Thoughts, over at The American Spectator:
So let me get this straight. Even a week after Tucson, after it was absolutely clear that Palin and the right had nothing whatsoever to do with the Giffords shooting, Fallows was still saying that the very “purpose” of journalists is to connect dots and “see if there’s a pattern there,” and that “it is legitimate in our current climate to ask” if the rhetoric on the right had something to do with the shooting. But now that Rubin, VERY shortly after the Norway tragedy, doesn’t just connect nearly invisible dots but actually cites stories quoting jidahists themselves as claiming jihadist “credit” for the terrorism, Fallows says it suddenly is not only a horrible sin for Rubin to take the jihadists’ words themselves for real — these aren’t mere dots, they are what’s known as solid circumstantial evidence — but that is is a mistake bad enough that her employer should apologize to the world.
Maybe it’s not hypocrisy so much as the usual grotesque double standard among the media in the service of a leftist ideology.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Jim Treacher:
When something gets blown up, we’re not supposed to even suspect the terrorist is Muslim? It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? Are you complaining to Reuters and the NYT and all those other right-wing outlets that suspected Muslim involvement? Or are you somehow confused about what the word “suspect” means? Shouldn’t you save some of your spiteful glee for anybody out there who’s still asserting that this crime was motivated by Islam, despite the evidence to the contrary?
If it’s some sort of victory to you that this freak is a Christian and a right-winger, go ahead and revel in it. As Neal Boortz pointed out: “Muslim zealots kill, Muslims celebrate and conservative Christians are angry. Christian zealots kill, liberals gloat. Odd.” Not as odd as it used to be, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, close to 100 people were murdered. I’m not going to whine that the murderer doesn’t represent all Christians, that he doesn’t speak for all right-wingers. Of course he doesn’t, just as Muslim terrorists don’t speak for all Muslims. Only the dumbest, most jaded lefty creeps are saying otherwise, and bickering about it isn’t going to bring any of those dead people back.
I hate that murdering bastard, and if it were up to me, right now he’d be rotting in Hell after death by waterboarding.
He just can’t stop being politically incorrect.
[Mid-morning update]
Apologize for what?
Anders Behring Breivik, the deranged savage who committed mass-murder in Oslo last Friday, is a severe critic of Islam. His targets, though, were not Muslims. They were his fellow Norwegians and Norway’s government. As Mark Steyn keenly observed this morning, it is patently absurd that Breivik’s attitudes about Muslims have come to dominate coverage of a horrific episode that appears to have little or nothing to do with Muslims — such that those actually killed become, as Mark puts it, “mere bit players in their own murder” while the legacy media shrieks about “Islamophobia.” As Bruce Bawer pointed out in his trenchant post this weekend (at Pajamas), we are now looking at “a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But I fear that legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has become profoundly discredited, in the eyes of many Norwegians, by association with this murderous lunatic.”
If we are to remain free and secure, that cannot be allowed to happen. And that starts with not apologizing for the entirely rational fear that future terrorist attacks will be fueled by Islamist ideology, just as thousands of past attacks have been. Prominent Muslims are forever making the most unfounded, most offensive pronouncements, and yet they never have to apologize. Right after 9/11, MPAC’s Salam Marayati told a Los Angeles radio interviewer, “If we are going to look at suspects, we should look at groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” Before becoming a top Obama aide and envoy, Rashad Hussain excoriated the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian as a “politically motivated” “travesty of justice” that fit a “common pattern … of politically motivated prosecutions,” by which the U.S. government exaggerates the “threat to American security” — al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge. CAIR has made a career of rushing to the nearest microphone to discredit the investigation of Muslims who are later found guilty of terrorism. The list goes on and on; only the words “I’m sorry, I was wrong” are never uttered — and never demanded.
No,they aren’t. At least not from the likes of James Fallows.