Sorry, Media, No White Tea Partiers Were Involved
Posted 06:44 PM ET
Media Bias: There's palpable dismay at outlets such as MSNBC and Salon that the Boston Marathon bombers were radicalized young men from Chechnya and not angry white males from the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Shortly after Monday's tragedy in Boston, David Sirota of Salon Magazine penned a piece titled "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American."
His hopes were dashed when the suspects turned out to be Muslim brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose family origins are in Chechnya, the rebellious Russian region that is a breeding ground for terrorists.
In 2002, about 40 armed Chechen separatists took more than 900 hostages at Moscow's Dubrovka Theatre, a siege that resulted in the deaths of 130 hostages and all of the Chechen terrorists.
The world also watched in horror in 2004 as armed Islamic separatist militants, some Chechen, occupied a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and killed more than 380 people.
By all accounts, the Tsarnaev brothers were fully Americanized, permanent residents attending U.S. schools. But as such they were the perfect "sleepers," terrorists in waiting, ripe for recruiting, particularly considering their place of origin.
Leftists such as Sirota bemoan "profiling" and "stereotyping" while they engage in a variety all their own. Sirota complained that the likes of Timothy McVeigh are treated as lone wolves while Muslim terrorists are treated as existential threats, that "white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted" for their acts.
Islamofascist terrorists, and the regimes and groups that support them, do constitute an existential threat. There have not been many Swedish terrorists; and what Sirota calls profiling we would call a description of the suspects. We wonder what part of "death to America" Sirota and his colleagues do not understand.
Those who scoured Tea Party rallies for signs of racism had no qualms about blaming Sarah Palin for the shooting of Rep. Gabriel Giffords or Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing. Recall how ABC's Brian Ross incorrectly suggested there might have been a link between the shooter in the Aurora, Colo., theater killings and the Tea Party. Ross rushed before the cameras after finding a man with the same name listed on the site of the Colorado Tea Party.
On Wednesday night, speaking on his MSNBC program "The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell," the host claimed that the National Rifle Association's successful lobbying efforts in Congress were hindering the federal criminal investigation in the Boston Marathon bombing.
O'Donnell argued that the "NRA's effort to guarantee that American mass murderers are the best-equipped mass murders in the world is not limited to murderers who use assault weapons and high-capacity magazines." He also said the NRA is "in the business of helping bombers get away with their crimes."
On taxpayer-funded NPR, counterterrorism reporter Dina Temple-Raston was guessing the bombing was domestic, not foreign, in origin.
"April is a big month for anti-government, and right wing, individuals," Temple-Raston declared on the Tuesday's edition of "All Things Considered."
"There's the Columbine anniversary. There's Hitler's birthday. There's the Oklahoma City bombing. There's the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. And the FBI right now is comparing this to the Eric Rudolph case. That's the 1996 bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta ."
Terrorism comes in all shades, colors and ethnicities. It is foreign and domestic. The left is being intellectually dishonest when it condemns bigotry and extremism on the right as it ignores the threat of Islamofascism and its recruits.
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