Emerson's charges were not without predictable allies in Congress. Citing earlier warnings by Emerson and other "experts," Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jon Kyl of Arizona wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month, demanding that she instruct the State Department to cancel all outstanding grants to "radical Islamist groups."
Well, it might just be worth noting that many of the groups cited by Emerson as "radical" are the very same ones the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies have been courting since shortly after 9/11 in their efforts to recruit agents and language experts. And that some of them meet regularly with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to provide insights into the attitudes of American Muslims.
To be sure, these organizations frequently disagree with U.S. government policies, particularly regarding the Middle East. They believe the U.S. has wasted precious years in the effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They assert that the U.S. does little to apply pressure on Israel to rein in the building of new settlements in the West Bank. They think the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder. And they regularly complain about ethnic profiling and other official government discrimination against Americans of Arab descent and other American Muslims.
But so do big chunks of the American foreign policy community. Like those bomb-throwers at the Council on Foreign Relations!
Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda is daily fare throughout the Middle East. Much of it comes from the press controlled by the very authoritarian rulers the U.S. has been propping up for decades with billions in military and economic assistance. And much of the opposition to these autocratic regimes today is coming from the very organizations Steve Emerson tags as radical Islamists.
As for what Emerson calls our "disastrous policy of outreach" to Islamic partners, someone ought to remind him that outreach is at the very heart of America's public diplomacy. The problem is not that we're spending hundreds of millions on outreach. The problem is that, given George Bush's Middle East policies, our outreach is not very effective at "winning hearts and minds."
OK, forget hearts and minds. To be totally cynical, outreach and dialogue are probably our most effective means of obtaining intelligence.
But, to self-designated "terrorism experts" like Steve Emerson, keeping fear alive is Priority One. The good news is that we are no longer seeing Mr. Emerson's talking head every time we turn our TVs on. And we aren't seeing many of his op-eds in the responsible mainstream press anymore - except perhaps in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Times.
Pity it's taken the media so long to begin to question his value as an authentic source of reliable information. Should have happened after he became one of the first on-air pundits to say the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City had all the earmarks of Middle Eastern terrorism.
Makes you wonder how long it will take Congress to get it!
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