HomeExamples of HuffPost Sympathizing with terrorists, re-branding them and cop-killers as “activists,” and glamorizing a mass murderer’s wife
Examples of HuffPost Sympathizing with terrorists, re-branding them and cop-killers as “activists,” and glamorizing a mass murderer’s wife
.
by Jon Sutz, Editor, SaveTheWest.com
Contents
(1) HuffPost gave top, sustained coverage to a story that sympathized with a “homesick American jihadi”
(2) HuffPost re-branded terrorists, terror-supporters and cop-killers as “activists” and “leaders” (4 case studies)
(3) HuffPost published a glowing fashion pictorial of a mass-murderer’s wife, that was part of his paid PR campaign to soften his image in the West
(1) HuffPost gave top, sustained coverage to a story that sympathized with a “homesick American jihadi”
The following is summarized from a detailed report at Huff-Watch.
HuffPost published simultaneously on its front page and World page a “news” story about an Islamist terrorist, Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (“The American”), who complained that he was “homesick,” in part because his gang’s leaders won’t let him touch the “war booty” that he captures. Excerpts, from his tragic, sad story:
“War booty is eaten by the top dogs, but the guys who won it are jailed for touching it,” Amriki says in one message on Twitter. It is a sharp turnaround for a man who once issued rap videos aimed at recruiting foreign fighters. […]
“What I would like though is to have a three day visit to see my mom, dad and sister… I often wonder what this whole experience has done to them,” he writes in the book, adding he misses his daughter whom he abandoned in Egypt as a baby.
“I’d like to make a round of the restaurants and get some Chinese food, some hot (chicken) wings, some Nestle ice cream, some gourmet coffee and a slew of other foods and beverages.”
Curiously, even though Arianna Huffington says, “There is an objective reality, and it is the media’s job to present it unequivocally,” HuffPost either failed or refused to mention in this story that the “war booty” to which Mansoor referred is the women and girls that his gang, Al Shabaab, is notorious for kidnapping and sexually terrorizinge And to ensure that poor Mansoor’s story became widely known, HuffPost kept the story on the front page for two straight days, and on the World page for five.
Just as curiously, while HuffPost was devoting such sustained, graphic, front-page, sympathetic coverage to a terrorist-rapist, it completely ignored Sgt. Clinton Romesha, who at the same time was being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his heroic service during one of the worst post-9/11 firefights, in Afghanistan.
(2) HuffPost re-branded terrorists, terror-supporters and cop-killers as “activists” and “leaders”
This has been a long-term practice at HuffPost. A few examples:
(2.1) HuffPost re-branded Al Qaeda supporters, financiers and radicalizers as “activists”
(2.2) HuffPost re-branded the convicted murderer of a police officer as an “activist” — and whitewashed a teacher who assigned her preteen child students to write “get-well” cards to him
(2.3) HuffPost re-branded a notorious Palestinian mass-murderer as a “leader”
(2.4) HuffPost whitewashed and helped evoke worldwide sympathy for one of the world’s most wanted anti-American terrorists, in part by using radical Islamist propaganda pictures
(2.1) HuffPost re-branded Al Qaeda supporters, financiers and radicalizers as “activists”
The story page to which this incendiary headline led, written by three HuffPost “journalists,” claimed that the NSA “spied” on the porn habits of “activists,” who merely “expressed controversial ideas”:
[T]he NSA believes the targeted individuals radicalize people through the expression of controversial ideas via YouTube, Facebook and other social media websites. Their audience, both English and Arabic speakers, “includes individuals who do not yet hold extremist views but who are susceptible to the extremist message,” the document states.
