Michelle Malkin contrasts the media and governmental treatment of the anti-abortion murder and that jihadist murder of two army recruiters in Arkansas. (Oh, you hadn’t heard about that one?)
When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone. These are the instantly ossifying narratives in the Sunday shooting death of Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller versus the Monday shootings of two Arkansas military recruiters.
Tiller’s suspected murderer, Scott Roeder, was white, Christian, anti-government, and anti-abortion. The gunman in the military recruiting center attack, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, was black, a Muslim convert, anti-military, and anti-American. Both crimes are despicable, cowardly acts of domestic terrorism. But the disparate treatment of the two brutal cases by both the White House and the media is striking.
President Obama issued a statement condemning “heinous acts of violence” within hours of Tiller’s death. The Justice Department issued its own statement and sent federal marshals to protect abortion clinics. News anchors and headline writers abandoned all qualms about labeling the gunman a terrorist. An almost gleeful excess of mainstream commentary poured forth on the climates of hate and fear created by conservative talk radio, blogs, and Fox News for reporting Tiller’s activities.
By contrast, President Obama was silent about the military recruiter attacks that left 24-year-old Private William Long dead and 18-year-old Private Quinton Ezeagwula gravely wounded. On Tuesday afternoon – more than 24 hours after the attack on the military recruiting center in Little Rock – President Obama held a press conference to announce his pick for Army Secretary. It would have been exactly the right moment to express condolences for the families of the targeted Army recruiters and to condemn heinous acts of violence against our troops.
But President Obama said nothing. The Justice Department was mum. And so were the legions of finger-pointing pundits happily convicting the pro-life movement and every right-leaning writer on the planet of contributing to the murder of George Tiller. Obama’s omission, it should be noted, comes just a few weeks after he failed to mention the Bronx jihadi plot to bomb synagogues and a National Guard airbase during his speech on homeland security.
Why the silence? Politically and religiously-motivated violence, it seems, is only worth lamenting when it demonizes opponents. Which also helps explain why the phrase “lone shooter” is ubiquitous in media coverage of jihadi shooters gone wild – think convicted Jeep Jihadi Mohammed Taheri-Azar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Israel-bashing gunman Naveed Haq who targeted a Seattle Jewish charity or Los Angeles International Airport shooter Hesham Hedayet who opened fire at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter– but not in cases involving rare acts of anti-abortion violence.
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