Jack Cashill, American Thinker, August 28, 2017

Some crime stories the media relish. Others they resist covering. In February of this year, a drunken peckerwood named Adam Purinton shot and killed an Indian engineer in suburban Kansas City thinking the man was an Iranian. The media nationwide ran with this story and shamelessly tied the shooting to the rise of Donald Trump. The Kansas City Star posted more than 50 articles on this one crime alone.

Three years earlier, the Star widely covered the story of a highway shooter who terrorized the metro for more than a month, hitting at least a dozen cars and wounding several people. Then the police arrested the shooter. The fact that he was black dimmed the enthusiasm in local newsrooms. The fact that his first name was “Mohammed” killed it.

The story of highway shooter Mohammed Whitaker quickly disappeared, even from the local news. After Whitaker’s arrest, the Star made no effort to sort out his motives, talk to his family and friends, profile the victims, or even learn why he had renamed himself “Mohammed.” A Google search on Mohammed Whitaker nets exactly 688 results. A Google search on Adam Purinton nets 130,000.

Last weekend when “Kissimmee” was trending on Twitter, there was not much in the news beyond the immediate: two cops shot in Kissimmee, ambush, bad part of town. While covering the George Zimmerman case in nearby Sanford, I subscribed to the online version of the Orlando Sentinel and never unsubscribed. Were it not for the Sentinel, I might have forgotten about the Kissimmee story altogether. A Sentinel report on the funeral of the two slain cops, Matthew Baxter and Sam Howard, drew me back in.

The killer, it turns out, called himself “Malik Mohammad Ali,” a fact reported only barely in the Sentinel and in virtually no other mainstream publication. To be fair, there is more to the story of Malik Mohammad Ali than that name. He is a U.S. Marine veteran named Everett Glenn Miller with a serious history of mental illness.

That said, the Sentinel made no obvious attempt to discover why Miller adopted Malik Mohammad Ali as his nom de guerre. In its cursory coverage of the shooting, the New York Times never even mentioned that Miller used the name “Malik Mohammad Ali.”

According to Heavy.com, which does a good job of getting at the social media pages of various killers before they are scrubbed, Miller’s Facebook page was filled with “derogatory posts about Donald Trump and posts about the Confederate monument issue and Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Not unlike James Alex Fields, the lethal Charlottesville driver and reported schizophrenic, Miller found an outlet for his illness in political posturing. The difference, of course, is that the media relish covering Fields and resist covering Miller as anything but a victim.

Read one Sentinel headline, “Kissimmee cop shooting suspect was in ‘downward spiral,’ had PTSD, family and friends say.” Fields will never see a headline that sympathetic. Miller will likely never be in a headline again.

In the months to come, the media will present Fields to the world as a poster child of the hate that is tearing America apart, its prime mover being Donald Trump. Miller would make a much more appropriate symbol of hate unleashed, its prime mover being Barack Obama.

In the last seven years, mentally unstable black men like Miller have killed scores of Americans in politically motivated attacks and wounded many more. The victims are virtually all either non-black or law enforcement or both.

Islam is one influence on the killers, but so is black nationalism, particularly the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Fueling the rage of the killers is a steady stream of disinformation from Democratic leaders, Obama included, and the mainstream media. Once the rage erupts and turns lethal, the media bury the stories their reporting helped inspire, quickly if that rage has Islamic roots.

A classic case study in this phenomenon involves John Allen Williams, an American who changed his name to John Muhammad after joining the Nation of Islam in 1987. An Army veteran, Muhammad came to the D.C. area in 2002 raging about America’s “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.” His goal, he told his young accomplice, Lee Malvo, was to six kill white people a day for a month, with a focus on pregnant white women. Although he did not accomplish that goal, the pair did succeed in terrorizing the District for a month, shooting thirteen random people, killing ten in that spree, seventeen total dead for the year 2002.

Up until the day the pair were captured, the media were telling their audiences that the killers were almost assuredly white men. When the media learned otherwise, they made this story disappear. Poof! Down the Memory Hole. Columnist Pat Buchanan predicted that Muhammad would be as infamous as Timothy McVeigh. No, not even close. The execution of McVeigh in 2001 was a national news story for weeks running. The execution of Muhammad in 2009 went all but unnoticed. Today, not one in American in ten knows who John Muhammad is.

