As my colleague Ben Shapiro points out, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple is a Media Matters shill. The anti-Semitic, left-wing hit squad can usually count on Wemple to push their propaganda into the pages of the Washington Post and therefore the mainstream media. But when Wemple (who has targeted Dana’s CNN relationship before) tells CNN that Loesch contradicted a 2007 CNN story when the opposite is true, Wemple only embarrasses himself.
Presumably, after desperately Googling for ammo like a third-grade tattletale, Wemple found a false equivalent in the form of this 2007 CNN article and told the network that on her local St. Louis radio show, Dana was contradicting their reporting.
Given that the network did such yeoman’s work in 2007 to debunk the Obama-madrassa connection — with a story titled “CNN debunks false report about Obama” — I figured that it would be eager to defend the legacy of its own work.
The false equivalent is this: If you look at the 2007 CNN report, the writer is obviously using the term “madrassa” in the context of a “terrorist school,” not in the broader context of the word, which in Arabic means, simply, “school”
If you look at Dana’s remarks in their full context, it’s obvious she was in no way trying to inflame fears about Obama’s childhood or his faith. In fact, if you look at her remarks in full (which Wemple chose not to include in his lengthy hit-piece), Dana compared madrassas to Catholic schools (which is true) and then had to reign a caller in angry over the comparison.
Good Heavens, even Media Matters admits Dana compared Obama’s Muslim school, or madrassa, to a Catholic school:
Loesch said: “Well, yeah, I mean, he did study — he went to one of the madrassas over in Indonesia for a while. So he knows — I mean, he — which is kind of like the equivalent in Islam of a Catholic school in Catholicism. So there’s that.”
While the word generally means “a Muslim school,” the American media have most commonly applied the word to schools that sprang up in South Asia after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and engage in anti-Western “political indoctrination.”
Later, another caller took issue with Loesch’s drawing a parallel between Islamic schools and Catholic schools:
CALLER: You know, I grew up in Catholic school. You know, I did eight years there. And, you know, we learned the Ten Commandments, we learned about God, turning the other cheek, loving thy neighbor. You’ve got books for these schools, these Islamic schools, that show them where to cut off appropriately for the hand and feet of infidels. You know, it’s math, language, and then how to build bombs in these schools. You know, to say that it’s —
LOESCH: Well, no, it’s, it’s —
CALLER: — to compare it to, you know, Catholic schools —
LOESCH: [caller’s name]
CALLER: — is a little stretch.
Loesch clarified that she believes those schools are “analogous” to Catholic schools because Muslims “have schools that train up children in the doctrine, in the religion that they practice, just like in Catholicism.”
So as we can see here, on behalf of his anti-Semitic pals over at Media Matters, Wemple’s reporting is actually worse than Media Matters’ and he is cynically playing a rhetorical game to hurt Dana’s relationship with CNN. He’s telling CNN that she contradicted their 2007 article, when the truth is that she backed up their reporting by making clear that Obama did not attend anything resembling a terrorist school.
The only daylight between CNN and Dana is that Dana uses the word “madrassa” in the same way Muslims do — to mean a Muslim school. In their report, CNN used the term to mean “terrorist school.” Other than that they are on the exact same page.
Ben Shapiro again:
Not only that – even MMFA admits that the word “madrassa” means Muslim school. The CNN report that Wemple relies on to state that Obama didn’t attend madrassa got the story wrong — the story misdefined the word “madrassa” to mean “a radical Muslim school.” This was inaccurate. Obama went to a Muslim school. He says so himself. A Muslim school is by definition a madrassa. Not all madrassas are bad. Some are. End of story. If CNN can’t use an Arabic dictionary, that’s their problem.
What’s most betrays Wemple’s agenda is that a good faith search of his site reveals more posts about what Dana Loesch says on her local St. Louis radio talk show than the concerns of many, including Alan Dershowitz, about Media Matters’ anti-Semitism.
Wemple’s obvious goal here is to silence the rare conservative voice on CNN.
It’s called the New Blacklist.
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