Big time!

Ooh! We got mentioned in The New York Times.

[At LGF, before the Great Switcheroo - ed.] Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”

It also emerges from the article that Charles is engaged to be married. Mazel tov!

And thanks to ChenZhen for the heads-up. (although actually, I was just about to post that article independently when I saw CZ's comment. Not that it really matters.)

There's no link to LGF Watch within the article, but just in case any NYT readers have been curious enough to seek us out: We've been on a, shall we say, somewhat lax posting schedule for the past year or so, mostly because Charles' Great Switcheroo has obviated much of our compulsion to keep an eagle eye on his shenanigans. Most of the anti-Charles action these days is, as you might expect, taking place in the far-right, ultra-right, ultra-far-right, and utterly-completely-batshit-bonkers segments of the blogosphere.

So -- if there are any first-time visitors here -- thanks for coming by, and feel free to browse our extensive archives for exhaustive documentation of just what nasty, hateful, warmongering reptiles CJ and his saurian horde used to be.

Video Killed The Blogging Star

Could this be the most hypocritical piece of crap ever recorded and put out on the internet?

What next?

Perhaps a chat with Debbie Schlussel discussing bigotry and racism?

Fauxtography?

Here's one case of photo manipulation that Charles might just ignore:

Row over altered US Army photo

Edited interviews for me, and not for thee

Link: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31245_ABC_News_Hid_Important_Parts_of_Palin_Interview

Old Chuckles is having a few problems with the recent TV interview with Sarah Palin:

ABC News Hid Important Parts of Palin Interview

It won’t come as a surprise to LGF readers, but Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin was heavily edited by ABC News to make Palin appear more hawkish and less knowledgeable. Mark Levin has the complete transcript, and what ABC News tried to pull here is a textbook example of media malfeasance: Gibson Interview.

Also see: ABC News Edited Out Key Parts of Sarah Palin Interview.

The interview was so egregiously biased, even UPI is calling out ABC News for their blatant double standards: ABC’s Gibson grilled Palin hard, but it may backfire.

(..)

Fair enough, however, it does come as a surprise that Charlie should complain.. After all, the source on media in the Middle East he relies on the most does that kind of stuff quite a lot of times..

//UPDATE: Not only does he entirely trust this bogus and sad excuse of a media outlet, he also urges his little green army to give them money: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31314_MEMRI_Needs_You

Ignoring the 48-hour rule (Updated)

Charles "Chuckles" Johnson, senior political expert and veteran neo-journalist writes:

Got a Big Al Qaeda Fish in Iraq

Thu, May 8, 2008 at 2:49:49 pm PST

Not completely confirmed but looking good: Leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Arrested in Mosul.

BAGHDAD — The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was arrested in the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

Spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said the arrest of al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, was confirmed to him by the Iraqi commander of the province. There was no immediate confirmation or comment from U.S. forces on the arrest.

The U.S. military in Baghdad said “we are currently checking with Iraqi authorities to confirm the accuracy of this information.”

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said that Mosul police “arrested one of Al Qaeda’s leaders at midnight and during the primary investigations he admitted that he is Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir.”

Link: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/29876_Got_a_Big_Al_Qaeda_Fish_in_Iraq
Source: Fox News. If you read the full article however you'd notice that even it is too skeptical of the information provided to be taken as the Gospel.

Shortly afterwards on BBC news:

Iraq al-Qaeda chief not captured

The United States military in Iraq says a man detained in the northern city of Mosul is not in fact the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

An earlier statement from the Iraqi defence ministry said that al-Masri had been captured.

But an American military spokeswoman, Peggy Kageleiry, said Abu Ayyub al-Masri had not been arrested.

She said confusion had arisen because a man with a similar name to the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader had been detained.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been blamed for or has claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest insurgent attacks in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

Members of al-Qaeda are believed to have regrouped in the northern city since the beginning of the US troops "surge" last year.

Al-Masri is believed to have helped Abu Musab al-Zarqawi form the first al-Qaeda cell in Baghdad. Zarqawi was killed in June 2006.

In April 2007, he was named "minister of war" in the 10-man cabinet of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organisation of Sunni militant groups.

Whoops.. Any bets up to when or whether he'll post an update?

//UPDATE: The lizard king has posted an update on the matter (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/29886_False_Alarm-_Not_Al-Masri). It's possible that he owes it to LGF Watch for pointing it out long in advance.. *waves*.. But then again, maybe not, so we'll never know..

Charles Johnson: MSM Magpie

Here's one of his latest posts on the dreaded MSM.

Survey Says: 64% Believe Mainstream Media Are Out of Touch
Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 5:46:46 pm PST

More Americans turning to Web for news.

Here's what the article actually states.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.

Spot the difference?

Any normal person can.

The MSM is not exclusively 'traditional journalism'.

The people turning to the 'net' to get their news are turning to the same MSM that produces the paper based news. Even those who are turning to blogs are merely getting recycled Reuters, AP and others pieces.

For instance on the same day that Charles misread this piece about the media he produced eight blog posts. Two were open threads, one was a Shawn Colvin video, one was sourced from Reuters, one was sourced from Australian Associated Press, three were sourced from Associated Press and all via MSM sources.

So much for 'nu meeja'

The very definition of hypocrisy

Charles apparently still hasn't got it and probably never will. Seems that he solves just about all his problems by spewing out one hypocritical statement after the other:

Here’s an email received from the Assistant Managing Editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on their uncritical, irresponsible reporting of CAIR propaganda: (..)

Heh. What about this bunch of uncritical, irresponsible reporting of anti-Islamic propaganda you've been parroting lately and have proven to be wrong about?

We know you're reading this, either you or your own faithful fanbase. For once, grow a set of balls and admit that you were wrong. Either that, or we'll conclude that you intentionally rely on lies and false information to support your cause. Some fauxtography catcher you are indeed.

To quote the Nodrog (interestingly enough, similar circumstances):

This post exemplifies a classic Charles Johnson technique - put up an inflammatory story, but with no editorial comment (sometimes he can't help himself, but other times like this he shows "restraint"), let the illiterati run wild, and then, if anyone calls him on it, point back to the actual post and say "Who, Me?"

Bonus Chuckie Quote:

There was no apology for Townsend’s rude, childish, and insulting tone, of course

Chutzpah anyone? Where's your apology Charles? After all the post the incited these calls for violence was completely and utterly bogus. Where's your apology to the local Muslims who have now had internet threats made against them based on a lie spread by you?

Symptoms of LGF syndrome

How you end up when LGF becomes your sole news outlet:








O ye of green skin, wasn't it about time you started questioning the news source?
(Found here)

The Genius of Charles Johnson

In response to this piece by AFP (Which he headlines 'AFP Shills for Hamas again'), it is quite obvious that Charles Johnson is either so ideologically blind that he reads bias and twists news at will or that he is a complete and utter moron.

Here's the AFP piece.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AFP) - Seventy-year-old Naim Ahjazi needs just a half-hour — 45 minutes at most — to run across the border to Egypt and pick up the desperately-needed farm supplies that he paid for last week.

But the Hamas gunmen standing guard at the frontier are not moved — after nearly two weeks of unfettered access between Gaza and Egypt, the border is shut again.

“I paid for the supplies, but the shop was closed all day yesterday so I couldn’t pick them up,” says Ahjazi, his tanned face etched with despair and resignation as he looks over at the border just metres away.

Quite how this is 'shilling' for Hamas when the piece quite clearly points out that the Hamas gunmen were'nt moved by the plight of Naim Ahjazi. How is this 'shilling' for Hamas?

Oh and Charles Johnson's advice to 70 year old farmer Naim Ahjazi regarding his problems?

Easy way to make things better: stop trying to kill people.

Yes, because all Palestinians are terrorists aren't they Chuckles?

