The Mexican billionaire, worth a reported $73.5 billion, has been plagued by the protesters who may or may not be paid, over the last two years, Bloomberg reports:

The 73-year-old, whose telecommunications empire spans Latin America, the U.S. and Europe, has been increasingly targeted by demonstrators over the past two years. In addition to the event this week at the New York Public Library, marchers hoisted signs during his commencement speech last year at George Washington University. Picketers have also shown up at a New York store owned by Saks Inc. (SKS) — his biggest U.S. investment — and called for California lawmakers to investigate him.

The protests are loosely organized by a group of Latino political organizations that say they’re self-funded and unconnected with Slim’s competitors in Mexico. They’re planning more events — including one later this month in Las Vegas — to spread their message that Slim has overcharged Mexican consumers to enrich himself, an accusation the billionaire denies.

At the library, where Slim was speaking about digital education as part of a lecture series, protesters drowned out his comments with laughter, then stood up and shouted that his charitable giving was a joke. They tossed fake bills around the room that said “$73 billion” — Slim’s estimated wealth. (It’s now $73.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.) Then they began playing the “Imperial Death March” from the “Star Wars” films as they filed out.

Slim owns 7 percent of the New York Times Company. He has visited the White House at least twice during the Obama presidency.

The article written by the New York Times editorial board makes the dubious claim that Republicans are hurting the economy by pushing for “austerity” while the Obama Administration is “doing better” by “adding new taxes and investments”:

Republicans have insisted on austerity for ideological and political reasons. The administration has done better by adding new taxes and investments to the cuts, but the reductions are still deep and damaging.

Kernan, joined by Harvard Business School professor Robert Kaplan blasted the Times‘ assertion that adding new taxes is beneficial to the economy:

JOE KERNAN: That’s the part that was to me either was dishonest or the people writing it don’t understand economics. Now, I have gone in and looked at the New York Times editorial board. I found one person that does have an economics degree, Terry Tang. [...] Anyway, we have a Harvard professor. And I talked to you a little bit. But how do you characterize that statement?

ROBERT KAPLAN: I don’t understand it. They might want to rewrite that sentence.

Kaplan went on to point out the U.S. economy is not feeling the full burden of its national debt mainly because of artificially low interest rates, a fact ignored by the New York Times in their editorial:

ROBERT KAPLAN:  [...] My fear is this. This deficit doesn’t feel that bad and this amount of debt doesn’t feel that bad because interest rates are so low.

BECKY QUICK: Right.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Imagine if we had, quote, unquote normal interest rates, 5 percent, 6 percent, 10-year, we would be taking much tougher action [on the national debt]. And we shouldn’t wait for that. [...]

]]> http://freebeacon.com/kernan-slams-nyt-editorial-either-dishonest-or-they-do-not-understand-economics/feed/ 0 http://freebeacon.com/the-real-samir-naji-al-hasan-moqbel/ http://freebeacon.com/the-real-samir-naji-al-hasan-moqbel/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:45:28 +0000 Adam Kredo http://freebeacon.com/?p=89728 A Guantanamo Bay detainee who accused the United States of torturing him in a New York Times editorial published on Monday failed to disclose his lengthy rap sheet, which includes efforts to kill Americans while fighting for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, who has been held in the Gitmo detention facility for more than 11 years, claims he has been detained and abused by the United States despite his innocence. However, anti-terrorism experts maintain he fought for the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11 and remains a risk to return to the battlefield.

Moqbel, a member of the “Dirty 30” gang of terrorists, went on a hunger strike in February and has been force-fed since.

“I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose,” Moqbel told the Times via a translator. “I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. … There was agony in my chest, throat, and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before.”

What the Times fails to mention is that Moqbel has a lengthy criminal rap sheet that identifies him as an al Qaeda terrorist who fought “on the front lines” against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, according to his confidential records.

None of this information is provided in Moqbel’s editorial or acknowledged in an editor’s note appended to the piece.

“Detainee admitted fighting on the front lines, is assessed to be a fighter in [Osama bin Laden’s] 55th Arab Brigade, and is assessed to have participated in hostilities against U.S. and coalition forces in [bin Laden’s] Tora Bora Mountain complex,” according a Department of Defense intelligence analysis.

Moqbel, who also served on bin Laden’s security detail, was captured following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks along with several other fighters, including a 20th hijacker and other bin Laden body guards, according to the DoD’s intelligence report.

Additionally, Moqbel’s information was listed on multiple al Qaeda documents and he later admitted he was “recruited by [a] known al Qaeda member,” according to the report.

U.S. intelligence analysts dubbed Moqbel a “high risk” after he admitted he was a paid terrorist fighter who personally knew bin Laden.

