Gray Lady Down (21 page)

Coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States carries an even softer journalistic edge. The group operates in secret through such organizations as the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim American Society. Its intent is to spread Islam throughout various American institutions with the goal of establishing Sharia. An “explanatory memorandum” captured by the FBI in 1991 read: “The Ikhwan [brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In September 2004, the
Chicago Tribune
published an exposé on the origins and operations of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American branch. But in the forty years it has existed in the United States, the
New York Times
has
never once
taken on the subject.

The two dominant themes of
Times
reporting on Islam in America—that Islam has a moderate face and that America is deeply Islamophobic—fused together in coverage of the controversy in 2010 over the plan to build a Muslim cultural center and mosque near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. The
Times
responded to the debate surrounding the “Ground Zero Mosque,” as it is popularly called, with one of the most demagogic
pile-ons in its history, with glaring examples of reportage echoing opinion, and with the condescending elitism that has alienated so many Americans.

According to Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the project, the Islamic center would promote cross-cultural bridge building and represent the “common impulse of our great faith traditions.” Supporters said it would symbolize American tolerance toward Islam as well as the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Opponents of the plan, including family members of 9/11 victims, said it was a sacrilege to put a mosque two short blocks away from “hallowed ground.” In fact, the roof of the building to be torn down on the site was pierced by wreckage from the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center, and according to some New York firefighters who worked at Ground Zero after the attack, body parts of victims were found as close as a block away. Victims’ families were joined by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and some Republican political figures, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Some prominent Democrats, such as Harry Reid and Howard Dean, also objected to having a mosque on that site, as did some journalistic free-speechers such as Nat Hentoff and Christopher Hitchens.

Some opponents of the mosque said it would feed Islamist triumphalism, since militant Muslim forces have a history of building mosques on the holy sites of their conquests. Opponents also took exception to some of Imam Rauf’s past statements, including his claim that America bore complicity for the 9/11 attacks, and to evidence that his tone was less moderate when he addressed audiences outside the United States. There was also the project’s murky finances. Rauf had little money to develop the site, and what he did have came from a Muslim who had given money to Hamas and had been dunned by the government for fraud. Some critics thought the project might attract Saudi money and Wahhabi extremists.

The
Times
could have stepped back from the fray and parsed the competing claims of supporters and opponents in a neutral way. It might have examined why, according to some polls, between 65 and 70 percent of Americans objected to the mosque, and why elite opinion was so divergent from popular opinion. It might have
examined how its own soft reporting on Islam may have contributed to popular distrust.

Instead, the
Times
produced shrill, scolding editorials, as well as reporting skewed in favor of the project. Additionally, almost every
Times
op-ed and Web columnist wrote favorably about the mosque, throwing shallow and unfair charges of bigotry against dissenters. Supporters of the mosque, such as New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, were hailed as heroes of conscience, while opponents, such as the New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, were smeared as craven opportunists. Imam Rauf was the subject of puff pieces that airbrushed the more dubious facets of his ideology and finances. “For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act” was the headline of a piece by Anne Barnard, who breezily dismissed the opponents’ claims about Rauf. “Some charges, the available record suggests, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas,” she wrote. “In any case, calling him a jihadist appears even less credible than calling him a United States agent.”

There were numerous reports on the resistance that other mosque plans were encountering around the country, which painted Americans who objected to these mosques as small-minded Archie Bunkers. When Judea Pearl, father of the slain
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, announced his opposition to the mosque in an interview with an Israeli news service, it was ignored; he had previously thanked Rauf for his words of solidarity at his son’s memorial service in 2002. The
Times’
coverage had its share of victimology, too. A report by Laurie Goodstein was headlined “American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?”

In a column headlined “Mosque Madness,” Maureen Dowd slammed the “moral timidity that would ban a mosque from that neighborhood.” Wrote Dowd: “Our enemies struck at our heart, but did they also warp our identity? . . . By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for.”

The most overwrought opinion columns were those by Nicholas Kristof, who wrote four times about the nativism and bigotry
he perceived behind the opposition to the mosque. “We’re seeing extremists, but not the Muslim kind,” read the pull quote of one column, headlined “Is This America?” In another, “America’s History of Fear,” Kristof maintained that the screeds against Catholics in the nineteenth century “sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque,” and that historically, “suspicion of outsiders” had led Americans to “burn witches, intern Japanese and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.” In still another column, he apologized to Muslims around the world for American behavior.

In early September, the
Times
op-ed page featured a piece by Imam Rauf in which he made veiled threats of violence and expressed a repugnant moral equivalence. America’s national security and “the personal security of Americans worldwide” were at risk if the project was scuttled, Rauf claimed. “This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse, and essentially our future, to radicals on both sides.” At that point, the
Times’
own polling showed that 60 percent of New Yorkers were against the mosque. The size and the diversity of the opposition made Rauf’s assertion about “radicals on both sides” particularly tendentious.

