How a Former Afghan Jihadist Began Covering Trump for the Voice of America

How did a former Jihadist go from the battlefields of Afghanistan to Washington D.C. and a bedroom community in Fairfax County filled with mosques and government employees, and from admiring Osama bin Laden’s mentor to working for a government media agency?

The answer lies in an old USAID-funded program that was supposed to train Jihadis in Afghanistan to become reporters. Instead it embedded the Jihadis into the media. Masood Farivar was one of a number of ex-Jihadis who went to work for the global media. Farivar’s presence at VOA is part of the larger story of another USAID project backfiring badly.

Rather than propagandizing in Afghanistan, Jihadi reporters spread propaganda in America..

When a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a French crowd on Bastille Day, killing 86 and wounding over 400, Farivar responded with an article titled, ‘Learn to Live With Terrorism’ Strikes Some as Good Advice”. When Front Page Magazine covered the Hamas Oct 7 attacks, he wrote an article smearing us as an “anti-Muslim” hate group for telling the truth about Jihad.

In VOA articles, he contended that demographic replacement by Muslims was a “right-wing conspiracy theory” and that racists were responsible for most domestic terrorism. A VOA segment credited to Farivar included the claim that, “the level of involvement in violent extremism by Muslims in the United States is still quite low”,

Last year, Farivar wrote a VOA analysis headlined, “The Hidden Cost Of Being Branded A Terrorist By The US Government” echoing claims from CAIR, a terror-linked organization which celebrated the attacks of Oct 7, that America was wrongly accusing Muslims of terrorism.

After pages of portraying his subject as an innocent man wrongly monitored by the government, Farivar finally revealed that he had actually been a supporter of an imam linked to a Jihadist group that had operated in Afghanistan and is currently affiliated with ISIS.

To what extent did Farivar’s past inform his contemporary coverage of Islamic terrorism?

As a teenager, Farivar described joining the Islamic Unity under Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf,who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, and whose name would be adopted by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group currently allied with ISIS, and then attended a Madrassa in Peshawar, Pakistan. While the name of the Madrassa is not given in his memoir, Farivar describes a speech by a sheikh calling them “the children of Jihad” who will be “participating in the Jihad”.

Sayyaf had founded a Madrassa in Peshawar known as Dawa al-Jihad or the Call of Jihad attended by a number of future terrorists including World Trade Center bombers Ramzi Al-Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, taught there.

I reached out to Farivar to inquire if he had studied at the terrorist school, but got no answer.

The future VOA analyst returned to Afghanistan twice as a Jihadist. The second time he was fighting with Hezb-i Islami Khalis whose members included Taliban founder Mullah Omar, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, the Taliban’s prime minister, Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, the Taliban’s future foreign minister, and other major Taliban leaders, and which has been at war with the U.S.

But Farivar’s career took a turn toward America due to another USAID program.

USAID provided funding to set up a Mujahadeen propaganda network known as the Afghan Media Resource Center. The terror media network, which reportedly required all personnel to “sacrifice for holy jihad”, operated under the auspices of the United States Information Agency (USIA): the parent organization of Voice of America.

Through his new role as a ‘journalist’, Farivar met Carlos Mavroleon, a Harvard graduate from a wealthy Greek shipping family who had converted to Islam and taken the name Karimullah, fighting as a Mujahadeen and playing journalist, before dying of a heroin overdose with a Koran on him during an assignment for CBS News. “In London I fought the Jihad with a pen. Now I fight it with a sword. I have come to Afghanistan to take part in the Jihad,” Carlos had bragged.

“Jihad with a pen” would prove crucial to the next stage of fighting the west from within.

Mavroleon and the head of USIA got Farivar into Harvard. “I got off the plane with my big Osama bin Laden beard, my Afghan rebel hat and traditional garb,” he later recalled.

After graduating, he continued living in the U.S. without a green card although a “friend with CIA connections” later offered him one.

He returned to Afghanistan and met with Taliban’s Minister of Culture Amir Khan Muttaqi, currently its foreign minister, to discuss starting a radio station.

