Back to Basics

The liberal media have harangued figures such as Franklin Graham when they have refused to state categorically that Barack Obama is a Christian. Now comes author Edward Klein telling Sean Hannity that Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of United Church of Christ in Chicago, told him that he “made it comfortable” for Obama to accept Christianity “without having to renounce his Islamic background.”

All of this is consistent with our point, made in 2010, that Muslims could join Wright’s church without giving up their Muslim faith. And while Obama accepted Christianity, in the sense of calling himself a Christian, there is no evidence that he was ever officially baptized into Wright’s church. We pointed out that Obama’s claim about his own baptism, as reported in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope, is subject to interpretation because of the lack of detail about how and when he was baptized and by whom.

Edward Klein’s unauthorized biography of Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in The White House (Regnery) has generated some criticism from the right for badly mangling the facts about Obama and infanticide. The book is also being strongly attacked by the Soros-funded media machine as a “smear.”

But he has the goods on Obama—in the form of tape-recorded conversations with Wright, who is spilling the beans on Obama’s “conversion.” Sean Hannity’s website has posted some of the blockbuster Klein-Wright tapes.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times calls the book “skimpy, bitter,” but does not dispute the statements from Wright. Instead, she dismisses them, saying that “any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates. And if they feel snubbed enough, they will talk.”

She writes, “The Rev. Jeremiah Wright asserted to Mr. Klein that during the last presidential election he was offered a bribe by the Obama camp, a payoff to stop speaking in public. Mr. Wright also says that even when Mr. Obama made this request directly, he would not cooperate. Among the reasons: he had speaking engagements scheduled, a family to support and college tuitions to pay.”

There is no reason, however, for Wright not to talk openly and honestly about his conversations with Obama when he wanted to join Wright’s church.

As we have pointed out in the past, Obama acknowledges in Dreams from My Father that his grandfather was a Muslim (page 104) and that he spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia studying the Koran (page 154). In The Audacity of Hope, he says (page 204) that “my father had been raised a Muslim” but that by the time he met his mother, his father was a “confirmed atheist.”

His stepfather was not particularly religious and his mother professed “secularism,” Obama wrote (pages 204-205), but as a child he went to a “predominantly Muslim school,” after being first sent to a Catholic school. His mother, he said, was concerned about him learning math, not religion.

According to Klein’s book, Wright told Obama, “Well, you already know the Muslim piece of your background. You studied Islam, didn’t you?” Obama replied, “Yeah, Rev, I studied Islam. But help me understand Christianity, because I already know Islam.”

Asked if he converted Obama from Islam to Christianity, Wright said, “That’s hard to tell.

Tamara Holder, a Fox News contributor, is accused of having an affair with Jesse Jackson, Sr. in a lawsuit that alleges the illegal use of a gay Jackson employee to facilitate the relationship.

The accuser, Tommy R. Bennett, was Jackson’s personal travel assistant and ran the legal clinic at Jackson’s organization, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He says he was eventually fired for protesting his treatment by Jackson and other PUSH employees and is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

Holder has not responded to repeated requests for comment from Accuracy in Media, but Jackson’s press representative, Lauren Love, says the allegations are false and will be proven so.

Bennett attorney Thomas V. Leverso says that Jackson and PUSH have been stonewalling a legal response for many months but that investigations and the case are moving forward. Leverso tells Accuracy in Media that witnesses have come forward to verify the allegations against Jackson.

Jackson, a minister and Democratic politician who served as an aide to Martin Luther King, Jr., suffered a major embarrassment in 2010 when he admitted to an extramarital affair that produced an illegitimate child.

Bennett worked for Jackson for more than two years and was known as “Aruba Tommy” on local Chicago radio station WVON. The lawsuit alleges that Bennett was subjected to “humiliating tasks” because he was a homosexual, such as “escorting women to his [Jackson’s] hotel room” and then being ordered to clean up after Jackson had sexual intercourse with them.

One of those women, the suit claims, was Tamara Holder, a pundit and criminal defense attorney who claims she “single-handedly” founded what she calls “a pro bono legal clinic at Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition.” A self-described Democrat, she appears regularly on Fox News to defend the Obama Administration and other prominent Democrats. “Because of the Democratic Party’s deep Chicago roots, Tamara has worked closely with some of the City’s most prominent leaders,” her website says.

