“Washington Post’s Dana Milbank Smears the Heritage Foundation,” Bryan Preston writes at the PJ Tatler:
Dana Milbank attended an event on Benghazi and terrorism that was hosted at the Heritage Foundation, and wrote up a dishonest smear piece about it. He omits key facts about participants, attributes beliefs to them are not accurate, omits key details about one of the participants, and makes hash of what actually happened in order to present a picture of the event that is not even close to accurate. His story cannot be explained by incompetence. It’s an intentional smear job.
To start with, the event wasn’t even a Heritage Foundation event. Milbank says it was in the title of his piece: “Heritage’s ugly Benghazi panel.” Heritage provided the room for the event, but an outside group was the actual host.
Mollie Hemingway did the first take-down, here at the Federalist. Politico’s Dylan Byers has the second, here.
Heritage is so confident that it and its panelists have been smeared that it plans on releasing the whole video of the event.
Did you notice that? It isn’t often that someone from the reliably establishment liberal Politico punches back against their fellow lefties at the Washington Post. But it gets even better (read: worse, if your last name is Milbank). As Noah Rothman writes at Hot Air, “Fortunately, Media Matters for America dug up a video of the exchange in question which they may have believed supported Milbank’s case. An objective viewing of the material suggests just the opposite:”
Gabriel delivered a fiery, impassioned response to Ahmed’s question, and appeared to take offense to the suggestion that “We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad,” a straw man that Americans have been forced to address on a near daily basis since September 12, 2001.“Great question,” Gabriel began. “What I find so amazing is, since the beginning of this panel, which we are hear about Benghazi attack against our people, not one person mentioned Muslims. We are here against Islam, or we are launching war against Muslims. We are here to discuss how four Americans died and what our government is doing.”
“We were not here to bash Muslims,” she continued. “You were the one who brought up the issue about ‘most Muslims,’ not us.”
“There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today,” Gabriel elaborated. “of course not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15 to 25 percent, according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 70 percent of them peaceful people.”
She added, however, that this means that between 180 and 300 million people are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.”
Well there’s something that doesn’t happen very often — a leftwing hit piece in the Post rebutted by Dylan Byers of the Politico, with an assist from Media Matters(!). Super job, Dana. Take two orange hunting vests and Mike Nesmith hats out of petty cash.
And further proof that Jeff Bezos has much more of the fever swamp left to drain if he really does care about turning around the Post’s still-dreadful reputation.
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