It’s commonplace and universal: if you’re a dissident from the Leftist agenda, you’re not going to get fair, accurate, or honest treatment from establishment media reporters. But in this hit piece on Hallandale Beach Commissioner Anabelle Lima-Taub, who called Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib a “Hamas-loving anti-Semite” who might “become a martyr and blow up Capitol Hill,” Sarah Blaskey of the Miami Herald hits a new low even for Leftist “journalists,” whose integrity was already a notch below that of child molesters, and provides a textbook example of how those “journalists” distort the facts, libel people, and lie outright in order to manipulate the public into believing what they want them to believe.
Start with the title, “Strange bedfellows: How a South Florida Democrat became the darling of the alt-right,” which claims that Lima-Taub has become “the darling of the alt-right.” “Alt-right” is the latest media term that essentially means “people you should hate and fear.” When Leftists get more specific about what it means, they generally say that it refers to people who are white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and the like. Those terms don’t remotely apply to Anabelle Lima-Taub, but Sarah Blaskey wants you to think they do. And in smearing Lima-Taub and her supporters, Blaskey is just getting started.
A wall of half a dozen men closed ranks around Rasha Mubarak. Leering at the young Palestinian-American woman who filmed them on her phone, they shoved Make America Great Again caps into her face, waved signs inscribed with anti-Muslim messages and spewed insults.
Animal. Anti-Semite. Woman-hater. Terrorist.
“My initial reaction was that the bigotry is real in South Florida,” said Mubarak, who told the Miami Herald she was afraid the men would become physically violent. “It was a little overwhelming and scary.”
Where is this video? If Rasha Mubarak was filming these people who shoved MAGA hats in her face, waved “signs inscribed with anti-Muslim messages” and called her “animal,” “anti-Semite,” “woman-hater,” and “terrorist,” where is the video? Sarah Blaskey has seven hyperlinks in this article; why didn’t she link to this video? If this really happened, did no one else film it?
The Miami Herald published a video of this rally that is designed to make the rallygoers look as bad as they possibly can, but it doesn’t show anyone shoving caps in anyone’s face, or any “anti-Muslim messages” on signs, or anyone calling any poor Muslima unkind names. Why hasn’t Blaskey produced the video of this incident? Does it even exist? Did any of this happen at all?
Mubarak’s antagonists were part of a group gathered outside Hallandale Beach City Hall on Jan. 23, in a rally that to some, was intended to be a defense of Israel against a growing boycott movement.
It became a platform for anti-Muslim hate. Setting that tone and mixed into the crowd were self-described Islamophobes, white nationalists, sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan and members of alt-right factions who had come to support an unlikely new ally: Hallandale Beach Commissioner Anabelle Lima-Taub, known until recent weeks as an outspoken feminist and Democrat.
“Islamophobe” is a propaganda neologism designed to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression. Those who describe themselves as such are mocking those who think jihad terror is not a threat, and the stigmatizing and demonizing by people such as Sarah Blaskey of those who call attention to that threat. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, himself a Muslim, wrote in the New York Daily News in 2010: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”
Responsible journalists shouldn’t be using manipulative propaganda terms, but Sarah Blaskey loves them. Not only do we get “alt-right” and “Islamophobe,” but she claims that “white nationalists” and “sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan” were present at this rally. That may be, but Blaskey offers no evidence, no quotes, nothing to support her claim. She just wants you to associate Anabelle Lima-Taub and her opposition to Rashida Tlaib and her antisemitism with hatred, bigotry, and racism. There is no connection between opposition to jihad terror and Sharia oppression and white nationalism, the KKK, and the like, but Blaskey here takes a page from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s book, and lumps them together. This is how propaganda works: repeat the Big Lie often enough, and people believe it. And indeed, many people today take for granted the idea that opposing the likes of Rashida Tlaib and Hamas makes one hateful, when anyone who steps back and considers the situation for a nanosecond would see that it is actually Tlaib who is the hateful one.
Not anymore. The day of the rally, Lima-Taub was facing official censure from colleagues on the city commission for a viral Facebook post in which she called Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim congresswoman from Michigan, a “Hamas-loving anti-Semite” who might “become a martyr and blow up Capitol Hill.” The post was denounced as hate speech by numerous Muslim and Jewish human rights organizations, but Lima-Taub remained unapologetic.
