Propaganda by the Column Inch

...One could even point to these numbers as evidence of complacency...

...One is Michigan congressman John Conyers, who says, "The suggestion that Arab and Muslim Americans appreciate being singled out and interrogated is a prime example of the attorney-general's wartime propaganda machine in full swing...

...On the Wednesday of the raids, former federal prosecutor and war-crimes investigator John Loftus had filed a lawsuit in Florida...

...A problem with Dunne's kind of vigorously slanted "adversarial" journalism, of course, is that by presenting the CAIRs of the world as typical of American Muslim opinion, it fosters the very sort of hostility it purports to diagnose...

...Customs Service's Operation Green Quest, a four-month-old investigation into the financing of terrorism...

...Al Qaeda co-founder Wael Jalaidan was in recent years the head of the MWL's Pakistan headquarters in Islamabad...

...But his larger point—that al Qaeda's fellow travelers have an easier time getting into print than its Muslim opponents—bears listening to...

...Dunne names CAIR without describing it, so it sounds like an academic conclave rather than what it actually is: a political pressure group that has as a primary purpose carping about the investigation of the September 11 atrocities...

...Loftus alleges links between Florida agitator Sami Al-Arian and a larger extremist network funded through Saudi money laundering...

...The media here has been throughout supporting the so-called Islamists," Duran said, "those extremists, those people who run around here in Washington who— whose mindset does not differ from those terrorists who attacked on September 11...

...Whether or not you consider the Islamist threat sufficient to justify federal raids is a legitimate question...

...That doesn't sound bad, considering that Green Quest is part of a desperately important counterinsur-gency campaign: only a couple dozen raids, with the average one resulting in a half-million dollars of confiscations, and a fifty-fifty chance of arrests...

...Dunne describes these groups' personnel as "some of the region's most respected Muslim leaders...

...The Financial Times's reporting on the March 20 raids raises important questions, as undoubtedly it sought to...

...Since its launch in November, Green Quest has, according to Dunne, "seized about $10.3m in smuggled US currency and $4.3m in other assets...

...Al-Arian's involvement in fund-raising for Middle Eastern terrorism has been documented on publicly available videotape and also, Loftus alleges, in tapped phone calls...

...She quotes Nihad Awad, the group's executive director: "He said he explained [to other Moslems] that the [U.S.] government had slipped into the control of 'the extremists.'" She quotes Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's spokesman, who said that a recent raid of a Georgia poultry business shows that "they [the Green Quest task force] are afraid of terrorist chickens...

...government's account that many of the charities these leaders run are only "so-called" relief operations...

...A democracy accepts such insults at its peril...

...What's more, a link between al Qaeda and the Saudi-funded Muslim World League—another Virginia-based "respected Islamic institution"—is documented in Steven Emerson's recent book American Jihad...

...On March 28, the FT published a piece of terrorist propaganda under the guise of news...

...If Dunne is aware of the American law-enforcement rationale for the raids, she does not share it with her readers...

...That some charities have been used as terrorist fronts is not doubted by any serious observer, as Stephen Schwartz's article on Page 15 makes clear...

...She uses sneer quotes to dispute the U.S...

...Al-Arian was the founder of the World Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE), shut down in the mid-1990s under Justice Department suspicion that it was serving as a terrorist front...

...After the [September 11] attacks," she warns, "the nightmare of detention camps, such as those employed against Japanese Americans in the second world war, has seemed to many like a real threat...

...Har, har, har...

...If terrorism is not the real threat, according to Dunne, Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Even outspoken Muslims are losing their patience with the press's one-dimensional sourcing of stories...

...Loftus said on The O'Reilly Factor that a Justice Department official had sought to dissuade him from filing the suit by assuring him that Al-Ari-an-linked groups would be raided...

...Its work has resulted in 21 searches, 12 arrests and four indictments...

...This kind of rhetorical snickering is possible only if you ignore a growing pile of evidence...

...One is Mohamed Majad of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, who says that Muslim children "are afraid to sleep at night"—pre-sumably for fear of midnight raids...

...Khalid Duran, editor of TransIslam magazine, lamented in late February that he himself had condemned terrorism at every turn, but that the newspapers were disinclined to print his comments...

...The danger lies less in the ideological bias of reporters than in the blockheaded crudeness with which that bias is expressed...

...But they are feted in the White House, they are taken into the State Department and being received over there...

...Who are the reporter's sources here...

...But to pooh-pooh the threat itself is an insult to the common sense of the American people...

...then the raids have an ulterior—and probably racist—motive...

...Duran, it must be added, holds the absurd idea that the media collude in portraying Arabs as crazies, in order to drive up support for Israel...

...The International Institute of Islamic Thought—one of the "respected Islamic institutions" raided in Virginia on March 20—was identified by former WISE employees as the main source of the group's funding...

...Many...

...The same kind of people with the same ideology, they are given all the publicity in the press...

...But it is in the process of acquiring one...

...Well, outside of a post-September 11 statement from Amnesty International, she has five...

...Dunne quotes a CAIR communiqué to the effect that the Virginia institutions raided last week were all "respected Islamic institutions...

...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL LONDON'S Financial Times, read by more and more American businessmen, does not have a reputation for remoteness from the facts...

...This network is what was raided on March 20...

...But Dunne will have none of it...

...In an article entitled "US Muslims see their American dreams die," reporter Nancy Dunne attacked the U.S...

...Unfortunately, the most important of the questions it raises is: Just how stupid do they think we are...

...She'd apparently rather see our Customs agents confiscating prosciutto from old ladies tottering off the return flight from Rome...

...Most of what we know about WISE and its links to terror comes from the excellent beat reporting of the Tampa Tribune's Michael Fechter...

...She tells us nothing about the foundations raided...

...Seemed...

...In particular, she is angered by the spate of searches that took place March 20 against alleged terrorist front groups in Northern Virginia and Georgia...

...And the other three of her sources come from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations...