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December 19th, 2020 
Awake Goy 
The New York Times is trying to do damage control about the multiple failures of its star Jihadist Terrorism reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, but its efforts to clean up the mess are failing. The paper just announced it had completed a 2-month internal investigation into “Caliphate,” its sensationalist, breathless, award-winning podcast that had been downloaded by millions, and it found that the 12-part series “did not meet the standards for Times journalism.”
The Times confirmed that the central character of “Caliphate,” Shehroze Chaudhry, a Canadian who said he joined ISIS in Syria and graphically testified that he personally murdered captives, had in fact made up his entire story.
But outside critics are charging that the Times is trying to minimize its responsibility. The paper did not actually “withdraw” the podcast, nor did it fire Callimachi, only announced that she would be transferred to a different reporting beat. In fact, the longer Times article on the scandal, written by Mark Mazzetti and three others, did not even mention her by name. Callimachi herself got away with declining to comment at all, although she later tweeted out a semi-defiant statement that fell short of a full apology.
The Times is adding “Editors’ notes” to the “Caliphate” podcast, and to two other questionable Callimachi articles. You now bump into a bizarre contradiction in the paper’s online Callimachi archive. The Editors’ Note first tells you in effect that “what you are about to read (or listen to) is largely false, and we’ll spend a few paragraphs warning you — but then we’ll give you the falsehoods in their entirety.”
Genuine experts on the Mideast, West Africa and Jihadism have been raising doubts about Rukimini Callimachi’s reporting for years. One of the best critiques, by the journalist and author Laila Al-Arian, starts by providing simple information that the Times’s half-hearted apology left out. Callimachi’s podcast says she found Chaudhry, the ISIS fraud, “though a researcher named Anat Agron.” She didn’t add that Agron works for MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), the pro-Israel organization notorious for “mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources” that are aimed at portraying the Arab and Muslim world negatively, as Al-Arian says. She also notes that Callimachi speaks little or no Arabic, which would seem to be a drawback for a jihadism expert.
Al-Arian eloquently summarizes what’s been fundamentally wrong all along with Callimachi’s work:
I believe Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS over-emphasizes religious ideology while stripping the group’s emergence and growth from its geopolitical context, specifically Iraq, a country that was destroyed by the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, which also led to the destabilization of the region as a whole. A leitmotif of her work is that ISIS and other jihadi groups are a legitimate and perhaps revealing manifestation of Islam.
Another genuine expert who the Times did not seek out is Alex Thurston, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who has just published a remarkable book called Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel. Thurston warns that Callimachi is an example of what he calls “terrorology” — by which he means “deliberately alarmist and reductive analysis of jihadist movements and ‘terrorist groups.’” He notes that Callimachi “has a pattern of outsourcing much of her analysis to terrorologists such as those at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and its spinoffs.” (The FDD, of course, is the pro-Israel think tank in Washington, D.C. that spends much of its energy trying to instigate the U.S. into attacking Iran.)
In the end, Callimachi is not herself totally to blame here. She sensed what the New York Times and some of its audience wanted, and she produced it for them — even if she had to cut corners. Here’s an incredible admission by Dean Baquet, the top Times editor, in an interview yesterday with National Public Radio in which he blames himself and other Times staff members, not just his reporter, for not recognizing the fake ISIS member’s hoax: “We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,” Baquet said. This sounds queasy, especially after you replace ‘A member of ISIS” with “A member of the Nazi SS,” and “the caliphate” with “Hitler’s Germany” and see how appropriate ‘falling in love’ sounds now.
But Baquet was right about his audience’s appetite for Callimachi’s reductionist work. The NPR story noted, “‘Caliphate’ made a huge splash for the Times, winning awards, acclaim, new listeners for its podcasts and new paying subscribers.” Callimachi herself has been nominated for 4 Pulitzer prizes, and won other prestigious awards.
But there has been at least one sign so far of mainstream media integrity in this sorry scandal. The Overseas Press Club of America yesterday issued a one-sentence statement:
The Overseas Press Club Board of Governors, noting the conclusions of the New York Times’s internal review of its “Caliphate” podcast, has rescinded its 2018 Lowell Thomas Award for “Caliphate” to Rukmini Callimachi, Andy Mills, Larissa Anderson and Wendy Dorr.”
[UPDATE: As of this morning, December 19, the Times has already removed any reference to its errors over “Caliphate” from its online home page.}
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