LONDON’S Financial Times, read by more and more American businessmen, does not have a reputation for remoteness from the facts. But it is in the process of acquiring one. On March 28, the FT published a piece of terrorist propaganda under the guise of news. In an article entitled “US Muslims see their American dreams die,” reporter Nancy Dunne attacked the U.S. Customs Service’s Operation Green Quest, a four-month-old investigation into the financing of terrorism. Since its launch in November, Green Quest has, according to Dunne, “seized about $10.3m in smuggled US currency and $4.3m in other assets. Its work has resulted in 21 searches, 12 arrests and four indictments.” That doesn’t sound bad, considering that Green Quest is part of a desperately important counterinsurgency campaign: only a couple dozen raids, with the average one resulting in a half-million dollars of confiscations, and a fifty-fifty chance of arrests. One could even point to these numbers as evidence of complacency. But Dunne will have none of it. She’d apparently rather see our Customs agents confiscating prosciutto from old ladies tottering off the return flight from Rome. In particular, she is angered by the spate of searches that took place March 20 against alleged terrorist front groups in Northern Virginia and Georgia. Dunne describes these groups’ personnel as “some of the region’s most respected Muslim leaders.” If terrorism is not the real threat, according to Dunne, then the raids have an ulterior–and probably racist–motive. “After the [September 11] attacks,” she warns, “the nightmare of detention camps, such as those employed against Japanese Americans in the second world war, has seemed to many like a real threat.” “Seemed”? “Many”? Who are the reporter’s sources here? Well, outside of a post-September 11 statement from Amnesty International, she has five. One is Michigan congressman John Conyers, who says, “The suggestion that Arab and Muslim Americans appreciate being singled out and interrogated is a prime example of the attorney-general’s wartime propaganda machine in full swing.” One is Mohamed Majad of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, who says that Muslim children “are afraid to sleep at night”–presumably for fear of midnight raids. And the other three of her sources come from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Dunne names CAIR without describing it, so it sounds like an academic conclave rather than what it actually is: a political pressure group that has as a primary purpose carping about the investigation of the September 11 atrocities. Dunne quotes a CAIR communiqu to the effect that the Virginia institutions raided last week were all “respected Islamic institutions.” She quotes Nihad Awad, the group’s executive director: “He said he explained [to other Moslems] that the [U.S.] government had slipped into the control of ‘the extremists.'” She quotes Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s spokesman, who said that a recent raid of a Georgia poultry business shows that “they [the Green Quest task force] are afraid of terrorist chickens.” Har, har, har. If Dunne is aware of the American law-enforcement rationale for the raids, she does not share it with her readers. She tells us nothing about the foundations raided. She uses sneer quotes to dispute the U.S. government’s account that many of the charities these leaders run are only “so-called” relief operations. This kind of rhetorical snickering is possible only if you ignore a growing pile of evidence. (That some charities have been used as terrorist fronts is not doubted by any serious observer, as Stephen Schwartz’s article on Page 15 makes clear.) On the Wednesday of the raids, former federal prosecutor and war-crimes investigator John Loftus had filed a lawsuit in Florida. Loftus alleges links between Florida agitator Sami Al-Arian and a larger extremist network funded through Saudi money laundering. This network is what was raided on March 20. Al-Arian’s involvement in fund-raising for Middle Eastern terrorism has been documented on publicly available videotape and also, Loftus alleges, in tapped phone calls. Loftus said on “The O’Reilly Factor” that a Justice Department official had sought to dissuade him from filing the suit by assuring him that Al-Arian-linked groups would be raided. Al-Arian was the founder of the World Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE), shut down in the mid-1990s under Justice Department suspicion that it was serving as a terrorist front. The International Institute of Islamic Thought–one of the “respected Islamic institutions” raided in Virginia on March 20–was identified by former WISE employees as the main source of the group’s funding. (Most of what we know about WISE and its links to terror comes from the excellent beat reporting of the Tampa Tribune’s Michael Fechter.) What’s more, a link between al Qaeda and the Saudi-funded Muslim World League–another Virginia-based “respected Islamic institution”–is documented in Steven Emerson’s recent book “American Jihad.” Al Qaeda co-founder Wael Jalaidan was in recent years the head of the MWL’s Pakistan headquarters in Islamabad. A problem with Dunne’s kind of vigorously slanted “adversarial” journalism, of course, is that by presenting the CAIRs of the world as typical of American Muslim opinion, it fosters the very sort of hostility it purports to diagnose. The danger lies less in the ideological bias of reporters than in the blockheaded crudeness with which that bias is expressed. Even outspoken Muslims are losing their patience with the press’s one-dimensional sourcing of stories. Khalid Duran, editor of TransIslam magazine, lamented in late February that he himself had condemned terrorism at every turn, but that the newspapers were disinclined to print his comments. “The media here has been throughout supporting the so-called Islamists,” Duran said, “those extremists, those people who run around here in Washington who–whose mindset does not differ from those terrorists who attacked on September 11. But they are feted in the White House, they are taken into the State Department and being received over there. The same kind of people with the same ideology, they are given all the publicity in the press.” Duran, it must be added, holds the absurd idea that the media collude in portraying Arabs as crazies, in order to drive up support for Israel. But his larger point–that al Qaeda’s fellow travelers have an easier time getting into print than its Muslim opponents–bears listening to. Whether or not you consider the Islamist threat sufficient to justify federal raids is a legitimate question. But to pooh-pooh the threat itself is an insult to the common sense of the American people. A democracy accepts such insults at its peril. The Financial Times’s reporting on the March 20 raids raises important questions, as undoubtedly it sought to. Unfortunately, the most important of the questions it raises is: Just how stupid do they think we are? Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
