MPAC likewise plays fast and loose with the facts in its attempts to assail Emerson’s “professional credibility.” It cites a 1991 New York Times review of Emerson’s book Terrorist that says the book was “marred by factual errors” and political bias. It doesn’t mention the political bias of the review itself, or the fact that the only “factual errors” actually referred to in the review were “mistranslations of Arabic names” — again unspecified. Emerson’s documentary Jihad In America, we’re told, was “faulted for bigotry and misrepresentation” — with no specifics, of course, as to who exactly was misrepresented. Nor does MPAC reveal who did the faulting. Surely MPAC doesn’t mean Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor whose deep involvement with the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad were first revealed in Jihad In America — and who was finally arrested and indicted in 2003 for providing material support to the Islamic Jihad. MPAC could not be talking about CAIR, the group that morphed out of the Islamic Association for Palestine , and which was exposed by the film as part of Hamas’ network in the US —  characterizations affirmed in recent court decisions.  

Conveniently, MPAC omits the fact that the documentary won the “Best Investigative Reporting Award in Print, Broadcast, or Book” from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), an organization dedicated to fostering journalistic excellence. However, the MPAC report does find the time to quote Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, saying of Emerson’s work: “It’s total bull****. He’s trying to say people who move to this country and set up charities and think tanks and are associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, that there’s some kind of connection between them and Sept. 11, that there’s a liaison or support network. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about...” Cannistraro’s venom was published in Salon magazine in March 2002, over eighteen months before the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of three Muslim charities, the Benevolence International Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, because of their ties to Hamas and or Al-Qaeda.[1] One would think that by now MPAC would know whether it was actually Emerson or Cannistraro who was really purveying bull****, but evidently not. Cannistraro, as Emerson publicly revealed in a symposium in Tampa in 1995, had actually agreed to be a defense witness for the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in his WTC-connected terrorism trial, but the judge disqualified him.  Instead, MPAC has consistently maintained that the terror arrests of leading figures in Islamic charities “bare [sic] strong signs of politicization,”^[2] although in doing so the group has not hesitated to gloss over and misrepresent the evidence. MPAC claimed, for example, that former Global Relief Foundation Chairman Rabih Haddad was only “arrested for overstaying his visa.”[3] However, the FBI revealed in court papers that Haddad had been spotted at sites that “housed and supported terrorist organizations associated with al Qaida” in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.[4]  

Nonetheless, we are supposed to believe that it is Emerson who is careless with the facts.

“One example of Emerson’s journalistic sloppiness,” says MPAC, “is an August 2000 article in which he writes, ‘Terrorism experts say Hamas raises $10 million tax-free annually in the United States …’” MPAC dismisses such allegations as “wild claims” and complains that Emerson “fails to name actual sources” for them. But they don’t seem so wild or unsupported in light of testimony by Gary M. Bald, the Acting Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control on March 4, 2004 . Bald testified that in 2002, the FBI blocked the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), thereby “shutting down Hamas’ largest fund-raising entity in the US . The HLF had been linked to the funding of Hamas terrorist activities, and in 2000, raised $13 million.”[5] Emerson was wrong, all right: he underestimated Hamas’ take by three million dollars.  

The MPAC report further faults Emerson for stating that terrorist groups established “a vast network of radical supporters running from Los Angeles to Boston .” The fact that jihad terrorists have been discovered and convicted all across the United States matters little to MPAC, which in its recent position paper on counterterrorism policy wondered  “whether alleged terror plots, such as those in Seattle, Buffalo, Portland, and Detroit, actually posed threats as serious as the government initially claimed them to be.”[6] Let’s see: in the Portland case, the jihad suspects told an FBI informant that they wanted to behead unbelievers, find “real” Muslim wives who would be willing to “blow something up,” and referred to Jews as “lampshades.” They pleaded guilty to traveling to Afghanistan and trying to join the Taliban.[7] Yes, clearly an exaggerated case. And in the Buffalo case, in which six Yemeni Muslims from Lackawanna , New York were persuaded to go to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan , the Associated Press reported: “Friends say the six men were manipulated into going to the camp by high-pressure recruiters who came to their mosque with a message of religious service.”[8] Yet MPAC has the breathtaking audacity, in trashing Emerson’s book American Jihad, to claim that he “fails to prove his most rudimentary argument in American Jihad — that terrorists are exploiting our most cherished freedoms and using their own religious and political institutions to plan and execute anti-America terrorist acts.”  

The accusations go on and on. MPAC claims that “following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he told CNN viewers that Yugoslavs were the likely suspects.” However, this is far from the “wild accusation” that MPAC makes it out to be. In fact, Emerson was the first to report that investigators were following Serbian leads in trying to find the bombers. This was widely reported at the time, and not only by Emerson. A March 3, 1993 Associated Press story noted that “investigators in the World Trade Center bombing are giving the most credence to a Serbian militant group’s claim of responsibility, an FBI official said Wednesday.” The next day, National Public Radio reported that “the FBI says a phone caller claiming to represent a Serbian group knew the site of the World Trade Center bombing before that news was public.” The day after that, the Christian Science Monitor stated: “Investigators in the World Trade Center bombing are said to be focusing on the first claim of responsibility received: a call from a Serbian group that knew the site of the blast before the public did.  ‘That’s the most likely direction and that's the first place they’re looking,’ said a Federal Bureau of Investigation official speaking yesterday on condition of anonymity.” On March 29, Newsweek added:

“Did the Muslim fundamentalists accused of bombing New York ’s World Trade Center last month beat Serbian terrorists to the punch?  NEWSWEEK has learned that several weeks before the Feb. 26 blast, the FBI received credible intelligence reports that Serbian radicals based in Belgrade planned to plant a bomb in a New York City building.” Yet now that twelve years have passed and memories have dimmed, MPAC is trying to pass this off as evidence of Emerson’s unreliability. (Even so, if Emerson was as anti-Muslim as MPAC alleges, why would he have reported that the Serbs were under investigation rather than Muslims?)  

Similarly, MPAC shakes its head over Emerson’s saying that a bomb had likely brought down TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996 (not 1994, as MPAC has it). But here again, Emerson was reflecting an opinion widely held at the time. The New York Times headlined a July 19 story: “Investigators Suspect Explosive Device As Likeliest Cause For Crash Of Flight 800.” Ten days later, another Times headline read: “Plane Split in Sky, Officials Say, Suggesting Bomb.” Financial Times published an article on July 30 headed: “US Likely to Confirm Bomb Caused TWA Crash.”   

But the most egregious evidence of MPAC’s venomous bias is the MPAC report’s reliance on one John Sugg. Sugg is currently writing for that beacon of journalistic superstardom, Atlanta ’s Creative Loafing. But as a reporter in the late 1990s for the equally distinguished Weekly Planet of Tampa, Florida, Sugg — who has consistently defended Al Arian and other Islamic militants arrested for terrorism as innocent victims of a conspiracy by Emerson in manipulating the Justice Department and
FBI — for years carried on a vendetta against Emerson — to the extent that Emerson finally sued Sugg for defamation. MPAC claims that “Emerson voluntarily withdrew the defamation lawsuit in May 2003, after failing to produce any evidence that Sugg’s report was false.”

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