The New York Times’ Christmas Day editorial got off to a wonderful start with a tribute to the astronauts of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the moon. But it quickly fell back to earth, as the liberals on the editorial board took advantage of the season to interpret peace on earth and goodwill toward men as a Christmas wish list for the left wing, celebrating Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, the climate change accord, and Syrian refugees, while putting America on the naughty list.
Islam
By Brad Wilmouth | December 23, 2015 | 5:20 PM EST
Near the end of Wednesday's New Day on CNN, during a segment about the top five stories on social media for 2015, co-host Chris Cuomo oddly declared that, "despite all the stats about Christian terrorists," if a "white kid" had brought a homemade clock to school, unlike a "brown" Muslim kid like Ahmed Mohamed, there would have been no assumption that it was actually a bomb.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 21, 2015 | 9:12 AM EST
It's rare when a politician says something surprising, or doesn't succumb to a feel-good suggestion. Which made Rick Santorum's response to Joe Scarborough this morning doubly remarkable.
On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough had teed Santorum up to agree with his suggestion that we need to "reach out aggressively to let Muslim Americans know that they are every bit a part of the American dream as you or me." But Santorum turned the tables, saying "I would ask that in reverse: what are they going to do to reach out to make sure they are confronting --" Scarborough broke in: "no, no, no. I don't think so." But a composed Santorum went on to calmly make his case, calling out in particular CAIR for "continuing to apologize for the radicals."
By Tim Graham | December 20, 2015 | 4:24 PM EST
The leftist website The Intercept is taking apart Friday’s CBS panel discussion on Muslims in America: “two Muslim Americans who took part in the group complained that CBS edited out parts of the discussion where they raised their own concerns — including critiques of U.S. militarism, surveillance and entrapment.”
They also said that Frank Luntz, “the right-wing pollster who led the focus group, silenced members of the group when they criticized discriminatory U.S. government policies.” They ripped into Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but CBS wanted its own tidy narrative of patriotic Muslims who have no problem with this president.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 19, 2015 | 4:26 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, during a discussion of President Barack Obama's news conference, CNN's Fareed Zakaria downplayed the threat to the U.S. posed by ISIS as he forwarded the President's view that ISIS "does not pose an existential threat," noting that President Obama "often points out that gun violence takes many, many more people" in the U.S. than radical Islamic terrorism.
By Tom Johnson | December 19, 2015 | 11:49 AM EST
Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.”
In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as “an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid”; opined that the GOP candidates “have made almost no attempt to argue” that their proposals “will reduce the terrorism risk, which is so small to begin with”; and asserted that Republicans’ “position on Jihadi terrorism (that no risk is too small to ignore) is practically the opposite of their position on mass shootings in general (that no risk is worth mitigating at all).”
By Brent Bozell | and By Tim Graham | December 19, 2015 | 8:04 AM EST
When Ted Turner was running CNN back in 1991, he banned the use of the word “foreign” on air. In a memo to employees, he made a threat to fine employees with a forced donation to UNICEF. To avoid offense, they were told they should use the word “international” instead because it “promotes a sense of unity."
Today, this is Jeff Zucker’s CNN, and unity be damned. Offending the audience is part of the ratings gambit. On December 13, as many Christians celebrated the third Sunday of Advent and rejoiced over the incarnation of Jesus Christ, CNN was celebrating Satan. Literally.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 18, 2015 | 4:55 PM EST
Appearing as a guest before MSNBC's live coverage of President Barack Obama's Friday press conference, during a discussion of Donald Trump's history of promoting birtherism against the President, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews recalled his accusation that Trump is "playing to racists" and playing to a view that President Obama is "not one of us, he's black."
By Clay Waters | December 18, 2015 | 12:18 PM EST
President Obama spoke off the record to news columnists, in a defensive response to Republican criticism that he has seemed passive and uninterested in the face of Islamic terror attacks against the United States. In a news story about the meeting New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris revealed this damning admission from the president: "In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments." So why was that sentence was deleted from the version that appeared in Friday’s print edition?
By Kyle Drennen | December 18, 2015 | 11:11 AM EST
In a focus group with American Muslims on CBS This Morning, participants told political strategist Frank Luntz that Republicans discussing terrorism was so offensive that their children could not be exposed to GOP debates. One woman warned: “I actually did a call out to Muslim parents across the country to not watch the Republican debate in front of their children because I knew that, that – subjecting our children to hear the hateful stereotyping and the lumping of Muslims with terrorism in front of our children is actually something that psychologically impacts them.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 9:56 PM EST
Nearing the end of her MSNBC program Andrea Mitchell Reports on Thursday, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell claimed that "there is a lot of discrimination" against Muslims as she was introducing President Barack Obama's 1:00 p.m. speech.
After suggesting that some of the "rhetoric" at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate was "really a recruitment tool for ISIS," she recounted that Bernie Sanders visited a mosque yesterday and then asserted that "there is a lot of discrimination here," adding that it is "fueling the ISIS rhetoric."
By Matthew Balan | December 17, 2015 | 4:32 PM EST
On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, left-wing analyst Rula Jebreal and Columbia University's Ahmed Shihab-Eldin unleashed against the Republican presidential candidates, in the wake of Tuesday's CNN debates. Jebreal asserted that Ted Cruz was "nostalgic for Arab dictators," and concluded that "this is racist. This is pure bigotry." She later likened the GOP contenders to the Nazis: "What you are hearing from these people is a criminalization of an entire group of people — something that, actually, we heard...in Europe before World War II."