On December 23 of last year, Time magazine published a story recapping the biggest incidents of domestic terrorism of the year. The piece by Bobby Ghosh began:
Domestic-Terrorism Incidents Hit a Peak in 2009
By Bobby Ghosh / Washington Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2009You may not have noticed, because most of the plots were foiled, but 2009 saw an unprecedented surge in terrorism events on U.S. soil. When analysts tally these events, they refer to anything from a disrupted plot to U.S. citizens traveling abroad to seek terrorism training or a lone gunman running amok in the U.S. And by the calculations of Rand Corp. expert Brian Jenkins, more terrorist threats were uncovered in the U.S. in 2009 than in any year since 2001.
"There appears to be an increase in [terrorist] activity in the U.S.," warns Jenkins, who calculates that there have been 32 terrorism-related events on these shores since 9/11 and that 12 of them occurred in 2009.
Notice a particular word missing from this intro? “Islam” or “Muslim”.
Ghosh then lists nine incidents that happened in 2009. (If the story had been written two days later (i.e., Christmas Day), he would have had ten incidents to list.) The perpetrators’ religion is not mentioned unless they had a non-Muslim name. These such individuals, WaPo informs us casually, happened to be converts to Islam.
Terrorism experts and Muslim-community leaders caution that the spurt in such events doesn’t necessarily add up to a trend. For one thing, the cases are unconnected. “Each case has its own special circumstances,” says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Nor is there likely to be wide-scale extremism in the American Muslim community. Jenkins points out that there’s “no underground network and no deep reservoir of resentment.” Hooper notes that the problem “is not coming from rhetoric within the community. It’s not the case that young men are being radicalized in American mosques.”
Ghosh then goes on to cover for the American Muslim community by explaining how young Muslim men are being radicalized via the internet by radical movements abroad. I will not corroborate or deny those claims; the point is that despite the fact that all nine major attempted or successful terrorist attacks in 2009, the Time article drives home the point that there is no trend for Americans to be concerned with. (To its credit, Time published a cover story on November 23 focusing on Hasan and his Muslim background.)
What about Christmas Day “underwear bomber” Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab? In its initial article, Time does mention “Muslim” a handful of times. However, it is never with respect to Abdulmutallab himself, but within the context of his home country of Nigeria, which is sharply divided between Muslims and Christians.
Let’s now look at how the Washington Post covered both the Ft. Hood shooting and Christmas Day attempted plane-bombing.
On November 6, 2009, the day after the Ft. Hood shooting by Muslim Nidal Hasan, the Washington Post’s news report did not mention the word Muslim until paragraph 16. The only other time Muslim or Islam(ic) is mentioned in the article is further down, in the context of a public statement from CAIR. Yet, even despite this single mention that Hasan was Muslim, the story stressed that it was yet unknown what Hasan’s motives were. They, like the rest of the mainstream media, obstinately stuck to that view for days.
Less than two months later, the WaPo outdid itself. In its initial news article about the Christmas Day attempted “underwear bombing” by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the word Muslim, Islam, or even al Qaeda did not appear once.
We all know the rest of the story. When the mainstream media finally admitted to the radical Islamic background and motivations of these perpetrators, we were always cautioned like little schoolchildren not to get carried away and jump to conclusions. The media was concerned of a backlash against Muslims from the “far right.”
Well now look who’s getting carried away, jumping to conclusions, and creating the backlash against conservatives: Mainstream media outlets like Washington Post and Time Magazine.
Just hours after an I.R.S. building is struck by a private plane, its deranged suicidal pilot Joe Stack is associated—without a single shred of proof—with the right wing, specifically the Tea Party movement.
Time doesn’t mention “Tea Party” in its article, but interjects it oh-so-subtly as a news advertisement in between paragraphs [h/t Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters]:
Next, at the WaPo’s “Post Partisan” opinion blog [also h/t NS @ NB], Jonathan Capehart writes:
There’s no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.
Get it? A radical Muslim terrorist shouts Allahu Akbar from the mountains before shooting or blowing up the place, and the lib media goes: “Shhh, we mustn’t jump to conclusions now.” But a deranged lunatic tired of running the big government-big business rat race slams his plane into a government building, immediately it’s: “He’s like the whole Tea Party movement!”
What causes libs to make this connection between Joe Stack and any conservative movement? That he was pissed at the government? That he was tired of being taxed and regulated to death. Right now you have a record number of independents who feel that way. They went to the voting booth in deep blue New Jersey in November and deep blue Massachusetts in January.
If you read this lunatic’s six-page suicide note, as did NewsBusters reader metaphorsbwithu, you will see that, in addition to big government and taxes, he was railing against:
- the Catholic Church,
- Wall Street,
- banks,
- sleazy executives,
- Big health,
- Big pharm,
- Big insurance,
- cronyism, and
- profits.
Also from this kook’s manifesto [h/t Free Republic reader krogers58]:
The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government.
* * * * *
Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
How in G0d’s name can any same person consider this guy a right-winger? He actually sounds a lot like ... Chris Matthews.
And speaking of which: As I complete this post, a guest on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” on MSNBC just associated Stack with “the radical right.” [h/t Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters]
By the way, on both the WaPo blog and “Hardball” the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was dredged up. And we all know who the libs blamed for that.
You folks in the lib mainstream media are pathetic, you know that?
P.S. Just so there’s no confusion, I am not excusing the cowardly murderous act perpetrated by Joe Stack this afternoon. He should burn in hell like the rest of ’em.
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