June 13th 2009
AP’s Anti-White Bias, Coddling Of Muslims
Let’s hear it for objectivity! AP’s big story on “lone wolf” terrorists dutifully lists all three recent lone wolf killings: The jew-hating white supremacist in DC, the anti-abortion murderer in Kansas and even the “militant Muslim” in Arkansas.
Hooray. Here’s today’s lesson in objectivity: It is not comparable to fairness or balance. Let me illustrate.
The number of words in the story related to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad total 16: “A young man in Arkansas pulls the trigger outside a military recruiting office” and ”one a militant Muslim.” Muhammed is never even named in the story.
Let’s contrast that with the number of words the article heaps upon racist angry white men. It begins similarly with 19 words, “An elderly man enters a crowded museum carrying a rifle and begins shooting,” and “One gunman was a white supremacist.” After a couple general paragraphs about the “lone wolf” phenomenon, the writers, Devlin Barrett and Eileen Sullivan, dedicate most of the remainder of the article – 17 paragraphs! – to James Von Brunn and other angry white men. Excerpts:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists, says the number of hate groups in the United States has risen 54 percent since 2000, fueled by opposition to Hispanic immigration and, more recently, by the election of the nation’s first black president and the economic downturn.
“Today the vast majority of domestic terrorist attacks are in fact lone wolf or so-called leaderless resistance attacks,” said the center’s Mark Potok. “There are very few ways to prevent them … short of assigning a police officer to every person in America.”
The number of angry white men in America is getting larger, said Chip Berlet, senior analyst with Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., a think tank that studies right-wing extremists.
In particular, the heterosexual, white, Christian men in America feel they’ve been pushed out of the way, Berlet said. Attacking the Holocaust Museum is a no-brainer, he said, because white supremacists blame Jews for the advancement of black people.
“The idea that blacks are put in positions of power by crafty Jews is central to their conspiracy theory,” Berlet said.
We are told that the number of angry white men in America is getting larger, but no studies are cited, no data is provided. And, of course, the article does not provide any estimate of the number of angry Muslim men in our country. No experts on domestic jihad are cited, nor or any of the numerous recent examples of lone wolf or small group jihad or attempted jihad in America cited. Certainly they outnumber angry white man violence.
To its credit, the Southern Poverty Law Center has published several articles on the links between radical Islam and white supremacy, but if Mark Potok mentioned this to the AP reporters, they didn’t include it in their article.
We are left with a picture of how white extremists think and enough fear about them to justify, in some “liberal” minds, increased invasions of their privacy of the sort they howled about when applied to domestic friends of Islamic terrorist. We are not left with any greater understanding of the nature or size of the threat posed by lone wolf jihadists.
But hey, the article passed journalism’s objectivity test with flying colors simply because it clearly identified each of the three recent shooters. Fairness should be the media’s standard, but reporters and editors conveniently opt for sloppy objectivity so they can justify intolerant, hate-stoking garbage like this.
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