(http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28829_AFP_Shills_for_Hamas&only)

Charles Johnson: Looking the other way

When Charles Johnson reports blogs about events in the real world, you can be sure he's only going to talk about half the story:

Schools opening in Baghdad, not schools being bombed.

Corrupt Democrats, not corrupt Republicans.

Media errors, not military errors.

For the past week or so CJ has been on the case of The New Republic and Scott Beauchamp, a soldier who apparently embellished some of his articles for the magazine.

The story is a feast for Wingnut dittoheads like Johnson, because in one fell swoop it neatly makes all bad news out of Iraq look like a lie.

Woe if anyone were to mention another series of reports from Iraq, in another 'leftie rag' (this time The Nation), which can't be so easily dismissed. Don't expect to read about it on LGF...

The devil made him do it

Who needs Debbie Schlussel, Pammy Gellar, Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin when you've got Fox News?

Did the Devil Make Him Do It?

Whilst the 'wingnut-o-sphere' happily spin ludicrous theories about Muslims, neo-Nazis and the like, Fox News picks up the ball and runs with it. Puts the blame firmly on Satan.

Anti-US or just the facts?

Last month Charles Johnson berated news media for reporting that US troops had shot and killed Afghan civilians. Now a Pentagon investigation has substantiated those reports. Will Charles eat crow?

Where hate mongering leads....

....I would imagine if a group of 'Muslim' youths did this Chuckles and his acolytes would be typing so fast the Cheetos dust from their fingers would create a small orange tornado.

Fortunately for him the victims here are an Algerian immigrant and her one year old son. Something tells me the wingnutosphere will pass on this one.

If only it had been committed some French youths in Paris, eh Charles?

An Algerian woman and her one-year-old baby were sexually assaulted in broad daylight in Glasgow in a racially aggravated attack. The 33-year-old woman was pushing her son in his pram through the Yoker area of the city when a group of young men threw stones at them and kicked the woman. One man then exposed himself, indecently assaulted the woman and attempted to perform an indecent act on the one-year-old boy.

The woman, who cannot be identified, had her headscarf torn from her head. She escaped by snatching her son from his pram and running away, leaving behind the pram, headscarf and a baby's bottle.

Racism, bigotry, violence, misogyny and child abuse. All committed by non-Muslims. Nothing to see here, move along.

Source: The Herald and BBC Radio 4

Paging Dr. Freud

It's funny when lizardoids engage in armchair psychoanalysis (emphasis added; misspellings and typos in original):

I would not be surprised if some of these moonbats have criminal tendencies. And i would not be surprised if many of them have been diagnosed with mental disorders some time in their lives. It seems possible after just reading what many of them post. They fantasize about death, murder and assasantion all the time. That to me signifys very sick and twisted minds.

From the same thread:

Can we nuke the NYT? [...] They keep calling to bring the troops home, well lets...and turn them loose on the bastards like this who are undermining our country.

Close Guantanamo and ship all the inmates directly up to the NY Times Building in NYC. Then weld the doors shut once they're inside. By my calculations, that should take care of a couple of problems in no time.

my wish for all the Journalists/Editors at the Times, and any who agree with their editorial political positions is to endure the stings of a thousand Scorpions every hour, of every day for eternity ... At a minimum.

Everyone at the NYT's who had a hand in publishing top secret information regarding the NSA surveillance program, the SWIFT program, or the exact locations of our troops in Iraq should be investigated, and if found guilty, should be hung....in public!

I can't help wondering what our guys, Bush and Cheney, must think in those two seconds when they're briefed on this this morning. I bet they just shake they're heads, also with disgust, and then say something funny, like "we begin bombing in five minutes...43rd street!"[username: psychocindy]

Here's a real gem:

Whattaya you NYT liberals lookin' at? You're all a bunch of raving lunatics. You know why? 'Cause you don't have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like us. You need people like us so you can point your little fingers, and say "they're the bad guys." So, what's that make you? Good? You're not good; you just know how to hide. How to lie. We, we don't have that problem. We, we always tell the truth--even when we lie. So kiss your business goodnight from the bad guys. Come on; this's the last time you gonna see a single red nickel from bad guys like us, let me tell ya. Come on, try to grow your business without the bad guys. There's a bunch a bad guys money streamin' through the blogosphere; and it's all gonna get outta your way!

