Smoke and mirrors confronting terror in the US

by Matthew M. Hausman

The media response to the vehicular terror attack in New York on Halloween gets high marks for political correctness, but failing grades for honesty and moral clarity. Both the mayor and governor of New York swiftly acknowledged it as an act of terrorism, but were equally quick to characterize it as a lone wolf attack and to ignore or downplay the perpetrator’s ideology. In so doing, they followed the same strategy employed by the former Obama administration to create a buffer between radical Islam and its core religious foundation. But there should have been no confusion about the philosophy of a terrorist who shouted “Allahu Akbar” after running down innocent pedestrians or his allegiance to a terror organization – ISIS – which routinely exhorts its followers to use motor vehicles as weapons to kill “infidels.”

Major news networks were just as willing to shift the story away from the agony of the victims and the terrorist’s doctrinal motivations, and to focus instead on the threat of an anti-Muslim backlash that never seems to materialize despite the dire warnings of progressive apologists. Less than a day after the attack, the principal storyline in a report by NBC was the Muslim community’s fear of reprisal – not the dead and injured, not the shock of the witnesses or horror of the survivors, and not the radical beliefs of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant who carried out the attack and then reportedly asked for an ISIS flag to be hung in his hospital room. Many in the mainstream media echoed similar sentiments, warning of Islamophobic repercussions that never came. . . .

Indeed, there were far more documented instances of bias against Jews during the Obama years than against other minority groups, including Muslims and Arabs….

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