President Donald Trump has been severely critical of the news media
for doing what he called a poor job of covering instances of Islamic
terrorism not only in the U.S. but around the world.
The White House released
a list
late Monday of 20 terrorist attacks “executed or inspired” by ISIS,
many of which Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said were not give sufficient
coverage by the national media.
“You have seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s
happening,” Trump told military leaders at the U.S. Central Command.
“It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many
cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They
have their reasons, and you understand that.”
One of the first news agencies to counter Trump’s allegations was the BBC, which on Tuesday ran a
compilation of all its stories about the terrorist events on the administration’s list.
But as many terrorism experts told WND, it’s not the amount of
coverage given to a specific event that counts but rather the type of
coverage.
A classic example of that can be found by comparing and contrasting
the coverage that two news agencies – WND and the BBC – gave to a brutal
machete attack at the Nazareth Mediterranean Restaurant one year ago in
February 2016 that left four patrons wounded, one critically.
In the
BBC story,
there is no mention of the words Islam, jihad, Muslim, refugee or
immigrant. Every one of those words applied to the attacker, Mohamed
Barry, who was a Muslim immigrant from the West African country of
Guinea, as pointed out in the
WND story.
“Trump is absolutely correct. The point is not that they ignore the
stories, but they deliberately conceal and/or misrepresent the aspects
of them that make it clear that they’re Islamic jihad attacks,” said
Robert Spencer, editor of Jihad Watch.
One notorious example of this is the Orlando massacre, Spencer said.
“Mainstream news outlets claimed that he was a conflicted gay man
lashing out at other gays,” he said. “This was outright disinformation:
The FBI later announced that there was no evidence that he was gay, no
gay apps on his phone, etc. Few outlets published his actual remarks,
making it clear that he was killing for ISIS and Islam. The coverage of
terrorist incidents in general in the establishment media deliberately
misleads the public.”
One terrorist event not included on the White House list was the
Chattanooga shooting in which Mohammad Abdulazeez killed five unarmed
U.S. servicemen at a Navy recruiting center in July 2015. It took five
months for the Obama Justice Department to declare the attack was an act
of terrorism, and very little mainstream reporting was done to keep the
attack in the national spotlight during those five months of silence by
the DOJ. In other words, no pressure was placed on the administration
to admit the obvious terrorism connections while the attack was still
fresh in the minds of the news-consuming public.
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez (Photo: Fox News screenshot)
Then came the University of California at Merced knife attack in
November 2015 by a student there, Faisal Mohamed, whose parents
emigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan.
The BBC did not report on the obvious jihadist markings in the
attack, which wounded four people and would have been worse if a brave
construction worker and officer had not intervened. The FBI waited four
months to declare the attack an act of terrorism, disclosing that
Mohamed had links to ISIS and had visited radical websites. Many
national news agencies never covered the original attack. The BBC
published a brief article on the incident after the FBI report came out,
but by that time few Americans were paying attention. At least the BBC
covered the FBI’s belated findings. Most establishment media companies
did not.
Faisal Mohammad was an 18-year-old student at UC-Merced.
The British-based BBC often provides more coverage of terrorist
attacks than its U.S. counterparts, ABC, CBS and NBC, said Phillip
Haney, retired Homeland Security officer who for more than 13 years
screen immigrants and refugees for connections to terrorism.
“Let’s say that in terms of scope of coverage the BBC is actually
correct that they were ahead of the others,” Haney told WND. “Even with
the broader scope of coverage the BBC, as deficient as it is, it’s still
better than the American journalistic coverage. During my time on the
inside with DHS, it seemed like the Daily Mail, another British news
outlet, would always come out with information within minutes if not
hours, well ahead of American media, so why do we have to look into
foreign media sources to find pieces of the story that you won’t find
here?”
Get
the book former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is calling the
“most important read of 2017.” It’s “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest
Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad” in which investigative
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When it came to the San Bernardino attack by Syed Farook and his
immigrant wife, Tashfeen Malik, the BBC, like CNN and most of the other
establishment media outlets, covered the story predominantly within the
leftist meme of “gun violence,” glossing over or ignoring the more
pertinent theme of Islamic jihad. The BBC, in its report Tuesday, linked
back to its San Bernardino coverage, which included a major sidebar
linking and comparing the San Bernardino event to other stories about
“gun violence.”
It’s exactly this type of broad contextual reporting, which the media
are so good at when it comes to “gun violence,” that critics say is
missing on the topic of Islamic terrorism.
An example of this came on Nov. 28, 2016, when a Somali refugee and
student at Ohio State University goaded fellow students to exit a
science building by pulling the fire alarm. Then he rammed his vehicle
into them, got out and stabbed as many as possible. He injured 11 before
he was shot dead by police. The obvious similarity of this attack and
another just two months earlier in St. Cloud, Minnesota, were striking.
Both attacks were carried out by a Somali Muslim refugee, both using
knives against a civilian soft target. Yet almost none of the reporting
by the mainstream media drew the parallels.
Rather, the
BBC’s main article
detailing the attack in San Bernardino on Dec. 11, 2015, starts out
like a story about a “mass shooting” crime, not an Islamic jihadist
attack. The word “Islam” does not even appear until the eighth
paragraph.
