Montemayor’s mysteries

Stephen Montemayor covers the courts for the Star Tribune. As the local courts reporter, for example, Steve has covered the several cases of the “Minnesota men” yearning to take up the jihad to smite nonbelievers and extend the sphere of Islam.

That’s not the way Steve sees it, of course. If I may borrow from the diagnostics of former blind sheikh prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, what we have here is a case Willful Blindness.

Only last week, for example, Steve focused on a “Minnesota man” who left his suburban Minneapolis family to join ISIS. At the time of his disappearance in 2015, the young man was a student at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. According to Steve, the son’s “motivation remains a mystery.” That is what he said. He drew no inferences from the group the young man abandoned his family to join.

The young man’s name is Abdelhamid Al-Madioum. He left to join ISIS while on a family trip to visit relatives in Morocco. The reader is left to draw the inference that Al-Madioum is — how to put it? — Muslim, a word which appears nowhere within the four corners of Steve’s article. Conspicuous by their absence from Montemayor’s article are the words “Muslim” or “Islam.” I could say that their disappearance remains a mystery, but their disappearance is about as mysterious as Al-Madioum’s.

I thought that story represented the nadir of the usual obfuscation, but Steve was back this past Sunday with a story that reached new frontiers in absurdity. Recall the case of the knife-wielding St. Cloud mall attacker who shouted “Allah!” and searched out infidels to attack last year? I wrote about him in the Weekly Standard column “A ‘Minnesota man’ strikes in St. Cloud” and in the City Journal column “Alice in Terrorland.”

Steve revisited the story this past Sunday in “One year later, motive of St. Cloud mall attacker remains unclear.” It’s another mystery! This time, however, Patrick Poole spares me the ordeal of exposing the absurdity. He addresses it in the PJ Media report “Media continues gaslighting Somali refugee’s stabbing terror attack at Minnesota mall.”

When I wrote about Steve’s story on the Normandale College student who left his family to join ISIS, I included my Twitter exchange with Steve. Poole does likewise in his extended analysis of Steve’s story on the mysterious case of Dahir Adan.

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy answers my house call.

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