WorldNetDaily’s anonymously written May 29 article on Jeremy Christian’s anti-Muslim stabbing rampage in Portland, leaving two dead, is an odd creature.
While the headline calls Christian an “murderous Muslim-hater” and the article itself noted that the incident began “when he began verbally assaulting a woman wearing a Muslim head covering, known as a hijab” using “what would be characterized as hate speech or bias language,” the article curiously fails to quote any of that alleged language, instead playing up Christian’s “felonious neo-Nazi” past.
One witness said that “He was saying that Muslims should die. That they’ve been killing Christians for years.”Christian was also reported as shouting “Die Muslims” at a rally in April. On Facebook, Christian wrote that “If we’re removing statues because of the Civil War, we should be removing mosques because of 9/11.”
Christian’s rhetoric isn’t really all that more extreme that the Islamophobia WND has been peddling.
WND reporter Leo Hohmann has written an entire anti-Muslim book maliciously portraying Muslim refugees escaping war and poverty to come to the U.S. as engaging in “civilization jihad.” Hohmann has endeavored to portray all Muslims as potential terrorists and ranted that Muslims “really don’t value what we value,” complete with shadowy images of armed Muslims. WND has told lies about a measles outbreak in a Somali-American community in Minnesota, falsely blaming it on the Quran instead of their fellow anti-vaxxers who spread their conspiracy theories among the community, and invoked the vision of scary Muslim hordes in order to promote the right-wing candidate in the French presidential election. And WND has attacked Muslims for making use of the very same religious-freedom laws it has praised Christians for invoking.
It seems Christian was acting on the Muslim-hate WND has been expressing both implicitly and explicitly and putting those hints into action.
Even as Christian sounded even more WND-esque at his arraignment hearing — where he ranted, “Free speech or die Portland. You’ve got no safe place. This is America. Get out if you don’t like free speech … Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom” — has devoted no more original coverage to this story. We can probably guess why.