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.
ISIS
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 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 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 Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 8:54 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Thursday's New Day on CNN, former Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown lavished praise on GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, as she pined for him to make it onto the main debate stage, and three times gushed that the South Carolina Republican "rocked." She also rejoiced over Senator Graham characterizing Donald Trump as "a poster boy for ISIS," as she asserted that he is "helping to radicalize the non-radical Muslims."
By Curtis Houck | December 17, 2015 | 3:02 AM EST
On Wednesday, the late-night comedy show hosts gave their thoughts on the previous evening’s Republican debate and, naturally, the jokes skewed to the left. Most prominent, Late Show host Stephen Colbert trashed conservative donor Sheldon Adelson as a “part-time Kuato” (a reference to the alien in the movie Total Recall) and Late Night host Seth Meyers joked that each of the nine major candidates “had definitely been radicalized by ISIS.”
By Tom Johnson | December 16, 2015 | 9:57 PM EST
Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 16, 2015 | 7:42 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's MSNBC Live, Linda Sarsour of the Arab-American Association of New York received no pushback from host Jose Diaz-Balart over her inflammatory assertion that some of the Republican presidential candidates "think they can mass murder civilians across the world" to defeat the ISIS threat.
She also absurdly claimed that the U.S. killed 650,000 civilians in Iraq, even though most estimates place the total number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military much lower.
By Matthew Balan | December 16, 2015 | 1:26 PM EST
CNN's Chris Cuomo made a gaffe regarding the religious faith of ISIS and other similar groups on Wednesday's New Day. When Senator Lindsey Graham accused Donald Trump of "playing into ISIL's hands," Cuomo replied, "Sixty percent of your party agrees with him. They think all jihadis are Muslim." Since jihad is a concept from the Islamic faith, a jihadi, by definition, would indeed be a Muslim waging a religious-based war for Islam.
By Ken Shepherd | December 15, 2015 | 8:05 PM EST
Former John McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt pushed back against Chris Matthews on tonight's Hardball when the latter whipped out his tired Bush-caused-ISIS talking point.
By Clay Waters | December 15, 2015 | 1:09 PM EST
The latest from New York Times reporter Kirk Semple on the front page of Tuesday’s Times, “Muslim Youth in U.S. Feel Strain of Suspicion,” demonstrates that the paper’s strongest impulse after Islamic terror attacks is not to investigate what went wrong but to fret over perceived, anecdotal “Islamophobia” among their fellow citizens. It’s much like his previous, anecdote-heavy, statistic-free “CAIR” package (as in Council on American-Islamic Relations) that Semple delivered in late November, an article completely dominated by CAIR sources in which Semple quite comfortably accused his fellow Americans of Islamophobia on the basis of anecdotes.
By Ken Shepherd | December 14, 2015 | 9:48 PM EST
MSNBC host Chris Matthews seems to have a problem with those who would call the torturers, rapists, and murderers who populate the ranks of ISIS as "animals."