The Village Voice has a mildly interesting article entitled "Secret Agent Schmuck" by Chris Thomson, about some guy named Juval Aviv who has been posing on Fox News as a "terrorism expert." The article has the usual sordid details you'd expect from this sort of story, which are not relevant to my post.
What caught my attention, however, was how the author of the article made a terrible mistake in quoting Steven Emerson to "debunk" this guy. The article in the Voice identifies Emerson as "a former CNN correspondent who specializes in security and terrorism" and quotes Emerson saying this about Juval Aviv:
It's amazing to see how many times he fooled people...It's so easy to go on the air and pretend you're something you're not...The trick in television is just to full up the time"
Well, Steven Emerson should know what he's talking about since Emerson himself has a rather "questionable" background as a "terrorism expert" too, and the Village Voice should have checked up on Emerson's own background before using his quotes. In fact, while the author of the Village Voice article also quotes Vince Cannistraro about Juval Aviv, the author apparently failed to check to see what Vince Cannistraro had to say about Steve Emerson:
"They're Israeli-funded. How do I know that? Because they tried to recruit me."
Steven Emerson, a self-styled "terrorism expert", has basically made a career pushing questionable stories about "radical muslims" and promoting anti-Arab hysteria in the US, when he's not busy smearing his critics as terrorist-supporters. Among other gaffes, this is the same "terrorism exerpt" who claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had a "Mideastern trait" and suggested it was the work of "radical Islamic extremists on American soil". According to reports, he tried pass off two forged documents, supposedly from "FBI files" about radical muslims in the US, to unsuspecting reporters of the Associated Press - who noticed that the alleged documents from "FBI files" looked suspiciously like Emerson's own writings. Emerson filed a defamation lawsuit against a newspaper editor who reported this, but later dropped the suit.
Anyway, this bit of poor journalism by the Village Voice should not reflect too poorly on on otherwise well-written article by Chris Thomson. However, my bigger point is this is hardly the first case in which someone has falsely passed themselves off on Fox News and other news programs as an "expert" on the Mideast or terrorism or whatever. There are many others, in addition to Juval Aviv and Steven Emerson (I am personally fond of the "Iran experts" who have never actually been to Iran, don't speak the language, and can't even pronounce the name of the country correctly)
Take for exampe Alirea Jafarzadeh, who regularly shows up on Fox News as their "Foreign Affairs Analyst" to make outrageous claims about the "threat" that Iran poses to the US - and who is the former (current?) spokesman for the bizzare, cultlike MEK, which is listed (along with its various other names such as NCR or NCRI) as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
So the next time some talking head shows up on your TV set, don't just believe whatever nonsense he's saying - check him out, find out if he has an agenda or an ax to grind. Remember, there's a whole industry of PR professionals whose job is to get certain faces on your TV set in order to communicate a particular message. You can't rely on the editors and reporters at the news stations to check these people out before they get on the air.
Comments