Pakistani authorities captured Moqbel while he was trying to cross the porous Afghan-Pakistan border.

Moqbel claims in his op-ed, “After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else.”

However, the U.S. intelligence assessment Moqbel has repeatedly been deemed “deceptive.” He admitted lying to U.S. interrogators at several junctures.

Moqbel claims he is only being held because President Barack Obama refuses to allow him to return to Yemen, his birth nation.

The U.S. intelligence assessment paints a different picture.

“Detainee is a member of al Qaeda,” the assessment maintains in a portion explaining his “continued detention.”

“Detainee served as a security guard for [bin Laden] and is listed on al Qaeda affiliated documents,” according to the report, which also notes Moqbel admitted to being a fighter in Kabul.

“Detainee was captured with a group referred to as the Dirty 30, which includes known [bin Laden] security guards,” states the report, which confirms that Moqbel was fingered as an al Qaeda member by other bin Laden confidants.

The only mention of Moqbel’s background comes at the bottom of his op-ed.

“Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call,” the NYT notes at the bottom of his story.

Terrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn criticized the Times for obfuscating Moqbel’s true backstory.

“Moqbel’s claim of innocence certainly doesn’t smell right,” Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Free Beacon.

“The public has to choose between two contradictory narratives,” Joscelyn said. “Moqbel claims that his ‘friend’ tricked him into going to Afghanistan more than one year prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was simply looking to get back home afterwards.”

Joscelyn said the evidence suggests this story is untrue.

“Intelligence professionals at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) concluded that Moqbel was a member of Osama bin Laden’s elite 55th Arab Brigade, which fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and rose in rank to become a trusted member of bin Laden’s security detail,” he explained.

“Moqbel writes that ‘no one seriously thinks I am a threat,’” Joscelyn added. “But JTF-GTMO deemed him a ‘high’ risk to the United States and its allies in 2008. And his name does not appear on a list of Gitmo detainees approved for transfer by the Obama administration as of September last year.”

“Many ‘high’ risk detainees have been transferred, subject to security protocols being in place,” he said. “If Moqbel hasn’t been approved for transfer, then that indicates he is not among the group of detainees the Obama administration is willing to gamble on.”

Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

The ascension of Jesus is observed on the 40th day of Easter.

Provocatively titled “Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?” the 8,000-word piece tells the story of a Palestinian village fighting “against the Israeli occupation.”

Author Ben Ehrenreich, a noted anti-Zionist, spent several weeks living in the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh with a popular Palestinian family that organizes weekly protests against Israel. The piece portrays the family—members of which have been imprisoned by the Israelis for inciting violence—as the David to Israel’s Goliath in the fight to establish an independent Palestine.

Arnold Roth, an Israeli blogger whose daughter was killed by a terrorist from Nabi Saleh, argued that the article was pure “advocacy journalism.”

“If consumers of the news believe they are being given objective reality when they read and view what is served up to them, they are unaware of just how ill-informed and agenda-driven so many of the practitioners in the news-packaging industries are,” Roth told the Free Beacon.

New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy defended the feature.

“Sunday’s magazine story was intended to provide a close-in look at one particular perspective in the Mideast conflict and we think it did so thoughtfully and sensitively,” Murphy told the Free Beacon via email.

Media experts also criticized the Times for stirring up anti-Israel sentiment ahead of Obama’s visit.

“NYT Magazine’s decision to publish such terrorist chic agitprop, providing a liberal Hechsher [seal of approval] for those who wish to begin a new, violent intifada, confirms what I’ve been fearing for a long time: The NYT is slouching towards the ideological extremism of the Guardian,” said Adam Levick, the managing editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

“The elitists who write such propaganda under the guise of respectable journalism are toying with Israeli lives,” Levick said.

Ehrenreich’s article contained several serious accusations, including the claim that an unprovoked Israeli border officer threw stun grenades at a group of protesting Palestinian children.

Ehrenreich also went to great lengths to portray the Palestinian villagers as peaceful freedom fighters despite their history of violence.

Nabi Saleh is known in Israel as a hotbed of “popular resistance,” spawning many “martyrs on the alter of freedom,” Roth pointed out on his anti-war blog, “This Ongoing War.”

Ehrenreich quotes Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi, the article’s central character, as endorsing armed struggle.

“Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one,” Ehrenreich writes. “He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works.”

Roth said Ehrenreich glosses over the town’s ties to prominent terrorists and pointed to the following passage:

“In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem,” Ehrenreich wrote. “Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.”

Ahlam Tamini “planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001,” Roth wrote on his blog. “She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb.”

Roth, whose daughter was murdered in that 2001 attack, said Ehrenreich fundamentally misunderstands the conflict.

