©Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com - August 24, 2014

First, I will acknowledge up front that this is a revised version of an earlier American Thinker article, which in itself was a revised version of an earlier American Thinker article, which in itself was an update of the information contained in my book, Deconstructing Obama.  But when a Harvard worthy gets busted for literary fraud anew, I feel compelled to update the scorecard.

The man on the hot seat once again is Fareed Zakaria. Born to a Muslim family in Mumbai, the fifty year-old Harvard Ph.D. insinuated himself into the Democratic-media complex with impressive speed and, it seems, guile. At the age of twenty-eight, he became managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and from there he put one major media notch on his belt after another—Newsweek, Time, Washington Post, CNN, the Atlantic Monthly.

The Zakaria story interested me in no small part because Harvard Law's own Barack Obama, whose literary misadventures I have chronicled at length, is a Zakaria fan.  In a famous photo , the president was seen holding a copy of Zakaria's 2011 book, The Post-American World. The affection seems to be reciprocal. A May 29 op-ed by Zakaria in the Washington Post was titled, incredibly enough, “Obama’s disciplined leadership is right for today.” Neither of the two fanboys has had a very good summer.

Kudos here to the bloggers at Our Bad Media for outing Zakaria. Those with a keen interest can check out their detective work in full, but I will provide just a taste. Consider these three passages in the 2011 The Post-American World, lifted without any attribution to the real author, Fawas Gerges, writing in the October 2007 edition of The Christian Science Monitor.

Zakaria

“In 2007 one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter criticizing him for “fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering, and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.”

Gerges

“And last month, one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter reproaching him for “fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.”

___

Zakaria

“One of Al Qaeda’s own top theorists, Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, renounced its extremism, including the killing of civilians and the choosing of targets based on religion and nationality. Sherif—a longtime associate of Zawahiri who crafted what became known as Al Qaeda’s guide to jihad—has called on militants to desist from terrorism, and authored a rebuttal of his former cohorts.”

Gerges

“. . . one of its top theorists, Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, renounced its extremes, including the killing of civilians and the choosing of targets based on religion and nationality. In the past few months, Mr. El-Sherif – a longtime associate of Zawahiri, who crafted what became known as Al Qaeda’s guide to jihad – called on militants to desist from terrorism and authored a dissenting rebuttal against his former cohorts.”

___

Zakaria

“That same year Abdulaziz al ash-Sheikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudis from engaging in jihad abroad and accused both bin Laden and Arab regimes of “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.”

Gerges

“In early October, Abdulaziz al-Ashaikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudis from engaging in jihad abroad and accused both bin Laden and Arab regimes of “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.”

What makes this revelation even more problematic for Zakaria is that when Our Bad Media pointed to some other examples of Zakaria’s plagiarism earlier this week, he responded huffily to Politico, “ Two anonymous bloggers today have alleged that there are 11 cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else. These are all facts, not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions.” The bloggers called this denial a flat-out lie. “What our investigation works to show is not that Zakaria forgot to cite simple statistics in his pieces, but rather that he lifted extensively from the work of others.”

In 2012, Zakaria got caught lifting a passage on gun control from an article by historian Jill Lepore published in April 2012 in the New Yorker. Like other notable Harvard progressives busted for plagiarism—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Laurence Tribe—Zakaria escaped with a slap on the wrist. He may not be so fortunate this time, no matter what matter of insanity he writes about Obama.

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