Last week, an Oklahoma man beheaded a former coworker after losing his job, but NBC, and its sister channel MSNBC, have ignored the role that his conversion to Islam may have played in the brutal murder.
After NBC failed to acknowledge Alton Nolen’s Muslim faith during its sole report on Friday night, a Monday morning news brief on the murder by MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart also ignored the murderer’s recent conversion to Islam.
Diaz-Balart’s news brief occurred on Monday during the 10:00 a.m. hour of his daily MSNBC program:
Charges could be filed as early as today against the man police say beheaded a woman at a food distribution center in Oklahoma. Police say murder and several other charges against Alton Nolen will be presented to the district attorney today. A second woman was also hurt. She's expected to recover. The company's chief operating officer ended the attack by shooting Nolan. He’s also expected to be okay.
While Jose Diaz-Balart failed to mention the murderer's Islamic faith, on Monday’s Morning Joe, co-host Joe Scarborough slammed the FBI for labeling the beheading “workplace violence” and laughed at the suggestion that Islam wasn’t a factor in the attack:
He was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence.
Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker's Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet.
On Saturday, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry repeated the “workplace violence” line during her weekend program and went one step further by mocking anyone who referenced the murderer’s Islamic faith:
I think this to me is that there is a belief that at the core--I can also probably have breakfast that morning but we don’t think any of those things are relevant. But we do think that his conversion, jailhouse by the way, conversion is what is relevant.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC
Jose Diaz-Balart
September 29, 2014
JOSE DIAZ-BALART: Charges could be filed as early as today against the man police say beheaded a woman at a food distribution center in Oklahoma. Police say murder and several other charges against Alton Nolen will be presented to the district attorney today. A second woman was also hurt. She's expected to recover. The company's chief operating officer ended the attack by shooting Nolan. He’s also expected to be okay.
