Terror Group Sympathizer @ShelbySebens of Reuters Carries Water for Hamas-CAIR

I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Reuter’s Shelby Sebens (@ShelbySebens), discussing our ad campaign highlighting Islamic antisemitism, currently running on San Francisco buses. The entire article quotes the terror-designated group Hamas-CAIR, although Ms. Sebens left out CAIR’s best known quotes, such as, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

Ms. Sebens, why are you carrying water for the propaganda arm of a global movement that is beheading and executing your colleagues? Is it madness, or just run of the mill brain-dead liberalism?

Shelby Sebens, who calls herself a reporter, refers to “the group calling itself the American Freedom Defense Initiative.” And what’s painfully funny is that I discussed the media’s sanction and elevation of terror-linked groups like CAIR and their leadership (now serving time for jihad-related time) with Ms. Sebens. She must have felt like an idiot or she is one, because she obviously did not do even a cursory investigation of Hamas-CAIR. What is journalism today? Taking dictation from the worst enemies of freedom?

Reuters is important. Like AP, it is a news service that is widely picked up from news organizations and newspapers across the country (and the world). See below how the story appears in Yahoo with CAIR’s photo:

Sebens uses one quote from me from a 20-minute conversation. Which one? “It’s the only way to leapfrog over the media,” she said. “It’s the only way to talk directly to the American people.” If anything proved that quote, it was Sebens’ own yellow journalism.

But instead of mentioning any of that, Sebens reprints the libel and defamation spewed by the uber-left Southern Poverty Law Center to explain to the readers who I am and to describe my work. In other words, she defines me wholly by what my enemies say. She neglects to mention my books or that I was awarded the Guardian of Freedom award by the Nassau County Federation of Republican Women. Or that the Queens Village Republican Club, the oldest Republican club in America, honored me as the “American Patriot of the Year.” The Creative Zionist Coalition gave me the Queen Esther Award for Jewish Heroism. And I also received the Annie Taylor Award for Courage in 2010 from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In October 2011, the members of the United States Marine Corps presented me with the flag flown on September 11, 2011 over Camp Leatherneck, “amid the battlefields of Afghanistan during decisive operations against enemy forces in Helmand Province.”

This Sebens did not include. Only that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the American Freedom Defense Initiative as a hate group.

In the same vein, Sebens quotes Ibrahim Hooper of Hamas-CAR without mentioning any of this: “And while CAIR is quite mainstream these days, this self-styled “civil rights group” was actually named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.” (source)

Here is the trail mix-munching cat lady on twitter:

Shelby Sebens Journalist, trail runner, cat lady and healthy living blogger. Tweets are mine. RT ≠endorsement

I wonder if Ms. Sebens was well-paid, like so many of her colleagues, or if this tool jumped through hoops for these Islamic supremacists for nothing.

She is obviously very young and very easily misled, but this is egregious. Here again is further proof of the kind of poison academia is producing.

“Anti-Islam group buys ads on San Francisco buses,” By Shelby Sebens, Reuters, Jan 14, 2015 10:06pm EST

(Reuters) – An anti-Islam group has sparked controversy with the purchase of advertisements on San Francisco’s public buses that display the image of Adolf Hitler and accuse the religion of fostering anti-Semitism.

The group calling itself the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which sued New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to run similar messages last year, purchased 50 large ads on San Francisco buses. They began appearing within days of attacks by Islamist militants in Paris that killed 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and another four at a Jewish supermarket. A policewoman was also shot dead.

“Islamic Jew hatred,” the ads read. “It’s in the Quran.”

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s Houston-based founder, Pamela Geller, was using the ads to stir up attention and raise money. The Council on American-Islamic Relations had countered past efforts by Geller with bus ads of its own but will not do that this time, he said.

“We’re not going to chase her from city to city trying to undo the hatred she promotes,” Hooper said. “We’d be doing little else. She seems to have an unending capacity for the promotion of hatred.”

Hooper said the majority of people will see the ads as “hate and intolerance and fear mongering.”

Geller said she had been working on placing the San Francisco ads since last spring.

“It’s the only way to leapfrog over the media,” she said. “It’s the only way to talk directly to the American people.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the American Freedom Defense Initiative as a hate group.

The group’s controversial ads have appeared in New York and Washington D.C., prompting outrage from politicians and civil rights leaders.

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) officials said the agency does not endorse the content of the ads and understands that people may be offended.

“However, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, including speech that is considered offensive,” SFMTA spokesman Paul Rose said in an emailed statement.

“Refusing placement would almost certainly result in a lawsuit that forces the city to run the ads under court order, and we believe taxpayer dollars should be used to improve transit and the overall transportation network; not on lawsuits.”

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