Another Holder website says that, in addition to being “a legal and political contributor for Fox News Channel,” she “previously wrote for The Huffington Post and now writes for The Daily Caller.” The latter identifies her as “one of the nation’s rising attorneys and legal analytical stars.”

On one occasion, “Mr. Bennett was instructed by Rev. Jackson to escort Ms. Holder to Rev. Jackson’s hotel room at the Hilton at Chicago O’Hare airport,” the suit says.

The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, says Bennett was director of the clinic but that when he objected to Holder taking a majority of the cases and charging too much to poor clients, he was replaced. He says Jackson then gave control of the clinic to Holder.

The allegations are the subject of several legal actions and complaints, including one by Bennett to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which is still under investigation, and another to the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which was not acted upon, prompting the lawsuit.

Bennett’s original complaint consisted of seven charges, including that Jackson exhibited a “bigoted attitude” toward homosexuals and ordered him to perform “improper job duties.” This was followed by a “supplemental statement of facts” from his attorney that runs eight pages in length.

This document declares, “It was well known that Ms.

Barack Obama is being presented as America’s first gay president by Newsweek, which glorifies his decision to recognize same-sex marriage. The Newsweek cover story will serve a purpose other than generating interest in a magazine that has been losing circulation and advertising revenue if it is viewed as an opportunity to finally discuss the taboo subject of Obama’s communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. This controversial figure, who drank heavily and smoked dope, wrote a pornographic novel in which the author declared, “under certain circumstances I am bisexual,” and discussed having sex with a young girl named “Anne.”

Despite Obama’s ABC News interview, where he claimed coming around on the issue in part because of conversations about homosexuals with his young daughters, Davis is the key to understanding Obama. Davis influenced Obama from ages 10 to 18, his critical growing-up years in Hawaii. Obama admits getting “hard-earned knowledge” from Davis.

The opportunity to finally discuss Davis is also at hand because Washington Post columnist and ombudsman Patrick Pexton, in an effort to justify the paper’s story about Mitt Romney allegedly bullying a kid in high school, notes that the paper’s associate editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, David Maraniss, wrote “a lengthy piece on Obama’s formative years in Hawaii, including his high school years at the prestigious Punahou School.”

He is clearly suggesting that Obama’s early years have been sufficiently covered by the Post. But note Pexton’s use of the word “lengthy” rather than “accurate” or “complete.” A journalist can write a lot of words without touching on the most relevant facts.

Once again, Pexton has failed in his role as the “ombudsman,” or consumer advocate, for the readers of the Post. He should have taken Maraniss to task for his cover-up of Obama’s communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. But Pexton didn’t want to take on one of the paper’s prize-winning journalists for what is clearly one of the most dishonest pieces of journalism ever published about a presidential candidate.

Pexton referred to the 10,000-word Maraniss piece, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible,” which was published on August 22, 2008.

Maraniss could have broken the story of Frank Marshall Davis wide open for a public eager to learn everything about Obama. Instead, Maraniss completely ignored the role of Davis, a member of the Soviet-funded Communist Party who was under surveillance by the FBI for 19 years.

The treatment of Davis is important because Maraniss has written a new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, which is being released on June 19. It will undoubtedly be seen by the mainstream media as the definitive word on Obama.

But considering how Maraniss completely omitted Davis’s influence over Obama in that 2008 article, it can be anticipated that the new book will also be a whitewash. One of the early “revelations” from the book is said to be that an Obama girlfriend was actually a “composite” of different people. But Frank Marshall Davis was real, not a composite character.

Remember that Obama had referred to Davis as just “Frank” in his book, Dreams from My Father. We confirmed the story about the identity of “Frank” on February 18, 2008.

On Thursday, May 10, The Washington Post Company held its annual meeting. AIM was there because of our ownership of company stock, enabling us to grill top brass about the condition of the newspaper and the company in general. The value of the company’s stock has fallen by 50 percent over the last five years.

But the worst may be yet to come. Kaplan, the Post subsidiary that has served as the cash cow for the paper that brought us the Watergate scandal that destroyed Republican Richard Nixon’s presidency, is going through scandal and financial turmoil.

In addition to growing concern over Kaplan, a for-profit educational institution, this year’s meeting featured questions about the paper’s controversial financial relationship with newspapers owned and controlled by the Russian and Chinese governments. Post Company chairman Donald E. Graham didn’t have any second thoughts over the paper being used, through paid advertisements, to promote Russian and Chinese propaganda to an American audience.

The meeting started at 9 a.m., before many people had probably seen what the Post was reporting in its print and online editions that day.

