Don Lemon surprisingly shot down a common moral equivalency argument in defense of the Islamic faith during a panel discussion on Wednesday's CNN Tonight. Lemon asked, "Is Islam a more violent religion than other faiths?" When CNN analyst Tom Fuentes answered, "Yes, it must be," guest Arsalan Iftikhar retorted by playing up that "Christian extremist organizations...have bombed gay nightclubs and...abortion clinics in the name of Christendom."
The CNN anchor interrupted Iftikhar as he made that talking point, and zeroed in on the vastly different death tolls between abortion clinic bombings and Islamist terrorist attacks: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
Boko Haram
By Matthew Balan | September 4, 2014 | 4:40 PM EDT
By Matt Philbin | July 21, 2014 | 2:44 PM EDT
Dear Guardian, thanks for making this easy! Rarely are a media outlet’s prejudices and blinkered sense of moral equivalence more in evidence than in two stories on the left-wing British newspaper’s site.
Exhibit A: A 461-word July 19 story picked up from the AP. Boko Haram killed more than 100 people when the Islamist group entered a town in North Eastern Nigeria on July 20. They “attacked the town of Damboa before dawn on Friday, firing rocket-propelled grenades, throwing homemade bombs into homes and gunning down people as they tried to escape the ensuing fires.” The accompanying photo captioned as “A screengrab taken on 13 July from a video released by Boko Haram shows the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau.”
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By Matt Philbin | June 16, 2014 | 10:32 AM EDT
Well, ABC and NBC are acting to type, ever reluctant to call evil by its name when doing so is politically incorrect (and possibly dangerous).
Consider both networks’ reporting on the story of the school girls kidnapped last month in Nigeria, and a second, smaller group kidnapped last week. To date, NBC identified the kidnappers of hundreds of Christian girls as Islamist less than 33 percent of the time (12 mentions in 37 reports). ABC’s record is particularly shameful – just 22 percent (eight of 36 total reports) of stories mentioned that Boko Haram, the terrorist gang that abducted the girls, are radical Muslims.
By P.J. Gladnick | May 11, 2014 | 2:54 PM EDT
Secretary of State John Kerry has stated that poverty is a recruitment tool for Boko Haram. However, Kerry might have met his match in absurdity by Nafeez Ahmed of the U.K. Guardian who claimed that global warming was responsible for the rise of that organization. Yes, if poverty does not absolve Boko Haram terrorists of responsibility then global warming now called climate change which has been updated to global climate disruption should do the trick.. Here is Ahmed placing the blame for Boko Haram squarely on the shoulders of that favorite all-purpose villain of the Left, global warming:
By Matthew Balan | May 10, 2014 | 4:45 PM EDT
Chris Matthews mocked Republicans on Friday's Hardball over their hawkish stance towards Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group that recently kidnapped hundreds of girls. Matthews made a thinly-veiled racial attack on the GOP during a panel discussion on the terrorist organization: "By the way, when did the Republican Party take this keen interest in Africa? I may have missed that one."
Guest Michelle Bernard, who is of Jamaican decent, quickly followed the MSNBC host with a more overt racially-based jab at Republicans: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
By P.J. Gladnick | May 8, 2014 | 11:10 AM EDT
Despite Hillary Clinton's current condemnation of Boko Haram for kidnapping hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, when she had a chance as Secretary of State to designate it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization she failed to do so as reported by the Daily Beast. That report stated, "The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years."
It will be difficult for Hillary to plead that it was not brought to her attention as she claimed in her defense of not providing more requested security for Benghazi. The fact is that she was publicly urged to act on Boko Haram, not from some website of the "vast rightwing conspiracy" but on the pages of the very liberal friendly Huffington Post as you can see in this December 6, 2012 article by Joseph Weissman: Hillary Clinton Must Designate Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
By Matthew Balan | May 1, 2014 | 4:38 PM EDT
ABC, CBS, and NBC's morning and evening newscasts have yet to set aside any air time to a mass abduction of over 200 schoolgirls from a school in northern Nigeria on April 16, 2014. Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram raided the government-run institution and forced the students into vehicles. On Thursday, the girls' parents and their supporters led a demonstration to pressure the government into action.
The last time the Big Three networks covered the ongoing insurgency in Nigeria was on the April 14, 2014 edition of NBC Nightly News. Anchor Brian Williams gave a 26-second news brief about Boko Haram's bombing in the capital of Abuja, which took place mere hours before the jihadist group kidnapped the students. Nine days later, CNN's Wolf Blitzer devoted a full segment on his Wolf program to the school incident with correspondent Vladimir Duthiers: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]