July 16, 2012
The Sun Daily (Malaysia)
Letters to the Editor letters@thesundaily.com:
In your article, One of America’s Finest Hours, it is apparent that Eric Margolis supports the well known phrase by Goebbels, “Tell a lie a hundred time and it becomes the truth.”
On what planet is Margolis living? For the past seven years, four major humanitarian organizations did research on these Balkan Civil Wars and to use their words: “We are having difficulty coming up with 100,000 victims on all sides.” America’s finest hour has been our State Department’s skill at hoodwinking the rest of the world.
Margolis has no evidence that “160,000 Muslims were slaughtered” or that “10,000 Bosnian girls were gang raped.” He supports the Partisan Press that claimed for 8 years that there were “300,000 Bosnian Muslims killed.” He personally used that figure in numerous articles. President Clinton increased that fictitious death count to “350,000” during his last inaugural address. Margolis makes clear that his finest hour is specializing in yellow journalism and hate speech.
Lies, manipulation, distortions and race baiting by the media have revealed the depth to which Margolis and his ilk will stoop for a byline and prove that few, if any, do any real research. Has political journalism become so difficult that a writer needs to resort to lies, or worse, fiction?
William Dorich, Los Angeles
The writer is the author of six books on Balkan history, including his 1992 book, Kosovo. His current book is Serbia: Faces & Places.
According to Wikipedia, Margolis’ mother is Albanian and he is heavily involved with Pakistani and other Muslim media outlets.
Eric S. Margolis (born 1942 or 1943)[1] is an American-born journalist and writer. For 27 years, ending in 2010,[2] he was a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun[3] chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East, South Asia and Islam. He contributes to the Huffington Post and appears frequently on Canadian television broadcasts, as well as on CNN.[4] A multinational, he holds residences in New York, Paris, and Banff, Canada.[5] Margolis is the owner of Canadian vitamin manufacturer Jamieson Laboratories.[6]
This is reason enough to boycott Jamieson Laboratories.
Margolis was born in New York City in 1947 to Henry M. Margolis, and Nexhmie Zaimi, an American-Albanian. His father was a New York businessman, restaurant owner, theatrical producer and investor, while his mother was a journalist and author. Eric Margolis holds degrees from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, the University of Geneva and New York University. During the Vietnam War he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
Margolis writes a regular column for the Huffington Post and also writes for Dawn,[7] an English language Pakistani newspaper, the Gulf Times[8] in Qatar, the Khaleej Times[9] in Dubai, New York Times[10] and The American Conservative[11][12] . He appears regularly on such television outlets as CNN,[4] Fox, CBC,[4] British Sky Broadcasting News, NPR, and CTV.[13][14] He is a regular guest on the TV Ontario’s The Agenda‘[15]‘.
He is affiliated with several organizations including International Institute of Strategic Studies[16] in London and the Institute of Regional Studies[4] based in Islamabad, Pakistan.
[…]
Margolis has argued that the American government may have been behind the 9/11 attacks. On September 10, 2010, in a column on his website[21] Margolis declares “we still do not know the real story about 9/11.” Margolis’ arguments include, the Osama Bin Laden tapes are fakes, questioning why the Air Force didn’t shoot down the planes, asserting a lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and repeating the theory that 9/11 was “staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of right-wing US Air Force generals” without criticizing the theory. While saying there is no “hard evidence” that Americans were behind 9/11, he adds “What, in the end, can we conclude? … The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry[,] boosted pro-Israel neo-conservatives [and] destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies.”[22]
[…]
More here.
It gets more interesting.
Captured records show that al-Qaeda bigwigs correctly identified Eric Margolis as a reliable shill for the ummah:
Toronto Sun: Canadian reporters named in al-Qaida spin plans
By Jessica Murphy, Parliamentary Bureau
First posted: Friday, May 04, 2012 02:26 PM EDT | Updated: Friday, May 04, 2012 06:26 PM EDTOTTAWA – Al-Qaida was a “moribund organization” that was “grasping at straws” with a proposed spin campaign to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, says a Canadian journalist named by the terror group in newly declassified documents.
“What kind of media blitz is going to make a blip of difference 10 years after the event?” said Gwynne Dyer in an telephone interview from London, England. “But what else was (Osama bin Laden) going to do on the 10th anniversary? Have a drink?”
