Only the most ignorant consider Fox News to be a legitimate news network. And when it comes to issues dealing with terrorism and Islam, Fox News is not only a font of disinformation and blatant propaganda but also flat out lies.
On January 11, so-called “international terrorism expert” Steven Emerson was on Fox’s Justice with Jeanine Pirro program and told one bald-faced whopper after another about the English city of Birmingham and the British capital. Emerson actually looked into the camera and with a straight face said, “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.” The so-called terrorism “expert” also said, “In parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound, seriously, anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.”
These lies, which are not Emerson’s first, came after the owner of Fox’s parent, News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, sent out a Twitter message stating that all Muslims must be held accountable for the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. The situation at Fox is so egregious, it is time for such professional journalism organizations as the National Press Club and Society of Professional Journalists to bar Fox News employees from membership. If the National Press Club, for example, can continue to bar as full members employees of the Voice of America, because it is considered to broadcast U.S. government propaganda, the same standard should be applied to Fox News. Relatively speaking, the Voice of America is a much more professional operation than Fox News could ever hope to be.
Although Emerson later apologized and promised to make a donation to the Birmingham Children’s Hospital. No apology was forthcoming from Fox News, which failed to publish or air a retraction of Emerson’s lies about Birmingham and London.
British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to Emerson’s description by calling the self-styled terrorism expert “a complete idiot.” Cameron would have been more correct if he called Emerson for what he really is: a tool of Israeli intelligence and its global propaganda network.
Emerson has been a long time colleague of Rita Katz, the Israeli intelligence operative who runs the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, which works hand-in-glove with the Middle East Media Research Institute, another Mossad contrivance, to “discover” on the Internet alleged terrorist messages posted by radical Islamists on websites and the latest Al Qaeda or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) videos. SITE has been caught on numerous occasions passing off as real, fake Islamist terrorist videos on the Internet.
WMR has reported on the Emerson-Katz propaganda operations in the past.
One June 25, 2006, WMR reported the following:
“The case of the ‘Liberty City Seven,’ a group of self-employed youths of mainly Haitian descent, is yet another example of the propaganda of the neocons creating new bogeyman. The barrage of fear mongering was best represented by agenda-laden cable news polemicists like Steven Emerson, Joel Mowbray, Sean Hannity, William Kristol, Ann Coulter, and Byron York, to demonize yet another sector of American society, this time Miami’s Haitian and non-Cuban Caribbean community. First, it was the Arabs and Muslims, then, it was the turn of the Hispanics, now, it is the Haitians. Tomorrow, it will be sub-continental Indians, then, Native Americans, and Chinese and Koreans. ‘Homeland security,’ that awful Teutonic phrase, is being used to establish an apartheid South African-style racial regime in the United States under the cover of ‘counter terrorism’ and ‘homeland security.’”
On September 9, 2007, WMR reported the following on Emerson and Katz:
“The so-called ‘Osama Bin Laden tape,’ was not only transmitted via the auspices of the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, a Washington, DC-based research institute with links to Israeli right-wing Likud elements, but U.S. intelligence officials are now claiming that large portions of the ‘Bin Laden’ speech were written by Los Angeles native Adam Gadahn, born Adam Pearlman, (aka Azzam the American), the number three man in charge of Al Qaeda, whose grandfather, Carl K. Pearlman, was a member of the board of the Anti Defamation League (ADL), an important component of the Israeli Lobby in the United States.
“Carl Pearlman, a prominent California urologist, was the chairman of the Orange County Bonds for Israel campaign and the United Jewish Welfare Fund.
“SITE and an Israeli intelligence front operation in Washington, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), are closely linked. MEMRI has been responsible for mis-translating several speeches made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. SITE’s director is Rita Katz, an Iraq-born Jew who moved to Israel after her father was executed by Saddam Hussein’s government for spying for the Mossad. She emigrated to the United States from Israel in 1997. Katz worked for the US Treasury Department in its pursuit of Muslim charity funds in the United States in Operation Green Quest and as a consultant for the FBI. The main coordinator for Green Quest was the then-head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Michael Chertoff.
“Katz once served as Research Director of the Investigative Project, another neocon outfit run by noted Arab and Muslim demonizer Steven Emerson, who was one of the first past the post to blame the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing on Arab terrorists.
“The co-founder of MEMRI is Col. Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and adviser to Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin. The other founder of MEMRI is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also employed by the Hudson Institute, a neocon think tank where I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, the convicted Bush administration perjurer and obstructor of justice, has taken up residence.
“The delivery of the latest ‘Bin Laden’ video was reported by the Associated Press as follows: ‘the 30-minute video was obtained by the SITE Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors terrorist messages, and provided to the Associated Press.’ In the past, Bin Laden videos were sent to Al Jazeera and other Arab media sources directly.
“The first news of the video’s release came on the al-Sahab web site, where ‘Al Qaeda’ has previously posted messages.
“Last year, a leaked French intelligence report stated that Bin Laden died of typhoid fever in Pakistan. There are other reports that after the US attack on Afghanistan, Bin Laden was spirited out of Afghanistan to his native Hadhramaut region of Yemen, where he later died of kidney failure surrounded by his close and extended family members. Bin Laden’s post-9/11 presence in Hadhramaut was hinted to by reputable Israeli intelligence sources in discussions with this editor in 2002.
“The speed at which the corporate media accepted the obviously bogus ‘Bin Laden makeover’ tape is amazing. However, considering the links between the neocon disinformation machinery in Washington, DC and the corporate media, it may not be so surprising when put into context.”
People like Emerson and Katz have made their careers on fostering fear and hatred. Fox News as their enablers should be dropped by every cable TV provider and their reporters should not receive accreditation as journalists for even so much as covering a local planning commission meeting.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
