Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Emerson Vermaat responds to false accusations against him made by Linda Sarsour
Emerson Vermaat responds to false accusations against him made by Linda Sarsour
March 22, 2010
I never accused Linda Sarsour of anything nor do I happen to know her
By EMERSON VERMAAT
Linda Sarsour, the Director of the Arab American Association of New York and Coordinator of Community Initiatives for the YWCA Brooklyn, claims that I and Daniel Pipes ‘have tried to paint her as a Hamas sympathizer.' Well, I never ever wrote about Linda Sarsour. Indeed, I was not even aware of her existence until she claimed on March 16: ‘Hate mongers like Daniel Pipes and Emerson Vermaat and others have tried to paint me as a Hamas sympathizer and they have failed miserably.'
I am not very familiar with Hamas networks in the United States, at least not as familiar as Steven Emerson is. Does Linda Sarsour perhaps confuse me with him? He may not have mentioned her name either. An article was published in Bosnia-Hercegovina on February 18, 2010, mentioning both Linda Sarsour and Steven Emerson in one paragraph. But nowhere in this article does Steven Emerson, quoted as an expert on terrorism, link Linda Sarsour to Hamas. She is mentioned separately, and not by Steven Emerson.
Daniel Pipes surely has not accused her of anything either. Pipes just asks: ‘Could it be that, in her haste, Sarsour confused me with PipeLineNews.org, a self-described "boutique news service" founded in 1999 that provides "vital information regarding national security matters, including the culture war, the rise of radical Islam and ‘stealth jihad'." Emerson Vermaat is on the PipelineNews.org Masthead and one of its articles both calls Sarsour a Hamas sympathizer and says "she has a power base in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge district".'
Let me tell you straight away, it wasn't me who wrote that! It seems that Mrs. Sarsour randomly picked up some names she saw on ‘Pipelinenews.org' and mentioned them to the interviewer. Again, I am not really an expert on Islam in America, and only follow Al-Qaeda linked networks there, including Somali networks. In a Dutch book published in 2008, I criticized outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theories espoused both by some Muslims and a few liberal theologians such as David Ray Griffin and his friend the late William Sloane Coffin.
Sources:
Arab Brooklynite Linda Sarsour Holds Her Own, www.elanthemag.com, March 16, 2010.
Vrsi li FBI prevelik pritisak na Muslimanske Zajednice u Americi? (www.diaspora.info, Bosnia-Hercegovina, February 18, 2010). (I made several TV programs on the war in Bosnia in the 1990s and visited Sarajevo and Northern Bosnia four times between November 1991 and December 1993, and I wasn't siding with the Serb besiegers of Sarajevo, by the way.)
Daniel Pipes,Popping Linda Sarsour's Balloon, March 16, 2010. http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/03/popping-linda-sarsours-balloon#continued
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Between 1983 and 2005, Emerson Vermaat was a television reporter for Dutch TV covering wars in various parts of the world. He was directly responsible for several TV reports on Al-Qaeda and international terrorism. One of his TV reports, ‘The making of a suicide bomber' (1996), was broadcast in more than thirty countries.
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