In his Sept. 21 WorldNetDaily column, Joseph Farah again responds to criticism in his usual thin-skinned way: lots of name-calling refusing to address the actual criticism.
This time, the target is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who aired a segment centered on WND’s promotion of a self-proclaimed counterterrorism expert who is apparently little more than a Muslim-basher. Farah starts off your basic ad hominem attack, declaring that only watches MSNBC “when it focuses on me” because the alternative is to “suffer through the tedium and infuriation of actually watching a cable network at which the inmates are quite literally running the asylum.” He went on to claim that MSNBC “has more in common with the old Soviet-era, official state press organs Izvestia or Pravda than what we once knew, a generation ago, as American-style, professional journalism. He then claimed that “Maddow has a big mouth but very little courage” because she didn’t invite him on her show to respond in person. (This from the operator of a website that regularly publishes only one side of a story.)
As he did last week when he bashed Michael Medved for saying mean things about him, Farah uses no direct quotes of what Maddow said, speaking only in generalities. Farah claimed that the author of the article on the counterterrorism expert Maddow featured, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman, “defam[ed] a very serious and highly credentialed counter-terrorism expert by the name of William Gawthrop – turning him unfairly into a bigoted cartoon character for his efforts to protect America from future terrorist attacks. There’s no scandal in Gawthrop’s work or his opinions.”
Farah is being disingenuous, since he never bothers to explain the source of the controversy over Gawthrop. As Ackerman wrote (in an article Farah failed to link to), Gawthrop was the author of several tracts used in FBI counterterrorism training baselessly claiming that, among other things, the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent” and that a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
Then, as you’d expect, Farah bashes Ackerman:
The focus, rather, should be on the stone-thrower – Ackerman. He should have been fired from Wired a long time ago – or, at the very least, disqualified from covering politics for the magazine. Why? He’s most famous not for anything he has ever published, but for things he wrote that he never intended to be published – namely his candid and inflammatory scribblings on the notorious JournoList.
At no point does Farah prove anything Ackerman wrote to be wrong. It’s just another rant by a man too thin-skinned to take criticism.