Never Mind the Terrorism, Find the Toyota - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield

The same media that chose to blow up atheist quotes by Richard Dawkins used by the Chapel Hill man who shot three Muslims over a parking spot has buried her enthusiasm for figures with actual terrorist links.

And it’s not the first time that this has happened.

When Julissa Magdalena Maradiaga-Iscoa rammed her car into a police vehicle while trying to drive through the Miami airport entrance and was then arrested after shouting in Arabic about a bomb, the media did its best to get all the important details right.
The AP made sure to mention that she was driving a silver Toyota. It failed to mention that she was Muslim or that her Facebook page describes her as a Shaheeda, a holy warrior, a term Muslims use to refer to their terrorists. A few American media outlets did report that she was an illegal alien, but only the Spanish language ones told their readers that she had converted to Islam.

Such minor details have become the first casualties of the War on Terror.

That Maradiaga-Iscoa chose to rename herself Shaheeda Hadee tells us more about her state of mind than the color of the car that she was driving. The make of her car is far less important than that her social media likes and follows included Zakir Naik, who said “Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”

In Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State John Kerry had ducked a question about Zakir Naik receiving an award from the Saudi King. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki condemned Naik’s views, but defended Saudi Arabia as a “key partner.” This doublethink on Islam has become typical of our Islam policy.

Other of Maradiaga-Iscoa’s follows included Yasir Qadhi, a Holocaust denier and a favorite of the Christmas bomber, whose media company featured lectures by Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki. Also listed was Bilal Philips, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who was caught on video defending the Islamic rape of prepubescent girls.

No actual bomb was found on Maradiaga-Iscoa. Her family claims that she’s mentally ill, and perhaps she is, but the media still chose to censor highly relevant information about her ideology. The same media that chose to blow up atheist quotes by Richard Dawkins used by the Chapel Hill man who shot three Muslims over a parking spot has buried her enthusiasm for figures with actual terrorist links.

And it’s not the first time that this has happened.

Last year two Muslims carried out attacks against NYPD officers. Both of them invoked Jihad. One of the cases was even classified as terrorism. But most people don’t even know who the perpetrators were.

The media spent more debating whether the first attacker used a hatchet or an axe.

The media has dogmatically covered up the terrorist ties of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, while insisting that Anders Behring Breivik was a Christian and Zionist anti-Muslim terrorist despite the fact that he had contemplated carrying out terrorist attacks on behalf of Muslims, denied belief in any deity and stated that his only interest in Israel was as a “deportation-port for disloyal jews.”

Breivik, like Maradiaga-Iscoa, was probably mentally ill. Unlike Maradiaga-Iscoa, the media spun the story the other way despite plenty of evidence of delusions in Breivik’s manifesto. But the media did insist that Nidal Hassan may have somehow contracted PTSD from the soldiers at the base.

It’s not just that the media covers up Islamic affiliations in violent incidents, but that it exaggerates non-Muslim affiliations to make Islam seem victimized even when the evidence points the other way.
That’s what happened at Chapel Hill. That’s what happened in Miami.

None of this is news. It’s a narrative. When it comes to violence involving Muslims (and any number of other subjects) the news is shaped to fit the narrative. The Chapel Hill killer’s atheism was important because it could be twisted to make it seem that his killings had a religious motive. Had he shot three Christians, that angle would never have been played up. Maradiaga-Iscoa’s religion and her interest in a man who said “Every Muslim should be a terrorist” cuts against the narrative and is cut out of the news.

The narrative is simple and straightforward. Islam can never be a motive for violence. Other religions, and even lack of religion, can always be assumed to be a motive for violence against Muslims.

We have heard far more about the Chapel Hill killer’s atheism than we ever did about Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Islam. And yet the prosecution’s case is that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev saw himself as a Shaheed, a holy warrior, bent on killing Americans on behalf of the Muslim Ummah.

We have mass media coverage of the trial of a terrorist mass murderer in which the prosecution’s argument is not mentioned. But we do get lots of irrelevant “Silver Toyota” details about the killer.

Christians and Jews are taunted in the media with Timothy McVeigh and Baruch Goldstein, men whose actions are over twenty years old, but we still can’t discuss the Islamic motivations of a killer from a few years ago or from last week. And if it’s not McVeigh and Goldstein, then it’s the Crusades. It can be anything and everything as long as it distracts us from dealing with a culture of Muslim violence today.

The one ideology that is involved in violence around the world is also the one we can’t discuss. It exists only as a shadow. We see it in the news only in the constant defamation of Jews, Christians, Atheists, Buddhists and Hindus and any other group suffering from the ravages of Muslim violence that are smeared as violent bigots to make Islam look better. Those lies are the shadow of Muslim violence.

The Washington Post recently responded to the call by Republicans that Obama address “Islamic Extremism” by accusing the GOP of being infested with “Islamophobia.” This comes from the same paper which had suggested that ISIS rapists and butchers were “victims”.

The only way to make such a warped point of view palatable is to demonize non-Muslims while labeling critics of Islamic terrorism as bigots. Discussing Islamic intolerance is intolerant. If you talk about Islamic Christophobia or Judeophobia, then you’re being Islamophobic. Intolerance toward Christians and Jews however is a sign of tolerance.

The extremes of Muslim violence that go beyond anything the media is capable of covering up can only be addressed with more extreme smears of their victims. That is why the media is always searching for Muslim victimization and denouncing Christian and Jewish extremism. As the media coverage of Israel’s conflict with Islamic terrorism has shown us, each Muslim terrorist atrocity leads to even more negative coverage of Israel. When Muslims appear to be perpetrators and non-Muslims victims, the media must step in to rebalance the scales to protect its narrative. A familiar symptom of this phenomenon is the ubiquitous “Muslims fear backlash” story that follows each Muslim terror attack in America or Europe.

This is not bias. Bias nudges the story. This is propaganda.

Propaganda grimly follows a narrative to the bitter end, whether it’s Baghdad Bob’s non-existent American soldiers or the Soviet newsreader cheerfully informing listeners of a 95% successful harvest. Our media’s coverage of Islamic terrorism is not biased or flawed; it’s propaganda.

It’s not enough for propaganda to have heroes; it also needs villains to justify its failures.

The worse Islamic terrorism becomes, the more the media will have to smear us. A failed ideology directs most of the blame at its critics because they are represent the alternative to its lies.

The Washington Post denouncing Republicans as Islamophobes while defending ISIS is Baghdad Bob screaming at the camera. It’s a Soviet newsreader claiming that the harvest would have been successful if not for the CIA. The lies are collapsing under the weight of Muslim violence. Christians and Jews can’t be demonized fast enough to make ISIS seem palatable. The more the media is pushed, the faster it will implode.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/never-mind-the-terrorism-find-the-toyota/

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