As of Sunday afternoon, Islamic jihadists in an upscale Kenyan mall have murdered 59 people and wounded 175, and were still holding at least 30 hostages. All (or at least most) of the victims have been non-Muslims, for as witness Elijah Kamau reported: “The gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave. They were safe, and non-Muslims would be targeted.”
The murderers didn’t just take the word of those who were trying to leave that they were Muslims. One of the hostages, a non-Muslim named Joshua Hakim, recounted that the jihadists were “firing indiscriminately, they shot a lot of people” – hence the possibility that some Muslims may have been hit. Hakim himself covered his Christian name on his ID card and showed it to the jihadists, who were apparently satisfied that he was Muslim. However, Hakim said, “Then an Indian man came forward and they said, ‘What is the name of Muhammad’s mother?’ When he couldn’t answer they just shot him.”
Non-Muslims who wish to prepare for the future of the United States and other non-Muslim nations may wish to commit to memory the factoid that Muhammad’s mother was Amina bint Wahb; however, the most noteworthy aspect of these jihadists’ selection process was that it forced the mainstream media, which generally ignores, denies, and/or obfuscates the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, to report about the jihadists’ desire to kill only non-Muslims, not Muslims.
This was singular. Remember that before the Boston Marathon jihad murderers were identified, the mainstream media was full of hope that they had finally witnessed a violent terror attack by Bible-quoting Christian killers, as they had hoped for for years.
Media reports were full of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. On the day of the bombings, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire was one of the first of many to caution people against thinking that the Marathon had just been the site of a jihad attack (“foreign terrorism”) and to try to link the bombings to the Right: “Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the Battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”
Likewise, CNN’s national security analyst, Peter Bergen, speculated that if “conventional explosives” had been used, “that might be some other kind of right-wing extremists,” as opposed to Al Qaeda. He reminded viewers that “we’ve also seen other extremist groups attacking, right-wing groups, for instance trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010.”
Most egregiously of all, David Sirota of Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”
Sirota, of course, got his wish. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were indeed white – indeed, veritable Caucasians – and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized American citizen.
The Tsarnaev brothers’ motivations quickly became clear. CNN reported a week after the bombings that “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack.”
Also, just before he was captured, when he was hiding out inside a pleasure boat, Dzhokhar wrote a long self-justification on the inside of the boat, including the line: “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”
Tamerlan also said, “I’m very religious.” His friend Donald Larking affirmed this: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev was my friend and we talked about everything from politics to religion. He was very, very religious. He believed that the Qur’an was the one true word and he loved it.” Tamerlan noted that he did not drink alcohol because Allah forbade it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend had converted to Islam, as his American wife did later. Even his name indicated the world from which he had come: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was apparently named for the warrior Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Asia, who was as noted for his Muslim piety as he was for his bloodlust: in 1398, he massacred 100,000 Hindus in Delhi, and killed 90,000 more people in Baghdad in 1401, all the while his devout adherence to the religion of Muhammad. This was the figure for whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was named.
Combine all that with the fact that the Boston Marathon bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square in the summer of 2010, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb had been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers were abundantly clear.
Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continued to obfuscate the truth. On July 15, 2013, three months after the bombings and long after the Tsarnaev brothers’ motivations had become clear, PBS — without mentioning Dzhokhar’s statements or any other evidence of the bombers’ motivations – expressed hope that the surviving brother’s trial would “shed more light on the motive behind the bombing.”
NBC made only scant mention of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them, noting only eight paragraphs down in a lengthy story that “Tamerlan had a YouTube page that featured videos about Islamic radicalism.” CNN’s initial profile of the bombers never mentioned Islam at all, and suggested instead that the bombers had decided to blow up the Marathon because Americans had not extended to these two immigrants a welcoming hand, quoting a comment Tamerlan made on a social media site: “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”
When journalists deigned to examine the brothers’ Islamic identity, they downplayed it. The Atlantic ran a piece entitled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim – So?” It complained that “we confuse categories – ‘male,’ ‘Muslim’ — with cause,” and cautioned against stereotyping all Muslims, painting them with a broad brush.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had on an FBI agent who asked about the bombers, “Where was their inspiration? Where did they get the guidance?” To that Matthews responded: “Why is that important? Why is that important to — is that important to prosecuting? I mean, what difference does it make why they did it if they did it? I’m being tough here.” Also on MSNBC, Martin Bashir lamented about how these Muslim bombers were “burying the ‘peace, compassion and kindness of the Qur’an.’”
The jihad murderers in Kenya, unbeknownst to themselves, did not allow for this kind of media obfuscation. With their single act of freeing Muslims and murdering non-Muslims, they did more to raise awareness of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat than anyone in recent memory in this age of denial, obfuscation, and misinformation. The media couldn’t ignore their selection process. And now thousands of people know that they’ve been lied to, and lied to for years. We can only hope that these newly enlightened will be moved to act for justice before yet another jihad mass murderer makes his bloody arrival on the scene.
