Topic: WorldNetDaily
Muslim-hater Leo Hohmann used a Feb. 7 WorldNetDaily article to not only endorse President Trump's bogus claim that the media underreports incidents of terrorism, he spins it to better fit his Islmaophobic presumption that a person with a Muslim name who commits a crime should be presumed a terrorist before any police investigation of the crime has taken place:
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.
First, we would point out that Spencer is not a "terrorism expert" -- like most of the "terrorism experts" Hohmann and WND love to quote, they're actually anti-Muslim activists.
In fact, Islamic extremism has not been officially established as a motive in Barry's attack. While Barry had been on a watchlist for expressing extreme views, officials didn't use the words "terrorism" or "terrorist" following the attack.
Hohmann adds:
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.”
Spencer is spreading disinformation of his own when he calls media reports raising questions about Orlando shooter Omar Mateen's sexuality "disinformation." The media simply reported what people were talking about. While investigators did say shortly after the shooting they found no substantiation that Mateen was secretly gay, the investigation was continuing, and even Mateen's ex-wife raised questions about his sexuality.
Hohmann went on to quote is WND buddy in Muslim-hating, Philip Haney, issuing a strange attack on the BBC's credibility:
“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?”
That would be the same Daily Mail that Wikipedia just banned from citations for being too unreliable. But then, facts aren't WND's main concern when reporting on Muslims; spreading hatred of them is.
Hohmann concluded his article with the Trump White House's list of terrorist attacks it falsely claimed were underreported; weirdly, Hohmann has edited the list to remove the targets and names of attackers that were on the original list. Hohmann provided no explanation for the omissions.
