It took only a day for the cable news propagandists to find guests who would blame the truck attack on bicyclists in Lower Manhattan on the personal troubles of the perp.
On MSNBC, as noticed by Justin Caruso of the Daily Caller, guest Mubin Shaikh, a “former Islamic extremist,” told viewers:
“They go online, they get most of their ideology, but, this is something that they’ve already decided to engage in. A person doesn’t go online and read something and decide, ‘Oh, I’m going to be – oh, I believe this. I’m going to go and act on this.’ They already have this going on inside them before they turn to the internet or somebody like in a real human network.
“What we need to look into is why this person even feels they need to look that way. And one of the things is hatred – is hatred, and alienation, and marginalization. Think about it this way – when you tell a kid that he’s dumb, he’s stupid, he’s going to amount to nothing, what do you think is going to happen with that kid? He’s going to take that, internalize that, and externalize it by acting it out onto other people,” he continued.
Here’s a news flash for Mr. Shaikh: teens and young adults go through all sorts of misery finding their place in the world. Everyone has frustrations, setbacks, and critical voices. The Quran and other scriptures teach such people that killing infidels is a way to solve all their problems by becoming a martyr and thereby gaining entrance to heaven with virgins available for their pleasure.
Absent the enabling ideology of jihad, such young people work out their problems in a more constructive fashion, sometimes even by studying or working harder, and showing people they were wrong to denigrate them.
Meanwhile, at CNN, in-house national security analyst Peter Bergen, who has written a book on jihadis, worries that some personal crisis triggered the attack:
[D]id this guy lose a job? You know, was he having family problems? What was the kind of thing that produced a cognitive opening for him to embrace these ideas because it’s not typical to embrace these ideas. Usually there is some kind of event in somebody’s life that allows them to be open to these ideas.
But Berger does at least concede that Saipov was following a recipe from ISIS:
[S]ame thing we saw in the Orlando case, the same thing in the San Bernardino case. These guys, they follow what the NYPD calls a playbook and the playbook involves pledging your allegiance to ISIS in a public manner as you do the crime so that it’s very clear why you’re doing this.
I cannot recall any instances of American media blaming personal trauma for German soldiers in World War II embracing Nazi doctrine. Or for North Koreans and Chinese soldiers embracing communism in the Korean Conflict. Facing these other doctrines premised on world domination – as jihad is – our media had the common sense to blame the doctrine itself.
Today, they prefer to live with and propagate illusions.
Source: American Thinker
