While the year was great and we had a lot of highs there were some pieces that didn’t get the attention that they truly deserved due to Loonwatch not being as well known at the time.

Here are a list of 10 pieces you may have missed but shouldn’t have, also take a look through our archives for any past articles:

Douglas Farah’s Delusional Delight

Douglas Farah

Doug, yet another so-called “investigative consultant” tries to link U.S. Muslim orgs to planet Zorbex, that global superpower operating in perfect coordination yet total secrecy to sneak in an evil empire.

M.Cherif Bassiouni Rips Fake Scholar Robert Spencer

Cherif Bassiouni

Robert Spencer, and his proxies such as Hugh Fitzgerald fail miserably trying to character assassinate M. Cherif Bassiouni, read them get ripped in the process.

Update: Robert Spencer Whines and Wimpers after being Exposed

Robert Spencer: Exposed

Update: Robert Spencer cries “bloody censorship” after he is exposed and the ALA canceled his near platform to spout anti-Muslimisms.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s Double Speak

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield

Rabbi Hirschfield seems like a good guy but on his blog he bizarrely criticizes Muslim objections to an anti-Muslim hate film he himself trashes, as “crying wolf.”

ADL Contradicts its Goals by Supporting Fascist

Abe Foxman’s support of Avigdor Lieberman is quite troubling for a number of reasons, most glaringly for its contradiction to the goals preached by the ADL.

Tawfik Hamid: The Shemp of the Three Stooges

Tawfik Hamid

Previously we wrote about the Three Stooges of Islamophobia: Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem but we forgot about Shemp — Tawfik Hamid.

Steven Emerson: “Wowser”

Steven Emerson likes to pass himself off as a gumshoe Investigative Journalist but his antics reveal that he is a poor imitation of Inspector Gadget.

Update: Freedumb of Speech Summit-Defenders of Delusion

The Freedumb of Speech Summit descended into a predictable Hate Summit, but were you expecting otherwise?

Spate of Islamophobic Gang Attacks on Elderly Muslims of London

Three year old girl, traumatized from watching her grandfather's brutal murder

A spate of racially motivated gang attacks against Muslims culminate in the death of a sixty-seven year old man, who was clubbed to death in front of his now traumatized granddaughter.

Fascist Leaves Daniel Pipes “Elated”

Avigdor Lieberman

Lieberman’s extreme world view and rhetoric has left observers around the world, including many Israelis, shocked and frightened. Not so, Daniel Pipes. Lieberman has him “elated.”

————————————————————————————————–

And here is a free bonus since Rabbi Hirschfield, while having a loonie moment, does not qualify as a loon in our books:

Robert Spencer: Teaming up with Euro-Supremacists Again

Robert Spencer, erstwhile ally of neo-Fascists, friend to advocates of genocide, and all around anti-Muslim is once again basking in the light of his own, made up self-importance.

This time it centers around his recent trip to Germany where he gave a speech at a rally in Berlin.

Inspector Gadget

Steven Emerson, a pillar of the Islamophobic movement, promotes himself as an “Investigative journalist” exposing terrorism and the supposed “fifth column activities of American Muslims” through his Orwellian organization, The Investigative Project.  He claims, just as his counterparts Douglas Farah and Joe Kaufman do, that all his work is done in defense of America and in order to safeguard the homeland.  Yet his claims are as mendacious and exaggerated as the other two.

He is simply the progenitor of some of the vilest, most imbecilic anti-Muslim hysteria on the inter-net and in America today. This is the case because more often than not he is so off the mark in his accusations and conclusions that it makes you wonder why anyone would take him seriously as a so-called “Investigative Journalist.”

His hunt to “expose” American Muslims is almost akin to watching an  Inspector Gadget cartoon because of its hilarity if it weren’t for the fact that at least Inspector Gadget was sincere and actually solved a case or two. Unfortunately, it looks like Emerson lacks the high tech gadgetry that was at the disposal of Inspector Gadget and that might show him the error of his ways or at the very least help him  get his foot out of his mouth.

Instead of using a magnifying glass to look for evidence, Emerson’s technique of choice is to make up the evidence as he goes along,  Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent notes:

Emerson has a long history of getting into hot water over his anti-Muslim rhetoric. In the 1998 nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, Emerson fed reporters with an informant who said Pakistan was set to strike India with a nuclear weapon. The media eventually found the informant to be unreliable – but not until international media had used Emerson’s source and intensified an international crisis.

In 1990, he was accused of plagiarism in his writings about Pan Am 103.

….

