Today’s New York Times contains a story entitled “A Bloody Crime in New Jersey Divides Egyptians,” by Andrea Elliott. (Thanks to Anthony for the link.)
To the outsider, the extent of vitriol and near-paranoia provoked by the slayings seems hard to fathom: the police have yet to make an arrest and believe that robbery was a motive. Still, in the days after the four victims were found bound, gagged and stabbed to death, the scant known facts of the case have been supplanted by a swirl of rumor and innuendo that the victims were the targets of Muslims, leading to scenes of chaos at the funeral, with mourners shoving each other and threatening to beat a sheik who attended.
Did Andrea Elliott somehow know that the death threat Armanious received and other evidence that points to a religious motivation in the case could be reliably downplayed? Or is she deliberately softpedaling this part of the story, a la the Times’ great Duranty?