Put Up Or Shut Up, Abdul

Abdul Hakim Shabazz is up to his old tricks again. After coming under fire in the blogosphere for his coverage of last week's Revolt At The Statehouse rally, Shabazz is blogging about someone anonymously sending a threatening e-mail. Shabazz, without posting the actual contents of the e-mail or the address used to send it, throws out a few words often used by those who organized last week's rally. Shabazz' motivation is clearly to implicate someone involved in organizing the rally without directly saying so. Shabazz also sent an e-mail to several people on Friday making the same claim prior to posting the e-mail threat claim on Indiana Barrister and his WRTV blog.

Abdul should either put up or shut up. If the threat is real as Abdul claims, then he should provide the full text of the e-mail, as well as the address used by the sender. Further, he should report the threat to law enforcement if that is what it really is, although he's now hedging on that assertion. "I don’t think the person was promising physical harm," Shabazz writes in a comment on his post. "I just thought it was odd that someone thought they could threaten their way into favorable press."

Abdul has a long history of deception. This is the guy who shortly after the 2007 election claimed he was the target of a witch hunt being carried out by the Indianapolis police department at the direction of the Bart Peterson administration. Abdul claimed he was being falsely linked to the anonymously-written, now-defunct IndyUndercover blog. Abdul suggested to his readers that police were targeting him because he was looking into child molestation charges against an influential Democrat. Later, we learned that the investigation had actually been triggered after the blog outed a confidential police informant in an arson investigation. The confidential informant was female who was 8 months' pregnant at the time and had to be relocated for her own personal safety following the disclosure. Blogger Ruth Holladay obtained a copy of the affidavit police filed in the case to obtain a search warrant. She wrote at the time:

A four-month investigation followed, in which police, possibly with the aid of federal officials, began peeling back the identity of IndyUndercover through various e-mail addresses and Internet providers: Yahoo, Google, EOS and finally Bright House.

The trail ultimately led to Abdul Shabazz, according to the affidavit, which also lists Shabazz' Downtown address and phone number. Boomershine identifies Shabazz in the warrant as the IndyUndercover blog's moderator.

Judge David Altice of Marion Superior Court Criminal Division signed the search warrant. Prior to that, throughout August, Grand Jury subpoenas were issued to Google, Yahoo, etc., in the painstaking search to trace the blog back and discover who was running/writing on it.

Abdul had on numerous occasions denied he was behind IndyUndercover. He even suggested e-mails that I had been sent and which I produced to him had been spoofed to make it appear he was behind the blog. That didn't stop him from fanning suggestions to other bloggers that I was behind the blog, which led to two published posts by different bloggers falsely accusing me of being behind the anonymous blog. So am I skeptical about Abdul's claim surrounding the threatening e-mail? Can a tiger change its stripes?