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| July 11, 2011 Newspaper’s smear of ACT! for America laced with lies, fabrications, and distortions Please take action below! Dear Harold, Yesterday, The Tennessean newspaper ran a story by Bob Smietana that is so laced with lies, fabrications and distortions we determined we had no choice but to respond to it. You can read the “yellow journalism” smear piece for yourself here. Space does not allow us to respond to every fabrication or distortion in the story, so we will focus on the most egregious. At the end of this email we ask you to take action! Item #1: Distortion Smietana opens the story with this:
Smietana takes the name of Brigitte Gabriel’s best-selling book to claim that this means ACT! for America’s mission is to “stop” Muslims, bluntly implying that we believe all Muslims are engaged in a “stealthy jihad” and thus that all Muslims must be stopped.
Item #2: Lie Later in the piece Smietana writes:
There is no other way to respond to this than to call this a lie.
Item #3: Lie In a lengthy section about Brigitte’s personal life, Smietana writes:
This is a lie.
Item #4: Fabrication Smietana writes:
This is intended to reinforce the distortion noted in Item #1 and the lie noted in Item #2.
As egregious as these lies, fabrications and distortions are, Smietana goes further and exposes Brigitte Gabriel’s real name, names her husband, and identifies the city in which they live. In fact, he uses her actual last name no fewer than six timesin the piece, instead of referring to her by her nationally known pseudonym. How was exposing Brigitte like this relevant to this story? There is a simple reason why Brigitte uses a pseudonym: the board of ACT voted in 2003 to require her to do so in order that she would enjoy some level of protection. This is not a misplaced concern. She has received death threats. We know that al Qaeda has written about Brigitte several different times on its website. Surely Smietana must know that al Qaeda has done this. Surely Smietana must know that Theo van Gogh was killed by a jihadist in the Netherlands. Today, al Jazeerah picked up a press release posted by CAIR which refers to the story—so now the entire Muslim world that has access to the radical al Jazeerah “media outlet” will know the details about Brigitte’s real name and city of residence. Surely Smietana must have known something like this would happen. We are thus compelled to ask, is he so driven by an agenda other than journalism that he would expose Brigitte’s name and city deliberately to expose her to danger? Only he knows the answer to that question. Bob Smietana has written a string of articles over the past many months that have clearly revealed his reporting is, to put it charitably, “factually challenged.” It is difficult not to conclude that Smietana sees his “reporting” on this issue, not as journalism seeking to uncover the truth and report facts, but as a mission to smear, silence and even recklessly endanger those who would dare to speak out against the threat of radical Islam. ACTION ITEMS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACT for America P.O. Box 12765 Pensacola, FL 32591 |
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