Category Archives: Ground Zero Mosque

Double Standards

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Check out Laura Trevelyan’s hard hitting investigation about Ground Zero Mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal.

Sorry, did I say “hard hitting investigation”? I meant “credulous, predictable piece of propaganda”.

Unsurprisingly Trevelyan neglects to mention this recent news:

Sharif El-Gamal, who runs the real estate firm Soho Properties and is heading the project two blocks from Ground Zero, was slapped with eviction proceedings last month after tallying up $39,000 in back rent, a Manhattan Housing Court filing shows…
It’s not the first time El-Gamal’s company has fallen behind in rent.
Royal Crospin sued Soho Properties last year for nearly $89,000 in back rent. El-Gamal’s firm paid $56,000 to settle.

How unlike Katie Connolly’s profile of Christine O’Donnell which included these nudge-nudge, passive aggressive nuggets of information:

In 2008 she defaulted on her mortgage and in 2010 the US government filed a claim stating that she owed more than $10,000 (£6,430) in back taxes and penalties. She has said this was a mistake, and a computer error…
Accusations that she inappropriately used campaign funds – to pay her rent, for example – have also surfaced.

The GZM developer gets the full sympathetic spin. The Tea Party “witch” gets the full load dumped on her.

And while I’m on the subject, does anybody recall the BBC covering this story in July?

Election watchdogs have directed Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign to pay the U.S. Treasury more than $219,000 to resolve issues caused by sloppy bookkeeping and accepting excessive contributions, including a discounted flight on a private jet.

The audit was released Friday by the Federal Election Commission.

It determined that the Biden campaign accepted an improper corporate contribution in the form of a round-trip flight between New Hampshire and Iowa in June 2007 for three people. The Biden campaign paid GEH Air Transportation $7,911 for the first-class airfare, but regulators say the campaign should have paid the charter rate of $34,800.

The FEC also found that the Biden campaign could not document repaying at least $106,000 in donations that were over the limit, and the campaign was ordered to pay the U.S. Treasury more than $85,000 for stale-dated checks.

The Biden campaign also failed to disclose more than $3.7 million in payments and roughly $870,000 in debts.

A bit more substantial than O’Donnell’s $10,000, and yet I can’t seem to find it mentioned on the BBC website. They did find space for this Biden story in the same month, though. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that Katty Kay’s good friend and co-author Claire Shipman is the wife of the Vice President’s chief spin doctor.

Update 19:45. Here’s Michelle Malkin on the double standards over O’Donnell’s financial problems.

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Latest BBC Spin on Obama & the Mosque

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The concluding, take-this-away-as-your-final-thought, paragraphs of a BBC article on the reaction to Obama’s support for the Ground Zero mosque:

“It was a bold decision – Obama could have stayed out of what is ostensibly a local matter,” wrote polling analyst Nate Silver on the political website FiveThirtyEight.com.
“But a careful evaluation of the polls reveals it to be less politically risky than it might at first appear.”

That would be the same Nate Silver who admitted recently his participation in Journolist, the controversial exclusive email list for Democrat-supporting hacks:

Almost always, I made exactly the points in these discussions that I made on FiveThirtyEight. Sometimes, I used the phrasing “we” when participating in these discussions, which I would not ordinarily use on the blog. I’ve disclosed from the first day of FiveThirtyEight’s existence that I’m usually a Democratic voter, and Journolist’s membership consisted of mostly Democrats, so this seemed fairly natural.

The anonymous BBC journalist’s description of a “polling analyst” from a “political website” doesn’t really do justice, does it? One of the new intake, perhaps, or just an old BBC hand? Same difference either way, I guess.

Hat tips to commenters David Preiser and Craig, the latter adding this:

That article’s use of polling evidence leaves a lot to be desired too:  
 
“While polling suggests a majority of Americans oppose plans to build the mosque, a Fox News poll released on Friday suggested 61% supported the developer’s right to build the mosque.”  
 
That poll comes in two parts, and the second part (the one the BBC quotes) needs to be seen in context:  
 
36. A group of Muslims plans to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center a few blocks from the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. Do you think it is appropriate to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero, or do you think it would be wrong to do so?  
      30% Appropriate  
      64% Wrong  
 
37. Regardless of whether you think it is appropriate to build a mosque near ground zero, do you think the Muslim group has the right to build a mosque there, or don’t they have that right?  
      61% Yes, they have the right  
      34% No, they don’t have the right  
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/081310_MosquePoll.pdf

All in all, quite a tendentious piece of Obama back-covering. Still, what’s new?

Update 20.00. I think we have our answer as to which BBC journalist is trying hard to spin this story in Obama’s favour – former Newsweek political correspondent (and Twitter follower of Nate Silver) Katie Connolly.

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