Lost in the fracas here is the fact that Tlaib really is demonstrably an anti-Semite who is friendly with several open supporters of jihad terror. See, for example, all the evidence here and here. That she might “blow up Capitol Hill” is hyperbole, but of course Sarah Blaskey never for a moment considers the possibility that Anabelle Lima-Taub may actually be on to something, or that Rashida Tlaib may really be an anti-Semite who is sympathetic to jihad terror groups and jihadis themselves. And no establishment media journalist would dare ask Tlaib herself for a statement on her obvious closeness to anti-Semites and supporters of the jihad against Israel. Establishment media journalists only ask tough questions to those who dissent from the Leftist agenda, not to those who support that agenda.
Lima-Taub has repeatedly denied that she is Islamophobic or anti-Muslim, though she wrote that Islam was a religion hijacked by terrorists.
It’s now “Islamophobic” and “anti-Muslim” to note that Islam has been “hijacked by terrorists”? 34,516 deadly jihad terror attacks worldwide since 9/11, and Sarah Blaskey thinks it’s morally wrong to say that Islam has been hijacked by terrorists?
She also maintains it’s reasonable to believe a Muslim congresswoman who supports an Israel boycott might be a terrorist.
No quote here, so we don’t know what Lima-Taub actually said. Would Blaskey deny that it’s reasonable to believe that a Muslim congresswoman who supports an Israel boycott is sympathetic to terrorists who target Israelis? Because that’s clearly true of Rashida Tlaib.
And recently, she gave the Center on American-Islamic Relations two middle fingers on a Facebook Live video, calling the Muslim advocacy and human rights group a terrorist organization. It’s not.
(The U.S. State Department has not designated the group a terrorist organization, nor is it a designated hate group.)
Indeed, but how trustworthy is the U.S. State Department on such questions? One thing we have learned since Trump became President is that the State Department and other government agencies are deeply politicized, and hardly the dispassionate, impartial judges that Americans in the past took them for granted as being. And the United Arab Emirates has declared CAIR to be a terrorist organization. There are plenty of reasons for doing so. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.) CAIR chapters frequently distribute pamphlets telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement.
CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
And as for CAIR not being a “designated hate group,” the primary organization that designates hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center, uses its “hate group” designation as a political weapon to smear and demonize groups that dissent from the Leftist line. This has become so obvious that even the Washington Post has noticed. The SPLC doesn’t list any pro-jihad or Islamic supremacist groups as “hate groups.”
“Her actions speak loud and clear. Anabelle Taub is a bigot,” said Commissioner Michele Lazarow, who sponsored the item to censor Lima-Taub for hate speech. “She says she’s not anti-Muslim while promoting bigoted stereotypes about Muslims.”
Remember, Lima-Taub only spoke about Rashida Tlaib, about whom there is a great deal of reason to be suspicious. But now Lima-Taub is accused of “promoting bigoted stereotypes about Muslims,” and Sarah Blaskey passes this on as if it were an accurate observation.
Taking a page from the playbook of the far right, the Israeli-born politician labeled her critics — even the Jewish ones like Lazarow — anti-Semitic, enemies of the First Amendment and terrorist sympathizers.
“Far right”: Blaskey now throws in yet another smear phrase that signifies that she wants her readers not to sympathize with Lima-Taub or her supporters.
By digging in and defending her statements, Lima-Taub alienated many of her mainstream supporters nearly over night. But she also attracted a new group of allies who cheered her on from internet chat rooms and anti-Muslim blogs. Some of them attended the rally at City Hall on Jan. 23.
“Anti-Muslim”: media propaganda term meaning “opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression.” Opposing such things no more makes one anti-Muslim than opposing Nazism made one anti-German.
“We are not going to relinquish our country to terrorists,” said Janet Komburg, who was one of the first Lima-Taub supporters to arrive to the rally. “There is no place in Congress for someone who takes an oath on the Quran.”
