The New York Times has a piece titled Shooting Clouds Life as Both Muslim and Texan, which examines the reactions of Typical Muslims from the Dallas area to the shooting in Garland. Extended attention is given to one Mohamed Elibiary. You can tell he’s a Regular Muslim Guy whose opinion is worth ten paragraphs in an article in the nation’s largest newspaper. Why, just look at the guy, with his Texan shirt:

I am going to quote the entirety of the paper’s discussion with Elibiary, starting with his introduction to the reader:

Mohamed Elibiary, 39, a founder of the North Texas Islamic Council — and a former member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which provides advice and recommendations to the secretary of Homeland Security — said he, too, found the idea behind the event in Garland on Sunday insulting. But, he added, that did not mean it warranted a reaction.

“It’s a gimmick,” he said. “Pamela Geller and people like her have no power. All they can do is cause commotion and bait people into things.”

I don’t know about you, but a guy who gave advice to Homeland Security seems like a guy we want to hear from. Wow. Hey, I wonder if he ever wore that Texas shirt while giving the advice? It’s like the New York Times knows that I want to hear more from this fella — and man, do they ever accommodate me:

Caricatures of the prophet are offensive to him and to others, Mr. Elibiary said, but reactions vary. Not everyone is interested in the arguments of Ms. Geller, who has defended herself by arguing that her enemies are simply trying to crush “truth and freedom.”

Mr. Elibiary said, “You’ve got to remember, I live a middle-class lifestyle in a first-world country.”

“I have plenty of opportunities to express myself,” he said, “and I’m in no way disenfranchised. People who usually react violently to that have a totally different life experience.”

Mr. Elibiary, who was born in Egypt and grew up in the Dallas area, runs a security consulting firm from his home in Plano, a suburb of Dallas that is a short drive from Garland. On Tuesday afternoon, he was wearing a button-down shirt emblazoned with the Texas flag.

Many of those who attended the Garland event were not from there, he pointed out, or even from Texas.

“These aren’t native Texans that are gravitating to picking a fight with their neighbors,” he said.

Similarly, he added, Muslims in the Dallas region view the two gunmen — who lived in the same apartment complex in Phoenix — as outsiders.

“Their actions don’t go into our calculus,” Mr. Elibiary said.

Don’t mess with Texas Muslims! This guy is clearly the salt of the earth. Runs a security firm. Advised Homeland Security. And need I remind you about the shirt?

If your spidey sense — something about my tone, perhaps? — suggests that there is another shoe about to drop, then your spidey sense is spidey indeed. Because as it turns out, this guy has some very unusual friends and opinions.

For one thing, he is pals with at least one terrorist. In a 2013 interview, Elibiary described his long, “tight friendship” with Shukri Abu Baker of Garland, Texas, now serving a 65-year sentence in federal prison for providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, money laundering, and other crimes. (Elibiary thinks he’s innocent — natch.)

Hmmm. The New York Times didn’t mention any of that.

Remember the detail in the New York Times piece about how Mr. Elibiary is a “former” DHS advisor? Yeah, well, it appears the “former” part is no accident. Here is a Pajamas Media piece on our friend Mr. Elibiary from January which explains:

In September, Elibiary was unceremoniously removed from his fellowship position with the Department of Homeland Security, which he tried to spin as a “resignation,” but letters sent to members of Congress by DHS officials indicated he would not be reappointed.

The Pajamas Media piece lists other several troubling facts about Mr. Elibiary’s history of support for radical Islam, including speaking at a conference honoring the Ayatollah Khomeini as a “Great Islamic Visionary,” boasting of the “inevitable” return of the Islamic caliphate (a prediction celebrated by ISIS), putting a Muslim Brotherhood icon on his Twitter account, and so forth.

The New York Times didn’t mention any of that either! Hmmmmm . . .

It’s almost as if the NYT reporter went to CAIR in Dallas and said: “hey, give us a nice Muslim guy to talk to” –and was directed to Elibiary. And so, without any investigation into his disturbing past, they did what they do best: stenography for PC opinions.

That’s the best spin they can put on this: that they didn’t bother to Google this guy.

The worst spin would be that they did Google him, and just decided not to tell you about what they found.

Either way, you won’t learn this information from reading the trained journalists. They have their agenda to spread, and they’re not going to let a little thing like facts get in the way.

P.S. Times editors, if you want a real Man on the Street, let me know. I know a guy who will give you some dynamite quotes — and as far as I know, has befriended zero convicted terrorist supporters. His name is Greg Packer. Just say the word and I’ll hook you up.

[guest post by Dana]

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has come under fire by a former deputy state’s attorney, Page Croyder, who was with the Baltimore State’s Attorney office for 21 years.

In a damning op-ed, Croyder observes the quickness with which Mosby leveled charges at the six officers and attributes her “quick” and “decisive” action to either “incompetence” or “unethical recklessness”.

Croyder examines Mosby’s choice not to utilize every resource available to her in order to make a more informed decision:

Any prosecutor interested in the truth and in justice would have used all the tools at her disposal to find them. Ms. Mosby ignored them. She has one of the most experienced homicide prosecutors in the state of Maryland as chief of her homicide unit, but did not ask him to investigate. She had the police report all of one day before filing charges, her mind already made up. And she failed to make use of the grand jury to gather, probe and test the evidence before a group of average citizens.

In fact, Ms. Mosby was so hasty it appears she locked up two completely innocent officers. She charged Freddie Gray’s arresting officers with “false imprisonment” because she said the knife that Gray had on him was legal. In fact, as The Sun reported, the Police Task Force found it to be illegal after all. It was Ms. Mosby who had no probable cause to lock the arresting officers up, an injustice she could have easily avoided by taking her time.

