Noel Sheppard declares in a Sept. 11 NewsBusters post that that he can’t understand why a writer at Foreign Policy magazine would use Newt Gingrich’s name in the same sentence as wannabe Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones as examples of the “Talibanization” of America:
So, as far as this author is concerned, the highly-esteemed former Speaker of the House is the same as a nutty Pastor in Florida that up until a few weeks ago almost nobody in America ever heard of.
Sheppard seems curiously incurious as to why the writer would make such a comparison. Why, it certainly couldn’t be Gingrich’s statement that “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Or his likening of the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero to the Nazis “a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington” and “the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.” And it certainly couldn’t be Gingrich’s statement that President Obama is engaging in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”
Why, as far as Sheppard is concerned, those are incredibly statesmanlike words that only a “highly-esteemed former Speaker of the House” could make.
Sheppard engages in fantasies elsewhere in the post, asserting that “this whole idea of Islamophobia is a fiction created by America’s press that’s been negligently presented as a mainstream fear rather than a fringe sentiment in a dishonest attempt to change the public’s view of the Ground Zero mosque.” His evidence for this is a previous post he wrote making the same claim without any evidence.
That’s right — his evidence that there’s no Islamophobia is that he said it before, so it must be true. Sad, isn’t it?