Does Sarah Blaskey know what’s in the Qur’an? Is she familiar with its calls to warfare against unbelievers, permission to lie to those unbelievers, or with its anti-Semitism and misogyny? Almost certainly not. She just knows this: “Those who oppose taking an oath on the Quran are bigoted and bad.” Why does she think this? Because it has been repeated so often among her peers. Once again, that’s how propaganda works.
Whether intentional or not, Lima-Taub’s call for a solidarity rally to defend her words opened Hallandale Beach to an anti-Islam agenda that has been building momentum nationally.
From Democrat to neocon
Before Lima-Taub became the darling of xenophobes and nationalists, she was one of South Florida’s most notorious pull-no-punches feminists.
“Xenophobes” and “nationalists.” Two more smear terms. Remember, we’re talking about someone who criticized a Congresswoman who has demonstrable ties to jihad terror sympathizers and anti-Semites. Just doing that has gotten Lima-Taub, in this article alone, called and/or associated with the “alt-right,” the “far right,” “Islamophobes, white nationalists, sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan,” people who are “anti-Muslim,” “xenophobes,” and “nationalists.” Sarah Blaskey is a veritable poster child for the moral inversion and propagandistic dishonesty of the establishment media.
The first-term commissioner from Hallandale Beach made national headlines last August when she publicly denounced former Mayor Keith London for his comments during an official budget hearing in which he accused the commissioner of profiting from bleaching her sphincter. She hash-tagged her Facebook take down of London #MeToo, and encouraged other women to come forward.
If Lima-Taub were on the Left, the likes of Sarah Blaskey would be castigating London for making this weird and out-of-context charge in the middle of a budget hearing. But because Blaskey hates Lima-Taub, any innuendo, any dirt, any smear will do, despite having nothing to do with the issue at hand.
On paper — or at least from her Facebook posts — Lima-Taub seemed perfect for the South Florida city tucked into Florida’s bluest county: She was a Democrat (though her commission seat is non-partisan). A vegan. A dedicated animal rights activist. Pro-union. A supporter of the Parkland students’ calls for gun control. A crusader for justice. She called herself corruption’s toughest rival in Hallandale Beach.
Ah, now we see why Blaskey hates Lima-Taub with such burning intensity: after being a reliably orthodox adherent of Blaskey’s secular religion of Leftism, globalism, socialism, and the like, Lima-Taub has become a heretic, and so she must be stoned to death with all the rhetorical stones Blaskey can manage to throw at her.
Then came her 2019 reinvention. Just days into the new year, she produced a quick succession of Facebook posts echoing the language of designated anti-Muslim hate groups. Amid backlash, she made an online announcement that she had left the Democratic Party over Tlaib’s support for an Israel boycott.
“Designated anti-Muslim hate groups”? Designated by whom? Blaskey doesn’t say, perhaps because she is aware that if she names the SPLC, she will be destroying her own credibility.
For those who know her however, the shift was not as drastic as it might seem.
“Commissioner Taub is not a Democrat in substance and never has been,” said Lazarow, who had worked with Lima-Taub on animal rights campaigns for years and helped her run for Hallandale Beach commission in 2016 before the two had a falling out. “She changed her party affiliation before last year’s election so that she could deceive voters at the polls by showing them a voter registration card with a “D” on it.”
Ah, so the heretic has been a deceiver all along. She’s a witch! Burn her!
According to her Broward voter registration records, Lima-Taub changed from non-party-affiliated to Democrat in August 2018. She switched her registration again, this time to Republican, on Jan. 23 — the day of the rally at Hallandale Beach City Hall.
Lima-Taub’s transition didn’t stop at Republican. Instead, she moved further right. On Facebook, she declared herself a neoconservative, consummating the transition by launching a very public friendship with Laura Loomer, an alt-right provocateur who denounces both feminism and the MeToo movement as being “anti-white male.”
Proud of the label “Islamophobe,” Loomer clarified that she sees her fear of Islam as rational. She calls Islam “the biggest threat to Western Society.” (In reality, most terrorist attacks in America are carried out by nationalist extremists.)…
In reality, this claim, as common as it is, is based on a rigged study that counted the casualties from terror attacks by supposed “right-wing extremists” and by jihadis. But it started the count on September 12, 2001, thus massively skewing the data, and ignored failed plots as well as the fact that jihad terror is an international movement, while “right-wing extremism” is not.