If truth and justice had been the goal, then it would also seem that taking the necessary time to thoroughly investigate would be essential. However, it appeared Mosby believed time was something she could not spare, and that speed was of the essence.

Croyder likens Mosby’s rush to judgement as “a calculated push to the spotlight, filing charges after a mere two weeks.”

Additionally,

She conducted her own “parallel” investigation using her police integrity unit (the only unit listed on her published staffing tree missing the name of a supervisor.) She had no time to evaluate the crucial autopsy report, or consult with experts about its implications. In her haste to step into the national limelight, she circumvented normal charging procedures by grabbing a member of the sheriff’s office to swear to their truth and file them for her. She calculated her actions for surprise and maximum effect, and she got it.

Croyder ends with a warning to those subject to Mosby’s leadership:

[S]he has created a new expectation in the city: that police officers who arrest without what she considers to be probable cause (a subjective standard) are subject not just to civil action (the current norm) but criminal action. Mere mistakes, or judgments exercised under duress, can land them in the pokey.

If I were a Baltimore police officer, I’d be looking for another job immediately. And as a Baltimore citizen, I may start looking for someplace else to live. When the police cannot depend upon the state’s attorney to be as thorough, competent, non-political and fair with them as she is supposed to be with all citizens, none of us will be safe.

While some are tooting Mosby’s horn as a rising political star, legal experts besides Croyder are expressing serious misgivings about the rapid decision making by Baltimore’s new state’s attorney. The new state’s attorney that so many have pinned their hopes upon in their quest for justice.

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

In a chilling move, an alleged threat by ISIS to kill Pamela Geller has been posted on an anonymous message board:

The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy. Our aim was the khanzeer Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her; we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter. This will heal the hearts of our brothers and disperse the ones behind her. To those who protect her: this will be your only warning of housing this woman and her circus show. Everyone who houses her events, gives her a platform to spill her filth are legitimate targets. We have been watching closely who was present at this event and the shooter of our brothers. We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah.

Geller has publicly responded to the threat:

This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State. They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this threat is that the media in denouncing me is essentially allying with and even cheering on the Islamic State. I expected this from jihadists. I never expected it from my fellow Americans in the mainstream media. –

Yesterday, Geller responded to her critics. Critics, by the way, who are fellow Americans taking full advantage of their secured right to freedom of speech to denigrate, blame and hold an innocent woman responsible for the hateful attack by radical Muslim terrorists. In the United States of America. Unfortunately, far too many Americans do not have the clarity, honesty, or even the will to see the truth and all its devastating implications:

Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.

Certainly there are none so weak and so fearful as those who want to censor others, and none so blind as those who cannot even discern what is at stake. And ironically, their hatred is reserved for those who know precisely what is at stake:

One day our children may live in a world where it’s possible to denounce both Pamela Geller and the psychopathic religious zealots who want her dead, but if we have to choose sides here, we probably have to choose Geller and free speech, no matter how offensive hers may be. Ugh. Guess this means we’re on team Geller here. The terrorists have won.

The awful thing is, if Geller were killed by terrorists in the United States, there might be some “Oh, that’s terrible” clucking from the elite political class and our intellectual betters in the MSM, but it would quickly be followed by a “Well, what did she expect, poking the hornet’s nest like that?”

I fear there would be no tears shed for her. And worse, there would still be no understanding of what we lost during this season of our surrender.

–Dana

Deadly violence to punish speech aside, the L.A. Times wants you to know (in a horribly written and edited piece) just how awful Pam Geller and that Garland event were:

Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.

I was unaware that they had designed Garland to caricature the prophet Muhammad, but I digress.

Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.

Their lives intersected Sunday in this small town in north-central Texas, an unlikely venue for a violent collision of cultures. After a Sunday evening shootout outside the contest site between police and Simpson and another man firing assault rifles, both gunmen lay dead in the street. And Geller quickly posted a defiant blog: “This is a war on free speech. … Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”

As a blogger, I admire anyone who can “quickly” post an entire “blog.” But I digress.

The Texas showdown was America’s Charlie Hebdo moment, erupting just four months after gunmen shot and killed 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper that had published cartoons of the prophet considered blasphemous by many Muslims.

I’m no scholar of Islam, but I’m pretty sure the prophet is not considered blasphemous by all that many Muslims. But I digress. (Editors: click and learn.)

The Garland attack refocused public attention on the fine line between free speech and hate speech in the ideological struggle between radical Islam and the West.

The piece makes sure to note that Geller’s organization is “considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” (No word on whether ISIS is so considered. I suspect not.) As an aside: I could not possibly care less whom the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. I have noted in the past that I like Brent Bozell but still enjoy Matt Welch’s colorful description of the SPLC because it is so entertaining:

Quoting the SPLC as an impartial arbiter on right-wing extremism is about as credible as quoting Brent Bozell as a fair-minded assessor of media content. This is not one of those, oh-the-ACLU-is-evil knee-jerk kind of observations; seriously, read up on the subject before either quoting from the organization or taking its findings as Gospel.

Terrorist Floyd Corkins used an SPLC hate map to choose targets for his violence. Under normal SPLC criteria, that would get the SPLC itself labeled a hate group.

But I digress.

The rest of the piece is devoted to talking about how Islamic experts say it’s terrible to draw Muhammed and how awful Geller is, e.g.:

Geller worked for the Daily News in New York and served as associate publisher of the New York Observer before turning full time to what critics consider her campaign of Islamaphobia.

That’s the first time I have seen “Islamophobia” spelled in that particular way, but I digress.

Anyway, it’s nice that the L.A. Times has its eye on what is really important: not shootings in response to free speech, but the supposed awfulness of Pam Geller. Yet another reason why hundreds of people throughout the Southland rely on the L.A. Times for their news.