Excerpt:
My piece from last night on Rep. Keith Ellison's testimony has generated loads of debate. For part of my argument, I used a risky tactic — I relied on, as it were, the dog that didn't bark. In this case, that was the lack of archived newspaper reports, angry bloggers, etc., accusing Hamdani of being a terrorist. If the climate was what Keith Ellison insinuated — all sorts of nasty rumors circulating about Hamdani just because he was Muslim, etc. — those dogs should have barked.
And I didn't hear them barking. And others didn't either, and followed my conclusion that Ellison's speech was pretty phony. So Media Matters and others took up the challenge. They offer several rebuttals. First, their main trump card is…the very same New York Post article cited and chewed over in my own piece. So that fails as a refutation. Media Matters also cites a New Yorker article from December, 2002. But this one celebrates Hamdani and claims he was defamed. In other words, the New Yorker piece is just another after-the-fact replication of the emergent narrative of Hamdani's ill-treatment, rather than an original source demonstrating the fact. Same with the New York Times eulogy, which others cite. It replicates the narrative, without telling us who exactly did this defaming.