Over at the Counterterrorism Blog, Steve Emerson has a great post detailing the New York Times's latest attempt to burnish the image of the pseudo-moderate Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR):

In what has become practically a routine, whenever bad publicity for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) surfaces, in an almost Pavlovian response, the New York Times leaps to its defense.

As I wrote about last March in The New Republic, when CAIR had befallen several embarrassing public setbacks, including the rescinding of an award from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office and public opposition on Capitol Hill for the use of a room to host a CAIR event, the Times dispatched its reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, to resuscitate CAIR’s image.

And now that CAIR has been named as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Hamas fundraising trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), and copious amounts of evidence linking CAIR to both Hamas itself and the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood have been reported, MacFarquhar and the Times are at it again, printing an article ("Muslim Groups Oppose a List of ‘Co-Conspirators’") that may as well be a CAIR press release. In fact, this “story” was spurred by CAIR’s announcement that the organization had filed an “amicus” brief in the HLF trial, seeking to remove itself from the list of un-indicted co-conspirators, and folded into its press release to shore up CAIR’s ridiculous – yet typical – persecution fantasy.

Meanwhile, the Times has done virtually no reporting whatsoever since the trial began one month ago, save one MacFarquhar piece during jury selection (which I wrote about at the time), another piece of CAIR-esque propaganda [...]

Yet again, when given an opportunity to report on CAIR’s Executive Director Nihad Awad being officially placed by the FBI at the notorious 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas activists and supporters, or the fact that there is documentary evidence consisting of official Muslim Brotherhood manifestoes from the trial directly linking CAIR with other noted American-based Hamas-front groups such as the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), the Times completely ignores the evidence and is nowhere to be seen.

—Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters and its Executive Editor.