Just one tiny problem: As HuffPost’s own story page revealed, these weren’t “activists,” they were Al Qaeda supporters, propagandists and financiers:
Sometime after the Jawa Report exposed HuffPost for re-branding Al Qaeda supporters as “activists,” it rewrote the story page headline, to now read:
(2.2) HuffPost re-branded the convicted murderer of a police officer as an “activist” — and whitewashed a teacher who assigned her preteen child students to write “get-well” cards to him
The following is summarized from the Huff-Watch blog:
So who is this man, whom HuffPost described as an “activist”? His name is Mumia Abu-Jamal, a militant founding member of the Black Panthers, who was convicted of murdering police officer Daniel Faulkner. From DiscoverTheNetworks:
Officer Daniel Faulkner, whom this “activist” was convicted of murdering.
[T]he event that decisively catapulted Abu-Jamal into the public eye occurred shortly after 3:55 a.m. on December 9, 1981, when a 25-year-old white Philadelphia police officer named Daniel Faulkner made a traffic stop of William Cook, Abu-Jamal’s brother, who was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Faulkner pulled behind Cook’s car, radioed for police backup, approached Cook’s vehicle, and ordered the driver to get out of his car.
While Faulkner handcuffed the driver, Abu-Jamal, who was employed at that time as a cab driver, was parked across the street in his taxi. He suddenly got out of his vehicle, ran toward Faulkner, and shot him in the back. As the officer fell, he drew his own gun and managed to shoot Abu-Jamal in the chest, wounding but not killing him. The gun-wielding cabdriver then fired repeatedly at Faulkner, finally dispatching him from close range with a bullet between his eyes. Abu Jamal’s presence near the scene of the roadside stop at that particular moment has led to serious speculation that William Cook had intentionally led Faulkner into an ambush—one that had all the earmarks of other Black Panther provocations in places like Newark and Oakland.
The body of evidence placing Abu-Jamal at the scene of Faulkner’s killing was overwhelming. When the arresting officers arrived at the scene, Abu-Jamal was sitting on a curb near Faulkner’s corpse, with a fresh gunshot wound incurred from the young officer’s weapon.
Not only did five witnesses see Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner, but the bullets that were later pulled from Faulkner’s chest and brain were matched to the .38 caliber handgun that was registered to Abu-Jamal and which was sitting at his feet when the police arrived at the murder scene. Moreover, the gun had five empty cartridges when investigators found it.
Next, did this teacher really only ask students to write to Al-Jamal, as HuffPost claimed? No. As HuffPost knew, or should have known, this was no suggestion: it was a class assignment, as NewsDayreported by four days before HuffPost published its “story”:
HuffPost eventually changed its story page headline to more closely approximate reality, while taking a morally neutral stance on the notion of a teacher assigning students to write get-well cards to a convicted murderer:
However, as of December 6, 2016, HuffPost’s story page still insists that the teacher only “asked” her students to write get-well cards to Abu-Jamal:
(2.3) HuffPost re-branded a notorious Palestinian mass-murderer as a “leader”
The following is a summary of a post by Huff-Watch:
This was the entirety of the story that HuffPost published about this man whom it calls a jailed Palestinian “leader,” Marwah Barghouti. Note the last line, which follows a nebulous statement about how he “led an armed uprising against Israel”:
“He is serving five life terms for his role in the conflict.”
Curiously, HuffPost says nothing about specifically what he was sentenced to five life times for doing.
Turns out, the copy that HuffPost published was a selectively edited version of a much longer AP article, which contained just a few more details about this “leader”:
Barghouti, convicted on murder charges in 2002, is serving five life sentences for his role in fatal Palestinian attacks. […] Barghouti, 51, was a leader of a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000, during which a wave of suicide bombings rocked Israeli cities and killed more than 1,000 civilians.
Here are some of the additional details that HuffPost refused to ferret out for its readers (in direction violation of Arianna Huffington’s adage that “[T]he highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned”):
“(Barghouti is) the founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which has carried out a large number of deadly terrorist attacks killing scores of Israelis and wounding hundreds… (H)e received large amounts of funds from different sources both inside and outside Israel… (which he used) to finance… dozens of attacks, including a large number of suicide bombings within Israel. (Examples include):
Jun 12, 2001 – The murder of a Greek Orthodox monk on the road to Ma’ale Adumim.
