Gray Lady Down (20 page)

On May 12, 2005, Andrea Elliott filed a story headlined “Muslims Report 50% Increase in Bias Crimes.” She wrote: “The report outlined more than 1,500 cases of harassment and anti-Muslim violence around the country in 2004, including 141 hate crimes, compared with 1,019 harassment cases and 93 hate crimes in 2003.” But a random sampling of these “hate crimes” by Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum discovered “a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration and distortion.” For instance, CAIR had cited the July 9, 2004, case of apparent arson at a Muslim-owned grocery store in Everett, Washington. But according to Pipes, investigators quickly determined that the store’s operator, Mirza Akram, staged the fire to avoid meeting his scheduled payments and to
collect on an insurance policy. CAIR also stated that “a Muslim-owned market was burned down in Texas” on August 6, 2004. But by the time CAIR released its report, the owner had already been arrested for having set fire to his own business. These were small-fry “cry wolf” cases, but they should have been reported in some kind of omnibus package by the
Times,
especially since the paper has acted as a mouthpiece for so many of CAIR’s charges in the first place.

On the flip side of the coin, the
Times
also refuses to acknowledge the jihadi subtext to hate crimes committed by Muslims. A case in point is the Muslim who ran his SUV into a crowd of students in March 2006. According to TimesWatch, “The man charged with nine counts of attempted murder for driving a Jeep through a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last Friday told the police that he deliberately rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle so he could ‘run over things and keep going,’ according to court papers released yesterday by investigators.” Times Watch further quoted statements made to the police in which Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-born graduate of the university, said he felt the United States government had been “‘killing his people across the sea’ and that his actions reflected ‘an eye for an eye.’” According to Chapel Hill news organizations, the suspect told the police that the attack was to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.” Nevertheless, the
Times
did not even use the word “Muslim” at any point in its story, which was buried on page 18.

The features of domestic Islamic extremism are further softened with favorable profiles that accent philosophical and social moderation. While an analysis of the relationship between free speech and hate speech by Adam Liptak in January 2004 mentions that “militant Wahhabism and other religious doctrines advocating violence are freely preached in the United States,” the
Times
rarely goes into the mosques and tells us what these radical imams are actually preaching. Nor has the paper looked at the phenomenon of “mosque coups,” where militants take over the executive committees, sometimes by intimidation or threats, and
change the tone of the mosque. In May 2004, a Muslim feminist, Asra Nomani, wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
about the transformation of her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, from mild to militant.

The
Times
highlights the gentler face of Islam through positive profiles of clerics who, it says, stand for moderation. An October 2001 piece by Laurie Goodstein mentioned the fact that before 9/11, “incendiary anti-American messages” were long a “staple” at some Muslim events, but said the attack had prompted influential American Muslim clerics to “temper their tone.” One cleric quoted in the piece is Anwar al-Awlaki, thirty years old, the spiritual leader of a mega-mosque in northern Virginia. According to Goodstein, al-Awlaki was being “held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.” Al-Awlaki told Goodstein that in the past, there had been “some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way.” He assured her, “What we might have tolerated in the past, we won’t tolerate any more.”

Goodstein does not mention that two of the 9/11 hijackers worshipped at al-Awlaki’s mosque or that law enforcement officials strongly suspected he was involved in the 9/11 plot, though they could not prove it. And by the end of the decade, al-Awlaki had established himself as an Internet jihadist superstar from a base in Yemen, and played a central role in radicalizing Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, and recruiting Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the “Christmas Bomber” of 2009.

Another radical Islamic cleric given a moderate face by the
Times
was Ali al-Timimi, leader of a mosque in Northern Virginia. In 2005 he was convicted of inciting his followers to go to Afghanistan to wage war against the United States right after the 9/11 attacks, and was sentenced to life. At the sentencing, according to Timesman Eric Lichtblau, “Mr. Timimi delivered to the court an impassioned and often eloquent speech that lasted nearly 10
minutes touching on Greek and Roman philosophy, religious history and the United States Constitution. Quoting Aaron Burr, Mr. Timimi said the idea that a cancer researcher like himself would incite his followers to violence was the stuff of ‘crudities and absurdities.’” Absent from Lichtblau’s account, but included in the
Washington Post
story, was al-Timimi’s assertion that his religious beliefs do not recognize “secular law.”

Fawaz Damra is another imam who got kid-glove treatment in the
Times,
at least for a while. On September 22, 2001, the religion columnist Gustav Niebuhr described how the Cleveland mosque where Damra preached was the target of a hate crime when a man rammed his car into the building, shattering the front doors and damaging a marble fountain inside. Instead of displaying anger, the congregation prayed for the man, Damra told Niebuhr, who obviously was struck by the imam’s compassion. What he was angry about, Damra said, were the 9/11 terror attacks, “because I’m an American.”

