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Robert Spencer in Aleteia: The “Terrorist” Double Standard

Jun 15, 2014 3:44 pm By Robert Spencer

Hooper2In Aleteia I explode the ridiculous myth propagated by Hamas-linked CAIR and the Washington Post, that the media designates only Muslims as terrorists.

In a Washington Post piece entitled, “In the news media, are Muslims the only ‘terrorists’?” Paul Farhi complains that killers Jerad and Amanda Miller and other right-wing extremists have not been labeled terrorists, and claims that the media only applies the “terrorist” label to Muslims who commit acts of violence.

There is no reason why the Millers’ attacks shouldn’t be labeled terrorism. But Farhi’s piece actually suffers from the same distortion and one-sidedness that he claims to see in media coverage. The key flaw in Farhi’s piece is a quote he uses from Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): “Without a doubt, if these individuals had been Muslim, it not only would be called ‘terrorism’ but it would have made national and international headlines for weeks. It was an act of terror, but when it’s not associated with Muslims it’s just a day story that comes and goes.”

Hooper’s own group, CAIR, has been labeled a “front for Hamas” by the FBI. The Justice Department named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, when what was once the nation’s largest Muslim charity was discovered to have been funneling money to Hamas. Several former CAIR officials have been imprisoned for terror-related crimes. Its California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. Nonetheless, although reporters routinely quote CAIR spokesmen in stories regarding Islam and Muslims, no one in the mainstream media ever mentions CAIR’s ties to Hamas or these other questionable aspects of its record. Instead, they deceptively call CAIR a “civil rights” organization. Farhi himself identifies it only as a “Washington-based group.”

Moreover, Hooper’s allegation that if a Muslim were involved in an act of violence, it would generate headlines around the nation/world is demonstrably false. The real double standard in the media today is the general tendency to downplay the Islamic character of Islamic jihad terror attacks, and the ongoing search for “right-wing terrorists.” The most egregious of this came in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. David Sirota wrote in Salon about the same alleged double standard of which Farhi complains, in a piece entitled “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”

Before the perpetrators were discovered, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire tried to associate the bombings with right-wingers: “Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the Battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”

CNN’s national security analyst, Peter Bergen, said that the bombers “might be some other kind of right-wing extremists.” He added that “we’ve also seen other extremist groups attacking, right-wing groups, for instance trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010.”

Even after it became clear that the bombers were Islamic terrorists, the media did its best to ignore it. CNN’s initial profile of the bombers never identified them as Muslims at all, and suggested that they were moved to bomb the Marathon by American xenophobia. In a lengthy profile of the bombers, NBC only mentioned their jihadist motives in passing and only in the eighth paragraph that “Tamerlan had a YouTube page that featured videos about Islamic radicalism.”

When journalists had to acknowledge the bombers’ Islamic identity and motives, they began publishing pieces saying it didn’t matter. Megan Garber wrote a piece in The Atlantic entitled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked, “What difference does it make why they did it if they did it?” PBS went even farther, professing not to know why they did it three months after the bombing, when the bombers’ motives were abundantly clear, and declaring the hope that the trial of surviving bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would “shed more light on the motive behind the bombing.”

The real double standard is decisively in CAIR’s favor. That’s why you’ll never read about it in the Washington Post.

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Filed Under: claiming victim status, journalistic bias Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. John C. Barile says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 4:08 pm

    CAIR better busy itself; the’re gonna need a lotta red herrings to keep the Amrikis from understanding their strategic goal to bring down their Miserable House from within and to make Allah’s religion triumphant over all other religions.

    • John C. Barile says

      Jun 15, 2014 at 4:10 pm

      “Its strategic goal”–CAIR’s, that is.

  2. Jay Boo says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 4:09 pm

    If only we would stop criticizing peaceful Islam than the whole world really would be a better place and Qur;an inspired Muslims would plant pretty flowers instead of being forced to plant bombs against infidels because of American xenophobia.