The bloody handiwork of HuffPost’s “jailed Palestinian leader.”
Jan 17, 2002 – The shooting attack during a bat mitzva celebration.. (s)ix Israelis were killed in this attack, 26 were injured. (UK Telegraph account here; BBC’s account here; Wikipedia entry here)
Jan 22, 2002 – The shooting spree on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. Two Israelis were killed, 37 wounded.
Feb 25, 2002 – The shooting attack in the Jerusalem residential neighborhood of Neve Ya’acov. One Israeli policewoman was killed, 9 Israelis were wounded.
Feb 27, 2002 – The murder of an Israeli at a coffee factory in the Atarot industrial zone of Jerusalem.
Feb 27, 2002 – The suicide attack perpetrated by Daryan Abu Aysha at the Maccabim checkpoint in which two policeman were injured.
Mar 5, 2002 – The shooting spree at the Tel Aviv Seafood restaurant. Three Israelis were killed, 31 wounded.
Mar 8, 2002 – A suicide terrorist was killed in Daheat el Barid as he was on his way to carry out an attack in Jerusalem.
In the negotiations for (Gilad) Shalit’s freedom, Hamas officials are demanding that Israel release leading terrorists including… Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah member.
Curiously, as of December 6, 2016, HuffPost has removed the page in its entirety — as if this whole episode never occurred:
“There is an objective reality, and it is the media’s job to present it unequivocally.”
“[Arianna Huffington] is offended and bewildered by the suggestion that other news outlets think she’s getting a free ride. She sees herself as the future of journalism, not the end of it.”
(2.4) HuffPost whitewashed and helped evoke worldwide sympathy for one of the world’s most wanted anti-American terrorists, in part by using radical Islamist propaganda pictures
The following is adapted from detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
On September 23, 2010 HuffPost published this item on its front page:
If you attempt to follow the link to that story, however, as shown in this screencap, taken on March 15, 2017, you’ll find that it leads to a dead page:
We speculate there are reasons why HuffPost threw this story “down the memory hole.”
As the Huff-Watch blog noted at the time (emphasis added):
A reasonable person would ask a few initial questions upon seeing this picture and headline:
(1) Why would a “scientist” fire on U.S. troops?
(2) And why would this poor woman, whom HuffPost chose to depict as a “victim” in this photograph, be sentenced to 86 years, if she didn’t even kill anyone??
If you read HuffPost’s version of the story, you’ll discover, below, all the inconvenient truths that HuffPost neglected to mention in this “news” story and headline — which it sourced, but selectively edited, from the AP.
Thanks to the Internet Archive (“Wayback Machine”), here is the story as it originally appeared at HuffPost:
The sentence imposed on the mother of three capped a strange legal odyssey that began two summers ago, when the 38-year-old Siddiqui turned up in Afghanistan carrying notes referencing a “mass casualty attack” on New York City landmarks and a stash of sodium cyanide.
At trial earlier this year, jurors heard eyewitnesses describe how, after she was detained by Afghan police, Siddiqui grabbed a rifle and tried to shoot U.S. authorities who had gone to interrogate her. They said she yelled, “Death to Americans!” before she was injured in return fire and subdued. […]
During a three-hour hearing in federal court in Manhattan, Siddiqui claimed she had evidence Israel was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and warned more plots were in the works. […]
Further, as Huff-Watch blog noted at the time, other news organizations played the AP story “straight,” and included details that HuffPost omitted from its version:
Why was she being sought? Because the architect of 9/11 attacks, Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed, who began singing like a bird after interrogations, revealed in 2003 that other al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S., planning terror attacks — including Siddiqui. Combined with the fact that she was a U.S.-trained neuroscientist, meaning she could give al Qaeda the technical expertise to produce biological and chemical weapons, she became one of the most wanted women on Earth, from 2003 onward. More information, including the indictment against Siddiqui, is located at The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Even MSNBC, not exactly a right-wing outlet, played the AP story “straight.” Breitbart.com, run by HuffPost’s original news editor, Andrew Breitbart, also played the story “straight.”