Copies of the paper were distributed for free to shareholders. But a story about Mitt Romney supposedly bullying a gay classmate was not in the print edition of that day’s paper. The story was published in the print edition the next day, Friday, and included an old photo of a young Romney playing around by pointing a toy gun to his chin under the caption, “Give a guy enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”

These pranks and jokes happened around 1965, and conservative commentators are having fun mocking the paper for devoting so much attention to these “troubling incidents,” as the paper puts it.

What is more troubling is what has happened to the Post, which does a good job of covering local news through such papers as The Calvert Recorder in Calvert County, Maryland, but which is suffering circulation and revenue declines because of its national newspaper product. The Calvert Recorder is part of the Southern Maryland Newspapers group, which is owned by the Post.

Dana Loesch of Big Journalism points out that the Post has already corrected the Romney story, without acknowledging that a correction was made. The correction was of the paper’s report that a former Romney classmate had “long been bothered” by the Romney bullying incident, when in fact, he wasn’t witness to it and only recently heard about it. It is troubling that the Post would embellish the story and then retract the charge without comment or an apology.

Romney reportedly helped pin a boy down and cut his hair off. There is no evidence Romney knew the boy was a homosexual and Romney can’t remember the incident. Yet, this is being presented by the paper in the context of Obama standing up for the rights of the poor gays, while his Republican opponent has a history of intimidating and harassing them.

RELATED: Watch the MSNBC Video Mashup “Bullying Mitt Romney”

There can be no doubt that the Post intended to damage Romney’s candidacy with this “news” story. This is typical of a liberal paper that faithfully promotes most of the liberal policies of the Obama Administration—except when it comes to regulating for-profit educational companies such as Post subsidiary Kaplan.

Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene, a black feminist, says on her Twitter page that “love can build a bridge.” But racism, not love, was on display last Thursday when she called conservative Tucker Carlson a “bow-tying white boy.”

Greene, a Democratic Party operative who was the national director of Project Vote, a group with close ties to the corrupt ACORN organization, has not offered a public apology. There is no indication that her financial relationship with Fox News has suffered as a result of the racial outburst.

“Jehmu apologized to Tucker by phone after the segment,” Irena Briganti, Group Senior Vice President at FOX News Channel & FOX Business Network, tells Accuracy in Media.

This is apparently the end of the matter for Fox News.

Robert Lifson of American Thinker pointed out that if Tucker Carlson had ever called Louis Farrakhan “a bow-tying black boy,” he would be out of a job.

What’s more, Greene said on the air that she had not done anything wrong.

“Hey, hey, hey,” reacted Carlson, at the slur. “You can’t, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa…You can use name calling all you like, but you’re ignoring the truth.”

“I didn’t call you a name,” replied Greene.

So calling somebody a “white boy” is acceptable to Greene.

As a Fox News Contributor, Greene is on the Fox News payroll and is paid to be a regular commentator on different programs.

At the time she was hired, ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief called Greene a Fox News “infiltrator,” saying, “Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and other Fox News personalities have been vilified in the mainstream media and threatened in their personal lives for exposing ACORN. It is an insult to them and average Americans to have a former ACORN insider using Fox News to espouse her liberal bias.”

Moncrief asked why black conservatives were not being hired by the channel to be commentators.

Conservative media critics of Fox News were subsequently cheered by the channel’s hiring of Deneen Borelli, a black conservative, as a Fox News Contributor. She wrote the excellent book, Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation, and was recently interviewed by Roger Aronoff of AIM.

But Greene is one of several left-wing commentators also hired by the channel, reflecting what Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has called a “course correction” from the days when it was considered a platform for outspoken conservative opinions.

Other left-wing commentators hired by Ailes include Sally Kohn, a lesbian feminist, and Santita Jackson, daughter of race-baiter Jesse Jackson.

Glenn Beck came under strong criticism when he said on Fox News that he considered President Obama a racist. Beck was forced to apologize and later lost his program on the channel.

Greene’s hiring by Fox News came after sustained criticism by liberal groups such as Media Matters of the conservative programming at Fox. Ironically, one of the Media Matters complaints against the channel was that its commentators too often used “racially charged commentary” and “race-baiting” in criticizing the Obama administration and liberal policies.

Newly declassified documents from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States, reveal that a journal called Freedomways, which was influential in the black community for decades, was subsidized by the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties.

