Two men who played key roles in the NPR fundraising sting in February have split with media trickster James O’Keefe. Simon Templar and Shaughn Adeleye, who posed as Muslim philanthropists and secretly recorded their conversations with NPR development execs, fault O’Keefe for selling them a “false bill of goods,” according to the Daily Beast. The pair say they designed a far-reaching, well-researched operation that was to extend far beyond NPR, but O’Keefe was only interested in a “hit job.”
“All he cared about was that he had people saying embarrassing stuff on video,” Templar tells media critic Howard Kurtz. “I came to learn how desperate he was in terms of money and needing to rehabilitate his reputation.”
Karen, do you know what they had wanted to do?
They wanted to expose how “political correctness allows the Muslim Brotherhood to operate freely in the United States,” according to the Daily Beast’s story. Their inspiration was a report published by the Center for Security Policy, “Sharia: The Threat to America.”
Here’s an interesting detail that Current Managing Editor Steve Behrens dug up yesterday: The president of the Center for Security Policy is Frank Gaffney, producer of “Islam vs. Islamists” a documentary funded through CPB’s America at a Crossroads initiative but left out of the high profile PBS series that aired in 2007.