Many Americans voted for Obama in 2008 thinking he would help heal the nation’s racial scars. Instead, he and his supporters inflamed them by making just about everything “about race.” In August 2010, 34-year-old Obama supporter, Omar Thornton, was caught on video stealing beer from the distributorship where he worked. Unable to accept the obvious reason for his termination, he shot ten of his white co-workers, killing eight.

“I killed the five racists that was there bothering me,” he told his mother. He also said his coworkers had drawn photos of President Obama with his head in a noose. As subsequent investigations made clear, this was all nonsense.

In 2013, former LAPD cop Christopher Dorner went on a rampage, killing four people and wounding three others, all white or Asian. In a manifesto of sorts, Dorner lashed out at Obama critics, saying, “You call [Obama’s] supporters, whether black, brown, yellow, or white, leeches, FSA, welfare recipients, and ni$&er [sic] lovers. You say this openly without any discretion.” He attributed his political awareness, such as it was, to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and CNN’s Piers Morgan.

Later that same year Aaron Alexis headed for the Washington Navy Yard and killed thirteen people before being killed by police. The Navy had discharged Alexis after nine misconduct charges, but he knew otherwise. Said a friend, “He thought he never got a promotion because of the color of his skin.” In the Obama years, racism was in the air. The Back Lives Matter movement emerged two months prior to the Navy Yards shootings following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Obama’s surrogate “son.”

Ismaaiyl Brinsley of Baltimore was subject to a variety of influences, including Islam. A frequenter of mosques, he likely attended the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan speech at Baltimore’s Morgan State University in November 2014, which concluded with Farrakhan shouting, “We’ll tear this god damn country up,” and the crowd cheering and chanting, “Allahu Akbar.”

A month later, a BLM inspired crowd was marching through the streets of New York chanting, “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.” They got their wish. Days later, Brinsley took a bus up to Brooklyn and assassinated two NYPD police officers.

In that same year, 2014, Oklahoma’s Alten Nolan converted to a strain of Islam that nurtured his hatred of whites. That hatred became obvious when he beheaded a white female coworker, slashed another, and would likely have killed many more had not the company CEO shot him.

According to Heavy, Micah Xavier Johnson “liked pages connected to Elijah Mohammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam, and also liked the New Black Panther Party and the Black Riders Liberation Party.” Don’t remember Micah Xavier Johnson? The media would just as soon you forget. He murdered five Dallas police officers just a year ago.

“He wanted to kill officers, and he expressed killing white people, he expressed killing white officers,” said Dallas Police Chief David Brown. “He expressed anger for Black Lives Matter.”

True to form, the New York Times failed to mention that among the late Gavin Long’s possessions was an Islamic holy book that referenced “asking forgiveness from Allah and includes a prayer passage wherein it states that repeating the prayer and dying on the same day guarantees the person will go to paradise.”

The reader may be forgiven for failing to remember Gavin Long. Just a year ago this July the Kansas City man drove to Baton Rouge and ambushed a group of police officers outside a convenience store, killing three and wounding three more before the police shot and killed him.

Of more immediate influence upon Long was the Black Lives Matter movement. “My people, and the people in general will continue to strike back against all cops until we see that bad cops are no longer protected and allowed to flourish,” he had written before the shooting.

Alexander Bonds, who assassinated NYPD Officer Miosotis Familia in July, was similarly stoked by the media and BLM. His Facebook posts were filled with anti-police and anti-Trump rants. “In November,” Heavy reports, “just before Election Day, he shared a conspiracy video from Occupy Democrats that claimed voting machines were changing Hillary Clinton votes to Trump.”

On the same night that Everett Glenn Miller killed the two Kissimmee police, Derrick Brabham shot and wounded two police officers in nearby Jacksonville. Reported Heavy, “A Facebook page in Brabham’s name was filled with posts about the KKK, racism, police shootings, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, and depression.”

Virtually all of these men grew up in homes without fathers. Not surprisingly, they all had emotional issues, some more obvious than others. Unable to understand their own failures, they heard any number of voices — Islamic, Democratic, journalistic, black nationalistic — telling them their failures were not their fault, but the white man’s. They believed them, and they acted.

Today, alas, those voices are louder than ever.