Freedomways has been called “one of the most influential African-American literary and political journals of the 1960s and 1970s.” It began in 1961 and ceased publication in 1986.

During the 25 years it served as a propaganda organ for the CPUSA and Soviet front organizations such as the World Peace Council, Freedomways published articles by such figures as:

• Derrick Bell, one of Barack Obama’s academic mentors and a Harvard professor;
• Martin Luther King, Jr., the slain civil rights leader who turned against the Vietnam War and has been honored with a national memorial in Washington, D.C.;
• John Lewis, a Democratic member of Congress from Georgia and critic of the conservative Tea Party movement; and
• Jesse Jackson, a former aide to King and Democratic candidate for president who has recently been stirring up racial resentment over the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin.

Freedomways grew out of a Soviet campaign, launched after the Russian revolution, to exploit the “Negro question” in the U.S. and manipulate blacks and members of other minority groups for Communist purposes. The goal was a “Soviet America.”

In 1981, a communist-inspired Black Liberation Army, with the help of the Weather Underground, waged a campaign of terrorism and murder that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a Brinks guard.

The SOLO documents demonstrate that the Soviet Union illegally provided funding, reportedly more than $28 million, to the CPUSA. The documents are based on FBI informants, Morris and Jack Childs, who had infiltrated the highest levels of the CPUSA and had participated in meetings with foreign communist parties.

President Ronald Reagan awarded Morris Childs (and posthumously, Jack) with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work for the U.S.

An FBI memo dated March 3, 1959, which summarized a meeting between CPUSA officials and the Soviet Communist Party, reveals that CPUSA official James Jackson had asked Soviet officials about “the possibility of a Negro magazine dealing with theoretical questions.” Jackson was the party secretary in charge of “Negro and southern affairs.”

Freedomways came into being two years later.

An FBI memorandum, dated July 6,1961, refers to funding for the CPUSA from the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and China, including $5,000 to CPUSA chairman Gus Hall “for Negro publication ‘Freedomways Associates, Inc.,’” the publisher of Freedomways.

A June 8, 1962, FBI memorandum refers to $3,000 “To Isodore Wofsy for transmittal to Esther Jackson, CP functionary for use of Negro magazine ‘Freedomways.’” Wofsy was another important CPUSA member.

Esther Jackson, wife of James Jackson, was a CPUSA member who served as managing editor of Freedomways.

Freedomways was so extreme that it ran a notice hailing Angela Davis as a “courageous Black woman leader” when she went on trial for murder. Davis, who beat the murder rap, became a prominent CPUSA official and college professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She later started an anti-prison project, Critical Resistance, funded by the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros.

Despite his reputation as a moderate, Martin Luther King, Jr. paid tribute to W.E.B.

Speaking at the April 25 New York Times annual meeting, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, tried to justify the rejection of an ad calling attention to the alleged oppressive nature of the Islamic religion and the “vengeful, hateful and violent teachings” of Islam’s prophet. He said the ad might incite violence in the Middle East.

At the same time, he justified the placement of an anti-Catholic ad in The New York Times by saying, “We take political ads that we do not agree with. That is the nature of advocacy advertising.”

Representing Accuracy in Media, a shareholder in the company for the purpose of getting access to the annual meetings, I told Sulzberger, his executives and other Times shareholders, “You’re willing to offend the Catholics because they’re not going to come and kill you.”

The full-page, anti-Catholic ad ran on March 9 under the title “It’s time to quit the Catholic Church” and was sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It showed a cartoon of a Catholic Bishop going berserk over a birth control pill and urged Catholics to leave the church.

The ad against radical Islam, designed to test the paper’s commitment to fairness and freedom of expression, had a cartoon of a radical Imam upset over a smoldering Koran. It was sponsored and signed by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of Nations and the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

Addressing moderate Muslims, the ad said in part: “In light of the ongoing, ruthless, international jihad against non-Muslims, the 1,400-year record of institutionalized oppression of women, the 18,560 Islamic attacks across the world since 9/11, and the endangering of free peoples across the world, if you’re part of the Islamic jihad, you’re part of the problem.”

Questions over the ad were just one of several headaches for Sulzberger. Several stockholders took to the floor of the annual meeting to grill him over the paper’s editorial, news and advertising policies. One individual attacked the Times for an anti-Israel bias in its news coverage. Another said the company is unaccountable and does not answer legitimate questions from the public.

Sulzberger is also under a lot of pressure because of the company’s falling stock price and financial losses.

