• Why Jihad Watch?
  • About Robert Spencer and Staff Writers
  • FAQ
  • Books
  • Muhammad
  • Islam 101
  • Privacy

Jihad Watch

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Pro-freedom lawyer David Yerushalmi responds to New York Times smear piece

Aug 12, 2011 5:58 am By Robert Spencer

It’s a Saul Alinsky tactic from Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In other words, zero in on an enemy, isolate him, demonize him, marginalize him, and silence him. The hard-Left mainstream media and its Islamic supremacist allies are using this tactic with increasing frequency. They’ve used this tactic with fanatical, frenzied hostility against Pamela Geller; they’ve used it on me, and now they’re going after the ace lawyer David Yerushalmi, who has represented us in our free speech SIOA lawsuits and has been instrumental in developing the anti-Sharia legislation now being considered all over the country.

For that transgression, as far as the New York Times is concerned, he must be eliminated. But now, in “NYT Searches for the Leader of the Anti-Shariah Movement, Finds Me Instead” in the American Thinker, August 11, he hits back:

I was featured, complete with pictures (and online video), in a 2,000+ word New York Times article about the anti-sharia movement in this country, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliot, which appeared in the Times’ July 31st Sunday edition, front page, above the fold.  Impressive, no? Unfortunately, Ms. Elliot exposed herself as biased and in denial, and has since given an interview to NPR in which she more openly evidences journalistic condescension, in addition to the bias one normally expects from the mainstream media. The story was quite explicitly intended to link a national movement to a single individual, me, and then to suggest that this individual — again, me — was manipulative, hidden, and controversial. This is evident from the title of the article: “The Man Behind the Anti-Sharia Movement.”

The truth remains at a distance, and this analysis will suggest only a more objective telling of the facts I say “suggest” because I am the subject of the Times “profile,” and as such I cannot realistically claim objectivity. I will allow others more at a distance to weigh in. One writer, Ben Shapiro, whom I don’t know, has already done that, and I must note my appreciation (see “In Defense of David Yerushalmi“).

We begin at the beginning. Ms. Elliot and I have traded emails on sharia and related matters for about 3 or 4 years. We first “met” when she did a long profile of Dhaba (Debbie) Almontaser, the spearhead and one-time principal of New York City’s failed Arabic-centric public school called the Khalil Gibran International Academy. (While KGIA’s doors remain open, everyone both within and without the school’s community of present and past teachers, administrators, students, parents, and early supporters admit it has failed as both an educational center and as a “multi-cultural” outreach.)

Ms. Elliot contacted me several months before the “anti-sharia movement” article was to run saying she wanted only background on the movement since she knew I was involved. I conditioned my agreement to provide background on an explicit commitment from her that the article was not about me. She agreed. When we finally sat down for a three-hour lunch, it was evident at the end of the “background” discussion that Ms. Elliot was focusing too much on personalities, me especially, and not enough on the substantive arguments against sharia. Every time I pressed her, though, she assured me that the story was “not about you.”

Well, that little bit of journalistic dishonesty we all know is part of the tradecraft. Journalists will often deceive their subjects about the focus of an interview to get them to open up. My colleagues and I understood this and discussed the risks of any interview with Ms. Elliot and the New York Times. But we concluded those risks versus a major story by an acclaimed journalist, even a card-carrying member of the elite Manhattan progressive club like Ms. Elliot, were worth taking. Why? Because public policy work is as much about creating a serious discussion and framing it in some non-PC context as it is about suggesting actual legislation or new policies. […]

Moving beyond Ms. Elliot’s purposeful deception that she was not writing about me, we come to her writing style (we’ll deal with substance as a final matter). Ms. Elliot treats her targets — me and the “anti-sharia movement” — more broadly in similar fashion. She begins by describing the “movement” as a kind of simplified ignorance. She accomplishes this by implicitly ridiculing a politician in Tennessee who, rather than dealing with the serious matters of the state’s unemployment, home foreclosures, and the like, is dealing with the problem of sharia as a threat to the U.S. and to Tennessee.

