Remember when journalist and author Naomi Wolf claimed during the Bush administration that the president was using “time-tested tactics to close down an open society,” going so far as to compare the Republican president to Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet?
Well, she’s back to “just asking questions,” suggesting on Facebook over the weekend that the beheading videos recorded by the Islamic State, a terrorist group that has conquered much of Iraq and Syria, may have been staged.
To date, the murderous terrorist army has broadcasted the beheadings of U.S. reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff and U.K. aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.
Wolf’s “questions” about the beheadings include implications that the victims and their families are in on some massive hoax.
@penkill Here it is, for your reference. pic.twitter.com/H5RxHZEXAp
— Graeme Wood (@gcaw) October 4, 2014
New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi eventually informed Wolf that the reason she hadn’t read about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria abductions before the beheadings was that they had been under a voluntary media blackout for two years. That prompted Wolf to delete her Facebook post.
Wolf later wrote an additional post saying that she was not “calling into question the authenticity of the [Islamic State] videos,” but merely insisting that the videos be authenticated.
“Wolf accused the news media of ‘badly distorting’ her comments Sunday in a rather lengthy, elliptical post and further tried to silence her critics by citing the insight she gained into how political narratives are crafted while advising former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore,” Talking Points Memo reported.
Here’s a sampling of what Wolf wrote in her defense: “So all the people who are attacking me right now for ‘conspiracy theories’ have no idea what they are talking about … People who assume the dominant narrative MUST BE TRUE and the dominant reasons MUST BE REAL are not experienced in how that world works.”
