What IF He Was A Muslim?

Tony Lee, at Human Events Online, asks that question.

And he sees a vast disconnect between how "the media" is treating the recent attempted assassination/mass shooting in Arizona and how it treated the not-so-recent mass shooting at Ft Hood. Needless to say he finds the usual suspects:

Shamefully and sadly, the media would have covered his horrific assassination attempt of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz) and slaying and maiming of innocent Arizonans in a more responsible manner. They would have called for restraint and not violated the journalistic tenet of not assuming anything, a tenet they purportedly (and often facetiously sanctimoniously) claim to hold dear.

And then:

The New York Times led the brigade in setting the agenda for the other liberal lemmings in the mainstream media to follow.

Immediately after this senseless tragedy, The New York Times opined that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”

There they go again. The lib'rul media blaming conservatives. But hey, wanna see the sentence immediately preceding Lee's mildly seething quotation? Here it is:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members.

Whah? So the Times isn't blaming the shooting on the tea party? The editorial is more about the violent imagery soaking the right side of our political "discussion" (anyone else remember when Glenn Beck symbolically doused a guy with gasoline as a political stunt? or the signs at the Tea Party rallies that said "We're unarmed - this time"?).

So how did Human Events Online describe the Ft Hood shooting? Guess:

Hasan’s Islam is rooted in traditional understandings of the faith as taught by the authoritative schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence. It also is the same Islam that is taught by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al-Qaeda.

In arguing that the Koran mandates defensive jihad against unbelievers, Hasan invokes the same Koranic verse that Osama bin Laden used as an epigraph on his “Letter to the American People” of October 2002: “Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged; and surely, Allah is able to give them victory.”

And finally:

No one in government or law enforcement has ever made any attempt to determine how prevalent such understandings of Islam are among Muslims in the United States. Yet it is of cardinal importance for those sworn to protect us to begin making such an attempt now. As we saw at Fort Hood, the lives of innocent people depend on it.

See! It's Islam's fault and the guv'ment needs to do something about all those violent Muslims!

That's how it works in the right wing noise machine - when a deranged shooter's a Muslim, it's Islam's fault. When a deranged shooter's an anti-guv'ment loon, he's a lone gunman who's solely responsible.