Topic: WorldNetDaily
Leo Hohmann writes in a July 16 WorldNetDaily article about the Chattanooga shootings:
An ISIS affiliated Twitter account tweeted 15 minutes before the attack started a “warning” to America with the #Chattanooga hashtag (see screenshot above article). Could this have been the signal that started the attack? Authorities refused to comment on that Thursday, but a similar Twitter message came just before the ISIS attack in Garland, Texas in early May. This pattern suggests ISIS may have sleeper cells it is able to activate within the United States.
Hohmann's article prominently features the alleged ISIS tweet (at right), though it's curiously not captioned as such, identified only later in the article.
In fact, Hohmann is making a false claim. As Media Matters documents, the right-wing activists who initially promoted the false claim that the ISIS tweet came just before the Chattanooga shootings misread the Twitter timestamp by not accounting for time zones. The tweet actually was issued a few hours after the shooting, not shortly before.
There's also no purported "pattern" of ISIS warning of shootings in the U.S. The issuer of the "similar Twitter message" before the Garland shooting was actually issued by one of the gunmen, Elton Simpson, not by someone higher up in ISIS.
Despite this tweet having no actual link to the Chattanooga shooting, Hohmann's boss, WND editor Joseph Farah uses it to illustrate his July 17 column ranting that the shooting was Muslim terrorism despite authorities having yet to even definitively establish that the shooter, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was a Muslim: "Hello? Since when do Christian or non-Muslim Arabs name their kids Mohammad?"
Farah then goes on to repeat the false claim his writer made, stealing it word-for-word: "An ISIS-affiliated Twitter account tweeted 15 minutes before the attack started a 'warning' to America with the #Chattanooga hashtag (see screenshot above article). Could this have been the signal that started the attack?"
If Farah had done even a modicum of research before writing his column, he would have known that the answer is no.
And that is yet another reason why nobody believes WND.
