Our URQ friends are pretty critical of mainstream media. Not a day goes by that you don’t read some contemptuous dismissal of the reviled “MSM” for running a story that, let’s say, focuses on Canadian casualties in Afghanistan or President Bush’s latest catastrophe, instead of, you know, cheerful stuff like bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. After all, they assert, it’s a proven fact that MSM is horribly biased, chooses their stories to promote that bias, and relies on all kinds of weak evidence and lame sources to come up with stuff intended to, you know, sap our will and all that.

With that in mind, it’s instructive to review exactly what these bloggers think a credible story might be.

Oh, hey, here’s one. I notice this in the Sunday Trackback exercise, and followed it back to its source. Here’s the good part.

“At a meeting today in Baqubah one Iraqi official I spoke with framed the al Qaeda infiltration and influence in the province. Although he spoke freely before a group of Iraqi and American commanders, including Staff Major General Abdul Kareem al Robai who commands Iraqi forces in Diyala, and LTC Fred Johnson, the deputy commander of 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team, the Iraqi official asked that I withhold his identity from publication….

Speaking through an American interpreter, Lieutenant David Wallach who is a native Arabic speaker, the Iraqi official related how al Qaeda united these gangs who then became absorbed into “al Qaeda.” …The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family..”

Let’s start by looking at the sourcing of this story.

It is a story being told at “a meeting” by an unnamed “official”. The unnamed official does not claim to have witnessed the event, and provides no source. It’s something that happened “on a couple of occasions” to unspecified people. No corroboration, no second source, and of course, no evidence. Just an assertion, at least fourth hand, of what sounds exactly like one of Jan Brunvand’s Urban Legends (always told about “the friend of a friend of mine…never actually witnessed), or one of the vintage atrocity tales that we circulate about our enemies to dehumanize them.

Now, I’m sure Al Qaeda people are not very nice. Pretty rotten folks, in fact. But it’s a bit hard to figure out why they’d cook and eat kids as part of a recruitment drive. That’s a grave offense against every version of Islamic law that I’m familiar with. Plus you’d think (maybe this is just me) that the community would find that kind of behaviour a little…well, alienating.

Aw, heck, cheap sarcasm aside, this one is too stupid for anyone except Canadian Sentinel to swallow.

Or… is it? Are there really, REALLY folks out there dumb enough to buy this transparent piece of horror propaganda?

Well, apparently, quite a few, actually.

(Disclaimer: The Bunker does not support Al Qaeda OR cannibalism. Thank you.)