It is only after reading the Breitbart version of the AP story that one realizes how much of the story HuffPost chose to omit in its version — even though Breitbart’s version was published three hours before HuffPost’s went up. For example, all of the following was not included in HuffPost’s version of the story:
Though she was not convicted of terrorism, the government has argued that Siddiqui is a cold-blooded radical who deserves a “terrorism enhancement” under federal sentencing guidelines that would guarantee a life term.
“She made it explicit, through her own words and her conduct, her intention to kill Americans, to cause `death to Americans,'” prosecutors wrote in court papers. Prosecutors cited threatening notes Siddiqui was carrying at the time of her detention.
They directly quoted one as referencing “a `mass casualty attack’ … NY CITY monuments: Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge,” and another musing how a dirty bomb would spread more fear than death. They claimed the notes, along with the fact that she was carrying sodium cyanide, showed she wasn’t an accidental menace.
Now, another question arises: After its deceptive headline and story copy, why would HuffPost decide to run that particular, sympathetic picture in its headline?
At the time HuffPost ran this story, it could have found out in a few keystrokes that this picture was taken right after she was shot, in 2008, by the U.S. soldiers and FBI agents whom she just attempted to murder. It is not, as militant Islamists and propagandists allege (below), a photo taken while she was being “tortured” and “raped” by U.S. forces.
Here is how MSNBC played the exact same AP story — using the picture that the AP provided with it, which is the same one the FBI used when it put this “scientist,” Aafia Siddiqui, on its Most-Wanted List:
During a rambling statement to the court Thursday, Siddiqui carried only a message of peace.
“I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
Siddiqui said she was particularly upset by overseas reports that she was being tortured in a U.S. prison. She said she was actually being treated well.
“I am not sad. I am not distressed. … They are not torturing me,” she said. “This is a myth and lie and it’s being spread among the Muslims.”
And as the Huff-Watch blog noted at the time, rather than using the photo the AP provided for this story, HuffPost chose to use the one after she was shot, while attempting to murder U.S. soldiers — which helped to advance its false narrative, as expressed in its deceptive headline, that she was merely a “scientist,” who had merely “fired at U.S. troops.” A narrative that, at the trial, even Siddiqui herself debunked.
It should also be noted that Islamists who were protesting Siddiqui’s inarceration also chose that picture, of her depicted as a distressed “victim,” to use in their propaganda materials.
In Karachi on Thursday, about 400 activists of the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and its allied youth group, Pasban, gathered outside the Karachi Press Club carrying pictures of Siddiqui and chanting slogans against the U.S. government and justice system. “Free Aafia,” ”We want Aafia, not dollars!” the activists chanted, a reference to U.S. aid funds given in return for Pakistan’s cooperation in battling Islamist militancy.
Even CBS, however, did not explain what Jamaat-e-Islami actually is. According to the U.S. State Department:
Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on October 23, 2002, Jemaah Islamiya (JI) is a Southeast Asia-based terrorist group co-founded by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar that seeks the establishment of an Islamic caliphate spanning Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, Singapore, Brunei, and the southern Philippines. More than 400 JI operatives have been captured since 2002, including operations chief and al-Qa’ida (AQ) associate Hambali. […]
In December 2001, Singaporean authorities uncovered a JI plot to attack U.S., Israeli, British, and Australian diplomatic facilities in Singapore. Other significant JI attacks include the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed more than 200, including seven U.S. citizens; the August 2003 bombing of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, the September 2004 bombing outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, and JI’s October 2005 suicide bombing in Bali, which killed 26, including the three suicide bombers.
A JI faction led by Noordin Mohammad Top conducted the most recent high-profile attack associated with the group July 17, 2009 at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta when two suicide bombers detonated explosive devices, killing seven and injuring more than 50, including seven Americans.
