Katie Paul http://newsbusters.org/taxonomy/term/6761/0 en Newsweek's Katie Paul: It's 'Nonsense' That al Qaeda Hates West For Its Freedoms http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2010/03/24/newsweeks-katie-paul-its-nonsense-al-qaeda-hates-west-its-freedoms <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>&quot;Let's just get it out of the way right off that bat that Al Qaeda madmen don't actually want to blast through bridges, skyscrapers, and subways in righteous protest of the First Amendment,&quot; an exasperated Katie Paul began her <a href="http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2010/03/23/what-bibi-s-they-hate-us-for-our-freedom-moment-at-aipac-means-for-the-obama-meeting.aspx" target="_blank">March 23 tirade</a> about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent address to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).</p><p>&quot;It's mind-boggling that politicians still consider this nonsense an effective enough talking point as to employ it in their keynote speeches to national audiences--until, that is, you realize they usually only bring it up when they're after something else,&quot; the Newsweek reporter added in her The Gaggle blog post, going on to argue Netanyahu's AIPAC speech was just red meat tossed out to a pro-Israel audience to bolster his closed-door meeting with President Obama over the Middle East peace process.</p><p>To be fair, it is true that politicians can and do simplify complex matters into sound bites that don't do justice to the issues at hand, but in this case, Paul is far too dismissive of the argument that al Qaeda's real complaint is not just with particular foreign policies of the United States and/or Israel but with the whole Western concept of secular, pluralistic liberal democracy. </p><p>Indeed, Paul doesn't have to take any politician's word for it, she need only look at al Qaeda's own pronouncements. From a February 4, 2005 Congressional Research Service document entitlted <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32759.pdf" target="_blank">&quot;Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology&quot;</a> (emphases mine):</p></div></div></div> Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:35:45 +0000 Ken Shepherd 35094 at http://newsbusters.org