Bjørn Stærk presents a pair of anecdotes that illustrate the virulence and pro-terrorist bias of certain segments of the European Left.
The first is “fake but accurate” raised to a more brazen level than even Mary Mapes dared. Several months ago a left-wing blogger posted what looked like a reprint of a real news story quoting an American “senior administration official’s” supposed statement that the U.S. government funds the European Security Advocacy Group, which runs anti-terrorism newspaper and television ads in Europe. Leftists had been claiming as much from the beginning. Bjørn immediately suspected that this convenient confirmation was untrue and confronted the blogger, who admitted that he had made the item up. He refused, however, to withdraw or disavow it, declaring, “If people are mislead [sic] by this it’s fine with me. Maybe they will ask their government who pays for these aids [sic]. That should be helpful to find out who has the moral responsibility for the disinformation terror campaign.”
There the matter rested for a while, but –
. . . the story’s been sitting there ever since, waiting for someone to fall for it. That happened early this month, when it began showing up in Norwegian left-wingcircles. . . .
On March 2, the story was reprinted by Hans Olav Fekjær on a Norwegian anti-NATO mailing list. From there, it made it to indymedia.no, and was then repeated by the Norwegian blogger Norvegia, who went on to spread it in the comment section on Dagbladet’s blog. [N.B.: Dagbladet is a leading Norwegian newspaper.]
I quickly replied on Indymedia and Dagbladet, pointing out that this was a deliberate fake story. I also sent a mail about it to Norvegia (who curiously doesn’t allow open comments in his blog). That was a week ago. Norvegia never replied to my mail, and never corrected his story, where he still claims that ESAG is financed by the US government. He did, however, reply to me on indymedia:
“Bjørn Stærk is of course entirely right; it is probably no more than 99.9% likely that the DoD (the Pentagon) is behind the financing of ESAG.”
So again: fake but accurate. Like Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, Norvegia believes that his own unproven suspicions justify making up an entire news story.
What is significant here is not merely that leftists feel no compunction about inventing and spreading “news” but that their target is an innocuous advertising campaign whose messages are “What Europe needs is a counter-terrorist response that’s thoughtful, balanced but appropriate,” and “Europe - all of Europe - must cooperate in deliberate, thoughtful but forceful measures against terrorism”, with the tag line, “There’s no future in terrorism”. It says a lot that, in some circles on the Left, such sentiments are not merely controversial but so outrageous that fighting them with lies is acceptable conduct.
The second incident involves not mere bloggers but a mainstream newspaper. Before the invasion of Iraq, Norway lent several laser-guidance systems to American forces in Kuwait. Last October, Norwegian media reported this assistance, and opposition politicians raised an outcry. An article in Dagsavisen reinforced the critics with quotes from “leading experts on terrorism” purportedly indicating that “The threat of terrorism against Norwegian targets has increased because of the weapons lending to the American forces”.
Bjørn talked to the persons quoted in the article and discovered that the reporters had (a) engaged in blatant shopping for statements that supported their preconceived opinion and (b) when that wasn’t sufficient, distorted what they were told. For example,
The most disturbing quote in the article is attributed to Jan Oskar Engene at the University of Bergen, another researcher with genuine expertise on terrorism:
“It could be enough to strike against something with a symbolic or real connection with Norway. An attack against the Norwegian Church Abroad would for instance be a heavy blow against the crusaders.”
In the context of the article, Engene seems to be talking about what form a revenge attack for the weapons lending may take, but he tells me that he does not at all agree with the thesis of the article, and that he said this only in reply to a direct question which he saw as unrelated to the weapons lending. He remembers his own surprise at reading the article, and discovering what he had supposedly agreed with.
In all, of the five sources Dagsavisen quotes in the article, only one – Marcus Buck – actually says what the headline affirms, that the “weapons lending” has placed Norway in greater danger of a terrorist attack. He's the only source explicitly referred to as a “terrorism expert”, and also the only source not in any way qualified for that label.
So what about the “leading terrorism experts” who have “concluded” that the terror danger against Norway has increased? They don’t exist. Jon Martin Larsen and Nilas Johnsen made them up. Norway’s actual leading experts on terrorism don’t believe this lending matters much at all. But casual readers have no way of knowing that. The article is deliberately designed to fool them. I have only one name for this: corrupt journalism.
Quite unexpectedly, Dagbladet ran an article about these criticisms. In it, the reporters were given a chance to defend their work; their effort was remarkably feeble, essentially a repetition of the out-of-context quotations that their sources had repudiated.
As with the blogging fabrication, we see unapologetic willingness to resort to falsehoods to attack even modest anti-terrorist actions, in this case one ally’s routine, small-scale aid to another. One can’t, of course, generalize from two incidents to Europe, or the European Left, as a whole, but it is important to be aware that people like these, who can legitimately be labeled fifth columnists, exist and influence opinion in the rest of the world.
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