Commentary magazine has published a profile on former Al-Jazeera General Manager Waddah Khanfar titled “Why Is Huffington Promoting Muslim Brotherhood Media?”. According to the report:
The Huffington Post has always been a mixed bag. It drives up its stats with “clickbait.” Pulitzer notwithstanding, this detracts from the seriousness of its news coverage, as does its occasional penchant for polemic and conspiracy theory over fact. Nevertheless, Huffington must be credited for her very real impact. The format might be different, and her politics may have migrated over time, but the results are indisputable: today Arianna Huffington really has become the Matt Drudge of the political left.
Alas, while her politics may be firmly ‘progressive’ and mainstream even if to the left in the American context, they are anything but in the Arab world. Her ‘Huffington Post Arabi’ has become a cesspool less for serious news, and more a mechanism to legitimize conspiracy, promote the Muslim Brotherhood, anti-Semitism, sectarian strife, anti-gay bias, and more. Admittedly, much of this lays less with Huffington directly than with the partners she choose and which now provide her Arabic site with content. Having sampled HuffPost Arabi, Brian Whitaker, a former Guardian journalist and Arabist whose own writings trend hard to the political left and occasional conspiratorial anti-Americanism, called her out for the content of her Arabic affiliate, much of which he seemed to blame on her partner, former Al-Jazeera Media Network chief Wadah Khanfar.
Read the rest here.
The GMBDW has been reporting extensively on Wadah Khanfar since June 2007, our first month of publication, when we wrote that he was likely on his way to being dismissed from Al Jazeera due to his alleged connections with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. As far as we can tell, we were the first English language publication to report on Khanfar. The GMBDW appears also to be the only publication to ever have reported on Mr. Khanfar’s association with the Al-Aqsa Foundation in South Africa which we noted in our 2007 post. In July 2015, we reported that the Huffington Post was forming a partnership with Wadah Khanfar, the former head of Al Jazeera and long associated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, to launch an Arabic-language edition targeting Middle Eastern youth. Despite our long history of work on Waddah Khanfar, neither the author of the above article nor any other journalist has ever contacted the GMBDW nor credited us for almost ten years of original reporting on his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
According to a report in a Mideast business publication, Wadah Khanfar was born and educated in Jordan where, consistent with a Muslim Brotherhood background, he was educated as an engineer.
For our profile on Waddah Khanfar, go here.