In his memoir, Farivar alternately claims to deplore the Taliban, but also admits to liking “the peace that the Taliban had restored.” When he visited the Taliban leader, it was with “a letter of introduction from the representative of the Taliban” in New York and after having “met several Taliban ministers while they were touring the United States.”

After 9/11, Farivar popped up in Afghanistan running a USAID funded “NPR-like network” while rejecting “American-funded ads to recruit for the Afghan Army or police”. He joked, “Sometimes my wife calls me the Taliban.” He told Harvard Magazine that, “there is some self-censorship, some lines you cannot cross. Islam is a subject that you cannot touch: you can’t piss off the mullahs, can’t offend people’s faith.”

Even while U.S. soldiers were fighting Farivar’s old comrades, the U.S. was funding a radio operation that appeared similar to the one that the ex-Jihadi had pitched to the Taliban and which was hostile to American efforts to militarily secure Afghanistan from the Jihadis..

Salam Watandar, the Afghan radio network Farivar ran, operated under the umbrella of the Internews Network, an European nonprofit media group funded by everyone from Bill Gates to USAID. From there, Farivar moved to the Voice of America where he transitioned from covering Afghanistan to covering the FBI and the Justice Department.

And Trump.

Obama had dismantled the firewall keeping the Voice of America from targeting Americans. And the former Jihadist became one of the vehicles for the VOA’s attacks on President Trump.

After the rise of Trump, Farivar switched from covering Afghanistan and the Muslim world for domestic coverage that attacked Trump, with articles like “Hate Crimes Surge After Trump Victory” and “Timeline: Trump’s Involvements With Russia” others that promoted Islamist narratives “Most Terrorism Victims Are in Muslim Majority Countries” and “With Surge in Hate Crime, Muslims Seen ‘Most Disdained’ Minority” or even did both “How Muslim-Americans Drifted to the Democratic Party” and “Arab Opinion Poll Shows Support for Clinton”.

After the Biden administration raided Mar-a-Lago, Masood Farivar was working the Justice Department, pressing for confirmation that Attorney General Merrick Garland was “experiencing an uptick in death threats” from Trump supporters.

The VOA, an arm of the government, was promoting Russiagate and unsubtly nudging voters to turn against Trump during three presidential elections in violation of its charter and mission. And the man behind some of these articles had been recruited by a related arm of the government back in the 1980s during his days as a Jihadist to engage in a war of propaganda.

Now that propaganda was being aimed within the United States against the president.

And it’s still going on.

A propaganda machine once aimed at America’s enemies is now run by our enemies and aimed at us. The story of Masood Farivar shows why the Voice of America needs urgent reform.

Farivar has at times sold himself as a fervent opponent of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while at other times he appeared willing to collaborate with the Taliban. After 9/11, Farivar argued in his memoir that even though “radical mujahadeen often hated America as much as they hated the Soviet Union, but the jihad was fundamentally good.”

Does America need a ‘good jihad’?

In describing his family history, Farivir wrote about the great Jihad against Kafiristan or “the land of infidels” that his family helped conduct against non-Muslims.

“The campaign to pacify Kafiristan was short-lived but violent,” Farivir unselfconsciously wrote, describing non-Muslims as ‘infidels’ and bragging about how his ancestors murdered and raped them “When the jihad was over, some sixty thousand infidels had embraced Islam and pledged their allegiance to the amir. With the valley subdued, the amir dispatched an army of mullahs to instruct the converts in the ways of Islam. None other than my maternal great-grandfather, Jalilur Rahman Khan, led a troop of mullahs into the valley… my paternal great-grandfather, also involved in the campaign, took into marriage a young girl from the area. She was one of the many women who were taken as spoils of war from the region.”

In the Islamic imagination, America, Europe and the rest of the world are the new ‘Kafiristan’. We are the infidel lands they have come to conquer. Our daughters and granddaughters are the women they hope their Jihadist offspring will be able to take as the spoils of war.

The Jihad may be fought with sword or pen, but its ultimate objective is to make America into Afghanistan. We pulled out of Afghanistan, now it’s time to pull Afghanistan out of America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading. 

Click to order.