My latest in PJ Media:

The Pensacola News Journal was first out of the gate this time around with what is a recurring feature of establishment media coverage of jihad attacks: the follow-up weeper about how the local Muslims are shocked (Shocked!) by the massacre, and are now cowering in fear of an “anti-Muslim backlash.” That backlash rarely, if ever, materializes, but when has the media ever allowed reality to intrude upon a good narrative?

The News Journal interviewed Salma Ashmawi of the Islamic Center of Northwest Florida, and Ashmawi hit all the expected notes, asking: “What can anybody do in a case like that except pray?” Ashmawi added, said the News Journal, that “the mosque’s membership is also raising money to help the victims.” She said: “We are all Pensacola residents. We’re hurt and we’re in mourning.”

Amid all this pious magnanimity, Ashmawi also remembered to play the victim: she “said parents who usually take their children to Sunday school at the mosque are planning to keep their children home this week out of fear they will become targets of backlash aimed against Muslims.”

Ashmawi explained: “I’m getting a lot of people telling me they’re not coming. Even teachers are not bringing their children. If the teacher doesn’t mind, her husband is like, ‘No absolutely not. You have no idea what people are saying out there, and I don’t want my kids to get hurt.’”

Nonetheless, the Muslims of Pensacola will bravely soldier on: Ashmawi told the News Journal that the Sunday school service would be held as usual, and would, of course, focus on the victims: “For the ones who come, we’ll use that time to talk about unity and standing by anybody who is injured or hurt. And how something like this unacceptable just like any crime. It was murder. It’s a crime. It is unacceptable. We are in a civil society. We don’t do things like that.”

No claim that Muslims were the real victims would be complete without a bit of moral equivalence, so Ashmawi “said what the shooter did was an act against God and against humanity, though she added that Christians don’t have to live in fear or face calls to apologize every time someone claiming to be a Christian does something wrong.” She did not, of course, mention the fact that jihad murderers quite often scream “Allahu akbar” while killing infidels, while Christian criminals don’t generally invoke Jesus while in the midst of their evildoing.

There is much more. Read the rest here.