Another Times Attack on an Opponent of Radical Islam

Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein made Tuesday's front page with an attack on Brigitte Gabriel, an activist who warns against the dangers of radical Islam in the United States: "Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message [1]."

Interestingly, the piece is datelined Fort Worth, Texas, suggesting much of the relevant reporting was done last fall - Gabriel spoke to a Tea Party event in Fort Worth in September 2010, and Goodstein's story includes a photo of Gabriel speaking at "a Tea Party event in September."

Did some of this story come out of the freezer? It was surely released today to intersect with Rep. Peter King's hearings on Islamic radicalism which begin on Thursday, but which the Times already bashed in its lead editorial today [2]. The editors pointed an accusing finger at King: "Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division."

Goodstein wrote:

Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd with a loud Texas "Yee-HAW," then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churches, synagogues and conference rooms across the United States:

As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn southern Lebanon in the 1970s, Ms. Gabriel said, she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the United States, only to find that the Islamic radicals who had terrorized her in Lebanon, she said, were now bent on taking over America.

....

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of Long Island, will conduct hearings Thursday in Washington on a similar theme: that the United States is infiltrated by Muslim radicals. Mr. King was the first guest last month on a new cable television show that Ms. Gabriel co-hosts with Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT! and a Republican consultant who helped build the Christian Coalition, once the most potent political organization on the Christian right.

Ms. Gabriel, 46, who uses a pseudonym, casts her organization as a nonpartisan, nonreligious national security group. Yet the organization draws on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans.

She presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion. She has found a receptive audience among Americans who are legitimately worried about the spread of terrorism.

But some of those who work in counterterrorism say that speakers like Ms. Gabriel are spreading distortion and fear, and are doing the country a disservice by failing to make distinctions between Muslims who are potentially dangerous and those who are not.

Gabriel was also attacked by the Times in an August 17, 2008 Sunday Magazine Q&A [3] with Deborah Solomon. The story's subhead referred to Gabriel as a "radical Islamophobe." Among Solomon's hostile questions: "Are you an agent of the U.S. government?" "Are you underwritten by the C.I.A.?"

Tuesday's front-page report was not Goodstein's first overheated defense of Islam. During the controversy over building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, Goodstein translated opposition to the project into anti-Muslim bigotry [4] and hate crimes [5].

Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali has also gotten strangely hostile coverage in the Times in her fight for women's rights. Book critic William Grimes' September 13, 2006 review [6] of a book by Ian Buruma included this bizarre criticism of Hirsi Ali, faulting Hirsi Ali and murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh for being too tolerant of gays and women in the face of Muslim extremism:

Enlightenment absolutists like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Mr. van Gogh turned apoplectic at any efforts to appease or accommodate Muslims on, say, gay rights or women's rights, and they were not alone in their fears.