What’s a liberal newspaper to do when a member of one preferred identity group murders a member of another favored identity group?
Answer? Ignore the first group completely.
On June 21, the Washington Post headlined this sad story:
Funeral, vigil for Muslim teen killed in attack near mosque draw throngs
The story, a genuine tale of a horrific murder of a 17-year old girl in Northern Virginia, begins as follows:
“The Northern Virginia Muslim community and grieving high-schoolers gathered on Wednesday to mourn Nabra Hassanen, a 17-year-old killed while she was walking to her mosque on Sunday with friends.
Dranesville Road, which was largely empty when an attacker beat Nabra there before dawn, was packed with people walking along the same sidewalk to attend her funeral. In traditional Muslim garb and Western attire, they walked and drove from every direction to All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS).”
So far, so good in terms of straight-up journalism. But then, eventually, the reader comes to this:
“Authorities arrested Darwin Martinez Torres, 22, of Sterling, after a Fairfax County officer noticed him circling the site Sunday.
Police said Martinez Torres, a construction worker, beat Nabra with a baseball bat and left her body in a pond near his apartment building. Her remains were found Sunday afternoon.
The brutal assault has alarmed the surrounding Muslim community and reverberated nationally with calls for a hate-crime investigation. A vigil in Dupont Circle in the District on Tuesday night drew hundreds, and hundreds more — many of them young — attended a vigil in Reston on Wednesday night.”
There was a little more and then it was back to the murder victim and her friends. So what was missing? If one checked in with Fox, one would find this:
ICE: Suspect in Murder of VA Muslim Teen Was in US Illegally
The Fox story begins as follows:
“A 22-year-old illegal immigrant who beat a 17-year-old Muslim girl to death has been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Darwin Martinez Torres, a citizen of El Salvador got into an altercation with Nabra Hassanen on Sunday morning in Virginia in what was reportedly a road rage incident. He assaulted her with a metal baseball bat, killing her and dumped her body in a pond.”
The Fox story of the murder, note well, ran a full day before the Post story. Which means the information as to the exact identity of the alleged murderer was out there in the public domain when the Post ran its story - a story that completely ignored the major fact that the alleged killer was not just some redneck white guy who hated Muslims. No, in fact the killer was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. But mention of this in the Post account? Zero. Nada. None.
The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham wrote about another story on the murder in the Post. Graham noted that the paper buried any relevant information on the crime: “Inside the paper on page 11, in paragraph 23, they sprinkled in the D-word -- deportation -- but never used an I-word in 35 paragraphs, for ‘illegally in the country.’"
This also happened in a June 21 Metro story on whether the killing was a "hate crime." This also happened in a June 20 Petula Dvorak opinion column in Metro: "Torres, the 22-year-old charged with Nabra's killing, is Latino and doesn't appear to have connected with any hate groups on his Facebook page. He doesn't fit into the narrative we come to expect when faced with alleged hate crimes."
The question here is not “did this really happen?” The question is: Why did this happen? Why in the world would the largest newspaper in the Washington- Northern Virginia area deliberately not report a significant fact in a serious straight-news story involving the murder of this 17 year old girl?
The guess here is the inevitable poison of identity politics. Too often identity politics - or as I call it the son of segregation and the grandson of slavery - is cast in the light of whites versus X other, non-white minority group. But the real and dirty little truth about identity politics is that eventually, when there is no white person involved, the liberal media organization of the moment will inevitably get into the business of preferring one favored group over another supposedly equally favored group.
In this case the Post has long made its view of illegal immigration perfectly clear through its criticisms of then-candidate and now President Trump. On August 17, 2015 the paper ran this editorial titled:
Donald Trump’s immigration plan would wreak havoc on U.S. society
Among other things this scorching editorial said:
“REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL hopeful Donald Trump, who unveiled his immigration platform over the weekend, says America’s illegal immigrants “have to go.” Although the large majority of Americans don’t agree, Mr. Trump is appealing to a more sympathetic audience: the most conservative slice of the Republican primary electorate.”
It went on to scorch Trump for among other things his “nativist rhetoric.”
Only weeks earlier, in July, the Post’s uber-liber columnist Dana Milbank headlined this story:
Donald Trump is the monster the GOP created
In this jewel of left-wingism Milbank said that Trump’s real appeal to GOP voters included the fact that he was “anti-immigrant.” And he went on to note:
“Trump’s position also closely follows those that came from Arizona in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer and other Republicans attempted an immigration crackdown. They spoke about illegal immigrants on the border as a source of beheadings, kidnappings and police killings.”
In other words? The Post makes it abundantly clear that Trump’s concern for illegals who murder Americans is nothing less than out-and-out nativism, racism and xenophobia. And the concerns expressed by such as ex-Arizona Governor Brewer about lethal violence from illegals are cut from the same nativist, racist, xenophobic cloth.
Then there is the Post's supposed support for Americans who happen to be Muslims. The paper insisted they were being unfairly targeted by Trump’s “bigotry” or, in the words of a Post columnist, the Trumpian “demonization” of Muslims. Concern for Muslims in America just oozed from the paper.
And now? Now one Darwin Martinez Torres, an illegal from El Salvador, has allegedly murdered a 17-year old Nabra Hassanen. An American born in America to her legal immigrant Egyptian parents. Nabra was savagely beaten to death with a metal baseball bat. The problem for the liberal Post? For a paper that adheres to the liberal religion of dividing by skin color two of its favored groups are now front and center in this horrific story. An illegal immigrant, a Hispanic, a “person of color” in the language of the new segregationists is accused by Fairfax County police of killing an American teenage girl who happens to be a Muslim. What to do?
Simply write the story up and completely ignore that a member of one of its favored groups is charged with murdering a member of another favored group.
In the ongoing battle against the inherent racism that is identity politics the Post story is a vivid illustration of where, eventually, all identity politics is headed. Inevitably it pits one group against another. And in this case? Nabra Hassanen, the American-born daughter of legal immigrants from Egypt — along with her fellow Americans of Northern Virginia who happen to be Muslim — got the short end of the identity politics stick. Nabra’s life ended brutally at 17, her death at the hands of an accused murderer who was in this country illegally.
Not that the Washington Post was going to tell anybody.
Shhhhh. Move along. Nothing to see here.
