards
Robert Spencer
Oddly enough, I haven’t heard anything back from this busy “journalist”! I will keep you posted.
“Note to Readers on Tennessean Story,” from IPT News, October 25:
In an article in Sunday’s Tennessean newspaper of Nashville, Tenn., reporter Bob Smietana made a series of unsupported claims about the nature of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and our work.
There’s a price that comes with erroneous reporting and we’re seeing it register already. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a news release calling for an IRS investigation into our status as a non-profit organization. We believe we can withstand any scrutiny.
This isn’t a surprise. Groups have been stung repeatedly by our ability to pierce their fog of deception and show their ties to radical Islam, including support for Hamas and other terrorist groups. That’s especially true for CAIR. We broke the news that the FBI cut off contact with them because of court evidence tying the organization and its founders to a Hamas-support network. It’s in CAIR’s interest to deflect attention from that fact and the disclosures which led to it. Trying to discredit the IPT is a sure way to do that.
We won’t let them silence us or make us go away. We also realize when you specialize in the work we do, you make enemies. We’ve earned them the hard way, through diligent research that relies on public documents and what the elements of radical Islam have said publicly. They have hated us for it for years and have found a naïve reporter willing to buy their line.
At issue in the Tennessean story is the relationship between the IPT Foundation, a tax-exempt charity, and SAE Productions, a for-profit company run by IPT Executive Director Steven Emerson. The foundation accepts private donations and contracts with SAE to manage operations. The Tennessean article pays only lip service to the legitimate security issues that dictated this structure and that the IRS has reviewed and approved it.
The article says the foundation’s “tax-exempt status is facing questions,” implying that someone other than the Tennessean and the paper’s hand-picked analysts are raising those questions. This is presented as something that is already happening outside the realm of the newspaper and its talking heads. There is no indication the discussion goes any further.
We provided the newspaper with our 1023 application for tax-exempt status and with our 2008 tax return, most commonly called a form 990. The documents show that we told the IRS we were contracting out our management with a group that did not have tax-exempt status. That was approved. As for the for-profit nature of SAE Productions, the IRS is aware of that as well. That has not been questioned. We say IPTF contracts out with SAE Productions, which files tax returns with the IRS. All of that has been disclosed. […]
We have continued to pay the price of investigating and combating the threat of radical Islam in the United States, from death threats to being blacklisted to fabricated character assassinations from media apologists for radical Islamic groups. We will not be intimidated and that, with your support, we will continue to expose the danger to our free society posed by radical Muslim groups and the people in the media they manage to fool.
Bravo. There is much more. Read it all.