Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, the Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
Did you hear about the man who entered New Orleans’ airport with explosives and a machete, in March of this year? No? Well, you would have if he’d been Muslim.
A Muslim American man carrying a duffel bag that holds six homemade explosives, a machete, and poison spray travels to a major U.S. airport. The man enters the airport, approaches the TSA security checkpoint, and then sprays two TSA officers with the poison. He then grabs his machete and chases another TSA officer with it. This Muslim man is then shot and killed by the police.
After the incident, a search of the attacker’s car by the police reveals it contained acetylene and oxygen tanks, two substances that, when mixed together, will yield a powerful explosive.
If this scenario occurred, there’s zero doubt that this would be called a terrorist attack. Zero.
This is what Dean Obeidallah wrote in March of this year.
The man who commited this attack was Richard White, a 63-year-old former Army serviceman who has long been retired and living on Social Security and disability checks. He was reportedly a devout Jehovah’s Witness.
Given the facts that a man armed with explosives and weapons traveled to an airport and only attacked federal officers, you would think that the word “terrorism” would at least come up as a possibility, right? But it’s not even mentioned.
This was not the only Christian terrorist, in recent times, who did not get public scrutiny for days on end, which would have meted any person with a Muslim identity or even a Muslim sounding name.
In September this year, a Kansas jury said a white supremacist who shot three people to death outside two Jewish centers last year should be put to death for the crimes.
Frazier Glenn Cross, 74, a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan who has been representing himself in court, was found guilty in August of killing Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, and Terri LaManno, 53, outside a Jewish retirement home, both in Overland Park, Kansas. The jury also convicted Cross of three counts of attempted murder for shooting at three other people.
But, the media failed to accord him extensive coverage to establish that every human life is sacred and precious and to establish human equality before law and in the eyes of public opinion.
This unilateral and biased pattern of the media has been once more exposed this week in the coverage of unfortunate killings outside Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.
Suspected Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear mentioned “baby parts” to investigators and in later interviews expressed anti-abortion and anti-government views, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told CNN.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has called the shooting, which killed three people and wounded nine more, a “crime against women;” Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has said it’s “a tragedy that is beyond speech.”
He has called for both sides of the US abortion debate to “tone down the rhetoric”, following an attack on a clinic.
He described the rampage by shooter Robert Lewis Dear as “a form of terrorism.“
Among the victims was Garrett Swasey, a University of Colorado-Colorado Springs police officer who rushed to the clinic to offer his assistance. “There was no way any of us could have kept him here,” UCCS Police Chief Brian McPike said of Swasey during a Saturday evening vigil. “He was always willing to go…he had an enthusiasm that was hard to quell.”
After the horrible tragedy in Paris, given 24/7 coverage of the media about Paris, triggered enough Islamophobia that I needed to pen an article: Individual Responsibility or Group Punishment: Destroying ISIS and Saving the Western Civilization.
The above quoted examples are not a few exceptions, rather a systematic strategy of the Western media that has emerged over the last 14 years, since the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and a war on terror initiated by the then US President George W Bush. Here, I link three articles to support the thesis:
All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 94% that Aren’t
Feds: White supremacists plotted to attack synagogues, black churches
Why we should call Chris Harper Mercer by his true title — a terrorist (COMMENTARY)
Responsible and a fair & balanced media, which is not ideologically driven, can truly educate us about sanctity of human life and in so doing not only defeat ISIS and the other Muslim terrorist associations, but, also domestic terrorism in USA or shall we give it a label of the Christian terrorism.
That will certainly usher in an era of coexistence in our global village, without any discrimination on the basis of religion.
Categories: Counter Terrorism, Islamophobia, Terrorism, The Muslim Times
The incident by Richard White was reported by Reuters on March 21 and is being repeated by Huff Post Crime, Nov.,29. The killer is said to have a history of mental illness and had stayed off his medication for quite sometime.
Planned Parenthood Shooting Appears To Have Been Politically Motivated
America’s Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States Hardcover – August 11, 2015
by Stuart Wexler (Author)
The conventional narrative concerning religious terrorism inside the United States says that the first salvo occurred in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. This narrative has motivated more than a decade of wars, and re-prioritized America’s domestic security and law enforcement agenda. But the conventional narrative is wrong.
A different group of jihadists exists within US borders. This group has a long but hidden history, is outside the purview of public officials and has an agenda as apocalyptic as anything Al Qaeda has to offer. Radical sects of Christianity have inspired some of the most grotesque acts of violence in American history: the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four young girls; the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s; and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.America’s Secret Jihad uses these crimes to tell a story that has not been told before.
Expanding upon the author’s ground-breaking work on the Martin Luther King, Jr. murder, and through the use of extensive documentation, never-before-released interviews, and a re-interpretation of major events, America’s Secret Jihad paints.
Buy in Amazon
The mental state of Robert Lewis Dear, 57, raises disturbing questions. Would any sane person live in the woods without water and electricity as a loner? Concern may not be for the lives lost at the abortion facility but for the disruption of the multi billion business. Listen to Lynch.
‘America is a country of … great contradiction’
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2015/11/isil-attacks-paris-151120132834566.html
That ‘great contradiction’ finds expression in the insanity which allows the importation of aliens, some with terrorist tendencies, either as ‘refugees’ or ‘undocumented foreign workers’ when millions of Americans are killed each year to satisfy the greed of the shareholders and operators of the multi billion dollar genocide industry.
Well its known to every body in d world today dat any act committed against humanity by a muslim is terrorist while by christians they give it different dis have been going on for. A while they control d media so they do whatever they want.we dnt want their recognition all dat matters is Allah’s recognition
You have forgotten that your allah gives you unrestricted licence to kill the Christians. There is no such authority given by the Christian God.
You are a Nigerian like me, from your name. How many times have Christian terrorists bombed schools, markets, hospitals, police stations, army barracks and mosques because their religion demands them to do so?