Meet the America-Hating, Assad-Loving Journalist Who Just Came Back From the Islamic State
When Jurgen Todenhofer crossed out of Islamic State-controlled territory on Dec. 16, he accomplished something that no Western journalist had done before him – he had visited the self-declared caliphate, and survived. The jihadist group, he warned upon his return, is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than the West realizes.
But this wasn’t Todenhofer’s first journalistic coup in Syria. In July 2012, he secured an interview with the ruler that the Islamic State is trying to topple – Bashar al-Assad. At the time, he was seen as sympathetic to the regime: He had recently published an article suggesting that Syrian rebels had been responsible for the mass killing of civilians in the village of Houla, and referred derisively to the rebels’ claims that Assad’s men perpetrated the attack as “massacre marketing.”
Todenhofer, a former judge and German parliamentarian, has seen his share of war zones. He traveled to Algiers during the Algerian civil war, to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, and to Libya during the revolt that toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi. He does not pretend to be a neutral observer of events: The New York Times referred to him as an “outspoken antiwar advocate” and a critic of Western coverage of Syria, which he viewed as unfairly hostile to Assad.
Todenhofer’s critics charge that he is little more than an apologist for dictators. He “is a strange political bird, but his business model is quite successful,” wrote Die Zeit editor-at-large Josef Joffe in an email. His recent books have sold well, and he is a regular on German television shows, “where he is cast as a pacifist bien pensant who likes to cavort with the world’s worst despots, notably Saddam [Hussein] and Assad, while flacking for the Iranian regime.”
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/23/meet-the-america-hating-assad-loving-journalist-who-just-came-back-from-the-islamic-state/