Everyone will of course recall, but not because Ms. Elliot mentions it, that Carlos Bledsoe was an African-American Christian living in Tennessee, where he was converted and “radicalized” sufficiently to attack an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, leaving one soldier dead and one injured. And, many will recall, again not because Ms. Elliot mentions it, that it is the Obama administration’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who informs us that homegrown jihad terrorism inspired by the likes of Yemen-based Awlaki is “one of the things that keeps me up at night” because “[t]he threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.”

While Ms. Elliot will no doubt plead that her reporting was a “fair” and “objective” narration of facts, a “fair” and “objective” assessment belies this claim. Beyond her not-so-veiled ridicule of the anti-sharia movement, she allows herself this bit of rather subjective “analysis” of the merits of the anti-sharia movement: “Yet, for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real.” Of course any assertion of fact to support a policy can be “arguably” something else. In this day and age, you can find “authoritative” voices to argue about anything (battling “experts” in courtrooms across the country demonstrate this point).

But, Ms. Elliot positioned the “arguably” irrational anti-sharia movement as fighting phantoms without bothering to actually articulate what the threat from sharia is, or “arguably” is. That is, she set up a straw man. Thus, she turns the sharia threat into a caricature of a Tennessee politician ignoring “real” problems for “imagined” ones and then attaches a “fervor” to all of us who understand sharia as the enemy’s common threat doctrine. The word “fervor” of course is to lend a sense of faith-based, that is, not real, religiosity to the “anti-sharia movement.”

There is much more. Read it all.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Follow me on Facebook

Filed Under: journalistic bias, Useful idiots


Learn more about RevenueStripe...

FacebookYoutubeTwitterLog in

Subscribe to the Jihad Watch Daily Digest

You will receive a daily mailing containing links to the stories posted at Jihad Watch in the last 24 hours.
Enter your email address to subscribe.

Please wait...

Thank you for signing up!
If you are forwarding to a friend, please remove the unsubscribe buttons first, as they my accidentally click it.

Subscribe to all Jihad Watch posts

You will receive immediate notification.
Enter your email address to subscribe.
Note: This may be up to 15 emails a day.

Donate to JihadWatch
FrontPage Mag

Search Site

Translate

The Team

Robert Spencer in FrontPageMag
Robert Spencer in PJ Media

Articles at Jihad Watch by
Robert Spencer
Hugh Fitzgerald
Christine Douglass-Williams
Andrew Harrod
Jamie Glazov
Daniel Greenfield

Contact Us

Terror Attacks Since 9/11

Archives

  • 2020
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2019
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2018
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2017
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2016
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2015
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2014
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2013
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2012
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2011
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2010
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2009
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2008
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2007
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2006
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2005
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2004
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2003
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • March

All Categories

You Might Like

Learn more about RevenueStripe...

Recent Comments

  • Westman on New study reveals that Muslim religiosity strongly linked to hatred towards the West
  • gravenimage on Erdogan: ‘Turks must defend the rights of Jerusalem, even with their lives’ for ‘the honor of the Islamic nation’
  • gravenimage on Erdogan: ‘Turks must defend the rights of Jerusalem, even with their lives’ for ‘the honor of the Islamic nation’
  • gravenimage on Erdogan: ‘Turks must defend the rights of Jerusalem, even with their lives’ for ‘the honor of the Islamic nation’
  • Walter Sieruk on Iranian Kurdistan: Muslim brothers behead their sister in honor killing over her romantic relationship

Popular Categories

dhimmitude Sharia Jihad in the U.S ISIS / Islamic State / ISIL Iran Free Speech

Robert Spencer FaceBook Page

Robert Spencer Twitter

Robert Spencer twitter

Robert Spencer YouTube Channel

Books by Robert Spencer

Jihad Watch® is a registered trademark of Robert Spencer in the United States and/or other countries - Site Developed and Managed by Free Speech Defense

Content copyright Jihad Watch, Jihad Watch claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyright to their respective owners. If there is an image appearing on this blog that belongs to you and you do not wish for it appear on this site, please E-mail with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed.

Our mailing address is: David Horowitz Freedom Center, P.O. Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.