A month later, Damra was forced to apologize to the city of Cleveland after local television stations broadcast a ten-year-old tape in which he called for the death of Jews as the enemies of the Islamic nation. The tape had been released by federal immigration authorities who used it in a Florida deportation case, and Damra said it no longer reflected his views. Then in 2004, Damra was charged with lying about his ties to terrorist organizations, tax evasion, money laundering, mail and wire fraud, and with providing false information in applying for U.S. citizenship. He was finally convicted of concealing his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and deported to his native West Bank in 2007. Even in the news brief in which it relayed this information, the
Times
found space to say that “His lawyer, Michael Birach, called him a healer who made a real contribution to religious understanding in the Cleveland area and said Damra was a victim of federal officials who wanted to look tough after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Then there was a three-part series in April 2007 by Andrea Elliott, exploring the world of Reda Shata, an Egyptian-born imam in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, as he negotiated the moral contours of a post-9/11 world for his flock. Headlined “An Imam in America,”
the series was clearly an effort on Elliott’s part to overcome the prejudices instilled in American readers by “a vilifying media”:

As well written and incisive as it was, the series raised a storm in some quarters. While many read the piece as a calculated bid to make Sheik Reda out to be a moderate, there were many discordant notes belying this impression. “Like Arabs around the world,” Elliott reported, “Mr. Shata disagrees profoundly with the United States’ steadfast support of Israel, and views the militant group Hamas as a powerful symbol of resistance.” Elliott noted that “When Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the terror group Hamas, was killed by Israelis in March 2004, Mr. Shata told hundreds who gathered at a memorial service in Brooklyn that the ‘lion of Palestine has been martyred.’”

The moderate image was also belied by recorded remarks of the imam that appeared as a multimedia sidebar on the
Times’
own website. Asserting that recent U.S. history has been marked by injustice, the imam says, “Anything about the conduct of Muslims can be used as an excuse to make threats or give punishment. . . . They find us inferior so they target us. They find us so
inferior they are unjust to us. . . . Injustice, injustice, injustice. If it strikes a nation and misfortune and disaster starts spreading, then beware, beware people of the Lord of Heavens.”

In an interview, Elliott maintained that Sheik Reda “didn’t fit into facile categories like ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative.’ He’s a complex person whose views about Islam in America were still being formed and whose ministry was a work in progress.”

The series on Sheik Reda won the Pulitzer Prize. Elliott’s editor, Joe Sexton, echoing the imam, said it helped to subtract a few bricks from “the wall of hatred.”

But “An Imam in America” had a disturbing coda. Almost a year later, Andrea Elliott wrote a piece headlined “A Cleric’s Journey Leads to a Suburban Frontier.” It described how Reda Shata had been forced to relocate to New Jersey after receiving threats from more rigid Muslims who objected to his “liberal” teachings that married couples could have oral sex and that a Muslim could sell pork and alcohol if no other work could be found. “In Bay Ridge, the Pulitzer-winning articles prompted a fistfight outside a Dunkin’ Donuts,” Elliott reported. “Fliers warned in Arabic that the imam was ‘a devil.’ . . . After weeks of defending himself, Mr. Shata felt worn down.” He had already been courted by a mosque in Middletown, New Jersey, and the controversy and implied threats influenced his decision to move.

The fact that it took months for this bit of the story to get into the newspaper suggests a reluctance to admit that much of the Islamic community is filled with intolerance and violence. Instead of the innocuous headline it was given, this report could just as easily have been called “Violent Muslims Play Role in Driving Iman out of Bay Ridge,” and it could have examined the distance between the American ideal of tolerance and Islamic norms. When I asked Elliott about this at a panel discussion in New York in March 2010, she said the news value of the attacks on the cleric was “debatable,” and in an interview I did with her, she said that other factors aside from intimidation were behind his relocation.

With its hypersensitivity toward Islamic immigrants, the
Times
offers consistently soft-edged reporting about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which presents itself as “an Islamic NAACP.” The communications director of CAIR, Ibrahim Hooper, says its official mission is “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” CAIR’s real aim, however, is Islamic hegemony. In 1998, its cofounder and former board chairman Omar Ahmad told a Muslim audience that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. . . . The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” A Washington representative of CAIR has said that Muslims “can never be full citizens” of the United States “because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”

Yet the
New York Times
has consistently produced articles on CAIR that are little more than repurposed CAIR press releases. As criticism of CAIR mounted on Capitol Hill in the spring of 2007, Neil MacFarquhar came to its defense in a piece headlined “Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in the US.” He criticized “a small band of people who hate Muslims and deal in half-truths,” and maintained that “more than one” government official in Washington “described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.”

MacFarquhar went to bat for CAIR again when it was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Dallas, Texas, beginning in 2007. Under the headline “Muslim Groups Oppose List of ‘Co-Conspirators,’” MacFarquhar quoted Muslim activists who claimed that naming the organization as a co-conspirator could “ratchet up the discrimination faced by American Muslims since the Sept. 11 attacks.” The legal brief he cited says that the list of co-conspirators “furthers a pattern of the ‘demonization of all
things Muslim’ that has unrolled in the United States since 2001.” MacFarquhar did not mention that an FBI agent testified during the trial that CAIR was “a front for Hamas,” or that conclusive FBI evidence has its executive director, Nihad Awad, participating in a planning meeting with Hamas fundraisers in 1993.

Following a mistrial, a second trial against the Holy Land Foundation ended in November 2008 when five of its officials were convicted on charges of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas. Another outcome was that the FBI, after years of including CAIR in its Islamic outreach efforts, severed its ties to the organization in late January 2009—which was news by any definition of the word. But the
Times
did not report this, nor did it take notice when a federal grand jury subpoenaed CAIR’s records in December of that year.