In late August, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told interviewers from ABC radio and MSNBC that the mosque was “a real affront to people who lost their lives on 9/11” and said it should be moved. Political and media elites, he said, should recognize that “sixty-five percent of the people were not right-wing bigots.” Dean’s remarks were eminently newsworthy, as was the furor they set off in the left-wing blogosphere. Other news organizations did stand-alone news stories on the comments; the
Times
did not.

A
New York Times
editorial from 1982, “Immigration and Purity,” articulated a realist view of the subject, saying: “Unlimited immigration was a need, and a glory, of the undeveloped American past. Yet no one believes America can still support it. We must
choose how many people to admit, and which ones. That can be done only if we can control the borders.” By 2004, when a new push began for tough, enforcement-driven immigration reform, the
Times
had changed its perspective markedly.

When the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 was introduced in Congress, the
Times
showed its bias by failing to report the bill’s various “hidden bombs,” as one critic called them. For example, it would have replaced the entire immigration bench with activists, since it required that lawyers proposed for immigration judgeships have at least five years practicing immigration law and that existing judges give up lifetime spots on the bench after seven years. The bill had an amendment called the “Dream Act,” which would have allowed illegals to attend college at in-state tuition rates, while U.S. citizens from out of state have to pay full freight. The bill also called for a massive granting of citizenship, but did not give the Citizenship and Immigration Service the budget or infrastructure to handle its new responsibilities—which many saw as simply implementing “amnesty” for up to twelve million illegal immigrants. The bill was premised on the idea that the documents that illegals would be filing to prove residency would be authentic, an unrealistic expectation given the easy availability of counterfeit Social Security cards, counterfeit visas, bank statements, tax returns and other fraudulent forms of documentation. Supporters of the bill said that no illegal would be allowed to cut in line ahead of someone patiently waiting in another country for approval to immigrate. Yet they did not specify if illegals who applied for what was nebulously called a “path to citizenship” would have to go home first or could remain here while they were being processed, which was virtually the same thing as cutting the line.

While hesitant to discuss these issues, the
Times
charged into the fray against those calling for felony penalties for facilitating illegal immigration. One editorial claimed, falsely and sensationally, that such penalties could lead to jail for church groups running soup kitchens, or neighbors taking an illegal to a hospital or a pharmacy.

Opponents of the bill flooded Capitol Hill with so many telephone calls, faxes and emails that the Senate switchboard had to
be shut down. On this, at least, the
Times
headline writers were honest. “The Grassroots Roared and an Immigration Plan Fell,” read one headline. But some of the columnists almost choked on sour grapes. Timothy Egan, a former reporter turned website columnist, blamed conservative radio and television talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. “Pragmatism is being drowned out by bullies with electronic bullhorns, who’ve got their [Republican] party leaders running scared.” Egan said.

The bitterness continued in
Times
analyses where opposition to the liberal view was equated with rank nativism. David Leonhardt, a business columnist, wrote that the backlash “had a familiar feel to it.” He went on to associate the tidal wave of illegals entering the United States over the previous two decades with other great eras of immigration into the country—in the 1850s, 1880s and early 1900s. He noted that they too caused a hysterical reaction, the most famous being the rise of the Know-Nothing movement. History looked as if it would repeat itself, suggested Leonhardt—ignoring the fact that this latest group of immigrants, unlike the previous generations, did not come legally through Ellis Island.

The editorial rhetoric from the
Times
got increasingly nasty. Although the editorial page called for civil discourse, it hardly practiced what it preached, instead issuing juvenile insults far more frequently than dependable insights. Even as it denounced the “demagoguery” of the opposition, it practiced its own form. Conservatives who were concerned about enforcement first were said to hold a view of immigration reform that was equivalent to “pest control.” Editorialists illogically likened opposing amnesty to favoring segregation. Other editorials indulged in victimology that sounded like self-parody: Hispanics are the new gays; Hispanics are the new Willy Horton; sending them home is immoral and a human rights violation. One editorial, “Ain’t That America,” said:

An especially rich target was the Minutemen, a group of armed volunteers patrolling the southern border with the aim of providing information to the Border Patrol on the movements of illegals trying to sneak into the country. The reporter James McKinley called them “self-proclaimed patriots” whose planned “vigilante watch” along the border was “alarming.” Sarah Vowell called them “a nutty experiment” that sprang from America’s “violent nativity,” further maligning them as “grown men playing army on the Mexican border” because they had nothing better to do. One
Times
story characterized the Minutemen as “anti-immigration,” which the paper later had to retract, admitting that they are only against
illegal
immigration.