Excuses, excuses. Daniel Pipes chronicles some of the absurd lengths to which the mainstream media and law enforcement authorities will go to avoid calling jihad jihad. “Sudden Jihad or Inordinate Stress at Ft. Hood?,” by Daniel Pipes at FrontPage, November 9:
When a Muslim in the West for no apparent reason violently attacks non-Muslims, a predictable argument ensues about motives.
The establishment – law enforcement, politicians, the media, and the academy – stands on one side of this debate, insisting that some kind of oppression caused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, to kill 13 and wound 38 at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5. […]
Instances of Muslim-on-unbeliever violence inspire the victim school to dig up new and imaginative excuses. Colorful examples (drawing on my article and weblog entry about denying Islamist terrorism) include:
- 1990: “A prescription drug for … depression” (to explain the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane)
- 1991: “A robbery gone wrong” (the murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney)
- 1994: “Road rage” (the killing of a random Jew on the Brooklyn Bridge)
- 1997: “Many, many enemies in his mind” (the shooting murder atop the Empire State Building)
- 2000: A traffic incident (the attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren near Paris)
- 2002: “A work dispute” (the double murder at LAX)
- 2002: A “stormy [family] relationship” (the Beltway snipers)
- 2003: An “attitude problem” (Hasan Karim Akbar’s attack on fellow soldiers, killing two)
- 2003: Mental illness (the mutilation murder of Sebastian Sellam)
- 2004: “Loneliness and depression” (an explosion in Brescia, Italy outside a McDonald’s restaurant)
- 2005: “A disagreement between the suspect and another staff member” (a rampage at a retirement center in Virginia)
- 2006: “An animus toward women” (a murderous rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006)
- 2006: “His recent, arranged marriage may have made him stressed” (killing with an SUV in northern California in 2006)
There is much more. Read it all.