ALLAHU PALIN

Tim Blair

Monday, January 10, 2011 at 06:12am

 

When Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in November 2009, he offered a loud clue about his motivation:

Eyewitnesses say suspected gunman Nidal Malik Hasan shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘God is great’ before opening fire …

But few wanted to hear it. The report above, for example, opens with: “The motive for the deadly Fort Hood shooting rampage that has left America reeling is still unclear.” It wasn’t unclear to one of Hasan’s victims, soldier Logan Burnette:



So the guy screams an Islamic oath at the top of his lungs then commences killing people. Nothing to see here, folks. Australian ABC news ran an eight-minute report without once mentioning Hasan’s faith. Barack Obama announced that “we cannot fully know” why Hasan slaughtered so many. Desperate to avoid the screamingly obvious, various media theorised that Hasan may have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, pre-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy, prospective traumatic stress disorder, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma or secondary trauma. One problem with all that post-trauma talk: Hasan had no trauma to be post of. And as for his Islamic death-screech, the Guardian‘s Michael Tomasky offered a simple explanation:

The fact that Hassan reportedly shouted the above is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic.
I’m not sure that it does. My understanding is that it’s something Arab people often shout before doing something or other. It’s used in many different situations.

Shootings, beheadings, stonings, you name it. No big deal. Nearly a month after the Fort Hood massacre, the NYT’s Thomas Friedman finally worked out that Hasan was “just another angry jihadist”. Which was what Hasan tried to tell us from the very beginning.
Now to Tucson, Arizona, where six people are dead and Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is seriously injured following another gun rampage. Attacker Jared Lee Loughner has thus far offered no clue at all about why he did it. Apparently the fellow is a drug-using gamer whom one former classmate recalls as “left wing”, a “political radical”, “reclusive”, a “pot head” and “quite liberal”. He’d met Giffords four years ago and thought her “stupid & unintelligent”. Besides that background and Loughner’s MySpace and YouTube rantings, that’s all we have. There’s no “Allahu Akbar” here. Yet – incredibly – many clearly heard a cry of “Allahu Palin”. The UK Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden:

Paul Krugman of the “New York Times” suggests darkly that Giffords was shot because she was “a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona” and “violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate” (those reponsible for such a climate being, of course, Republicans).
TBogg of FireDogLake wades straight in and blames Sarah Palin for the shooting because of a graphic of crosshairs placed on the districts of moderate Democrats …
Jane Fonda pins it on Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party.

Krugman’s view: “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.” Who needs proof? CBS and Daily Kos also put Palin in the frame. Like their columnist, the NYT isn’t waiting for further evidence:

Regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.

Such as Barack Obama’s 2008 statement at a Democrat fundraiser: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” But the NYT is more worried about Palin:

Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.

“At the time” being last March. How this map featured in Loughner’s homicidal thinking is anyone’s guess, but it’s currently exhibit A. The Australian‘s Brad Norington:

Last March, Ms Giffords was among 20 Democrats whose districts were marked on an internet campaign map with a gunsight’s crosshairs as “targets” of mid-term elections of former Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

That would be vice presidential candidate. Al Arabiya‘s Ali Younes:

The aftermath of electing the first African American president, coupled with a democratic sweeping wins in the US congress in 2008, created a conservative and right wing backlash that saw threats of violence, increase in extremist groups. Such an environment created a hateful atmosphere that culminated in the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona.

That’s the essential picture being sold worldwide. Matt Bai in the Age refers to:

Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘’cross-hairs’’ map from last year, which showed a series of contested congressional districts, including Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them.

The SMH’s Simon Mann:

Commentators pointed to an online map posted by Mrs Palin before the midterm congressional elections last year that used gun cross-hairs to mark the districts of 20 Democrats she wanted to defeat, along with Mrs Palin’s frequent use of shooting metaphors on the campaign trail.

Michael Tomasky – the Guardian muppet who saw nothing noteworthy in Hasan’s pre-shooting “Allahu Akbar” – now sets the evidentiary bar a little lower:

You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between [rightwing] violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday …
He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know?

Nothing, apparently. At a vigil for Giffords in Washington, reporters pushed the Palin line:

Though the vigil was by no means a witch hunt for a culprit, some of the attendees – often when pressed by reporters – criticized Sarah Palin’s use of a diagram with crosshairs over certain Congressional districts that she saw as targets in the upcoming election.

Funny thing about those crosshairs. They ain’t crosshairs. These are crosshairs. The images shown on Palin’s map are crop marks, commonly used in printing.
(Further from Byron York, Tommy Christopher, Ed Morrissey, Legal Insurrection, Warner Todd Huston and Howard Kurtz, who notes: “This isn’t about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it’s about a lone nutjob who doesn’t value human life.")