Should We Believe Rashad Hussain?

Rashad Hussain, Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has run into a problem: He appears to be an Islamist. The evidence largely concerns a public statement he made six years ago, as Josh Gerstein reports in Politico: 

Hussain, now a deputy associate White House counsel, was quoted back in 2004 decrying the prosecution of a Florida professor accused of ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian. However, the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report noted Sunday that the article quoting Hussain, published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was subsequently sanitized on the Web to remove the quotes and all other references to Hussain. The changes appear to have taken place in 2007 or later. 

According to the original story, Hussain told a panel discussion at a Muslim Students Association conference in ’04 that the criminal case against Al-Arian was one of a series of “politically motivated persecutions.” Hussain also reportedly asserted that Al-Arian was being “used politically to squash dissent.” 

Of course, this not at all the case: Sami Al-Arian was an accessory to terrorism by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and he sits at this moment in a U.S. jail for his actions. 

At this point, Hussain’s views hinge on the reliability of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Its news editor, Delinda Hanley, explained that his 

quotes were taken down because the quotes attributed to him actually came from Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, who took part in the same panel discussion. “Laila Al-Arian said the things attributed to Rashad Hussain, and an intern who attended the event and wrote up the article made an error, which was corrected on our Web site by deleting the two quotes in their entirety,” Hanley wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. 

However, the author of the article, Shereen Kandil, said Tuesday that she stood by her original report. “When I worked as a reporter, I understood how important it was to quote the right person, and accurately,” Kandil wrote in response to an e-mailed query from POLITICO asking about the possibility of a misquotation. 

As someone who has experienced first-hand the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs‘ grossly inaccurate reporting, I should like to voice an opinion here. 

In July 2001, the magazine reported on a panel I took part in at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. It ascribed to me the statement that “The Palestinians are a miserable people … and they deserve to be.” I had not said this and immediately responded to the article. WRMEA (snidely) published my letter to the editor in its October 2001 in which I denied having made this statement, said it’s “not how I think, speak, or write,” and quoted from an article of mine published six days after the panel to show my actual views about Palestinians. 

Now, the WRMEA, an obsessively anti-Zionist publication that believes Israel’s Mossad killed Kennedy, overthrew Nixon, and considered assassinating George H. W. Bush, clearly likes Hussain more with than me, so his misquote eventually got pulled while mine, eight-plus years later, yet languishes on its website, and is still used against me. 

But that should now divert attention from WRMEA‘s reliance on amateur ideologues to “report” on events for it and the publication’s lack of credibility. In an argument between Hussain and WRMEA, therefore, I am inclined to believe the former. (February 17, 2010)