17 February 2007

American muslims don't like disrespecting Osama bin Laden

Despite the claim that Osama bin Laden isn’t a real muslim, when an Imam in Tulsa, OK, said so publically, he was booted out of his mosque and condemned by many other muslims. There is no evidence of support for his position in the ummah.

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Rotten through and through

[source, source]

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has released a pair of bombshell reports on U.S. government broadcasting to Iran, writing to President George W. Bush that the broadcasts “undermine U.S. policy on Iran, often even supporting the propaganda of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

[…]

But the government’s interagency Iran Steering Group found in a report released by Coburn that neither network has been effective at representing the views of the U.S. government, a mission defined in VOA’s charter, let alone at promoting democracy.

[…]

The report found that Radio Farda, whose mission is to be a “surrogate radio” similar to the Radio Free Europe broadcasts to Poland during the Solidarity movement, “rarely takes a stance that could risk antagonizing the Islamic Republic.”

The radio’s “normal coverage of views inside Iran seems to vary between sympathetic and neutral with respect to the regime,” the report added. Before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over as Iran’s president in August 2005, Radio Farda was known derisively inside Iran as “Radio Khatami,” after Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, the much-touted “moderate” Mohammad Khatami.

Rather than present original reporting from sources inside Iran, “the majority of the news read on Radio Farda is actually from the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), the official news agency of the Iranian regime,” the report states. “Residents of Iran do not need to turn to Radio Farda to receive IRNA news. This is probably one reason why Iranians do not turn to Radio Farda as a source of fresh news.”

The situation at the Voice of America, which is seeking to expand into a 24/7 television network, is arguably worse.

VOA’s Persian service rarely invites U.S. government officials to debate or even explain U.S. policy. But it has given ample air-time to top Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, and to anti-American advocates, the report found.

Why is it that we no longer seem able to find people to work in organizations like this who don’t have the moral fortitude to prefer their own country to hostile regimes? On the other hand, one does have to note that it was people very high up in the Bush Adminstration who decided to not confront the mullahs by providing evidence of their involvement in Iraq, and can’t remember official policy about Hamas.

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