Of course you can hear such nonsense from drunken Islamophobes in any number of bars in the US and other parts of the Western world. What makes Emerson much more sinister is that his comments can be seen as official. He has given evidence to several Congressional committees in his role as a “terrorism expert”. It is people like him, rather than people who know anything about a given subject, who the US Congress are asking for their opinions, and it is these opinions the US is basing its actions on.
Emerson has apologised for his “terrible error” but refused to name his sources. He presents this as taking “full responsibility” for his actions, but in fact he is refusing to take any responsibility. Emerson did not suddenly invent these views. He has chosen to listen to grossly unreliable sources and chosen to promote patently false information to Congress and presumably other clients of his.
Refusing to name and repudiate his sources is a way of allowing those same false tales to continue to be told, because the sources will continue to be hidden and not be questioned. Emerson may have been left with egg on his face but the sources are untouched. Why? Because they are too useful to the agenda being pursued to be subjected to any scrutiny by elected officials, who are themselves, by definition, supposed to be subject to public scrutiny.
The city of a thousand faces
So what is Birmingham actually like for its non-Muslim population? This map gives some idea. It shows the proportion of Birmingham residents who declared themselves to be Muslim at the last census, by neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods are designed to be roughly the same size. This picture is consistent with that you would expect in a cosmopolitan city with over a million inhabitants, but does not indicate the whole city is a Muslim-dominated no-go zone for white people.
The implication of Emerson’s comments is that Muslims are part of an alien culture and are seeking to impose this on the local population. Rumwold Leigh, an international journalist born and brought up in Birmingham, says:
“There is indeed a significant Muslim minority in Birmingham. Their distinguishing feature is that the vast majority of them, whether first, second or third generation, speak with a broad Birmingham accent. They are indistinguishable from any other sort of Brummie until they encounter the harsh reality of institutional racism as teenagers. Even then, only a tiny minority go down the path of radical hostility to the world around them, as they still feel a sense of ownership of that world, as they do of other worlds, such as whatever they think their cultural background is.”
Birmingham developed as an industrial powerhouse from the eighteenth century onwards and was at one time much more famous and prestigious than it is now. Politicians would insist on making major speeches in Birmingham, musicians would have their latest works premiered there. Like all cities which have enjoyed such eminence, it has always been home to every community under the sun, and each one similarly makes the place their home.
It is true there are some racial incidents in Birmingham. If these are considered a significant problem, maybe Steve Emerson would like to spend some time in the black areas of US cities, and then explain why the whole of those cities are not similarly branded as no-go zones.
The unidentified source
So why is Steve Emerson used as a commentator by Fox News and a trusted expert by Congressional committees? The answer probably lies in the real source of his comments. They did not originate with him, but are an extension of claims first made by the Gatestone Institute, a New York-based think tank.
Gatestone is chaired by John Bolton, a veteran of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Bolton’s policy positions can be deduced from his online resume – “His many accomplishments include the rescission of the UN’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution, U.S. renunciation of the International Criminal Court and the establishment of the Proliferation Security Initiative.”
Bolton is also a Fox News contributor. Recommendations go a long way in television, as anyone who is involved with a breaking news story discovers. The stations talk to the people they are recommended to talk to, as they don’t have the time to check everyone who has an opinion.
Given that Fox is another Rupert Murdoch outlet, his own recommendations, and those of people he has himself recommended, can be presumed to carry weight. Murdoch has recently stated that all Muslims must be held collectively responsible for the Charlie Hedbo killings. This may be why the latest piece of “analysis” on the Gatestone website is a piece entitled “Jihad in France: It’s Just Beginning”. Why “just beginning?” Because Muslims have not risen in the streets of Paris demanding the imposition of Sharia law, as we were told they would. Anything and everything must be the beginning of jihad, because that is what the Fox coverage told us would happen.
In 2011 Gatestone published a piece which stated that certain areas of France were “off-limits to non-Muslims” and gave a list of 751 places listed as “Sensitive Urban Zones” by the French government. These claims themselves derived from a piece by Daniel Pipes, published in 2006, in which the same claims were made.
