By her own admission, Fox's Judith Miller admits that information is still sketchy about the background of the Boston bombing suspects. But that didn't stop her from writing a column called, "A desire to be part of an 'epic struggle' -- a new profile of jihadis," that's pure speculation that the brothers are jihadists. And then Miller speculates about what they are like, after assuming that they are jihadists.
Miller writes:
One of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing is dead. While the manhunt for the second suspect continues an influential terrorism expert says that law enforcement has learned much about the kind of persons involved in attacks like this.
While detailed information about the two suspects, who are believed to be brothers, continues to emerge, if the attack turns out to have been directed or inspired by extremist Islamists – Brian Jenkins, senior adviser to the president at RAND and widely regarded as a pioneer of terrorism research, says that previous jihadist attacks on American soil suggest that the suspects are men for whom Islam as a religion is less important than the search for adventure and a desire to be part of a historic “epic struggle.”
In other words, neither Miller nor Jenkins have any idea whether this could apply to the current suspects. But just that it "could" is good enough for an entire column on FoxNews.com.
In fact, the hard information Miller does put forth suggests the suspects may not be jihadis:
As we now know, the Boston Marathon suspects are believed to be Chechen Muslims living in the United States for a significant period of time.
The campaign by Al Qaeda and like-minded groups to recruit Americans to their cause has had very few takers, (Jenkins) concludes.
He calls such recruitment levels among the millions of Muslims in America “a very low yield.” “There is no army of sleepers, no vast Muslim underground here,” Jenkins says. Despite the proliferation of what he calls “retail outlets” for militant recruiting, such as the on-line magazine, Inspire, (whose editor was killed in a drone strike in 2011) and jihadist Internet websites, “Al Qaeda isn’t selling a lot of cars these days.”
The “evidence free speculation” was going on on every channel, both on right wing radio and on all the cable news channels. Fox in particular had its pundits leaning to this being the work of foreign nationals coming to the US to commit terrorist acts. Rush Limbaugh devoted hours during the week to fomenting that the suspect was “brown skinned”, and specifically to trying to attack the left wing for waiting to see more facts before automatically assuming who did this.
The approach taken by the right wing media has clearly been to start with the notion that this was an organized terrorist attack by Muslims, build the groundwork for that and then scream, “See! We told you!” The left wing response has tended to be to wait for more evidence. The mainstream media has tended toward the middle of the road, as usual – some going down the Fox News road, some noting that there are plenty of other possibilities.
What happens next will likely be Fox and the right trying to tie these two guys to something bigger, as a way of fomenting against immigration reform and reinforcing people’s paranoia.
At this point, the right wing media is trying to play the game of building as many pointers to the Muslim boogeyman as they can.
As I linked up in another thread, even Christian outlets were speculating that the bombers were ethnically white (or at least very light skinned), and RW extremists were high on the suspect list because keeping the threats to themselves was really that much of a chore.
But thank you for proving you can’t leave Fox News or Nation long enough to have seen that part in context- other than the context Ailes and Watters gave you. Not only did it give me lulz, but it saves me a lot of time pointing out all the times when Fox News hyped up a manhunt, hyping up that the suspect was their hate speech flavour of the month… then barely gave any attention to the arrest when he turned out to be gasp! white!
Oh, and bonus points for each time Watters or a host flat refused to comment on it, after it turned out that that they were Christian, anti-Obama, and/or had ties to the Tea Party- Even if they had stopped attending long ago.
You also saved me the time of explaining how Fox News actually defends people like Bill Looman and Ted Nugent, and how their viewers repeatedly use Fox Nation to conspire violence against network targets. So thank you for that, as well.
NHP
Well, you can bet Fox is gonna play up the “Muslim/jihadist” angle: now that the suspects are revealed to be Russians who became residents in 2007, rather than Middle Easterners that Obama let in, any connection Dumbya will be minimized . . .
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I would be disappointed if they didn’t.
We know they never check anything out thoroughly and just make things up as they go along.
Disgusting bunch of people.
Report the news, not create news to fit your agenda of hate. What an embarrassing week this has been in the race to be first. No one remembers or cares who reported what first or who got the exclusive story. What is remembered is who got it wrong, except for those who like to say to others that they heard what they want to hear without checking or verifying what the truth is.
No it is already being used to defeat immigration reform & get a bill thru.
