The entire storyline of the two men responsible for the horrible terrorist attack during the Boston Marathon has me completely stunned. These two radicals, picked a very public event and a location they knew would be filled with people, including children, and decided they wanted to kill Americans. Yet, in all the coverage, the phrase all media avoided like the plague, was the one that was the most obvious and readily known: they were Islamic extremists.
First here’s a little bit of history just to refresh the minds of the media and those others out there who think these very public acts of terror are somehow NOT motivated by a religion whose extremist wing is hell bent on destroying America:
* 18 April 1983 – The April 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing, Beirut, Lebanon by the Islamic Jihad Organization, 63 dead, 120 injured
* 26 February 1993 – World Trade Center bombing, in New York City. 6 killed.
* 7 August 1998 – United States embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. 224 dead. 4000+ injured.
* October 12, 2000 – USS Cole bombing at a Yemen port. 17 American sailors were killed, 39 injured.
* 11 September 2001 – 4 planes hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers: two planes crashed into World Trade Center and one into the The Pentagon. Nearly 3000 dead.
* 22 December 2001 – Richard Reid attempted shoe bombing on American Airlines Flight 63
* 11 September 2012 – On the anniversary of the 2001 September 11th attacks in the United States, Islamist militants killed 4 and wounded 7 in the Benghazi U.S. Consulate attack
Just talk a look at the expanded list to see what’s been going on around the world over the past few decades.
And yet, when the reports started flowing in following the terrorist attack in Boston, it appeared the media all followed a two-step process.
* Step 1 — Blame a far right, white, extremist man or Organization
* Step 2 — Keep quiet about the real background of the bombers
Let’s look at Step 1. As I watched the initial coverage, I switched back and forth between Fox and CNN. At one point on CNN (and this was on the day of the bombing when the only thing that was going on was replaying the bombing videos over and over again), Wolf Blitzer was talking to a guest who brought up the idea that it could be a member of a white supremacist group. He brought this up simply because, “We’ve been hearing about that in the news a lot lately.”
As reported in Politic.com, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell blamed the NRA for delays in the Boston Marathon investigation. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews immediately tried to link the bombing to a far right group.
I could go on and on, but let’s move to Step 2. NO ONE, not even Fox News, was reporting that these guys… these terrorist bombers… were Islamic extremists. Why? Is it politically incorrect to identify them for what they are?
It was quite amazing on Friday when GOPUSA ran it’s lead story with the headline: One Islamic Bomber Dead, One on the Run; Boston Suburbs Locked Down. It was amazing, because some people actually wrote in and complained that we used the word “Islamic.” Some accused us of spreading rumors. Others blamed us for “poor reporting.” And why? Simply because they hadn’t heard it anywhere else.
Here was my personal favorite by one reader: “Hey dumbass, he’s not islamic, but he was russian.”
There’s so much I could say about that one sentence. I guess this guy doesn’t know the difference between a religion and a nationality.
The fact is that even while most of the media were silent, the information was EASILY available. They guys were Islamic extremists. One posted a video with an “Extremist Religious Prophecy Associated with Al Qaeda” on YouTube.
All of this information was out there, and yet even conservative web sites avoided the obvious.
I guess the media was just too upset that it wasn’t a freaked-out white guy. Instead, it’s one more chilling example, just like we saw in Benghazi, of a strain of humanity that is clearly inhuman.
Recent Comments