However Gatestone failed to mention that Pipes had subsequently visited many of these zones to write a follow-up story and apologised for ever having called them no-go zones. It also failed to point out that national police forces often categorise particular areas as “sensitive zones” due to the possibility of disorder breaking out, but this is not a phenomenon peculiar to Islamic neighbourhoods, nor does it imply that Muslims are the source of any potential disorder.
Nevertheless, all this has been spun by Gatestone into a jihad waiting to happen. These claims, and others which did not require a foundation because they were made by State Department political cronies with more influence than the average fact-checker, were then repeated by Emerson and his Investigative Project on Terrorism. So what exactly does this body do?
Why white man speaks with forked tongue
Steve Emerson’s organisation says it aims to “Investigate, Analyze, Expose”. Like John Bolton’s think tank, it takes policy positions very similar to those subsequently adopted by official commentators in the US after the fact, as if it knew about such facts all along.
Readers will recall that barely anyone had heard of Osama bin Laden before 9/11. Suddenly, we were given a wealth of information about him and al-Qaeda and their activities. If the US really knew all this, could it not have prevented 9/11? When horse racing officials can have their careers ended in public humiliation for not tying a piece of elastic tape tightly enough, why was someone senior not hung out to dry in public for being asleep at the wheel?
Another fact Fox and Gatehouse are unlikely to mention is that the US State Department has a large and well-funded counter-terrorism unit devoted to seeking out radical Islamists and others on US soil. It is so large that over 500 of its staff have been dismissed, and arrested, for theft and misuse of its facilities. But it has not caught a single terrorist with all the facilities it has been given, and the staff can’t have stolen them all.
If Gatehouse or the International Project on Terrorism actually knew anything about terrorism they would pass this information on to the authorities and claim the credit for subsequent captures. The captures don’t happen because they are not interested in actual information about terrorists. These bodies are in the business of spreading stories which support US policy positions, or the ones they want the US to have. They are not interested in information, merely disinformation.
The US may well know more genuine facts about international terrorism than the terrorists themselves do. After all, it has been training “Islamic terrorists” for years in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia and sending them all over the world to cause trouble, the same people appearing in each place.
It has also employed people to spread Islamic radicalism to the young to foment trouble, as Georgian army commanders who have had to go along with this programme have complained to new Defence ministers in the hope of changing things. It has sponsored state terrorism all over the developing world, sending CIA trainers whose names we now know to show foreign governments how to do it.
Not all terrorism derives from the US. But the disinformation we get about it usually does. This disinformation is not accidental. Steve Emerson wasn’t supposed to say what he said, but Fox News gave him the chance to say it for a reason.
You’ve guessed it
Bolton and Emerson share a major funder. Their largest donor is the Middle East Forum, run by the same Daniel Pipes who apologised for his comments about the 751 neighbourhoods. Having embarrassed himself, he is paying others to say the same things. Emerson wouldn’t have a job if he wasn’t knowingly spreading stories even his donor has had to admit are untrue.
Institutes with high-sounding titles are often a dumping ground for political cronies like John Bolton. The EU, to take another example, is full of such placeholders who have lost office at home. Why? Because losing power doesn’t necessarily mean losing influence. Putting your losers in such posts is a time-honoured way for political elites to ensure that whoever is actually elected, the same old faces will still pull all the strings.
Congress and Fox talk to people like Bolton and Emerson because they are insiders, known quantities. What they actually say is not so important. Get your information from an insider and you cover your back. Invite someone less well connected, who gets it wrong or gets it too right for comfort, you have to take the embarrassment yourself. The source gets away with it, you carry the can.
Steve Emerson was interviewed on Fox News to tell the world what the US government wanted it to hear. On this occasion he fulfilled his brief too zealously. He won’t name his sources because he wants to protect them. From what? The democracy he and his friends claim to uphold?
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
