Memory-holed

Last weekend, a British Muslim invaded a Texas synagogue and held the rabbi and four members of his flock at gunpoint while demanding the release from prison of a biochemist known as ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. The drama flared briefly across news sites before vanishing from sight. As the Australian Jewish News observes, the assault

…failed to make even the world headlines on the ABC digital media platforms for the 12 hours the stand-off with police was taking place.

Since then, if the ABC’s internal search engine is any guide, there has been only one follow-up. Some stories, it seems, are of little but passing interest. There are terrorists, and then there are those other terrorists, the ones whose motives and religious background are best not mentioned. Diversity, don’t you know, enriches us all, so team-player journalism ignores the sand that grates in the gears of the multiculturalists’ narrative.

Daniel Greenfield, however, indulges his curiosity to report what mainstream media might have done were it actually interested in getting to the nub of a story rather than papering over unfortunate and disconcerting truths. Of Faisal Akram (above), who will never again interrupt Shabbat gatherings thanks to a sharp-shooting Texas SWAT team, he writes:

Back home, the Blackburn Muslim Community page announced that “Faisal Akram has sadly departed from this temporary world” and prayed that Allah “bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise”….

…The town has produced no shortage of Jihadists, including the youngest terrorist in the UK, as well as a number of Jihadis who traveled to join ISIS, an associate of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and a terrorist who played a key role in an Al Qaeda plot that targeted New York and D.C.

Blackburn is one of the most segregated towns in the country and has been described as a “no-go zone”. The area that produced the Temple Terrorist has one of the highest Muslim populations outside of London and some claim that flying the English flag has been effectively outlawed.

The setting couldn’t be any better for the media to whitewash the murderous terrorist with the familiar excuses that he was the victim of failed integration in the United Kingdom. His family, in an even more familiar excuse, is claiming that he “was suffering from mental health issues”.

There is much more in Greenfield’s piece, which can be read in full here.

–roger franklin