Whenever a terrorist attack happens, it seems like the media jump through hoops to whitewash the incident to avoid using the dreaded “I” word. While it’s obvious to the public that the guy shouting “Allahu Akbar” during a televised beheading is probably not a practicing Methodist, the media would first speculate that he might be a white conservative, as they initially did with the Boston bombing. The latest deadly shooting on a French newspaper office that killed 12 people is turning out to be another case of the media protecting radical Muslims.
Just yesterday, left-wing news blog Raw Story ran a story that asked why Fox News was obsessed with Islamic terrorist attacks. What perfect timing! Blogger Eric W. Dolan attacked Fox for blaming a beheading that occurred in September on Islamic terrorism.
Alton Nolen, a recent Muslim convert, killed and beheaded a co-worker after repeated attempts to convert his co-workers. Despite Nolen’s religious fervor and the fact that he killed in a manner consistent with the preferred method of execution to Islamic terrorists, Dolan insisted, this was simply “an act of workplace violence.” Dolan accused Fox of fueling Islamophobia.
Dolan’s main beef with Fox was that it allegedly didn’t give as much time to another killing, a near-beheading that happened in October, when a heavily drugged man with fanatical “Christian” beliefs beheaded his roommate for practicing witchcraft. While this man was rightly described as a “religious zealot,” if there’s a beheading revival sweeping Christian denominations, we’re unaware of it. It takes an awful lot of magical thinking to seriously compare one random psychotic event to a the near-weekly decapitations by ISIS – not to mention al Qaeda’s fondness for sawing off infidels’ heads on video – and other common atrocities committed explicitly in the name of Islam.
Instead of complaining about Fox and other conservative outlets pointing out the obvious, maybe Dolan and other “tolerant” liberal bloggers should open their eyes and start telling the truth instead of targeting everyday Christians as dangerous and extreme.
So far the media’s reaction to the Paris attack has been predictably atrocious, with Howard Dean scolding that the media to not call the shooters “Muslim terrorists” and Time Magazine actually blaming the French satirical newspaper for inciting the attack. Slate writer Joshua Keeting seemed to take a similar approach, deeming the paper “proud provocateurs” whose actions seemed to justify the assault.
