The New York Times on Imam Rauf: The Journalism That Failed

Andrew Bostom, whose trenchant scholarly work on Islam deserves more attention, rightly compares Anne Barnard’s sanitized profile in the New York Times of the Ground Zero Mosque’s originator, Imam Feisal Rauf, to Communist agitprop.

For Bostom, Barnard’s “Balancing Act for Imam In Muslim Center Furor” recalls Arthur Koestler’s account in The God That Failed of mastering, after due indoctrination, how to turn out Soviet propaganda. How cheerily oblivious, wrote Koestler:

… to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

Koestler also recollects that the USSR for years handsomely paid two well-known German exiles in France to propagandize. “Both,” he noted, “were passionate and lucid critics of democratic corruption; neither of them has ever written a word of criticism of the Soviet Union.”

Likewise, nary a ripple of criticism of “peacemaking, moderate” Rauf disrupts Barnard’s plaudit. She vaguely alludes to “a host of allegations” against him – “that he supports terrorism; that his father, who worked at the behest of the Egyptian government, was a militant; that his publicly expressed views mask stealth extremism.” Then, with no analysis whatsoever, she proceeds to dismiss these charges as “unsupported,” mere “simplifications,” and not “credible.”

Barnard takes no notice, for example, of Alyssa Lappen’s account of Rauf’s suspect Malaysian excursions and Steven Emerson’s compilation of hours of damning recorded evidence of his Islamic radicalism. Bostom justly concludes that:

… doctrinaire, willfully blind cultural relativist journalists such as Barnard … ignore Koestler’s insights on Communist totalitarianism at great peril to our most fundamental freedoms … [they] consciously champion the Sharia-based Islamic totalitarianism embraced by [this] Muslim Brotherhood ideologue … Her work epitomizes the journalism that has failed.