From the beginning of the NPR-gate story, it bugged me that NPR's critics were so focused on what Ron Schiller said about the Tea Party and Jews controlling the media. To me, the big story was that NPR executives were eager to schmooze with and accept funding from a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas. (Although I can certainly understand why ADL is upset and demanding an apology. I don't know if Tea Party Patriots has asked for an apology.)
NPR, of course, insisted that they'd repeatedly turned down the $5 million contribution. But now that Project Veritas has released its second NPR-gate video, that claim has been shown to be a lie. And the focus is now where I think it belongs — on NPR's knowing collaboration with a Muslim Brotherhood front group, the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center, and its willingness to not only accept the donation, but help make sure the source remains anonymous.
In her conversations with MEAC's "Ibrahim Kasaam," Betsy Liley, Senior Director of Institutional Giving, suggested more than once that the donation could be directed to a specific purpose, such as supporting NPR's foreign desk or religious coverage. And she revealed that she had checked out the MEAC website, which states that the organization is dedicated to spreading Sharia "across the world."
Big Journalism's Larry O'Connor thinks it's time for a Congressional investigation:
While taking great pains to isolate Mr Schiller (who had already tendered his resignation to the publicly-funded broadcaster) NPR also suggested to the American public that they had no intention of accepting the proposed donation from MEAC and had, in fact, “repeatedly refused” the donation. Only later in the day did NPR reveal that they had been vetting the group as recently as last week with hopes of obtaining their 501(c)(3) credentials. We continue to ask: Why vet a group you have repeatedly refused to take money from?
What we are witnessing is NPR’s ‘Modified Limited Hangout’ made famous by the engineers of the Watergate cover-up. NPR is attempting to admit guilt and beg forgiveness for the lesser “crime” of making intolerant remarks about conservatives and supporters of Israel as a means to misdirect from the much larger and odious crime of being willing to accept blood money from a Muslim Brotherhood front group.
These two conflicting accounts could very well have paved the way for CEO Vivian Schiller’s ouster as her forced resignation was announced twelve hours after our article exposing the contradiction. Now, with today’s video showing an active engagement from the NPR development team with the journalists posing as Shariah advocates and “All Things Considered” aficionados, NPR’s attempt at deception is clear for all tax payers to see.
MEAC: “It sounded like you were saying NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit, is that correct?”
Liley: “I think that is the case, especially if you are anonymous. I can inquire about that.”
And in a subsequent e-mail from Liley to MEAC, Liley wrote that she’s “awaiting a draft of a gift agreement from our legal counsel and will share it when I have it.” That sure is a funny way of “repeatedly refusing” a donation.
This should be the long-overdue death knell for taxpayer funding of NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which amounts to about half a billion dollars a year.
