Last month, Steve Emerson, a propagandist with close ties to Israel's Likud and America's neocons, 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 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."
Emerson purported to "fact check" Rauf's statement on the death toll from the Iraq sanctions by claiming "a report by the British government said at most only 50,000 deaths could be attributed to the sanctions, which were brought on by the actions by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein."
What Emerson's "fact check" ignored, however, was that Rauf was accurately recounting Leslie Stahl's questioning of Secretary of State Albright on CBS "60 Minutes" in 1996. Emerson also left out the fact that United Nations studies did conclude that those U.S.-led sanctions caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five.
In the 1996 interview, Stahl told Albright regarding the sanctions, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think the price is worth it."
Later, a competing academic study by Columbia University's Richard Garfield put the sanctions-related death toll of Iraqi children, under five, at 106,000 to 227,000.
Emerson doesn't identify the specific British report that contains the lower figure, although even that number 50,000 represents a stunning death toll and doesn't contradict Rauf's chief point, that U.S.-British actions have killed many innocent Muslims over the years.
Also, by 2005, when Rauf made his remarks in Australia, the United States and Great Britain had invaded and occupied Iraq, with a death toll spiraling from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands with some estimates of war-related deaths in Iraq now exceeding one million.
Far from "defending bin Laden violence," Rauf's comments simply reflected the truth about the indiscriminate killing inflicted on the Muslim world by U.S.-British military might over the years. Indeed, British imperialism in the region dates back several centuries, a point that Emerson also ignores.
U.S.-Backed Dictators
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