Spinning the Web

Remember the phony, rent-a-mob cartoon jihad? LGF with follow-up:

A Muslim group in Denmark has been trying to use the Danish legal system to shut down criticism of their hate speech and seditious behavior, but the Danish court has refused to knuckle under to their demands: Muslim group loses cartoons libel case in Denmark.

Score one for the principles of Western civilization and free speech. But the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and CAIR (a Hamas spin-off) keep spinning the web, this time in the US. CAIR's latest tactic is trying to intimidate airline passengers in the US through legal means. LGF with links and graph.Background on central figure Mousa Abu Marzook at CAIR Watch. More background on Marzook here, and the recent slap on the wrist sentence in Chicago in the case of his colleague Salah here, with predictable slimy comments from Hamas' creature CAIR:

"I think the fact that he's going to jail provides some justice for the Boim family," Steve Landes, attorney for the Boims, said Wednesday. "For society at large, it's an important victory for those of us seeking justice for victims of international terrorism." Sentiments in the Muslim community could not be more different, Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago, said Wednesday. The community viewed Salah as "a trustworthy person caught in a political drama at a time when it's difficult to be a Palestinian or a Muslim," Rehab said. "The feeling is this could happen to anyone."

I don't think so, unless CAIR is suggesting every Muslim in America is a Hamas conspirator in the murder of teenagers. And note the MSM newspapers' attitude---just when you think they couldn't get worse, they continue to shock:

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’ Deputy political bureau chief in Damascus and specially designated global terrorist (pdf, see page 4). This just a few weeks after Ahmed Yousef, the senior political advisor to Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, had op-eds in both the Washington Post and New York Times published on the same day.

Both Marzook and Haniyeh made appearances on the Post’s editorial page last year. And Yousef has graced the pages of the New York Times in the past.

The Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell, shed some light on the process of how op-eds penned by high-ranking Hamas operatives end up on the editorial pages of major American newspapers. Commenting on the confusion between the Post and the Times over the publishing of two competing Yousef pieces, Howell reported:

(Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred) Hiatt said, "Our piece came to us through a representative of Mr. Yousef [in the United States] with whom we'd dealt before. He assured us afterward that he did not realize a separate piece was in the works." (New York Times op-ed Editor David) Shipley's source was in London and assured him of the same thing. (emphasis added)

It is hardly surprising that Yousef, or Marzook for that matter, would have a representative in America. Both Hamas leaders spent a significant amount of time living in the United States, developing an extensive infrastructure of front groups for the terrorist organization.

It is notable that, from the Post’s perspective, the controversy was not the publishing of propaganda from a designated foreign terrorist organization, but rather that its major competitor had published a similar op-ed from the same author that very day.

Marzook is still under indictment in the Chicago case, though he is unavailable in Nancy Pelosi's favorite dictator's Syria. CAIR is charged as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas case pending in Texas, as is the Chicago-based Islamic Society of North America, as they prepare for this year's convention.

Will they again invite US domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn (now a professor at Northwestern Law School, who spoke on torture), a notorious apologist for terror, and nuke-seeking Iranian officials? Or maybe this time they'll invite Dohrn's husband, Bill Ayers, a specialist on nail bombs, who felt "he didn't do enough" bombing. (Ayers teaches at the publicly funded University of Illinois Chicago, as a "Distinguished Professor of Education". How nice for us in Chicagoland.)

And there may be links to Al Qaida in the Texas case. Could be they're just related to each other. Family ties, that sort of thing. No spider web there. That must be what the LA Times, Washington Post and the NY Times were thinking.

Related posts: The Cost of Failure, A CAIR Package, In Search of Reform Muslims

UPDATE: VDH:

Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed champion of human rights and nonviolence, has called the United States' unwillingness to accept the 2006 Palestinian election of the terrorists of Hamas "criminal." Unlike Carter, Egyptian reformer Sa'd Al-Din Ibrahim, no friend of the United States, thinks members of Hamas are real criminals.

In an article on the terrorist organization's recent takeover of Gaza, Ibrahim wrote, "The Hamas fighters behaved in a barbaric, bloody manner, while repeatedly [shouting] 'Allahu Akbar' and religious prayers. ... The victors executed a number of Fatah leaders and fighters, shooting them or throwing them from the roofs of buildings, with no trial -- not even a mock trial."

Carter is one among many Western liberals who either ignore or, worse, defend Hamas and other acknowledged enemies of free speech, due process and religious and political tolerance.