“Perhaps to Ehrenreich, perhaps to Bassem Tamimi, I am the party with the upper hand in the conflict,” Roth told the Free Beacon. “But it does not feel that way to me.”

Some pro-Israel observers argued that Ehrenreich’s past statements about Israel prove that he is incapable of impartiality on the matter.

“The bad news is that the Times’ profile was a viciously  unbalanced piece of anti-Israel propaganda. The good news is that since it was such a viciously unbalanced piece of anti-Israel propaganda it probably didn’t change any minds but reinforced the Times’ reputation for unfailr anti-Israel animus,” said one prominent pro-Israel activist who requested anonymity.

Ehrenreich is perhaps best known among pro-Palestinian activists for his 2009 essay arguing, “Zionism is the problem.”

Ehrenreich wrote that Israel is sliding towards “ethnic cleansing” and condemned “the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse,” he wrote. “To question not just Israel’s actions but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.”

Given Ehrenreich’s anti-Israel background, critics maintain that his Times piece should be viewed as nothing more than “propaganda.”

“Ehrenreich’s article is a pathetically one-sided piece of propaganda,” said David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel.

“His readers will never know that there could have been a Palestinian state in 2000, 2001, and 2008 if only the Palestinians would have accepted Israel’s offers to create one,” Brog said. “Yes, rock throwing is better than suicide bombing. But peace would be better yet.”

The Times has a history of publishing anti-Israel articles, according to CAMERA. Nearly 190 of 275 New York Times articles about Israel in the second half of 2011 criticized the Jewish state while 88 were critical of the Palestinians, according to a survey conducted by CAMERA.

Ehrenreich did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment sent via a form on his website.

Even the liberal Israeli daily, Haaretz, condemned the piece as a “pro-Palestinian manifesto.”

“The article, which some may interpret as encouraging a third intifada, is decidedly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and hostile both to the IDF as well as to the Palestinian ‘Ramallah bubble’, which, the author maintains, serves as an inhibitor to the ‘popular struggle’ of Palestinian villagers,” wrote blogger Chemi Shalev.

Haaretz’s surprising attack on the Times led Wall Street Journal editor Tom Gara to fire off a snarky Tweet.

“Some excellent passive aggressiveness in this Haaretz piece on the NYT‘s big Naba,” Gara tweeted.

The message prompted sharp reply from Huffington Post blogger Joshua Hersh.

“*Passive* aggressive?” Hersh replied. “Damn, that column is straight out the free beacon.”

“The subsequent character assassination [in the article] is pure combat journalism,” he followed up.

Hersh is believed to be referring to the Washington Free Beacon and its editor-in-chief’s first editorial.

Slim, currently the world’s richest man, has become insanely wealthy through the stranglehold his company, América Móvil SAB, has on Mexico’s telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately for Slim, the Mexican government seems poised to loosen Slim’s grip on the industry.

Mexico is expected to pass new legislation to create competition in the industry, which would spell trouble for Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Mexico’s top three political parties have vowed to pass the law by April 30, which would give the government new latitude in reshaping both the telephone and television market.

América Móvil, owned 40 percent by Mr. Slim and his family, stands to be the hardest hit by the competition push, say analysts. The company, which has a market value of $75 billion, has 261.6 million wireless subscribers in North and South America.

It has commanded a quasi-monopoly in Mexico since the 1990s. It currently controls 70 percent of the country’s mobile phones and 80 percent of its fixed lines, giving it some of the region’s biggest profits. The profits have helped América Móvil carve up other markets with heavy investments from Colombia, where it has 60 percent of the cellphone market to Brazil where it has 24 percent.

The new Mexican regulator will be able to issue tougher sanctions and force asset sales by dominant players—and the company may have less ability to parry these decisions by tying them up in Mexican courts. Under the new law, foreign companies could buy América Móvil’s small Mexican competitors and beef them up with big capital investments, ending a restriction which capped foreign investment in landline companies at 49 percent.

Christopher King, an analyst at brokerage Stifel Nicolaus & Co., puts it this way: “As long as the government is putting these kind of teeth into telecom regulators, it’s bad news for América Móvil. I would say this is the biggest regulatory threat in Mexico.”

Although Slim has publicly said that he welcomes the reform, the markets have not been kind to the company since the news broke.

América Móvil stock has plummeted in New York and seen its lowest price in the Mexican Stock Exchange since April 2009. Additionally, both Moody’s and Credit Suisse have lowered their ratings on the company.

Slim’s stake in the company accounts for roughly half of his $73 billion net worth.

The new laws may not be the only bump on the road ahead for América Móvil.

AT&T recently hinted that it is looking to sell off the 9.6 percent of América Móvil that it owns, a stake worth about $7 billion.