    Doublespeak Islam
    Islam annoys before it deploys
    Islam is the only religion that implicitly allows its followers to partner with and even speak for its god ‘Allah’ while simultaneously explicitly denying it does this.
    No wonder Muslims absolutely love to honor kill their own daughters.
    But what would the daughters of Allah (53:19) say about this?

  3. george whyte says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 4:41 pm

    Muslim Candidate Wants to Repeal Second Amendment?

    http://misguidedchildren.com/politics/2014/06/muslim-candidate-wants-to-repeal-second-amendment/23531

  4. Wellington says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 5:39 pm

    A key question to be asked and answered is, “How much terrorism in the world today is not Islamically related?” Even Fibrahim Hooper (and his ilk) will do his best to shy away from ACCURATELY answering this query.

  5. screenstarr says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 8:34 pm

    What planet is Hooper from? The main problem is that the media do NOT refer to Muslim extremists as terrorists, which they are, but rather as activists or by another meliorative adjective. Hooper has a larger problem: what to do when CAIR is designated a terrorist organization. It IS on the horizon.

  6. Jay Boo says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 10:14 pm

    With tongues flapping at air and noses held aloft
    beware of the MSM and this dreaded CAIR Scheiße Kopf

  7. Alarmed Pig Farmer says

    Jun 15, 2014 at 10:34 pm

    Now that the Global Jihad is flowering, at long last, the work of Ibrahim and his cohort is more important than ever. He must maintain that Moslems are mostly reasonable folk, vast herds of Unicorns with considerate furrowed brows, to help maintain the self-delusional willfully ignorant self-pleasing belief that what Prez Dubya said was true. Hey, why else would he had said it?

    Ibrahim’s cohort spans far and wide, to include the talking heads at Fox RINO in the form of Sean and his extremists and Bill and his gotta give the benefit of the doubt.

    Gonna be a lotta real bad publicity now, thus the need for news entertainer opinion programing propaganda, somno-prop not agit-prop, now more than ever.

  8. Lord Paper Clip says

    Jun 16, 2014 at 2:40 am

    The FBI, not CAIR, is the country’s largest Muslim (and everyone else’s too) civil rights organization, because it is part of their mission and they represent 100%. CAIR isn’t even close with the single figure % it has scared together.

  9. Charles Dada says

    Jun 16, 2014 at 3:35 am

    About a year ago, the SPLC issued a very good training film focusing on terrorists attacking Law Enforcement, as exemplified in the deaths of two officers from West Mephis, Arkansas. At the end of the film, it listed all officers who were killed by “right wing” terrorists. Strangely, among those listed was the late Officer David Mobilio, of the Red Bluff Police Department, whom I knew personally. Mobilio WAS MURDERED BY A LEFT-WINGER, not a Right-Winger. My conclusion was that the SPLC mis-attributed his death to suit their own agenda, which is to criminalize those who disagree with their liberal/radical bent. Officer Mobilio was assassinated by a radical who formed his notions as undergrad at the absurdly liberal Evergreen State College (WA). For the SPLC to blame Mobilio’s death on the wrong political camp speaks to their devious attempts to criminalize those who disagree with liberals in the political sphere.

    My friend died, only to have his murder mis-appropriated by the same liberals who blame the wrong side of the sphere. The question remains, how many other deaths have the SPLC wrongly mis-attributed to the wrong end of the political spectrum?

  10. Michael Copeland says

    Jun 16, 2014 at 4:01 am

    What qualifies as “terrorism”?
    Not “workplace violence”.
    Publicly hacking to death an off-duty soldier in broad daylight ?
    Not according to the UK government and Europol.
    http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/home/root/news-libertygb/6446-europol-report-no-religiously-inspired-terrorism-recorded-for-uk-in-2013

  11. SMISAC says

    Jun 16, 2014 at 7:17 am

    Hooper probably considers Jihadwatch and others like it “mainstream” as he obsessed over their accurate coverage of jihad activities around the world.

    Keep it up!

  12. andrew sapia says

    Jun 16, 2014 at 6:04 pm

    ok, ok, almost the only terrorists, happy now!

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