Al Qaeda: It's the new Jew.
Yon tries to backpedal from it on the July 12 Hugh Hewitt show - "...there’s no proof, and I haven’t been trying to get proof of that. That’s just Iraqis talking," he says - but this is what he wrote on his Web site on July 5:
At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
No proof... just Iraqis talking... But I'm going to post it with next to no qualification on my blog, because that's how blood libel works the best.
And he doesn't provide us with who these "Al Qaeda" boy-bakers are: are they Iraqis? Saudis? Pakistanis? I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? There can be no mistaking that they're brown, Arab-ish people, and that's really all that matters.
UPDATE: Yon updated his story when he heard that people were misusing, if that's the right word, what he wrote. (His point about the chicken crossing the road is worth the read, and understandable.) This is according to a representative of his, who just sent me an email. Yon states in the update that he was simply writing what someone had told him. Fine. He stated it as a fact in the story, but he didn't mean to and updated it. It is unfortunately being used by Right Wing bloggers for their own purposes.
2 comments:
I'm sure what I'm about to say makes me a bad person, but... what proof has Yon offered that anyone ever told him this?
Sorry, but this is a credibility issue: you might usually be polite and not ask people to lay out the actual proof. But that's for people who actually haven't posted the rumor as something that really happened. For people who have done that and are now backing off, I don't think it's out of line to take a harsher position and say "Prove it. Prove you didn't just make it up yourself."
--derek
You're right. There's no reason to simply trust this report. The spokeswoman for Yon said she'd seen video of the interview. I took her at her word - I honestly don't know why. I think it's because even if someone said it - so what? He should have never reported it the way he did. Beyond irresponsible.
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