Media Malfeasance Again

At the risk of being accused of bigotry, I am willing to admit that as I was driving to work early this past Monday and heard that a mass shooting had occurred in Toronto, my first thought was: "I bet the guy's name turns out to be something like Abdul Mohammed, and that all of the early articles about him will furnish a wealth of information about his past without saying a word about his religion."

'Twas one of the easiest predictions ever. The shooter's name turned out to be Faisal Hussain, and there was neither mention nor speculation about his religion. An article about him in Tuesday's Toronto Star described him as a "quiet sibling" and "shy young man" who "had a complicated past replete with family misfortune...and mental health challenges," yet it contained nary a word about whether Hussain was Muslim or whether his "complicated past" included any time spent reading or listening to Islamist dogma.

Of course, the article did dutifully note that a friend of Hussain's "has no idea how Hussain could have gotten his hands on a gun." Meanwhile, the headline to a piece written by one of the paper's columnists, Rosie DiManno, flat out asked "is Toronto ready to take gun violence seriously?"

Why don't DiManno and her ilk ever ask about taking Islam seriously? Why do their knees always jerk toward controlling the inanimate objects that are guns, rather than jerking toward controlling or countering the murderous call of jihad -- which exhorts its followers to do violence not so much by guns, but rather by any and all means that exist (such as, you know, bombs, airplanes, trucks, etc.)?

The article linked to above, like many others, relied largely on a statement that was said to have been released by Hussain's family after he was identified as the shooter. But in reality, it was released by one Mohammed Hashid, a leftist community organizer with a history of Muslim advocacy.

When asked, Hashid declined to say if it was he who contacted Hussain's family about releasing a statement, or whether the family contacted him, and he also declined to say who in Hussain's small family had anything to do with writing it. It's worth noting that the statement (which is embedded in it entirety here and elsewhere) reads entirely like a PR clip. Which makes sense because Hashid is a PR professional. And let me reiterate that he is not just any PR professional; he is one who has an agenda.

There have been reports -- reports that are as yet unconfirmed, I must stress -- that Faisal Hussain visited ISIS websites and that he traveled to (and perhaps briefly lived in) Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. But few and far between are the mainstream media articles which mention those reports -- in contrast to almost every mainstream media article about Hussain accepting at face value Mohammed Hashim claim his family's claim that he he had a history of mental illness.

Granted, it is technically possible that it might turn out that Hussain was unfamiliar with Islam and didn't even know what a mosque is. But every sign points strongly in the opposite direction, and yet the mainstream media is not even looking in that opposite direction, either up in Canada or down here in the USA. So I have to ask: Don't you think that if Hussain attended a Baptist church, that would have been the first thing said about him? And don't you think that if his name had been something like Abraham Steinberg, we would be hearing rampant speculation about whether he was "pro-Israel" or believed in "Zionism"?

One of the things that's worst about this kind of media malfeasance -- the kind that implicitly excuses Islamist violence by refusing to talk about Islam when the violence is perpetrated -- is that it keeps most people in the Western world unaware of authentic, brave, peace-loving Muslims like Raif Badawi.

You can't write positive pieces about the Badawis of the world without acknowledging that their noteworthiness flows from how they stand in contrast to the bin Ladens and Mateens of the world. In the MSM's desire to say nothing bad about the practitioners of Islam, they routinely either downplay or completely ignore the role that Islam plays in Islamist terror attacks... and as an inevitable result, they also fail to report on Badawi and Tawakkol Karman and others like them... and as an inevitable result of that, the MSM hurts the very demographic they want to help, because the general public is left reading the names of killers and thereby concluding that those killers are Muslims, while never once hearing the name of an actual Muslim who believes in peace and tolerance.

That disconnect causes most many people in the general public to believe that real life Muslims who believe in peace and tolerance don't actually exist, but are instead a liberal fantasy that the liberal MSM talks about vaguely for the purpose of fooling everyone.

And since people do not like it when others try to fool them, they react to the disconnect in the precise way that any student of human nature would expect them to react: By disbelieving doubting MSM claims that there are any Muslims out there who are genuinely peaceful and tolerant.

That is absolutely the media's fault.

Media malfeasance indeed.