He sued a Florida paper after it published reports that he was supplying reporters with documents he said were from the FBI. The Florida Weekly Planet reported that the documents were frauds and Emerson sued. When he couldn’t substantiate his claims, he withdrew the lawsuit.

Emerson once claimed that an extremist Muslim group put out a hit on him and that the FBI offered to put him in a witness protection program. The FBI denied that claim.

In 1995, right after the Oklahoma City Bombing, Emerson was quoted on air stating that he believed the bombing showed “a Middle Eastern trait,” he came to this conclusion because according to him it was done “to inflict as many casualties as possible.” Wowser!

He went on to insinuate, with out providing any evidence, that Oklahoma was a hotbed of radicalism, “Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East.” Double wowser!

Of course, it was later proven that the real culprits behind the bombings were Timothy McVeigh and

Steven Emerson

a few other accomplices that were driven by a nationalistic white ideology and not by Muslims or Arabs. Emerson in his haste it seems did not consider the possibility that maybe something originating from other than the Middle East was responsible for the bombing, nor did he apologize for his gaffe.

This is par for the course with Steven Emerson and his motivation is quite plain as the Wall Street Journal stated in 1993, “Mr. Emerson’s prime role is to whitewash Israeli governments and revile their critics.” The Jerusalem Post has also asserted that Emerson has close ties to the Israeli equivalent of the CIA-the Mossad.

Does Emerson have an unconditional bias towards Israel and an incentive in portraying Arabs and Muslims as terrorists behind all evil? Sure seems like it!

Anyone who is critical of Israeli actions and brings to light that it might not be in American interests to put our unconditional backing behind every Israeli adventure gives Emerson a compulsive fit, and when anyone calls him out on it he returns to the smear job of casting those he disagrees with as Anti-Semites. Johnathan F. Sugg, formerly of the Tampa Bay Weekly Planet wrote for Alternet,

“He has been run out of many respectable newsrooms. His response was the smear job. When The Washington Post shunned him, he branded the paper pro-Hamas.’ When the Miami Herald strafed Emerson’s shoddy claims, he wrote the city’s Jewish leaders claiming the paper’s reporter was nothing short of racist.”

Jane Hunter in a piece for Extra! characterized Emerson’s journalism as “nimble in its treatment of facts, often credulous of intelligence sources, and almost invariably supportive of the Israeli government.”

Former Chief of Operations and Analysis at the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center Vince Cannistraro described Emerson as “dishonest” and “Joseph McCarthy-like” and said that, “word has got around on what he (Emerson) is, that he’s a paid polemicist, not a journalist.”

This is the modus operandi of our “Investigative Journalist,” who it seems is more of an Inspector Gadget wannabe just without all the hardware.  He is driven by a desire not to safe guard America from dangerous threats but to exaggerate them and sell his agenda of smearing American Muslims and Arabs through any means necessary. To that we can only say “Wowser!”

Douglas Farah

In a blog entry titled, “The MB Inroads Into the Obama Administration,” Douglas Farah, yet another so-called “investigative” consultant, sets out to link American Muslim organizations to planet Zorbex, that global superpower which is able to operate in perfect coordination yet secrecy toward “sneaking in” an evil empire in the United States — Zorbex is also known as the Muslim Brotherhood, or affectionately as MB.

Douglas Farah throws a few punches around at the usual American Muslim organizations, but hones his venom in this piece at Prof. John “the architect” Esposito, and Dalia “the insider” Mogahed.

Let’s start with Esposito:

Farah: “The architect is Dr. John Esposito, a long time defender of the MB and the head of the Saudi-financed Georgetown University Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service.”

Why is Douglas Farah threatened by the concept of Muslim-Christian Understanding?

Because it actually gets people talking to each other, rather than secluding from each other and retiring to wild speculation and demagoguery about one another. The latter is what the Douglas Farah’s, Daniel Pipes’, and Steven Emerson’s of the world desperately need in order to stay in business.

For most people, universities, especially well-established and credible top institutions like Georgetown University are a service to society. Not so to the conspiracy loons like Douglas Farah. He is willing to argue that Georgetown with all of its gargantuan bureaucracy and what that may include in checks and balances is but one sweeping front for the Muslim Brotherhood. In a similar vein, all of the national American Muslim organizations (Farah’s blog piece mentions CAIR, MPAC, and CSID by name) are but one sweeping secretive front for that same ominous superpower, that struggling Egyptian party, the Muslim Brotherhood.

But hey, Douglas Farah is no dummy. He is sure to provide proof for his arguments. You ready? Georgetown, presumably like those orgs, is….. “Saudi-financed!”