The fact that Farook had recently traveled to Saudi Arabia was not mentioned until the 10th graph.
In the 14th graph, we find out that Farook and Malik had been
“radicalized” for some time, but the BBC fails to inform its readers how
or by whom this “radicalization” occurred. Do Muslims just wake up one
day and decide to kill? Where does this inspiration come from? Silence
on that issue is the unwritten code of conduct for mainstream news
reporters.
And here’s the kicker. The reader must continue reading down to the
21st paragraph to find where the BBC has buried the most important news
information. It is here that readers are finally told:
“U.S. officials have told the media Tashfeen Malik pledged allegiance
to the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group on Facebook.”
Readers further learn that the U.S. government “did not pick up on
extremist messages posted online when Farook and his wife began
chatting.”
Haney, co-author of the book “
See Something Say Nothing,” said it’s the point of emphasis that counts, not the volume of coverage.
“Look at what they choose to emphasize. It’s obvious the way they lay
out the article on San Bernardino that they don’t really want to
emphasize the Islamic aspect of the story,” he says. “Why didn’t they
just put all that factual information into two or three paragraphs at
the very beginning?”
As a former counter-terrorism officer at Customs and Border Patrol in
DHS, Haney was involved in many of the cases on the White House list.
“I was there for the Boston bombing, Chattanooga shooting, Fort Hood
massacre, Time Square bomber, and I saw the way these stories were
reported,” he said.
He said it took him 10 minutes using open sources on his laptop to
connect Orlando shooter Omar Mateen to a mosque in Fort Pierce, Florida,
which has ties to the extremist group Tabliqui Jumaat.
Haney said the idea of “self radicalization” popularized in the U.S. media is
largely a myth.
“I definitely agree with what Trump said, because I saw it first
hand. I saw the way the coverage of these events was skewed by the
‘countering violent extremism’ narrative and the prevailing tendency to
initially report that there was no link between mainstream Islam and
terrorism,” he said.
And whenever someone in Congress wanted to get serious about Islamic terrorism, they were brutalized in the media, Haney said.
He cites the case of Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert and several
other members of Congress who wanted to investigate the Muslim
Brotherhood’s infiltration of the Obama administration in 2012.
“The way they covered that story, they reacted with the same level of
political hysteria as they did when Trump issued his executive order
temporarily banning travel from seven countries,” Haney said. “Mike
Rogers [former Michigan GOP congressman], John Boehner [former House
Speaker] and Sen. John McCain attacked the five members of Congress with
hysterical fury. They were conspiracy theorists, they were biased, they
were Islamophobic, racist, unnecessarily targeting wonderful people
like Huma Abedin. And it was widely covered that way by the mainstream
media. There was never any analytic, thoughtful, step-by-step reporting,
I wonder if it is true, could it be true, and what is it the inspector
general’s role to investigate?”
By contrast, Haney points to how quickly the inspector general lurched into action when Trump implemented his executive order.
“Within a day or two of the order being implemented, the inspector
general launched an investigation,” he said. “Whereas, in 2012, they
couldn’t find the wherewithal to inspect five members of Congress
alleging deep involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama
administration. So, Trump is right; they are biased. The other thing
they always say is, ‘Let’s be careful not to jump to any hasty
conclusions,’ and then that’s it, they leave you hanging. And by the
time they revisit the story, you forget what the plot of the movie has
been and what you were watching to begin with.”
A familiar pattern
Whether it was San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Columbus or Orlando,
Haney says the “automatic, reflexive response, by the media was to say,
‘We don’t have any evidence of a foreign terrorist link,’ or they say
upfront it is linked to ISIS, which allows people to come to a false
conclusion, that there is either no foreign link to terrorism or it’s
just those ISIS guys, so we must be OK because it’s just some kooks who
got radicalized on the Internet and got affiliated with this nasty group
called ISIS.”
The media over the last eight years have increasingly considered off
limits any reporting on mosques and their involvement in terrorism.
“The radical message, it’s often affirmed here in the mosques. That’s
the big question that is never asked or investigated, that maybe some
of the mosques right here in the United States are really the source of
some of the so-called radicalization,” Haney said. “That is the danger.
Trump is right. He’s not always eloquent in the way he says it, but he’s
right.”
Get
the book former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is calling the
“most important read of 2017.” It’s “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest
Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad” in which investigative
reporter Leo Hohmann blows the lid off of the dark side of refugee
resettlement.
Below is the White House list of terror attacks it said were planned or inspired by ISIS.
Each
and every one of you is motivated by a cause that you genuinely believe
in. What you don’t seem to recognize is that the recent momentum you
have gained is a direct result of forced propaganda and financing from
the true NAZIs, the Globalists that are intent on not only controlling
the United States, but using our military might to dominate the World.
What you don’t seem to comprehend is that you are cannon fodder. You are
being used and exploited. You are the useful idiots of a 4th Reich that
was 
Kennedy
and Reagan both resisted the Globalist agenda. Both were stopped with
bullets. While Reagan was not killed, his fight against the Globalists
ended 69 days into his presidency with a bullet that almost killed him.