With all that in mind, it becomes easier to understand why there was such support for Siddiqui from radical Islamists throughout Pakistan and elsewhere, demanding her release — all of which used the same, sympathetic picture of her that HuffPost chose to, to craft its deceptive, sympathetic depiction of her:
Given all these facts, it is not difficult to understand why HuffPost would want to cleanse its archive of any trace of its original depiction of this “story” — in which it falsely depicted one of the world’s most dangerous aspiring terrorists, attempted murderer and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, as merely a “scientist,” and deliberately altered a source story to further depict her as a victim.
HuffPost went further, by giving top positioning to an editorial that alleged Siddiqui had been tortured by U.S. troops — a libel that she had denied two days earlier, in open court
On September 24, 2010, HuffPost published this editorial on its front page:
Curiously, however, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has removed this editorial from its archives. A March 16, 2017 search using the string “Andy Worthington Siddiqui” returned zero results.
Perhaps HuffPost removed it because someone exposed it for having once again libeled the U.S. military, based on incendiary, false allegations — which even Siddiqui herself said were not true. Fortunately, we can discover the truth thanks to Google Cache’s capture of this editorial:
To be honest, I can hardly express sufficiently my shock at the news that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was rendered to the U.S. to face a trial after she reportedly tried — and failed — to shoot two U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn’t make sense. […]
Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention — possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan — where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
Note that this “journalist”:
Only referred to Siddiqui as a “neuroscientist,” mentioning nothing about the other details about her work to develop and deploy WMDs for Al Qaeda
Ignored the fact that Siddiqui herself said, in open court, that she had not been tortured by U.S. forces, and that Muslims should stop spreading this lie — the day before this editorial was published (screencap):
During a rambling statement to the court Thursday [September 23], Siddiqui carried only a message of peace.
“I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
Siddiqui said she was particularly upset by overseas reports that she was being tortured in a U.S. prison. She said she was actually being treated well.
“I am not sad. I am not distressed. … They are not torturing me,” she said. “This is a myth and lie and it’s being spread among the Muslims.”
The fact that HuffPost cleansed its archive of any instance of this “journalist” having written about Siddiqui also indicates that it never published an apology or retraction to this libel against the U.S. military. Thus, HuffPost’s original act, and this omission, could only serve to fuel the widespread protests against the U.S. military regarding Siddiqui, and may have helped to ignite physical attacks on U.S. soldiers as a result.
(3) HuffPost published a glowing fashion pictorial of a mass-murderer’s wife, that was part of his paid PR campaign to soften his image in the West
HuffPo has been caught pushing positive PR for foreign dictators. The New York Times reported that in 2009 HuffPo published a short article accompanied by a “fashion slide show” titled “Asma al-Assad: Syria’s First Lady and All-Natural Beauty” not long after the Assad family began using Western PR firms to “shape her image.”
The story page to which this incendiary headline led, written by three HuffPost “journalists,” claimed that the NSA “spied” on the porn habits of “activists,” who merely “expressed controversial ideas”:
However, as of December 6, 2016, HuffPost’s story page still insists that the teacher only “asked” her students to write get-well cards to Abu-Jamal:
This was the entirety of the story that HuffPost published about this man whom it calls a jailed Palestinian “leader,” Marwah Barghouti. Note the last line, which follows a nebulous statement about how he “led an armed uprising against Israel”:
If you attempt to follow the link to that story, however, as shown in this screencap, taken on March 15, 2017, you’ll find that it leads to a dead page:
Curiously, however, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has removed this editorial from its archives. A March 16, 2017 search using the string “Andy Worthington Siddiqui” returned zero results.
As we documented in our special report, “The Rhodes To HuffPost”: The Huffington Post’s use of lies, deception, bias and anti-Semitic incitement in order to help ‘sell’ the Iran deal,” this is not the first time HuffPost whitewashed, and acted as a volunteer PR agency for murderous Islamist dictators.