Boston bombing - Ignoring the obvious

We’ve all be captivated by the events that transpired in Boston since the Marathon bombings took place.  I know it sounds cliché but it was like something out of a movie.  Almost immediately news outlets like MSNBC were leaning toward a right-wing nut theory.  After all, it was tax day and, to be sure, this was the work of some government-hating tea party type.

One commentator even went so far as to publicly wish it would turn out to be a tea partier.  As the week unfolded and the pictures of the two suspects were released speculation began to swirl.  They were young white males.  Could it be the left-wing media’s dream was coming true?

But soon those dreams were dashed with the revelation that the two brothers were Muslim.  I happened to be traveling from Washington, DC to Pennsylvania by car as the dramatic events were breaking.  The only source of news I could find was NPR.  The hosts were constantly reminding us that just because we had learned they were Muslim didn’t mean their religion had anything to do with the bombings.  Of course, common sense told us otherwise.

NPR invited on various experts and reporters who had discovered more and more details about the brothers.  The older one, we learned from his aunt, had become deeply religious over the last four or five years.  We learned they were both Chechen. We learned the older brother had traveled to Russia, specifically Dagestan, which is known as a hot bed of radical Muslims, for six months. 

Then there were the details of his domestic abuse charge for slapping around a girlfriend.  We were told he had posted anti-American and pro-radical Muslim videos to YouTube.  Still the commentators warned us not to jump to any conclusions about his religion.

Had the two brothers been middle-aged white guys from the South and had ever voted for a Republican and even taken a sip of sweet tea they would immediately have been labeled as tea party terrorists yet we were constantly urged not to connect the dots between their religion and the terrorist acts they committed in Boston.

There was plenty of misinformation during the course of the week.  CNN at one point reported that an arrest had been made.  Later, red-faced, they were forced to retract.  NPR was reporting the two held up a 7-Eleven in Cambridge.  That, too, turned out to be false.  The left-wing news outlets had no problem going to air with flimsy intelligence about breaking news – or what their sources were telling them was news – but they could never bring themselves to state the obvious: This was the work of Muslim terrorists.

Even after the younger brother was captured hiding in a boat, CNN continued the search for a motive.  It seems the network, that had desperately tried to regain relevance with a breaking news story that ended up being false, couldn’t even bring itself to report the one piece of news that, by then, was obvious to everyone.

Even as of this writing, some are still feigning an attempt to “understand” why these brothers did what they did.  Even as the FBI was raiding terrorist sleeper cells some news outlets were still begging us to believe the two acted alone and we still don’t know why.

What go unreported are the stories of immigrants – legal and illegal – who have no business in America.  There are people sent here to kill us and still some news outlets are in denial.

The trouble with media bias is not so much what they tell you, it’s what they don’t.