A July 4 WorldNetDaily column by Jack Cashill snarkily claimed that an incident in which a man stabbed several people in an apartment complex in Boise, Idaho, housing refugees — killing one child — didn’t get more play because the alleged assailant, Timmy Kinner, is black and “There is nothing ‘Idaho’ or ‘MAGA’ about him.” Cashill went on to claim that “In the last decade, mentally unstable black men like Kinner have killed scores of non-black victims in serial attacks that often have a racial motivation. If fame was their goal, these killers misunderstood the media.
Ironically, Cashill’s column is only one of two articles at WND that even mention the stabbing incident. The other is one of WND’s trademark theft of the work of others, this time a CBS report on the stabbing. One curious aspect of the excerpt WND used is that it omits any mention of the fact that the victims lived in an apartment building with refugees.
You might remember that over the past couple of years, WND — mostly former reporter Leo Hohmann — relentlessly fearmongered about refugees moving to Idaho, exploiting an incident in which two children of refugees engaged in alleged sexual behavior with a third child in order to inflame anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment. Hohmann was particularly incensed by a Chobani yogurt plant in Idaho hiring refugees, so much so that he and WND published false smears about Chobani and founder Hamdi Ulukaya over the refugee issue — claims that were quietly and mysteriously scrubbed and corrected months later, presumably after Chobani threatened to sue WND.
(These days, though, Hohmann is reduced to spewing his anti-Muslim hate at his own website.)
You’d be reading a lot more about this incident at WND if a refugee had been the perpetrator. But because refugees were the victims, the story gets shoved down the memory hole with copy-and-paste coverage instead of original reporting.
Instead of asking “why Boise murder didn’t trend on Twitter,” as the headline of his column stated, Cashill would be better off asking why it didn’t trend at the “news” outlet that publishes his column. Of course, the answer — because WND is hostile to the status and religion of the victims — is too obvious and wouldn’t fill out a whole column.