Dyer, a columnist and broadcaster, and Eric Margolis [emphasis added], a veteran Middle East correspondent, are the two Canadians among a number of journalists cherry-picked by the terror group for the contemplated “media strategy,” according to documents seized in a raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan last year.
Also named were New Yorker contributor Seymour Hersh, Beirut-based Robert Fisk and senior ABC correspondent Brian Ross.
According to the proposed plan, 30 to 50 reporters would have been given a website address and password to access the materials in the run-up to Sept. 11, 2011.
[…]
More here.
What the above Toronto Sun article does not mention is that Sun Media, the parent company of Toronto Sun, had already fired Eric Margolis in July, 2010.
Could the Toronto Sun be ashamed that this foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite used to write for them? Or have the current news staffers simply forgotten that he was ever there? How the mighty have fallen!
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun: Appeaser, Jew-hater or moron?
by Klaus Rohrich
Monday, May 8, 2006Last Sunday’s Toronto Sun featured and article in its comment section by Eric Margolis, the Sun’s foreign correspondent. The gist of the article was that a nuclear Iran posed absolutely no threat to the rest of the world, as the Iranians were A) cognizant of the fact that if they did start a nuclear incident they would be totally annihilated by the Americans and B) Iran did not possess the technological capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to a selected target and C) the Americans and Israelis with their nuclear capability were the real threat to world peace.
In the article Margolis made a number of claims that were highly dubious, if not outright lies and I questioned the competence of the Sun’s fact checkers printing his piece without the usual due diligence. For instance, Margolis claims that he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 because he knew that Iraq couldn’t possibly be a threat, even if they were in possession of WMDs, as they did not have the capability to deliver them. Margolis claims that Saddam’s most advance missile could only fly a distance of some 130 kms.
A quick check of the Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) web site would have revealed that not only did the Iraqis have missiles that went a lot further than what Margolis claims they were capable of, they were actually used against Israel and Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War in 1991. According to the FAS, the Iraqis’ Al Husayn and Al Hijarah scud-type missiles had a range of well over 600 kms, sufficient to reach most of Israel. Short memory or loose ethics?
Margolis also posited that the Mullahs in Iran were from 5-10 years away from perfecting nuclear weapons, so there was no need for the world to get its knickers in a knot. Wasn’t that the same attitude that the Clinton administration had toward North Korea when it attempted to “negotiate” them out of completing a WMD program? Today North Korea is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to many parts of the United States.
Most galling of all was Margolis’s cavalier rationale why Iran would never nuke Israel. He conceded that the Iranians were capable of hitting Israel as well as some American bases in the Gulf, but claimed they would not do so as any nuclear strike in that region “would blow back on Iran”.
Maybe Margolis was sleeping last week when the chief Iranian nutter, Ahmed Ahmadinejad said they don’t care if there is a nuclear exchange with Israel, as there are only six million Jews (an interesting number) in Israel versus nearly a billion Muslims in the world. Israel could conceivably be eradicated with two or three nukes, as the area that Israel covers is slightly less than that of New Jersey. At its narrowest point Israel is only about 8 miles wide.
Margolis rationalizes that if Iran is really developing nuclear weapons it is for reasons of “national prestige and self-defense”, because Israel and the evil Jews have an estimated 200 nuclear weapons ready to go.
He also dismissed the idea that Iran might give nukes to terrorists, claiming that Iran was at odds with both the Sunnis of Iraq, Al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban. He also explained that nuclear weapons are easy to trace because of each nuke’s unique signature. So if Trenton, New Jersey disappears into a smoking mound of radioactive rubble the Americans will be able to track down the source and obliterate it. My question is if a country loves death as much as many fundamentalist Islamic nations do, what do they care, so long as they inflict grievous harm on the Great Satan, America.
I think Margolis’s anti-Bush, anti-neocon (read that as Jews) and anti-Semitic sentiments have gone to his head and have affected his sense of reason. That’s a shame. But a greater shame is that such drivel finds its way into what was once a fine newspaper.
Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on retirementhomes.com and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism. His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Lucianne, among others. He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto and is an avid student of history. Klaus can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com.
