The MSM Finds A Villain--Then They Lie About It

The mainstream media has searched high and low for an instance of anti-Muslim violence ever since September 11, 2001. With the sudden wave of protest and anger over the despicable plans to build a triumphal mosque at Ground Zero, they found one at last. Or at least it appeared they had.

The New York Times advanced the lie, then the network nightly news and "lesser publications" repeated it. Islamophobia is the controlling voice of the mob which is out to murder every Muslim in America. Or at least one Muslim cab driver in New York City. After the right-wing bigots and professional haters stirred up the troops of ignorant rubes into a feeding frenzy, one of them obligingly used a knife on a Muslim cabbie. See? It was all so predictable. All that hate was bound to produce deaths and serious injuries. This one is only the beginning. Soon Bill Clinton will be talking about all the mosques he has seen burning in the South. Barack Obama will be doing his best out-thrust Mussolini chin thing, decrying the mass violence against innocent Muslims. Oh, the humanity!

The only problem is that they jumped the gun. It turns out that the only part that was true was that somebody stabbed a cabbie who was indeed Muslim. But it wasn't the right wing zealot they claimed it was. You're all waiting for the headlines and network mea culpas about the mistake, aren't you? As the famous peacemaker Al Sharpton said, "well, maybe it wasn't true, but it could have been." Don't hold your breath waiting for follow-up stories explaining how they were completely wrong about the attack.

Turns out that the attacker who was the "if it bleeds, it leads" poster boy for right-wing religious hatred is actually a volunteer for Intersections International, an organization that has taken a strong and public stand in favor of the building of the Islamic sharia center at Ground Zero. He was drunk and quite possibly more than a little nuts when he attacked the cabbie. When caught with their journalistic pants down, many of the liars pointed out that they had mentioned Intersections International in previous unrelated articles. Unfortunately for their ongoing lie, none had mentioned the pro-mosque stand the group takes.

Never much for admitting error, and always creative in finding red herrings, The New York Times found a whole new source of Islamaphobia to discuss so you wouldn't notice their minor "error." And now it's time to explain why I used that picture of the Empire State Building to illustrate the deviousness and perhaps pure evil of the mainstream media. That is one of the many versions of lighting up the building for special occasions, in this case St. Patrick's day. It's been done in yellow to celebrate the Simpsons (of all things), and best of all in red to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the murderous commmunist regime in China.

Times Metro writer Clyde Haberman on Friday has found the new source of Muslim-hatred which will result in blood in the streets and mayhem committed by ignorant Islamophobes. The Jews and the Evangelicals are bad enough, but nobody can touch those Papists for promoting anti-Muslim violence. On Thursday, about the time it became apparent that the cabbie attack was perpetrated by a crazed liberal, the Catholic League was holding a rally to protest the denial of special lighting on the Empire State Building to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mother Teresa.

Of course, the Jews were involved, as always. One of the speakers was famous rabbi and comedian Jackie Mason. But most of the hatred kool-aid was carried by Catholic League president William Donohue. Haberman took a swipe at Mason, calling him "that noted theologian," but reserved most of his hysteria for Donohue. Haberman still managed to tie the cabbie stabber, William Enright, to the "fever of hatred" promoted by those opposed to the mosque.

Said Haberman: "In this most tolerant of cities, we have been swept up in culture wars rooted in religion (I guess nobody tipped him off to what the word 'jihad' actually means). The dispute over Mother Teresa is relatively small. Bearing far greater potential for lasting damage is the multisided anger over the proposed Muslim community center and mosque (and library of sharia) near the World Trade Center site, a struggle that may or may not have influenced a man charged on Wednesday with knifing a Muslim cab driver after having made anti-Muslim remarks."

OK. Now I know you're all rubes like me, so I had a liberal explain the logic to me. All the hatred being stirred up by Islamophobic ignoramuses caused a crazed and drunken lefty to shout anti-Islamic words and stab a Muslim cab driver. Now do you understand?