Steven Zhou lists BuzzFeed, CBC News, and Vice on his Twitter profile, presumably as outlets for which he writes. Abigail Hauslohner describes herself as a “roving national reporter” for the Washington Post, “covering Islam & Arab affairs in America.”
Recently both Zhou and Hauslohner picked up on a press release from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), demanding that the Marines drop my book The Truth About Muhammad from its “Civilian Marine Professional Reading Lists.”
I was surprised to see that the Marines still had my book listed after the Obama Administration’s 2011 purge of all materials mentioning Islam and jihad from counterterror training, and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if they cave to Hamas-linked CAIR’s pressure and remove the book now.
However, while Hamas-linked CAIR claims the book is inaccurate, it makes only sweeping claims about it, and never points out even a single specific inaccuracy. In reality, the book is based entirely on the earliest Islamic sources about Muhammad, and it does what its title says: it tells the truth about what those sources say.
What is noteworthy about this episode is not so much Hamas-linked CAIR calling for the suppression of the truth about Islam. It always does that. What is noteworthy is how these “journalists” Zhou and Hauslohner eagerly parrot Hamas-linked CAIR talking points, claiming the book is “Islamophobic” and is “propagating misinformation,” once again without a single example.
I very seriously doubt that either Zhou or Hauslohner has read the book. They just understand that for the establishment media, Hamas-linked CAIR is a good, reliable source, and I am a condemned “Islamophobe,” and so they don’t approach this story for what it actually is, an attempt at censorship and the spiking of inconvenient truths, but as a forbidden book somehow coming to be recommended by the Marines. They’d sneer at the Catholic Church’s old Index of Forbidden Books, and preen about how much more enlightened they are than that, but they swallow Hamas-linked CAIR’s Index of Forbidden Books with alacrity. Hamas-linked CAIR carries around mainstream media reporters in its pocket like so many nickels and dimes.
Also noteworthy is how careless both these “reporters” are. The tweets below have both been deleted, but only after I and others pointed out their tendentiousness and factual inaccuracies. Zhou claimed that my book The Truth About Muhammad was “new,” when actually it was published in 2006. Hauslohner attributed the book to “Richard Spencer,” and left the erroneous attribution up for hours even after correcting it in other tweets, presumably to associate the book with Richard Spencer’s white nationalism and neo-Nazism. She also called me “anti-Muslim,” as establishment media “journalists” always do, without ever pausing to reflect what the implications are of their characterizing opposition to jihad terror and Sharia oppression in that way. Were foes of the Nazis anti-German?
Anyway, their carelessness with the facts is telling. They aren’t really journalists at all, they’re just low level propagandists, doing the bidding of their masters at Hamas-linked CAIR and elsewhere.
