Irresponsible accusations

There’s an Internet pundit out there in the blogosphere whose name I will not utter.

From her perch, the world revolves around her. If she writes something one day, she imagines millions actually read it.

She imagines we read it at WND, even though I have expressly forbidden my staff to visit her site because of her repeated, reckless, irresponsible accusations of theft of her ideas and ramblings.

Last weekend, she apparently reported, contrary to widespread Internet rumors, that President Obama is not planning to bring Palestinian Gazans to the U.S. as part of the recent “emergency aid package.” Good for her. She got this one right.

Many days before she wrote this on her blog, however, I was in consultation with WND’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Aaron Klein, about reporting this story. I told him the rumor mill was rife with the misinformation and it was time to set the record straight – which he did first two days before she wrote anything on her blog, and then again in WND a day after her report, which I have still never seen because I must follow my own edict never to visit her site.

Nevertheless, even though Aaron Klein is on record revealing the truth about this story two days before her blog posting, she is insisting, in the most hateful, vile accusations imaginable (I know this only because third parties are sending me the material), that WND ripped off her report.

What I would like you to notice here is that no one at WND is accusing her of theft and chicanery, even though Klein’s report was broadcast 48 hours before hers. We don’t make reckless and irresponsible allegations like that. We give others the benefit of the doubt. We don’t assume everyone listens to Israel National Radio reports any more than this prima donna pundit should assume we read her tripe.

But this unnamed blogger didn’t stop there. She attempted to defame Klein by alleging that he “had to retract a story he made up, claiming that Fox News paid ransom to Palestinian terrorists for Fox News personnel’s release.”

This statement is a total fabrication. The article was never retracted! Actually we defended it! And it remains posted permanently in the WND archives for anyone to view – even an investigative sleuth like the blogger in question.

But even those lies were not sufficient for said blogger. She continued to target the Middle East’s most courageous reporter, Aaron Klein, who risks his life interviewing some of the most dangerous people in the world, by writing: “Muslims in Gaza he claims to have interviewed never heard of the guy.”

It must be easy hurling those kinds of libelous insults from the safe confines of her easy chair in the United States. However, Aaron Klein doesn’t use anonymous sources when he quotes senior terrorist leaders in Gaza and many of the most prominent Islamists in the world. He names names. He records many of his interviews. Some of those quoted in his news reports for WND and in his book, “Schmoozing With Terrorists,” have actually been interviewed by Klein on live national radio and television. Klein has ventured into the strongholds of some of the Mideast’s top jihadists, several times taking along with him top American radio hosts. The day before I wrote this, he conducted an on-record, exclusive interview with Hamas’ chief political adviser in Gaza.

Again, she doesn’t stop there. She claims Klein’s book was cribbed from Israeli news reports. Anyone who has read “Schmoozing With Terrorists” knows it is a first-person account of his frontline reporting and exclusive interviews with leading jihadists. It is work that has never been done before and will probably never be equaled in its fearlessness and gutsy determination. In fact, nothing in the book comes from second-hand media reports – Israeli or otherwise.

In a subsequent e-mail to Klein, the fearless blogger admitted she had never even read his book.

Now, why do I write an entire column about the reckless, irresponsible ravings of an unnamed blogger?

I do so because I will not give her what she most craves – attention and visibility. She works in relative obscurity, and I will not lift a finger to change that.

But because there are a few people who read her blog and have believed her scurrilous and scandalous accusations about me, Klein and WND, I felt it was important to set the record straight.

There’s a big difference between blogging safely from one’s home in the United States and doing old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground, investigative reporting on the frontlines of the Middle East. The unnamed blogger does the former. Aaron Klein does the latter.

By the way, Aaron Klein and WND are hardly the only targets of this blogger’s venomous diatribes. Many others in the media have felt the sting of her baseless tirades. But the bizarre behavior she exhibits in conjunction with her periodic public hissy fits is perhaps even more disturbing.

They are often accompanied by obscenity-laced e-mails and, in one case, repeated calls, after midnight, to the cell phones of WND representatives and voicemails full of unrepeatable expletives.

Beware of people making claims like this. Anyone can say anything on the Internet – and that’s the way it should be. But that doesn’t mean there is even a shred of truth associated with what people say. Use discernment. Be wise. There are many out there bearing false witness against truly heroic journalists and commentators just because they can.

 

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