In May the New York Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, where he argued that Obama was a Muslim by virtue of his Muslim father and that his adoption of Christianity made his “apostate” and was therefore guilty of “the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit.” Luttwak went on to suggest that Obama was at serious risk of assassination if he should travel to any Muslim country.

The takeaway from the piece was simple. It screamed : OBAMA IS A MUSLIM AND ALL TRUE MUSLIMS WANT TO KILL HIM.

 The problem is that the claim is complete nonsense as detailed in today's “The Public Editor” column.
Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? 

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times Public Editor, spoke to five Islamic scholars and all agreed that Luttwak's interpretation of Islamic was completely wrong. Luttwak's article did not reflect Islamic law but rather Luttwak's own anti-Islamic bias. “Luttwak said the scholars with whom [Hoyt] spoke were guilty of “gross misrepresentation” of Islam, which he said they portrayed as “a tolerant religion of peace;” he called it “intolerant.” Essentially Luttwak argues that everyone should pay attention to Luttwak, a military historian with a vocal antipathy to Islam, and ignore the Islamic scholars who actually know something about the Islamic law that Luttwak so freely misinterprets.

There is a bizarre irony at work here. The New York Times is the bastion of “liberal” media which the right loves to attack at every opportunity, and yet the New York Times has become an incredibly effective enabler of the right in recent years, printing both falsehood and prejudice as it it were fact.

The Times allowed Judith Miller to pump Bush administration propaganda on Saddam and his dreaded WMD straight on to the front page in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The bulk of her reporting has been shown to be based on phony intelligence dummied up by Bush's White House Iraq Group. Likewise on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion the Times published “Reflections on the Invasion of Iraq” where they featured six apologists for the war, giving each the opportunity to blame everyone but themselves and to declare that the invasion was good and just foreign policy. Nowhere did the Times find space for a dissenting voice or one which suggested that invading countries who never attacked us might indeed be very, very bad foreign policy.

And now we have Luttwak venting his prejudice as if it were fact. To the Times' credit they have allowed Clark Hoyt to point this out, though based on his conversations with the editorial staff, they appear once again to deny any errors of judgment.

And so it goes. The New York Times, the whipping boy of the right wing, once again lends credibility to falsehood and prejudice. We all deserve better.