Just promulgated the biggest, most harmful fake news conspiracy theory in a generation.
What will their punishment be?
Leader Of New Zealand Mosque Blames Jews For Christchurch Massacre
On Saturday, at a rally for the victims of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where 50 people were murdered at a mosque, a well-known mosque leader accused Jews of being responsible for the massacre.
At the rally in Auckland’s Aotea Square, Ahmed Bhamji, chairman of the Mount Roskill Masjid E Umar, which is associated with The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, stated of the shooter who targeted the victims, “”I really want to say one thing today. Do you think this guy was alone? … I want to ask you, where did he get the funding from? I will not mince words. I stand here and I say I have very, very strong suspicion that there is some group behind him and I am not afraid to say I feel that Mossad is behind this.”
An onlooker shouted, “It’s the truth! Israel is behind this. That’s right!”
According to Newshub, Bhamji also said the gunman was funded by “Zionist business.”
Outrage erupted from the local Jewish community. New Zealand Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses told Newshub, “These conspiracy theories are dangerous lies. They put the Jewish community at risk, at a time of heightened security concerns. Conspiracy theories – particularly the idea that Jews (whether through the Jewish state or otherwise) are a malevolent controlling force in the world — are at the very core of anti-Semitism.”
The event was organized by a group calling itself Love Aotearoa Hate Racism; its co-founder Joe Carolan protested to Newshub spoke that Bhamji was only one of 30 speakers and different perspectives were offered at the rally. He told Newshub he personally did not believe that Jews were behind the massacre.
Moses said that was no excuse for not publicly denouncing Bhamji’s vitriol, asserting, “It is unfortunate that they did not appear to put its anti-racism message into practice, by challenging or condemning the racism in their midst. We must call out hateful dehumanizing language, whatever the source, target and circumstances, and even when it is not politically expedient to do so.”
When he was queried by Newshub, Bhamji doubled down on his rhetoric and claimed he was being targeted, saying, “I made a statement, a lot of other people made statements,” adding that there should be an investigation of how the gunman financed his action, snapping, “Mossad is up to all these things. When I talk about Mossad, why should the Jews be upset about it? Give me an answer?”
The first mainstream New Zealand news agency to suggest that Israel was connected to the Christchurch massacre was Stuff irresponsibly sharing an Associated Press article with a provocative headline “Christchurch mosque attacks: Alleged gunman Brenton Tarrant visited Israel in 2016.” It is in paragraph six that we learn “Also in late 2016, Tarrant visited Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, where he stopped by historic battle sites, before travelling in Western Europe in 2017.” Yet the headline would suggest Israel is somehow special and there is comment from unnamed “Israeli officials” but no other nation’s officials are sought for comment.
(BLACK PRIVILEGE) – Criminal charges dropped in case against Jussie Smollett, attorneys say
Chicago prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against ‘Empire’ star and alleged hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett. The actor had been indicted on 16 felony counts for faking a ‘racist and homophobic’ attack on himself.
Smollett claimed in January that two masked men wearing red hats yelled racial slurs at him, put a noose around his neck, poured bleach on his skin and shouted “This is MAGA country” – a reference to President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ catchphrase. Smollett’s case began to unravel, however, after it emerged that the actor allegedly paid two Nigerian brothers to stage the attack.
Smollett’s initial story captivated outrage-hungry politicians and media figures. 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) called the supposed attack a “modern day lynching,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) called it an “act of hatred and bigotry,” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) called it “an affront to our humanity.”
All of these Democrat leaders deleted their tweets when Smollett himself was arrested and charged in February.
After the charges against him were dropped on Tuesday, Smollett’s attorneys said that their client “was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgement.”
Prosecutors dropped the case after “reviewing all of the facts and circumstances,” and taking into account Smollett’s volunteer service in the community. His lawyers, without a trace of irony, called the case “a reminder that there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion.”
The prosecutors’ decision shocked conservatives, some of whom viewed Smollett’s easy ride as a form of “leftist privilege,” and District Attorney Kimberly Foxx’s membership of the Democratic party as instrumental in her decision to let Smollett off the hook.
CNN Zucker: No Regrets… (THE MEDIA IS THE ENEMY)
By Joshua Caplan
CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is pushing back against critics accusing the news network of being one of the chief propagators of a debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller cleared the president’s 2016 campaign of alleged collusion with the Kremlin.
In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s Trump-Russia coverage and suggested it was entirely appropriate to give near around-the-clock-coverage due to the story’s magnitude. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” the CNN chief wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”
According to a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings written by the Justice Department, investigators found no evidence President Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the election.
Zucker neglected to mention CNN’s steady stream of conspiracy-theory punditry and several stories which proved demonstrably false.
