[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
In the weeks after the horrifying Islamic terrorist attacks of Oct 7, FrontPage Magazine provided compelling commentary, analysis and investigative journalism. We mourned with the people of Israel and the American victims of the attacks, and we maintained our commitment to telling the unflinching truth about the causes and origins of the crisis the way few other magazines would.
After 9/11, David Horowitz led the way in calling Islamic terrorism what it was and taking the fight to college campuses. FrontPage Magazine featured the work of early truthtellers about Islamic terrorism like Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Jamie Glazov, Frank Gaffney, Bosch Fawstin, Christine Douglass-Williams, Philip Haney, and many others. And we still do.
Leftist organizations couldn’t disprove us, so instead they tried to cancel us. We were smeared as “Islamophobes” and a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the media.
But never before had we been targeted and smeared by an arm of the government.
That changed after Oct 7.
Last year, the Voice of America ran an article headlined, “Anti-Muslim hate groups in US surge back into spotlight”. The Freedom Center was falsely described as one of those “hate groups”.
The VOA accused the David Horowitz Freedom Center of being a “leading anti-Muslim group” and along with Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch of being part of a “well-funded, close-knit anti-Muslim industry”.
Its evidence for this smear were two of our articles about Oct 7, one from Front Page Magazine and one reprinted on Jihad Watch, “Savages” and “It’s Islam, Stupid”: both written by me.
The VOA article was written by Masood Farivar, an Afghan immigrant whose autobiography ‘Confessions of a Mullah Warrior’ depicts him as “coming of age in a madrassa in Pakistan” before “he returned home to join the jihad, fighting beside not only the Afghan mujahideen but also Arab and Pakistani volunteers.”
In his memoir, Farivar described having viewed the Taliban as a “necessary evil”, called American soldiers in Afghanistan an “occupation force” and had joined the Hezb-i Islami party which fought alongside Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. An arm of the U.S. government had decided to put him in charge of deciding which Americans were “anti-Muslim hate groups”.
Farivar and the VOA could take no issue with any of the facts presented in “It’s Islam, Stupid” which listed horrifying atrocities going back to the days of Mohammed and the Islamic terror attacks that, like Oct 7, took place on Christian, Jewish and Hindu holidays. It could not disprove the evidence showing that Hamas saw Oct 7 as a religious war. So it called us bigots for telling the truth about the bigotry of the Islamic mass murderers in Israel, India, Europe and Africa.
We’ve been libeled as bigots before, but this was different because this time our government was doing it, amplifying smears from the Southern Poverty Law Center that had been previously used to defund and debank us, and forced us to spend heavily on security to protect ourselves.
Smears by an arm of the government threatened Americans with censorship and violence.
The Voice of America looks like any other media site, but it operates under the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Originating from anti-Nazi messages broadcast during WWII, the VOA encouraged Soviet dissidents living under Communism (my mother was among those who tried to illegally catch its broadcasts) and offering hope to millions living under tyranny in Latin America, Communist China and around the world. But even then the VOA’s coverage of domestic issues in the United States was taking on an increasingly partisan slant. The VOA charter signed off on by Eisenhower and Ford was supposed to fix this problem, yet actually made it worse by emphasizing the need for multidimensional coverage of the United States.
Obama toppled the final firewall restricting the VOA from engaging in domestic propaganda by using the National Defense Authorization Act to allow the government arm to push domestic content. And at that point the VOA became a taxpayer-funded government media agency aimed at pushing leftist agendas. That is how we came to be smeared by an arm of the government.
The assault on the David Horowitz Freedom Center was a violation of the VOA charter that its news will be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive”, that it “will represent America, not any single segment of American society” and present “balanced” and “comprehensive” coverage.
The Voice of America did not reach out to us for comment before slurring us as a “hate group”, and its libelous claim appeared to be based on nothing more than the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of our organization as a “hate group” even though the SPLC’s own leadership fell due to a racism scandal, media stories demonstrated that the SPLC’s ‘hate maps’ were often baseless and the SPLC’s ‘Islamophobia’ lists came from Islamists.
When it came to smearing us as ‘Islamophobes’ and ‘hate groups’, the SPLC’s work has been flagrantly dishonest in ways that go beyond media bias and into the realm of shameless fraud.
The Southern Poverty Law Center had previously listed my single-author blog as a ‘hate group’ along with a sign outside a Pennsylvania bar on K-Mart Plaza. The SPLC not only couldn’t define “hate”, but it couldn’t even define “group” or tell a bar sign from an organization.
Freedom Center Investigates previously demonstrated the SPLC’s fraudulent faking of an ‘Islamophobia crisis’, falsely claiming that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016” inflated the numbers by counting different chapters separately. A year later, the SPLC was forced to pay out millions when, under the influence of Islamists, it listed a Muslim as an “anti-Muslim extremist”. A Politico story described how the SPLC put a town on its ‘hate map’ over a ‘racist book club’ that never actually met there and another town on the list over a KKK chapter that never actually existed. The SPLC had a history of such malicious lies.
Despite this publicly available knowledge, yet the VOA took the SPLC’s word for its smear.
Our experiences with Voice of America show why major changes need to come to the organization. What was once a means of conveying America’s message to the world has become a platform for an ex-Islamist Jihadist to smear Americans fighting against Islamic terror.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
President Trump’s appointments of Brent Bozell to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media and Kari Lake to serve as the director of Voice of America is a promising start. But there is a lot of work to be done before the VOA returns to its founding mission of promoting American interests.
President John F. Kennedy had told Voice of America staffers that their mission was to “paint us ‘with all our blemishes and warts,’ all those things about us that may not be immediately attractive.” Taxpayers should not be paying to have an arm of the government telling the rest of the world that America is a terrible place. And certainly not sending that message to Americans.
No American patriot should ever have to fear being smeared by a government media agency.
The VOA should cease all operations that are aimed at Americans or that depict America negatively. It should certainly not be in the business of making partisan attacks on Americans.
The Voice of America should be America’s voice, not that of Islamists or the anti-American Left.