Who is he talking about? Well, Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Who is Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, that prince of darkness and anti-Americanism? Well, we’ll get to that in the last of three points that explain the major problems with Douglas Farah’s argument:

1. The much larger picture. Has he ever heard of philanthropy? That thing that tends to be a long and strong legacy in the United States. How does he think most US private institutions receive a good chunk of their assets? There are hundreds of examples of wealthy financiers of US academic institutions both American and foreign. Does he pin an agenda on each depending on where they were born or the faith they espouse? For example, does he look at a Jewish Hungarian philanthropist who donates to an Ivy league school and scream “Zionist agenda?” Not only does he not do so, but if others did, he would be blogging about anti-Semitism. Good, but then why does he engage in the reverse?

 

2. The slightly larger picture. Georgetown is Saudi-financed? As in Georgetown exclusively? How about the United States is Saudi-financed? Try on the order of $860 billion in Saudi investments to the U.S. economy. Now one may legitimately have an issue with that. It’s a good debate to have. But Douglas Farah is being hypocritical when he cherry picks Georgetown for criticism on that point.

 

3. The full picture. Much has been made about Prince Al Waleed bin Talal’s donations to Georgetown and American Muslim organizations. The donations are made out to be some sort of dubious evil secretive Wahhabi endeavor. But again, anyone familiar with reality can see through the bull. The conspiracy theorists happen to neglect a few small facts that may give an entirely different picture. Georgetown and these American Muslim organizations are in the same league with AOL, Apple Inc., Worldcom, Motorola, News Corporation Ltd, the Four Seasons hotel chain and the Plaza Hotel in New York, London’s Savoy Hotel, Monaco’s Monte Carlo Grand Hotel, Euro Disney SCA, Fairmont Hotels – and yes, President George H. W. Bush. Al-Waleed who is a major investor in all of these companies donated $500,000 to the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship Fund, established by Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, to honor the former President.Or how about the epitome of Western intelligensia: Harvard University. Al-Waleed donated $20 million to Harvard, one of its 25 largest donations. Al-Waleed donated $10 million to Cornell University to study complex genomic and cellular systems as they relate to medicine and biology by using mathematical models, physics and high-speed computing. Al-Waleed donated $20 million to the Louvre Museum in Paris, the World’s top temple of art, its largest gift ever.Now if Al-Waleed is part of an undercover Wahhabi front to establish a caliphate in the West, he is one dumb bastard. I mean that would be one heck of an expensive route with way too much irreversible contradictions on the way. Here’s a whopping $30 million in financing for “Western” halmarks like liberalism, art, and genomes — oh but then here’s a tiny fraction of that amount given to the evil Muslim organizations that will trump all of that – and some – with their impending anti-Western Caliphate. It’s fool proof. Ingenious! Nihohaha.

Next is Dalia Mogahed:

There is no need to even get into Doug’s off-point hate there. Hussein Ibish hit it on the head in a comment on the same blog:

OK, so let’s review, then, the case against Dalia Mogahed:

1. Born in Egypt
2. Worked for Gallup
3. Wrote a book with a Georgetown professor
4. Had a co-worker who used to work for MPAC
5. Used to work for a mosque in which one person lost a security clearance and another person has immigration issues
6. Father is associated with a different mosque, whose website links to American Muslim organizations
7. That mosque was headed by a guy who now has a job with one of those groups.

Egypt, Gallup, Georgetown, a former coworker, some guy’s immigration problems, a mosque’s website, some other guy’s new job. Wow. Case closed. She is definitely an operative of the Muslim Brotherhood. Another brilliant piece of reporting, Doug!

— Hussein Ibish Apr 14, 03:27 #

As you seem to not know, the MB is a web of relationships, including and particularly Georgetown and Esposito. Sorry that was lost on you.

— Douglas Farah Apr 14, 09:07 #

oooh. Doug got you there Hussein! How can the web be lost on you? How can anyone with a name like Hussein be trusted to get it right anyway…

The serious question though is, why does Douglas Farah, an investigative consultant (whatever that means) fail to “investigate” and disclose the full facts to his readers? Why does he do the sloppy cut-and-paste thing, giving a tiny portion of the facts, and then filling in the rest with conspiracy theories?

Because that is the modus operandi of the Loons. And that’s why there’s a loonwatch.

Like Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, Farah is not interested in uncovering the real terrorist threat, he is committed to a different agenda: delegitimizing credible and mainstream Muslims, under the guise of fighting terror while taking advantage of everyone else’s genuine concerns about real terror.

While these “investigative” loons are busy with their politicization and keeping others busy with them, real terrorists will slip by as they have in the past.