Last December, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. access to information nearly two weeks prior to their public release. However, the network failed to verify the email’s date — September 14th, 2016 — by which time the emails had already been released. In June, CNN reported former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated for meeting with a Russian banker ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Scaramucci denied the claim and CNN eventually apologized for its inaccurate report. CNN Executive editor Lex Haris, editor Eric Lichtblau, and journalist Thomas Frank resigned in shame over the story.
Further, CNN claimed in July that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, was prepared to tell special counsel investigators that the president possesses advanced knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting between his son, Donald Trump Jr. and a Russia lawyer, and others. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, later told CNN had “mixed up” its facts and denied claims that Cohen had any such knowledge about the meeting.
Over the course of the Mueller probe, CNN gave a platform to Trump-Russia collusion pushers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Washington Post opinion writer Max Boot. For example, appearing February 19th on CNN’s State of the Union, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that there is “compelling” evidence in “plain sight” of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence. Now, there’s a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt,” Schiff told host Dana Bash.
In 2017, an undercover investigator for Project Veritas filmed CNN Supervising Producer John Bonifield saying that the Russia conspiracy theory was “mostly bullshit” and the network was promoting it so heavily — without real evidence — “because it’s ratings.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘RUSSIAN COLLUSION’
Published on Mar 25, 2019
Who’s the ‘conspiracy theorist’ now?
SHAME OF THE NATION: 533,074 articles have been published about Russia and Trump… Networks Gave Whopping 2,284 Minutes to Probe… CNN STILL sitting outside Mueller’s office…
By Rich Noyes | March 25, 2019
The amount of time and energy that the media elite — cable news, big newspapers, etc. — have spent talking and writing about the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is incalculable, but here’s one calculable slice: From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (the last night before special counsel Robert Mueller sent his report to the Attorney General), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage, most of it (1,909 minutes) following Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017.
That’s an average of roughly three minutes a night, every night, for an astonishing 791 days — a level of coverage normally associated only with a major war or a presidential election. In fact, TV reporters devoted more airtime to the Russia investigation than any of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives — immigration, tax reform, trade, North Korea, ISIS, the economy, veterans’ affairs, the opioid epidemic, to name but a few. Since his presidency began, nearly one-fifth (18.8%) of all of Trump’s evening news coverage has been about this one investigation.
The networks’ fixation on scandal over substance is one reason their coverage of the President has been so preposterously lopsided. From January 1 through March 21 of this year, the spin of Trump coverage on the evening newscasts has been 92% negative vs. just eight percent positive — even worse than the 90% negative coverage we calculated in 2017 and 2018.
[To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about the President or his administration from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.]
For those who spend all of their time on their phones or glued to 24-hour cable news, note that these shows still matter: despite today’s fractured media environment, the Big Three evening newscasts still have a larger audience than either their morning show counterparts or even the biggest cable news shows — a combined 24 million people, according to ratings compiled the week of February 25.
Back on March 10, two weeks before the Mueller report was delivered, ABC’s Terry Moran publicly warned that there would be “a reckoning for the media” if there report failed to deliver evidence to validate journalists’ years-long suspicion that the “current President of the United States assist[ed] the Kremlin in an attack on our democracy.” According to the summary delivered Sunday afternoon, “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Even before that conclusion was made public, anti-Trump journalist Matt Taibbi argued that the “news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”
As much as any of their hyperbolic spin, the massive onslaught of coverage during the past two years starkly reveals the media’s mindset. Now that the investigation they relentlessly touted has ended with an outcome favorable to the President they despise, it does seem a good time for that “reckoning.”
It Was All A Fraud: ‘No More Indictments’ Coming From Mueller Probe, Multiple Outlets Report
By Chris Menahan
Fox News, ABC News, CNN and others are reporting Department of Justice sources told them there will be “no more indictments” coming from Robert Mueller‘s Russia probe.
The lying media is not taking the news well:
Tucker Carlson had an excellent rundown of this colossal fraud:
For the record, I said this was a fraud and an attempted deep state coup on day one.
It couldn’t have been more obvious. I remember back in 2016 watching hacks on CNN cite Trump publicly telling Russia to try and release Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing” as though that was evidence enough.
They never had anything, but that doesn’t mean they can’t just make “crimes” up out of thin air.
Just a few months ago, former FBI director James Comey went on MSNBC and laughed about “getting away with” entrapping Michael Flynn:
Look at what they’re doing to Roger Stone and what they did to George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Cohen.
The main question I have is whether Mueller chose not to indict Trump simply because he has fallen in line with the establishment and scrapped the whole “America First” agenda he ran on. There’s no reason to indict him if he no longer poses a threat to the establishment.
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