When is Boehlert going to acknowledge that he protested the innocence of someone who just pled guilty to aiding Islamic Jihad?

Salon in 2002, byline by Boehlert:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/01/19/bubba/index.html

*The prime-time smearing of Sami Al-Arian*

By pandering to anti-Arab hysteria, NBC, Fox News, Media General and Clear Channel radio disgraced themselves -- and ruined an innocent professor's life.

Huffpo in 2005, byline by Boehlert:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/sami-alarian-the-terror_b_11835.html

*Sami Al-Arian: The Terror Verdict TV Networks Ignored*

"... Raise your hand if you think the nets would have covered the trial's conclusion if the jury had returned with a guilty verdict in what the government had hyped as a centerpiece to its War on Terror."

Raise your hands if you're surprised that weeks later, neither Salon nor Eric Boehlert have said anything about this:

http://news.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBU23G11ME.html

Published: Apr 14, 2006

TAMPA - Sami Al-Arian has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to provide support to a terrorist organization under a deal with the government in which Al-Arian will be deported and the rest of the charges he faces will be dropped, according to an attorney involved in the negotiations.

... by citing Adam Curtis' "The Power of Nightmares" which was almost thoroughly debunked in The Nation by Peter Bergen, among the leading journalist expert on Islamic terrorism. (He observed the program "has the feel of a Noam Chomsky lecture channeled by Monty Python".) No, Al Qaeda was not the invention of US prosecutors-- it was and is a global organization with a coherent, influential, and utterly obscurantist political theology (Qutb has been widely revered throughout the Muslim world for decades.) More here:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/bergen

Apparently O'Hehir caught Curtis' movie and decided that it was the final word on the subject. Meanwhile, Islamic extremism runs rampant throughout Europe, in terrorist acts large and small, while violently forwarding Wahhabist *sharia* throughout the Muslim world, not just in the Middle East, but the former Soviet Union, Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, the Philipines) and Africa (Sudan, Somalia, and points between.) Refusing to seriously acknowledge the existence of an enemy that approaches a totalizing global savagery unseen since Hitler, O'Hehir indulges in the power of wishful thinking, and encourages with some final flattering words the narcissistic, provincial fantasies of those whose only priority is continuing to indulger their five year fever dream of resistance against George W. Bush, surely the meanest, most horrible Hitleresque person in the whole wide world.

"whether the al-Qaida faithful hate America for its freedoms or for its policies. Wright's work reveals that the answer, clearly, is both... Bin Laden often emphasized his objection to the presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian peninsula, beginning with the Gulf War. He regularly demonized Israel and the United States as its prime benefactor."

I don't think that follows, though. If you look at what he actually says, Bin Laden's specific objection to US troops in the Holy Land was that they included women, Jews, and other hated infidels, and his specific objection to Israel is, well, that it exists. It's way too simplistic to reduce either to "US policies". When the hatred is actually directed at our policy of having a multi-denominational military of both genders and our policy of not wanting the Holocaust to happen again, why, that's also about hating our freedoms and values.

> Muslim rage, driven by U.S. policies ranging from

> coziness with autocratic Arab regimes to support for

> Israel, as well as by socioreligious frustrations that

> U.S. policies had nothing to do with, had been building

> for years.

This formulation is at least 60% misleading. Islamist rage at US coziness with Arab governments is not that they're autocratic, but that they're *jaaliya* apostate regimes which are not truly subordinated to Islam. Islamist rage over support for Israel is not that we approve of Sharon or expanding settlements, but that we support Israel's right to exist. Both points are explicitly, consistently made by Islamists, over and over again, but the author, along with Gary, once again engage in mirror-imaging in the hopes that apocalyptic nihilists can be, well, appeased.

Oh yeah, news flash: Al Qaeda just declared war on France:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060914/ap_on_re_eu/france_al_qaida_video

Maybe I should have just posted that link, seems like it would refute the whole book. And Gary's fawning over it.