by Daniel Pipes
September 2, 2011
To much attention, the leftist Center for American Progress just issued a report, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, written by no less than five co-authors (Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir). It’s the predictable leftist-Islamist alarmism about those of us trying to warn the world of lawful Islamism, with a specific focus on five individuals – Frank Gaffney, David Yerushalmi, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, and myself.
The report does have one original element, however, a calculation that “seven charitable groups provided $42.6 million to Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009.” The reporting on Fear, Inc. has focused on this $42.6 million number. A table on pp. 14-15 of the report shows how this number was arrived at. Curious to test its accuracy, I asked a colleague to check the nearly $6 million that the report indicates was received by the Middle East Forum from six of those seven foundations over the nine years.
Comments: (1) In addition to getting the larger picture wrong, the CAP report cannot even get the details correct. (2) It’s pretty rich that CAP, on organization with a yearly budget of nearly $40 million, focuses on 8 organizations receiving that sum over a period of 9 years. (September 2, 2011)
Source material can be found at this site.