Whitewashing Islamists

Our friend Joel Mowbray comments on the lack of media interest in the Islamist motivation of the Seattle shooting rampage by Naveed Haq in his column for the Washington Times this morning. Joel writes:

The New York Times has written only one story. Ditto for The Washington Post. Both papers buried what little coverage they did offer on page 22 and page 13, respectively.

Most of those outlets that publicized the shootings have focused on Mr. Haq’s history of mental illness, the most serious of which was bipolar disorder. Great attention has been paid to his apparently having acted alone. And some have reported that sometime last year, the accused murderer was a practicing Christian.

In other words, media outlets have spent fantastic energy exploring every possibility — except the obvious one. Moments after spraying bullets across the offices of the Jewish Federation, he announced, “I’m a Muslim-American; I’m angry at Israel.” So while Mr. Haq’s short-lived apparent conversion to Christianity might be interesting, it neither inspired the murderous rampage nor serves as evidence that something in his Islamic environment did not.

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