Only gradually did a few brave reporters begin criticizing Emerson and his cozy ties to right-wing Israeli officials, including Israeli intelligence officers. Typically, Emerson would hit back by issuing legal threats from his vast stable of high-priced lawyers.
Emerson's use of lawyers to bully other journalists, which I had witnessed firsthand, became part of his modus operandi, as Nation reporter Robert I. Friedman discovered in 1995 after criticizing Emerson's "Jihad in America."
"Intellectual terrorism seems to be part of Emerson's standard repertoire," Friedman wrote. "So is his penchant for papering his critics with threatening lawyers' letters."
Friedman also reported that Emerson hosted right-wing Israeli intelligence officials when they were in Washington.
"[Yigal] Carmon, who was Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's adviser on terrorism, and [Yoram] Ettinger, who was Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's man in the Israeli Embassy, stay in Emerson's apartment on their frequent visits to Washington," Friedman wrote.
In 1999, a study of Emerson's history by John F. Sugg for FAIR's magazine "Extra!" quoted an Associated Press reporter who had worked with Emerson on a project as saying of Emerson and Carmon: "I have no doubt these guys are working together."
The Jerusalem Post reported that Emerson has "close ties to Israeli intelligence," and "Victor Ostrovsky, who defected from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and has written books disclosing its secrets, calls Emerson "the horn' -- because he trumpets Mossad claims," Sugg reported.
Bigotry Toward Muslims
Emerson's biases are better known today than they were when he was "debunking" the October Surprise allegations. He is now notorious for his Islamophobia and his "investigative journalism" that hammers away at purported dangers from "radicalized" American Muslims.
Last year, Emerson went on a national radio program and claimed that Islamic cleric Feisal Abdul Rauf would likely not "survive" Emerson's disclosure of supposedly radical comments that Rauf made a half decade ago.
Although acknowledging that his "investigation" was incomplete, Emerson offered the listeners to Bill Bennett's right-wing radio show "a little preview" of the allegedly offensive comments by Rauf, the cleric behind a planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan near the site of 9/11's "ground zero."
"We have found audiotapes of Imam Rauf defending Wahhabism, the puritanical version of Islam that governs Saudi Arabia; we have found him calling for the elimination of the state of Israel by claiming he wants a one-nation state meaning no more Jewish state; we found him defending bin Laden violence."
However, when Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) released its evidence several days later, it fell far short of Emerson's lurid descriptions. Rauf actually made points that are shared by many mainstream analysts -- and none of the excerpted comments involved "defending Wahhabism."
As for Rauf "defending bin Laden violence," Emerson apparently was referring to remarks that Rauf made to an audience in Australia in 2005 about the history of U.S. and Western mistreatment of people in the Middle East.
"We tend to forget, in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims," Rauf said.
"You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, [she] said it was worth it."
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