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On mentioning religion

Feb 18, 2007 8:27 pm By Robert Spencer

A few days ago I wrote this about the Salt Lake City shooter:

This story confirms that Talovic was a Muslim — which of course we already knew, for if he had been a Christian the mainstream media would not have failed to take prominent note of that fact.

Many people took issue with this, saying that Christians murder people in America all the time, and their religion isn’t noted, and that it shouldn’t be noted anyway unless it had something to do with the crime. And of course this is true in regard to murders committed by Americans, but I stand by my assertion that if Talovic had been a member of Bosnia’s Christian minority, that fact would have been noted in mainstream media reports. And today comes evidence of that fact from another case, “Three women found bludgeoned to death in Chicago,” a report from AP (thanks to Aunt Bea):

(CHICAGO) — Three women were found bludgeoned to death with a hammer in two apartments on the city’s far North Side, and police had a suspect in custody Sunday….

They also found a man hitting himself on the head with a blunt object, apparently trying to kill himself, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. The 56-year-old man was hospitalized in police custody and was in fair condition early Sunday, authorities said….

Authorities did not release the name of the victims, but neighbors and friends identified two of the women as Karmin Khooshabeh, 44, and her stepsister, Karolin Khooshabeh, 40. They said the third victim was their 60-year-old mother….

Estrepaniance said the family was Assyrian Christian, a minority group in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. He said he and his former wife had fled Iran in 1995, fearing persecution for their faith. Her parents came to the United States about four years ago, and the family arranged for Karmin Khooshabeh and her husband to immigrate about three months ago, he said.

Chicago’s Assyrian community — about 100,000 — is one of the largest in the country.

Now compare that to this initial AP report about the Salt Lake mall shootings: “Police: Teen Shot Mall Victims at Random,” by Jennifer Dobner. All we learn about Sulejman Talovic beyond his name is that he was a “trench coat-clad teenager” who lived with his mother.

Now, when people point out that the religion of nominally Christian murderers isn’t noted in news stories, and that Talovic’s religion should therefore not have been either, they are assuming that in both instances religion played no factor in the killing, and was hence an irrelevant detail. However, while it is extraordinarily unlikely that the Khooshabeh killed his victims in the name of Jesus Christ, or would attempt to justify the killings by reference to Christ’s teachings, it is at very least a possibility that Talovic, like so many others around the world every day, as well as other lone jihadists in the U.S. like Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar, killed in the name of Allah and with justification from the Qur’an and Sunnah. That’s why Talovic’s religion at least merits a mention, and some investigation.

But AP has it exactly backwards, identifying Khooshabeh’s Christian faith but not Talovic’s Islamic faith. This is just another manifestation, of course, of the fog of suicidal political correctness in which we all live and move and breathe. AP, like almost everyone else, cannot conceive of Christians as anything other than evil, and of Muslims as anything other than victims. Facts that don’t fit this paradigm are consigned to oblivion.

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