Emerson Terror-Smears Cynthia McKinney

Terror-monger Steve Emerson is at it again. This time he has set his sights on smearing one of the most honorable members of Congress, Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia Democrat. The venue for his latest assault was an October 3 story in The Hill magazine by Alexander Bolton, which tried to paint McKinney as a fundraiser for terrorists.

Bolton made a big deal out of the fact that McKinney was slated to give a talk at an October fundraising event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of those relatively innocuous Washington NGOs that seeks to advance a more humane view of Muslims in the United States. Lately CAIR has been doing its best to dampen the raging anti-Islamic sentiment in the US. These days that makes you a coddler of terrorists. And in the wake of the Ashcroft Anti-Terrorism bill, anyone who helps raise money for groups that nurture (however figuratively) terrorists is considered part of the conspiracy. The implication of Bolton's piece is that Cynthia McKinney may be in treacherous breach of the Patriot Act.

Bolton turns to Emerson in an effort to make CAIR appear to be nothing more than a front group for suicide bombers. The Emersonian smear technique is infinitely elastic, using the flimsiest connections to stretch around the necks of people and organizations. In this instance, Emerson tries to tie CAIR to the Palestinian revolutionary group Hamas via a Babushka doll of nestled interlocks and organizations, starting with the Islamic Association of Palestine and extending to the United Association for Studies of Research or UASR. Emerson ominously describes UASR as "the political command of Hamas in the United States."

As evidence of this link, Emerson points his finger at Mohammed Nimer, currently CAIR's director of research, who once worked for UASR nearly a decade ago, and Anisa Abdel Fattah, UASR's public affairs director who also sits on CAIR's board. These two are somehow suspect because a founding member of UASR, Dr. Mousa Abu Marzook, later became the head of Hamas' political bureau in Jordan after leaving UASR.

As usual, Emerson's charges have all the accuracy of one of those Navy smart bombs that have destroyed a block of apartments in downtown Kabul as the result of "target processing error." Remember it was Emerson who rushed to CNN studios only moments after the Oklahoma City bombings to pronounce his expert opinion that the bombing was certainly the work of Arab terrorists.

But this time even Emerson is forced to throw in a subtle caveat, noting that none of the groups are "officially linked." But that's okay, he says, because "their mutual origins show they were born of the same parent. They were ideologically tethered at birth and continue to be ideologically tethered. [To say they are not connected] is like saying families sprung from a Mafia family and sprout off into independence are no longer connected to the Mafia." Someone should send Emerson's criminal-profiling-by-genealogy to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose father was a Mafia street boss.

The fact that Steve Emerson is still considered an expert on terrorism is an amazing feat that must owe everything to his unyielding allegiance to Israel. After all, he's rarely been right about anything. For example, Emerson blamed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing on "Yugoslavians." He charged that a "bomb" brought down TWA Flight 800. Even the New York Times found his book The Terrorist to be saturated with "factual errors" and corroded with "a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias." The Jerusalem Post says that Emerson has often served as a conduit for Israeli intelligence.

McKinney is in some ways an odd target. After all, she voted for the war resolution and has condemned bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. She tells us that the smears on her and CAIR are part of a campaign of "specious innuendo and fear-mongering."

"We mustn't repeat the grave mistakes of unfairly victimizing an entire religious or ethnic community, as was the case when we persecuted Japanese-Americans during World War II," says McKinney, "It is unfair to make blanket statements about these citizens and the organizations that lead their struggle for equality in the United States. That's the kind of work that CAIR is doing and that's why I was proud to speak at their fundraiser."