And, best of all:

People like that are like caged chimps hurling feces at anyone who comes near. They lives are empty. The laughter they revel in is thin and hollow. [referring to the movie Dogma]

source: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24685

The topic at hand is what Senior Political Analyst Charles Johnson refers to as a "Terrorist Bill of Rights," an editorial published today by the New York Times. The gist of the editorial is that the U.S., being a better nation than the totalitarian religious régimes with whom it is at war, should endeavor to be better than those totalitarian religious régimes when it comes to observing due process and the rule of law generally -- a proposition to which most lizards take exception, sometimes violently. The reasoning, apparently, is that if a torture technique was good enough for Saddam, it's good enough for the U.S. of A. And if Iran throws people into jail indefinitely without even attempting to determine their guilt or innocence -- why, we'd better do the same, otherwise we'll all DIE!

In case you're new to our site and you're wondering why we're using comments to illustrate a point about the LGF mindset: (1) The comments are an integral part of LGF, and indeed make up the overwhelming majority of its "content"; and (2) Charles routinely deletes comments he doesn't agree with. So as far as we're concerned, the commenters are fair game. Oops! Was that a violent, "stalkerish" hunting metaphor?

Irony alert!

Quoth Charles, in response to this piece in the Grauniad in which he is quoted extensively:

Do you notice anything missing from this limp-wristed [wink, nudge - Ed.] attack? For example, a counter-argument? People like Glaister think it’s sufficient to simply quote statements and point disapprovingly. Why strain his logical faculties? All decent people will automatically agree with him, after all.

This from someone who has turned the argument-free quote-and-point into an art form. And if you want to see "people automatically agreeing" with one another -- while constantly congratulating one another on their "decency", of course -- there's no better example than the LGF comment section.

(source: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24478 )

The Charles Johnson Style Guide

Charles has been driven into a self-righteous frenzy (again) at the failure of the MSM to identify Muslims as "Muslims" even before all the facts are in.

Well, OK then. Let's see what one current news item would look like if the media chucked out their AP Style Guides and replaced them with the LGF version:

Immigrant murdered in Tennessee

Ramses Iskander, a Muslim, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Metro Police said he was helping out a friend when he was shot and killed in Nashville.

"It was very depressing. I was very sad and I started realizing life is so short that we never know when it's the end coming," Iskander's presumably non-Muslim co-worker Armando Rodriguez said.

Iskandar, 66, was a Muslim immigrant from Egypt, which receives $2 billion in U.S. foreign aid per year.

He was shot in the parking lot of the Wynstone Apartments on Millwood Drive Feb. 8. At 11:30 p.m. friends said he had just finished giving another co-worker, religion unknown, a ride home.

"He's a Muslim of Egyptian descent, so we don't know if he really understood what they were saying. He began yelling and shots were fired, and it turned out he was shot multiple times," Brad Putnam, probably a Christian, with the Metro Police Department said.

But this still lacks that certain Johnsonian je ne sais quoi.

If Charles Johnson were ever to feature this story on his blog, which of course he never will, the LGF Style Guide™ would require him to add a heavy sprinkling of lurid adjectives and irrelevant clauses and "scare quotes," all cunningly conceived to foster the impression that all Muslims are very, very bad people.

Something like this:

RoP Struck in Tennessee; Victim's Immigrant "Friend" Whines, Seethes
A Muslim immigrant in Tennessee is sitting in front of a big pile of rotten raisins tonight, after he was allegedly "murdered" while giving a "friend" -- probably a meteorite-worshiping, wife-beating, Jew-hating jihadi -- a ride in his car:

He began yelling and shots were fired, and it turned out he was shot multiple times," Brad Putnam with the Metro Police Department said.

