The insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf

[KamaAina]

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-scotland-conspiracy-theories

Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.

Wild-eyed conspiracy theories are common on Facebook. You may naturally wonder, then, why you are reading about these ones. Partly it's because Wolf's posts on ISIS deeply offended many people who knew one or more of the four murdered Westerners whom Wolf accused of being actors. And as American victims James Foley and Steven Sotloff were journalists, their outraged friends included a number of fellow journalists, so you may have seen them discussing Wolf's posts online and wondered what had happened.

Perhaps more importantly, though, despite Wolf's turn into conspiracy theory, she is still more widely known for her earlier and much-respected work on feminism, as well as her political consulting for the 1996 Bill Clinton and 2000 Al Gore presidential campaigns on reaching female voters. I was taught parts of Wolf's 1990 book "The Beauty Myth" in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. In other words, I was carrying the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously. I can only assume that I was not alone in this.

Mom once applied to be her personal assistant. And she may very well have served me a plate of Cincinnati five-way chili; she worked in the Berkeley College (dorm) dining hall at Yale during the time frame I was there. I was in Saybrook, but often transferred to Berkeley to eat with friends.

[samsingh]

1. this is so far out there in loonie land

if that was the case, whey are the Western powers resisting putting boots on the ground. They are doing everything they can to avoid doing anything substantive.

[OnyxCollie]

2. Maybe not so crazy.

From the article:

Her initial posts on ISIS repeatedly stated that confirmation of the authenticity of their beheading videos "has not happened yet." Wolf said that the media was ignoring "journalistic red flags" in that the sole source of the videos had been "SITE, which is run by an anti-Muslim activist with half a million dollars in US funding in 2004." (In fact, the videos were widely distributed on open-source jihadist online outlets. Maryland-based nonprofit SITE monitors extremist social media.) She also detailed an alleged incident, which I was not able to confirm, of a website "based in Doha, address registered at a private intelligence firm in the UK" that she said had spread news of a Canadian journalist, who turned out not to exist, taken hostage in Syria.

...

From a post by berni_mccoy:

A "Charitable Organization" (The SITE Institute) Released the Bin Laden Video...
http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1778459

I find it amazing that the release of this video, supposedly by Al Qaeda, was intercepted and released by a PRIVATE CHARITABLE organization run by TWO PEOPLE, one of which is an Israeli who is a self proclaimed terrorist expert. I say self proclaimed because she was called in as a witness by the gov't in the trial against Al-Hussayen and they were not allowed to call her an expert witness. Al-Hussayen was acquitted of all charges even though he had been detained for over a year and a half (for more info, see: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SITE_Institu... )

How is it that this two run CHARITABLE organization intercepted Bin Laden's latest video message to America, and yet Al Jazeera and the CIA did not catch it nor release it to the public?

Maybe it's because between 2003 and 2004 the SITE Institute earned more than $500,000 from the GOVERNMENT (2003 tax return here: http://tfcny.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/481/48126632... and 2004 return here: http://tfcny.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/481/48126632... )

Note in the returns that in 2004 over $273,000 came directly from taxpayers.

I don't find it surprising that they have removed the link from their list of articles to their very first article published on March 15th, 2003 (what an interesting time to make a splash for your new organization) about Al-Hussayen and their discovery of his alleged funding of terrorism which happened to be completely WRONG. Unfortunately for them it's out there on the Internets and google helped me find the article, still on their site, here: http://siteinstitute.org/bin/articles.cgi?ID=inthenews2...