The term “alt-right,” first coined by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer to describe his brand of white nationalism, has expanded in common vernacular to describe a non-homogeneous, dizzying array of far-right ideologies and warring factions. Alt-right groups range from full-blown white supremacists, to watered-down, pro-Israel versions of the ideology that Loomer promotes, sometimes called the “alt-lite.”
I give Blaskey credit for not making the common establishment media mistake of confusing the Nazi Richard Spencer with me, but note that her definition of “alt-right” boils down to anything she doesn’t like and wants to tar with a smear term.
This faction, which Loomer described as socially liberal, is tolerant of gay — albeit mostly white — men, for example, but still deeply xenophobic and nationalistic.
Note how Blaskey keeps trying to smear Lima-Taub as a racist — remember, all for criticizing an anti-Semitic Congresswoman.
As Lima-Taub came under fire in national headlines for “anti-Muslim comments,” various alt-lite publications and blog sites came to her defense. Some claimed the press had blown the story out of proportion and had conspired with Lazarow to discredit Lima-Taub out of personal vendetta.
The major proponents of this counter narrative included Halsey News, an organization founded by a woman who claims responsibility for starting the infamous PizzaGate rumors, according to the Miami New Times. It was also pushed by the Geller Report, a publication founded by extremist and anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller. Lima-Taub called the former “good reporting!” and thanked Geller by name on Facebook for the positive press.
Calling Pamela Geller an “extremist” is her most vicious smear of all. “Extremism” became during the Obama administration the U.S. government’s official euphemism for jihad terrorism, and the word became essentially synonymous with “terrorist.” To call Pamela Geller an “extremist” is to claim that opposing jihad terror is equivalent to promoting jihad terror. It also paints a massive target on Pamela Geller’s head by implying that she is a plotter of violence or something equally sinister. And to call her “anti-Muslim” suggests that what she opposes — jihad violence, Islamic anti-Semitism and misogyny, etc. — is endorsed by every Muslim, which makes Sarah Blaskey more anti-Muslim than Pamela Geller could ever be.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “In recent years, the most influential [anti-Muslim hate] groups — namely ACT for America and the think tank Center for Security Policy [CSP] — have sought to develop closer relationships with elected officials both at the state and local level.” Recently on her public “Rogue Commissioner” Facebook page, Lima-Taub posted a video by Brigitte Gabriel, founder of anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America, with a comment: “Preach on!” The video slammed two Muslim congresswomen, calling them anti-American.
At last Blaskey names the SPLC, without, of course, any hint of that cynical and dishonest organization’s massive and growing credibility problem.
By thenight [sic] of the Jan. 23 commission meeting, Lima-Taub was familiar enough with this new world of conspiracy theorists and extremists that she picked Loomer out of the crowd, having never met her before in person, and excitedly waved the woman forward to give her a hug. “We support you,” Loomer said….
Add “conspiracy theorist” to the list of Blaskey’s smear terms. And she goes on and on, leaping into the SPLC’s paranoid fantasies about “hate groups” being on the rise (which means you need the SPLC, you see, so send money, lots of money). Even the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s FrontPage magazine, a stolid journal of conservative opinion, comes into Blaskey’s crosshairs:
Filming the event was Joe Kaufman, founder of CAIR Watch, an organization dedicated to disparaging the Muslim-advocacy group, and frequent contributor to FrontPage Mag, a far-right extremist publication founded by David Horowitz.
Lima-Taub’s supporters outnumbered her critics five to one at City Hall….
Ah, that explains why Blaskey saw the need to resort to the supreme level of viciousness she displays in this hit piece.
If the Miami Herald were remotely sane, honest, or committed to actual journalism, it would retract Sarah Blaskey’s article, apologize to Lima-Taub, and fire Blaskey. But the world of establishment media “journalism” is so deranged today, and so thoroughly given over to Leftist propaganda, that if Blaskey were actually fired (which will never happen), she would likely get immediately snapped up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN.
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