“If it bleeds, it leads” is, say critics, the morbid media standard. But it’s more accurate to say that if the right person bleeds, it leads. A good example would be the horrible massacres at two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques by China-loving, anti-capitalist, self-described “eco-fascist” Brenton Harrison Tarrant and the massacres that Time forgot (along with the rest of the media).
Actually, the latter, recent incidents in Nigeria in which Muslim Fulani militants murdered a total of 23 Christians, are just part of a large category of massacres ignored by the mainstream media. But it’s not fair to say the media couldn’t care less about them.
They care very much about ignoring them.
Because these incidents involve the wrong people killing and the right people killed.
Were I inclined to score cheap political points, I’d take a leaf from the leftists’ book and say that the mainstream media just “don’t care when black people are killed.” Yet while this appears largely true, it’s mainly because they don’t seem to really care about anyone being killed (hence their support for pre, and now even post-natal infanticide).
To be clear, it does make sense that the Christchurch shooting would receive more coverage than a Nigerian massacre. New Zealand is part of the West and the Anglosphere, as are we, and that the nation is strikingly peaceful with an extremely low murder rate makes the carnage stand out; in contrast, violence is rife in Africa.
But a massacre isn’t the issue. As Chronicles reported Friday, according “to ‘Open Doors,’ at least 4,305 Christians known by name were murdered by Muslims because of their faith in 2018.”
Yet “known by name” may be the key words. According to the Baptist Press, approximately 6,000 Christians were murdered last year alone (as of August 6) in Nigeria “by jihadist Fulani herdsmen aided by resurging Boko Haram terrorists.”
Moreover, according to figures from organizations Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Christian Association of Nigeria, “the Fulani jihadists have destroyed more than 500 churches in the Middle Belt’s Benue State alone since 2011, and internally displaced about 800,000 people in the state, with 180,000 of them living in camps and others living with relatives or as squatters,” the site also reports.
Here are just a few examples, provided by Open Doors:
On February 17, 2018 Boko Haram militants attacked a Christian farming village in Borno State. The attack, in which 106 people were killed, specifically targeted male residents of the Christian community.
On April 24, 2018, militant Fulani herdsmen attacked a Catholic church in Benue State during a morning service, killing two priests and 17 parishioners. After the “shooting rampage,” the attackers reportedly “descended on the community and razed over 60 houses, farmland, food barns, after carting away what the people had in their barns.”
On June 23, 2018, 120 Christians were killed by Fulani militants in Plateau State, as they returned from attending a funeral.
Going beyond Africa, Chronicles presents a list of 10 terrorist acts in France, then tallies the victim numbers and writes, “That makes 261 dead and many more injured, in attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims, in less than four years, in only one country, France (pop. 66 million). With 66 dead a year on average, Frenchmen are exactly ten times more likely to be murdered by a Muslim than a Muslim being killed by a non-Muslim terrorist anywhere in the Western world.”
Furthermore, “Aid to the Church in Need, in its latest ‘Religious Freedom Report,’ warned that 300 million Christians, overwhelmingly in the majority-Muslim countries, were subjected to violence, making it ‘the most persecuted religion in the world,’” the site also tells us.
In contrast, “Terrorist attacks against Muslims in the Western world are extremely rare,” Chronicles writes, adding perspective. “This morning’s carnage in two mosques in New Zealand, with the death toll currently at 50, is the first major event of its kind since the Quebec City mosque shooting — over two years ago — which killed six persons.”
In fact, a “Christian living in a majority Muslim country is 143 times more likely to be killed by a Muslim for being a Christian than a Muslim is…to be killed by a non-Muslim in a Western country for being what he is,” Chronicles further informs.
Given this, someone naïve might think the Christchurch shootings receive disproportionate attention because they’re a man-bites-dog story. But the reality is that the media want people to believe it’s a dog-bites-man story — and that rabid right-wing dogs are everywhere.
The media have not only been portraying the 28-year-old Tarrant, an Australian national, as a “white supremacist” (which he appears to be) but also as being of a kind with “President Trump, his supporters, and conservatives in general,” as The New American’s C. Mitchell Shaw wrote Friday.
This is more journalistic malpractice. Tarrant, who is in custody, penned a 2,644-word manifesto in which he quite literately detailed his passions, which included impugning conservatism, capitalism, and Trump’s leadership and policy-making; and expressing affection for China’s despotic regime. Explaining his ideological evolution, he wrote, “When I was young I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before coming to be an eco-fascist.”
But don’t bother the media with the facts. In fact, Chronicles writes that the Christchurch affair’s consequences are predictable (all quotations are Chronicles’):
• Pseudo-elites the Western world over, in and out of media, will characterize terrorism as a conservative, Christian, white phenomenon stoked by “racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and all other traits of the deplorables; and yes, it will be Trump’s fault to boot.”
• Islamic activists embedded in the West, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “and its fellow-conspirators elsewhere, will clamor for ever more stringent laws criminalizing ‘Islamophobia,’ effectively defined as any form of meaningful debate of Islam, its scriptural message, historical practice, and current ambitions.”
• “Such demands will be promptly translated into legislative proposals by the jihadophile liberal class which will proclaim zero tolerance of ‘Islamophobia’ as defined by CAIR et al. And, of course, they will demand additional Soviet/Nazi style gun laws.”
Ironically, this is precisely what Tarrant wants. He wrote in his manifesto that he perpetrated his act with firearms precisely because of the “affect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the affect it could have on the politics of United states [sic] and thereby the political situation of the world.” He knew the media would beat the anti-Second Amendment drum; he aimed to catalyze a removal of gun rights, which, he believed, would evoke a strong reaction from the Right — and this, he hoped, would spark a civil war.
So given how pseudo-elites have long been complicit in aiding jihadism via media-malpractice acts of omission and commission, one could ask: Is there any terrorist whose bidding they won’t do?
Photo of mourner at funeral for slain Christians in Minya, Egypt, Nov. 3, 2018: AP Images
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