Fr. Colin McKenna of Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown, Connecticut, reamed Sulzberger over the anti-Catholic ad, wondering whether the paper would run an ad calling Islam’s Prophet Muhammad a pedophile for having a 6-year-old girl as a child bride.

McKenna, who said he had 100 shares in company stock, and that they had lost 50 percent of their value, said the paper was needlessly offending Catholics, who might be persuaded to buy the paper if it did not have such a strident anti-Catholic bias.

Sulzberger said the only ads the paper rejects are those which are obscene or dangerous to American soldiers. He did not elaborate on that latter point or allude to the fact that the Times had rejected other ads.

“Please do not confuse the ads we run with the positions we hold as journalists,” he said.

He failed to tell McKenna that the Times had rejected the Geller/Spencer ad that was supposed to run with the title of, “It’s Time to Quit Islam.”

We informed the shareholders, “…the fact is, Mr.

At The New York Times annual meeting on April 25, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Arthur Sulzberger Jr. denied that his paper was waging a war on the New York City Police Department and its commissioner, Ray Kelly. The denials are not convincing.

As I arrived in New York City for the annual meeting, the reason for the recent intensity of this campaign became apparent. Other papers were full of stories about how Kelly, who is very popular with city residents, is being pushed by New York City Republican officials to run for mayor.

The New York Daily News is reporting that Kelly’s job approval rating is at 77%, while his 63% favorability rating among city voters was “by far the highest of anyone considering a mayoral run next year.”

The Times is determined to do something about that. On the same day as the annual meeting, the Times published a puff piece on how New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the leading Democrat for the office, could become the city’s first homosexual mayor. The paper happily reported that, on May 19, Quinn will marry her girlfriend, Kim M. Catullo.

This is somehow supposed to be a qualification for higher office.

“She has joked about caterer tastings and trying on dresses. She has sent out hundreds of invitations, sprinkled with references to an early romantic getaway at the Pierre hotel and a shared affection for the Jersey Shore,” reported Times reporter Kate Taylor.

This kind of fluff is what qualifies as hard news reporting by the Times.

The paper added, “Longtime observers of the New York political scene said the wedding could benefit Ms. Quinn, as it would give her an early chance to share her story with voters and to underline the historic nature of her candidacy—if elected she would be the first woman and the first openly gay person to lead the nation’s largest city.”

It would certainly benefit Quinn at the Times headquarters, where support for homosexual rights and homosexual marriage is axiomatic. Affirming the rights of gays is almost as important to the Times as protecting the rights of Muslims to be free of police surveillance.

By contrast, in a story headlined, “After 11 Years, a Police Leader Hits Turbulence,” the Times on February 3 played down Kelly’s success in fighting crime and terrorism, and savaged him with everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. The Times assigned not one, not two, but three reporters—N. R. Kleinfield, Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein—to the story. The charges included:

• Kelly is “confronted with a steady drip of troublesome episodes,” including officers “fixing traffic tickets, running guns and disparaging civilians on Facebook,” and accusations that the Police Department “encourages officers to question minorities on the streets indiscriminately.”
• Kelly these days “seems to exude remoteness.”
• Kelly “is rarely expansive or publicly introspective.”
• “With his stubbled crew cut and muscled look, he is the picture of the prototypical police officer. Beneath his piercing eyes, a grimace appears to have been ironed onto his face.”

Kelly was even faulted for not taking vacations: “Except for a few long weekends, he has not had a vacation in years.

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has picked up the endorsement and fundraising support of entertainer Harry Belafonte, whose reputation as a calypso singer has been superseded by his service to international Marxism. During the Cold War, Belafonte sang at a “Concert for Peace” in communist East Germany, where he attacked President Reagan’s anti-communist foreign policy.

A long-time supporter of the Castro dictatorship, he has more recently been singing the praises of Venezuelan Marxist ruler Hugo Chavez.

The April 19 Warren fundraiser, which included Belafonte’s name on the letterhead, was held at the Manhattan penthouse of HBO executive Michael Fuchs, another indication of how Warren has the support of the media in her critical race. HBO recently ran the Sarah Palin-bashing film “Game Change.”

A radical in her own right, Warren proudly claims to be the intellectual author of the Occupy Wall Street movement and is running as a “consumer advocate.” But she had previously benefitted from a fundraiser hosted by George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund operator linked to the 2008 housing-market collapse.

