Deport the Messenger!

The Star Tribune’s Dick Meryhew wrote a long piece about the lawsuit filed last week by the so-called “flying imams,” the Muslim leaders who were pulled from their November US Airways flight for what passengers and airport officials considered unusual behavior. He told me he received about a dozen emails after his 850-word story ran, half critical of the imams’ actions, half complimenting him for a story that was, as the saying goes, fair and balanced. Nobody told him he should be forced to leave the United States for writing it.

Our own Abdi Aynte wasn’t so lucky.

He published a story about the suit seven or so hours before Maryhew. We were pretty sure we were the first media outlet to cover the news, so we sent out a press alert. Using his personal email account, conservative talk show host Michael Savage sent a reply to that notice saying, simply, “You and they should be deported for taking advantage of this great nation.”

Say what?

There must’ve been something pretty offensive in Abdi’s reporting to send “America’s #1 Independent Talkshow” host over the edge like this.

Right?

Nope. As I see it, Abdi’s piece was factual and even-handed — and short. Here it is in its entirety:

The six Muslim imams who were removed from a Minneapolis US Airways flight in November will file a discrimination lawsuit against the airline on Tuesday, their legal representative announced today.The imams retained the Council on American Islamic Relations as their legal counsel. Three of them are expected to announce the lawsuit in a press conference in Washington, D.C. tomorrow.

The six Muslim imams were removed from a US Airways flight bound to Phoenix after a passenger voiced a concern over their religious activity. They were attending a national imams conference in Minneapolis in November.

But I’m biased: I like Abdi, know him, and have respect for what he does and how he does it. So I called up a less compromised source, Jane Kirtley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law to get her opinion. After we shared a laugh over the hyperbole of Savage’s response, she agreed to look over Abdi’s piece.

“It’s the kind of reporting all journalists should do — reporting accurately on an issue of public concern,” she wrote in an email after our call. She said the story Minnesota Monitor ran the previous day about CAIR’s barring of conservative journalists from a press conference is “further evidence to me of the desire to be complete, accurate and balanced in covering the story.”

“I am mystified as to why the story would prompt Savage’s reaction,” she added. “He may be angry at the imams for filing their lawsuit, and he’s entitled to his opinion on that.  But directing that anger at the reporter is misplaced. It seems to be a classic example of shooting the messenger.”

Or deporting him.

Given Savage’s history, calling for the deportation of a productive immigrant who arrived on these shores as a legal refugee from Somalia is pretty tame stuff.

He’s advocated “an outright ban on Muslim immigration” into the U.S. He’s called Arabs “non-humans” and, ironically, “racist, fascist bigots,” and said Muslims should be “forcibly converted to Christianity,” because that’s “the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.”  He believes Islam is “a bloodthirsty religion that’s practiced over there by a bunch of throwbacks, and we’re gonna kill ‘em,” and he thinks the word “imam” is a “code word for trouble-making bum who should have been thrown out of the country.”

Suffice it to say, he read our press release from within a context that’s … unique. Judging from his extreme, ratings-grabbing vitriol, it’s pretty clear he might’ve been set off by keywords that so infuriate those on the far, far right, from Abdi’s obviously non-Western name to “imams” and CAIR, themes he fumes about on his radio show. That’s his right, said Kirtley.

“One of the great things about the United States is that we don’t license journalists, so people like Abdi Aynte, as well as Michael Savage, both have the First  Amendment right to do their work without interference from the government,” she said. “Criticism is par for the course for everyone who works in the media. But that doesn’t negate the constitutional principle that there should be no ideological litmus test to decide who gets to be a journalist.”

I get Savage’s schtick: the son of Jewish immigrants, Michael Alan Weiner adopted a gonzo pseudonym to match his extreme rhetoric against immigrants, Islam, gays and lesbians, and liberalism — leveraged, it seems, merely to push ratings and sales of books, women’s tanktops, and coffee mugs (his “Liberalism is a mental disorder” mugs go for $14.95 each).

By Savage’s estimate, some 8 million listeners a week seem to like it. Too bad more of them aren’t hearing how, in this case, the man who says he “isn’t afraid to tell it like it is” seems threatened by a Somali journalist with exponentially more integrity.