Any guesses what this obviously deranged jihad wannabe was yelling?

And as long as we're going to treat the unveiling of every individual's private religious convictions as a matter of national security: what exactly is Charles' religion, anyway? Now that he's being quoted in publications far and wide, the world has a right to know!

LGF News Values

When Charles Johnson shouts 'Breaking' you can be pretty damn sure that whichever MSM news item has caught his attention is not going to be a case of terrorism but a hoax (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24239) or a crude nationalist prank (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24407).

However, when there is a real incident of 'breaking' news (such as a gunman walking into a crowded mall and shooting dead half a dozen people) but it doesn't involve Muslims or terrorism, then you can bet your bottom dollar Charles isn't going to be 'breaking' it.

UPDATE: Charles has now got round to posting about the Utah shooting. Why? Because there's a possibility there could be a Muslim angle to the story (the shooter was from Bosnia, a Muslim-majority ex-Yugoslav republic). How much more transparent is Charles going to get in his racism? Note that he has yet to post on the incident that happened on the same day in Philadelphia, in which four people died...

Two-faced news analysis

As we point out time and again, one of the biggest problems with LGF is its glaring hypocrisy. This trait, of condeming something on the one hand but gladly using that same thing when it suits him, is most obvious in Charles Johnson's relationship with the media.

Witness this comment about Reuters' reporting in Gaza:

The mainstream wire services are perpetrating an Orwellian fraud of massive proportions.

It's standard stuff, from Charles. But then we also have the other side, where Charles picks bits out of the same mainstream media that suits his agenda. Just to give an example, look at how he seized upon the Reuters report about alleged indoctrination of Iranian schoolchildren (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24274). If this story hadn't suited CJ's line, he would have been all over it, poking, prodding and stripping it apart as another instance of bad MSM reporting. And he would have had a point. Because sources tell LGFWatch that the story has pretty shaky foundations.

For one, the report is based on research produced by the 'Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace'. Nowhere does Reuters explain who this group is, or even where they are based. You might want to google them.

Second, the story didn't come directly from CMIP. Invitations to the Brussels news conference (and parallel events in various other European capitals) were relentlessly pushed to journalists for weeks by an organization claiming to be based in London, but calling from Washington.

All of this should make any journalist suspicious, but apparently they were having a slow news day at Reuters in Brussels. Can you imagine what would happen if Reuters picked up a 'report' by an Iranian group on the indoctrination of Israeli or American schoolchildren?

You'd read about it on LGF, but the tone would be pretty different...

Charles, reality clash in blogosphere

OK, I'll admit it. Charles has a somewhat of a scoop with this post. The Associated Press did make a hash of this headline:




You got 'em Chuckles. Somebody in AP wrote a frankly awful headline. But hey, don't you notice something Charles? Don't you spot something sadly lacking in your coverage? While you're hyperventilating about a headline another thing continued to happen on Wednesday the 24th of January 2007 that AP and other news agencies covered. In fact they covered it in the piece with the sucky headline. That's right Charles, the Iraq War. Remember that? How is that war you supported from behind your monitor so valiantly going?

Oh.

Charles Johnson: Too stupid for Google News

Sometimes Charles Johnson makes it too easy for his opponents (in this case us!) to show him up for the ignorant, blinkered, bullshit spouter that he is.

Witness today's assertion by the Lizard King that "The Associated Press never uses the word 'terror' without enclosing it in quotes"

Then do a search for "Associated Press Terror" on Google News. Result? 7,357 hits. And that's just their recent output...

Granted, many instances will have the word appear in quotes. But many won't. There's terrorism in Indonesia, the Philippine terror leader, and the Somali terror suspects.

As for the use of the term 'terrorist', the wingnut-o-sphere really need to get a handle on why journalists are reluctant to use the term without extreme caution. Phil Rees' "Dining with Terrorists" is a good primer on the subjet.

So, the next time Charles accuses the MSM of stupidity or blatant lying, point him to this post.