Belafonte’s pro-Marxist views rarely make national news, but last October he garnered headlines when he dozed off before a TV interview, leaving anchor Leyla Santiago to say on camera, “Harry, wake up! Harry?”

Belafonte’s endorsement of Warren, who is trying to unseat Republican Senator Scott Brown, should prompt the media to ask whether Warren, a Harvard professor, has been awake or asleep as more than one hundred million people have died at the hands of communist regimes. Her operatives did not disavow Belafonte’s support for her candidacy.

Belafonte’s 2011 book, My Song: A Memoir, attacked Cuban-Americans opposed to the Castro regime as “angry partisans” who had been “cogs in the corrupt Batista machine” and had “lost their plunder” when Batista was overthrown by Castro.

Typical of how the media cover the legendary singer, a Boston Globe review of the book by Sarah Rodman completely ignores his activism on behalf of communist causes, saying only that his “political activities” drew the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a convenient villain for the media.

Belafonte claims he never joined the Communist Party USA but acknowledges in his book My Song: A Memoir that he used to attend lectures in 1947 at the Jefferson School in New York City, “which openly billed itself as an institute of Marxist thought affiliated with the American Communist party.” He says he heard such speakers as I.F. Stone, the so-called “independent journalist” later unmasked as a Soviet intelligence agent.

Indeed, the Jefferson School was a “Marxist adult education institute” in New York City that was associated with the Communist Party USA. Equally significant, it was closed down in the mid-1950s after the Subversive Activities Control Board ordered it to register as an agency of the Soviet Union.

At the time he attended lectures at the Jefferson School, Russia “seemed to be leading the way” internationally in achieving a “classless society,” Belafonte writes in his book.

This view carried forward at least to the 1980s, when Belafonte performed at a “concert for peace” in Communist East Germany, a Soviet client state, at a time when the Soviet Union was trying to prevent President Reagan and our NATO allies from deploying nuclear missiles in Western Europe as a counter to a Soviet military advantage.

Luke Harding of the London Guardian says Julian Assange is a “useful idiot,” based on the premier episode of his Russian Today (RT) program “The World Tomorrow.” The show featured a mostly softball interview with Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah, who not surprisingly adopted the Russian position of support for the Assad regime in Syria.

In fact, the useful idiots are those who believed that Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was not an anti-American activist willing to act on behalf of the Russian regime.

Media naiveté about Assange is legendary on many fronts. Back in May of 2011, the PBS program Frontline broadcast an interview with Assange in which he denied any direct contact with Bradley Manning, the Army analyst on trial for leaking to WikiLeaks. The preliminary hearing in the Manning case offered evidence that demonstrated a connection. It was evidence of a conspiracy to commit espionage.

Manning’s next scheduled day in court is April 24 and his supporters are planning to protest his treatment by holding an  “Occupy DOJ rally” in Washington D.C., in front of the Department of Justice building, even though Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t have a direct role in the prosecution of Manning on treason charges. The next day, April 25, Bradley Manning supporters are staging a vigil at the main gate at Fort Mead, where the Manning trial is being held.

One can find numerous references in the press to Holder’s alleged “relentless” effort to indict Assange for espionage, and there are even references to an alleged secret indictment (based on documents stolen and released by WikiLeaks). But where is the evidence?

The good news is that some in the media are waking up to the anti-American agenda of Assange, with Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times noting that his vehicle, RT, first known as Russia Today, “is an English-language news network created by the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin in 2005 to promote the Kremlin line abroad. It’s like the Voice of America, only with more money and a zesty anti-American slant.”

Alluding to how the media, including the Times, have soured on Assange, the paper added, “His reputation has taken a deep plunge since he shook the world in 2010 by releasing, in cooperation with The New York Times and several other news organizations, masses of secret government documents, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most news organizations edited and redacted the papers to protect lives. Mr. Assange put everything on his Web site. To some he was a hero, to others a spy, but nowadays he is most often portrayed as a nut job.”

Not surprisingly, officials of the Bradley Manning Support Network also make regular appearances on RT.

In explaining why he chose RT, Assange said, “We’ve seen RT’s reportage on the attacks on WikiLeaks for a number of years, and that reportage has generally been quite supportive. When we were looking what international broadcaster we wished to partner with as opposed to national broadcasters, we looked to see what was the penetration into the United States. And RT had higher penetration in the United States than Al Jazeera.”

He went on to say, in regard to the international television networks, “there’s really only two that are worth speaking about, and that’s RT and Al Jazeera.