Leftist journalist clings tenaciously to “Islamophobia” myth as the evidence piles up against it.

What we got here is a failure to communicate. You know, some men you just can’t reach.

Late in November I wrote an article here at FrontPage entitled, “Poster Boy for ‘Islamophobia’ Tries to Join ISIS.” It was about Saadiq Long, a Muslim from the U.S. who had become a darling of MSNBC, Leftist propagandist Glenn Greenwald and the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for being on the No-Fly List and unable to return to the U.S. He was on the No-Fly List for no reason at all, you see, and so was an illustration of how the U.S. authorities had fallen prey to “Islamophobia.”

But then, as investigative journalist Patrick Poole reported, Long was arrested in Turkey as part of an Islamic State cell. It was on the basis of his piece that I wrote my article. Greenwald, who has for years been an eager ally of the Muslim victimhood industry, and has unapologetically worked with Hamas-linked CAIR, subsequently published a lengthy piece claiming that Poole’s was a “fabrication,” that there had been no terror raid, and that Long was just in Turkey looking for work. According to Greenwald, it was just another attempt by “Islamophobes” to defame a Muslim because he was a Muslim (and black, of course).

Unfortunately for Greenwald, however, David Steinberg of PJ Media blistered him with the facts, showing that Poole’s story was entirely accurate. At that point, one might have expected Greenwald to drop the matter: I would never expect a Leftist journalist to retract or admit his error, but he might at least have gone quiet and tried to minimize the damage. Instead, he has come back yet again, claiming anew that Poole and PJ Media, both of which he smears (with a tiresome lack of originality, honest thought or imagination) as “anti-Muslim,” were making false claims. And so Steinberg has come back again as well, with a piece that definitively drives a stake into the heart of Greenwald’s false claims.

Don’t be surprised, however, if this undead thing, Greenwald’s false charges, once again stalks through the land, for Greenwald is clearly deeply invested in them, and that illustrates why this whole episode has much larger implications than just the question of whether or not Saadiq Long was arrested as part of an Islamic State cell. The Leftist media, of which Greenwald is a foremost exponent, is unshakably committed to the narrative that the jihad threat has been wildly exaggerated by “right-wing bigots,” and that white Christian men pose a far greater security threat, and that “Islamophobia” is a much bigger and more urgent problem than jihad terror. Saadiq Long was a poster child for those claims, and when it came to light that he had been arrested as part of an Islamic State cell, it didn’t just show up Greenwald and Hamas-linked CAIR for championing him as an innocent victim of “right-wing hate”: it challenged the entire false narrative they have been reinforcing in hundreds and hundreds of articles all over the mainstream media for years.

Here’s a prediction: Glenn Greenwald will keep on insisting that Saadiq Long was an innocent victim twice over, first of “Islamophobic” law enforcement officials who put him on the No-Fly List and then of “Islamophobic” journalists who claimed he had been arrested in a raid on an Islamic State cell, until the day he dies. He will do so with all the adamantine, never-break-character flintiness of the Leftists who ignored the mountains of evidence and insisted for decades that Alger Hiss had never been a Communist spy, but had been framed by Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon. He will do so because the alternative is this: he would have to admit not only that he was wrong about Saadiq Long, but that he has been wrong about “right-wing media Islamophobia” and the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat — and thus that a great deal more of his reporting has been wrong than just what he has said about Long, Poole, and PJ Media.

Glenn Greenwald could conceivably come in from the cold and become a journalist who was actually committed to accuracy and responsible reporting, but I’m betting he won’t.