Thursday, August 10, 2006
Joel Mowbary on our useful idiots in the media
Hiding behind potted plants, Naveed Haq laid in wait for a 14-year-old girl he could use as a hostage. With a gun in her back, he pushed his way past security and through the door. He coldly, deliberately shot six women. When a wounded Pamela Waechter tried to flee up some stairs, he followed her, leaned over a railing and killed her.
Are these the actions of a crazy person?
A crazy person might cause harm to himself, maybe even someone close to him. Haq, though, did not know anyone at the Seattle Jewish Federation. He traveled some distance late last month from central Washington, getting there after determining his target following an Internet search for “something Jewish.”
That wasn’t all of his planning. Because of Washington law, Haq waited to purchase his two semiautomatic handguns, picking them up one day earlier.
Premeditation is the antithesis of crazy. So why is it that the mainstream media has either ignored or played down this story? The New York Times has written only one article. Ditto for the Washington Post. Both papers buried what little coverage they did offer, on page 22 and page 13, respectively.
Most of those outlets that publicized the shootings have focused on Haq’s history of mental illness, the most serious of which was bipolar disorder. Great attention has been paid to his apparently having acted alone. And some have reported that sometime last year, the accused murderer was a practicing Christian.
OK, so that story is about an individual in Seattle right? The press never considers some nutball statement from Pat Robertson as an individual thing. Left wing blogs will go to fantastic lengths to paint any transgression by a Republican, no matter how tenuous those Republican ties are, as an indictment of all Republicans.
Why does the press bend over backward to protect Muslims from being associated with Islamic terrorists? It seems to me that if peaceful. upstanding Muslims don't want to be associated with the terrorists that they would be the first ones out condemning terror and the people that are hijacking their religion. The fact is they spend far more time and energy denouncing the people that will identify the terrorists and our press is all too happy to be complicit in this.
The reason seems to be the same for both groups, they are simply scared to speak up. It can almost be understood from the Muslim community, but the press coverup is completely inexcusable and actually exacerbates the problem by making people fear they will be the ones blamed in the media should they speak out.
Mark Finkelstein has more from Newsbusters.
