It's fascinating to watch the mainstream media whip up racial hatred whenever they get a chance. Gotta sell the papers somehow and it doesn't matter who you kill along the way.Just moments after Talking Points Media sends out a message that the Fort Hood shooting suspect has an Islamic name, and "this is going to get very dark," sure enough, I find this in the Associated Press:
The official says investigators are trying to determine if Hasan was his birth name, or if he changed his name and converted to Islam at some point in his life.
No doubt they are, just as (I'll assume, giving investigators the benefit of the doubt) they are trying to find out literally everything they can - a list of everyone he ever called or emailed, an inventory of everything he owns, his full life history, and good for them for investigating everything. So, while those investigators are trying to find out his religious background, his shoe size, his blood type, the Associated Press reports specifically and exclusively on the need to determine...
... if Hasan was his birth name, or if he changed his name and converted to Islam at some point in his life.
It rarely gets more clear than that. Out of the huge mass of things investigators are pursuing, the AP chooses to pursue the one area most likely to whip up hatred based on racial and religious prejudice. There's just a small jump, okay a huge prejudicial leap to feed the (as of this moment utterly baseless) prejudices that somehow, Islam is to blame here. As of this moment, we have no information to support any of that, but we have seen enough prejudice to know what the news media are doing.
I also remember when Timothy McVeigh was arrested. The AP didn't include any speculations about his religious background in the first hours of his arrest - in fact, the initial speculations were that the Oklahoma City bombings might have been committed by dark-skinned men of Arabic background.
Muslims get blamed when they do bad things, they get blamed when they don't.
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