Slim has used his power and connections to turn América Móvil into the giant monopoly. The company has millions of subscribers throughout North and South America, including more than 22 million in the United States.

Slim’s influence extends into the United States as well.

Slim owns more than 7 percent of the New York Times Company, and also loaned the company $250 million in 2009 “amid a particularly rough period in its history.”

This relationship earned Slim a pass from the New York Times when he held a series of closed-door meetings with senior officials in President Barack Obama’s administration such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

According to visitor logs, Slim has also visited the White House at least twice during Obama’s presidency.

Weekly Standard writer Samuel Tadros broke the story of Ibrahim’s support for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Bulgarian bus bombing attack of 2012, resulting in the State Department’s decision to “defer” its plan to honor Ibrahim with a women’s courage award.

But Times reporter Robert Mackey speculated on Twitter that Tadros’s religious background, which Mackey believed was Coptic Christian, might have played a role in his reporting.

“Is it correct to say you’re from Egypt’s Coptic Christian community? If so, does that inform your criticism of Islamists?” Mackey asked Tadros.

Mackey was quickly flooded with Tweets saying his question was out of line.

“Please explain your theory for how being Coptic might make one critical of a non-Islamist (Samira) who celebrates 9/11,” wrote Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Your question was framed in a way often used by people to marginalize members of ethnic, religious and racial minorities,” wrote the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Mackey responded that he was not trying to diminish Tadros’s story, but merely point out that some reporters are influenced by their religious views.

“[H]ave we reached a point where questions about our perspectives can only be racist? My background does influence my take,” asked Mackey.

Mackey added that because of his own “Northern Irish (Catholic but with some Protestant) heritage” that he “perhaps mistakenly thought that was an inoffensive question.”

“Yes, maybe my N.Irish background makes me too ready to ask questions about perspective others find offensive,” he conceded.

Mackey has drawn parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “the Troubles” on his New York Times blog, suggesting that a one-state solution, which would likely result in the end of Israel as a Jewish state, is a viable option because it worked in Northern Ireland.

When Tadros’s story broke, Ibrahim claimed her Twitter account was hacked on multiple occasions to make it appear that she was praising the terrorist attacks and favorably quoting Adolf Hitler.

But after State Department deferred the award, Ibrahim wrote on Twitter:

I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America regarding my previous anti-Zionist statements under pressure from American government therefore they withdrew the award.

A paid death notice published by the New York Times noted that Israel-born New Yorker Amos Shuchman “loved everything about NYC, except the New York Times.”

Dan Amira of New York Magazine speculated Shuchman’s antipathy for the Times is tied to the “newspaper of record’s” criticism of his nation of birth.

“We’re going to go ahead and guess that Amos Shuchman’s immortal hatred for the Times might have something to do with its stance toward Israel?” he wrote.

The Times has a reputation for biased and inaccurate reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has reinforced this reputation time and time again.

Shuchman may also have been turned off by the progressivism that “virtually bleeds through the fabric“ of the paper.

Whatever the root of Shuchman’s animosity, however, the Free Beacon shares it.

The revelation is buried in the 19th paragraph of the paper of record’s debriefing on the resignation.

“When he took office, Pope Benedict’s well-known stands included the assertion that Catholicism is ‘true’ and other religions are ‘deficient,’” the Times notes, ”that the modern, secular world, especially in Europe, is spiritually weak; and that Catholicism is in competition with Islam.”

In other news, the Times reported Sunday evening that college students are liberal.

According to the New York Times, the label of “assault weapon” applied to firearms available to civilians is so vague and politicized that it may be impossible to find a definition comprehensive enough to banish them from the market.

Obama’s decision to go after “military-style weapons” adds to the confusion:

The most basic criteria have to do with a firearm’s ability to fire multiple rounds quickly. Because of this, the firearms included under any assault weapons ban are usually semiautomatic, meaning that a new round is automatically reloaded into the chamber but is not fired until the trigger is pulled again. The weapons also have detachable magazines, allowing them to fire 10, 20, 30 rounds or more without the need to insert a new magazine.

After that, however, the definition becomes more difficult. In calling for a renewed ban, Mr. Obama on Wednesday singled out “military style” weapons.

Those could include features like a pistol grip, designed to allow a weapon to be fired from the hip; a collapsible or folding stock, which allows the weapon to be shortened and perhaps concealed; a flash suppressor, which keeps the gun’s user from being blinded by muzzle flashes; a muzzle brake, which helps decrease recoil; and a threaded barrel, which can accept a silencer or a suppressor. Bayonet lugs or grenade launchers are also sometimes included.

But there is disagreement about which features are worrisome enough to include in a ban. And existing state bans differ in how many features they allow.