The New York Times continued to evade the issue of Islamic terror in its reporting Tuesday on the Orlando nightclub massacre. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns targeted Donald Trump for his intolerance on the front-page under a lecturing headline “Branding Muslims as Threats, Trump Tosses Pluralism Aside.”
Also, reporter Jim Yardley fretted about the bizarre aberration" of America's gun laws while finding threats among "evangelical Christianity" but not radical Islam. And the liberal Times apparently considers Mexico not to be an "advanced" country.
Donald J. Trump left little doubt on Monday that he intends to run on the same proposals on immigration and terrorism that animated his primary campaign, using his first speech after the massacre in Orlando, Fla., to propose sweeping measures against Muslims that pay little heed to American traditions of pluralism.
Without distinguishing between mainstream Muslims and Islamist terrorists, Mr. Trump suggested that all Muslim immigrants posed potential threats to America’s security and called for a ban on migrants from any part of the world with “a proven history of terrorism” against the United States or its allies. He also insinuated that American Muslims were all but complicit in acts of domestic terrorism for failing to report attacks in advance, asserting without evidence that they had warnings of shootings like the one in Orlando.
Mr. Trump’s speech, delivered at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., represented an extraordinary break from the longstanding rhetorical norms of American presidential nominees. But if his language more closely resembled a European nationalist’s than a mainstream Republican’s, he was wagering that voters are stirred more by their fears of Islamic terrorism than any concerns they may have about his flouting traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity.
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Mr. Trump carefully read his remarks from a teleprompter and offered more detail than his stump speeches generally contain, but his speech was still rife with the sort of misstatements and exaggerations that have typified his campaign.
That’s in sharp contrast to the Democrat, who said nothing that would disturb the slumber of the liberal media, or anyone else -- certainly not a potential terrorist:
As Mrs. Clinton reached for the mantle of statesmanship, Mr. Trump’s speech amounted to a rejection of the conventional wisdom that he must remake himself for the November election as a more sober figure and discard the volcanic tone and ethnic and racial provocation that marked his primary campaign.
Yet Mr. Trump has showed little interest in assuaging those concerns. He used the hours after the Orlando massacre to claim prescience about the attack and to demand Mr. Obama’s resignation. Then, in a television interview on Monday morning, Mr. Trump darkly suggested that the president was sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.
There was an interesting bit of liberal ethnocentrism in a graph comparison on Page 3 of gun deaths worldwide: “The U.S. Is a World Apart In Gun Death Rates” by Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz.
Apparently the liberals at the Times think that our southern neighbors in Mexico live in a primitive backwater, because Mexico and El Salvador were evidently not part of the paper’s roll call of “advanced countries.”
The mass shooting in Orlando on Sunday was appalling in scale: 49 killed in a single attack. But it’s not unusual for dozens of Americans to be killed by guns in a single day.
Gun homicides are a common cause of death in the United States, killing about as many people as car crashes (not counting van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents). Some cases command our attention more than others, of course. Counting mass shootings that make headlines and the thousands of Americans murdered one or a few at a time, gunshot homicides totaled 8,124 in 2014, according to the F.B.I.
This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.
The accompanying chart showed Mexico and El Salvador had far more gun deaths than America. Apparently they don’t count as “advanced.”
From Rome, Jim Yardley worried how the world (including authoritarian China) saw unsophisticated, violence-prone America and its bizarre insistence on the right to bear arms: “In Now-Familiar Rituals, World Reacts to Massacre With Mourning and Outrage.”
The Orlando attack now ranks as the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. And the horrific slaughter early Sunday at a gay nightclub has a uniquely American component, again demonstrating an easy access to assault weapons that stupefies much of the rest of the world.
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The Orlando attack is already stirring debate on some of the most visceral fault lines of American politics: terrorism and Islamophobia, security and civil liberties, gun control and gay rights. But absent guns, those issues also resonate across the world, especially in many developed countries wrestling with how to maintain their freedoms in the face of violent attacks on their values.
Yardley somehow only managed to find “evangelical Christian” and “right-wing” threats after a massacre by an Islamic terrorist.
The day before the Orlando attack, thousands of people took part in gay pride parades in Croatia and Poland amid concerns about rising right-wing political trends. In Brazil, a spate of killings of gay and transgender people has started an intense debate, with some Brazilians arguing that the rising clout of evangelical Christian legislators is increasing intolerance in the country.
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Even so, the Orlando killings come as far-right political parties in Europe are stoking anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments in a similar vein to Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in the United States. As Mr. Trump quickly seized on the massacre to renew his call to view Muslim immigrants as a threat, some politicians in the European right did the same.
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For years, America’s liberal gun laws, and the unwillingness of Congress to change them, have mystified people in many other countries.
In Japan, the American gun issue is treated as a bizarre aberration, and much of the news media coverage of the Orlando killings focused on the terrorism angle. Only one person was killed by a gun last year in Japan, according to the National Police Agency, and there were only eight reported incidents of a gun being fired.
In China, news of the Orlando shooting came only hours after a man set off primitive explosives in the check-in area at an airport in Shanghai. Four people were slightly injured, showing the gulf between the two countries in the lethality of the weapons available to the public. In China, where ordinary citizens have no access to firearms, the weapon of choice is often a large kitchen knife.
Surely an authoritarian Communist regime where all power lies in an oppressive state isn’t the best example the Times could come up to justify its push for gun control? Yardley even ended on the authoritarian note:
“I think the American government should tighten its gun control,” Ms. Gao said by telephone. “Yes, it is a free society for people with all religions and beliefs, but not everyone is capable of controlling their behavior, and the government’s lax regulation is making killing a lot easier.”
There’s certainly no problem about “lax regulation” under the Chinese Communist dictatorship.
