Group Questions Media's Brief Treatment of Seattle Hate Crime
by Chad Groening
August 8, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative media watchdog thinks it is ironic that the liberal media, which usually gives wall-to-wall coverage of supposed "hate crimes," is virtually ignoring a blatant example of one in Seattle.Thirty-year-old Muslim Naveed Afzal Haq has been charged with nine felony counts, including aggravated first-degree murder, following a shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on July 28. The man reportedly picked the Federation after conducting a random Internet search for Jewish organizations in his area. Police said Haq's statements indicate the shooting -- which injured five and left one dead -- was a hate crime, and prosecutors are calling it a hate crime as well.
Despite that, says Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (MRC), the mainstream media has treated the shooting as a one-day story. He says he finds such treatment "ironic" from "liberals who believe so fervently in these hate crime laws, that you should somehow punish a criminal more if they're racist than if they just merely kill people for fun."
"It is funny," he continues, "that this certainly would qualify into that sort of hate crime category, and they actually find it less newsworthy than they would otherwise. It really is a mind-boggling omission."
The MRC spokesman contrasts coverage of the Seattle shooting to that given Mel Gibson's recent anti-Semitic comments following his arrest for drunk driving.
"Here you have a situation where a guy walks into a community center, shoots one woman dead, wounds five other people. It was a one-day story," he says of the mainstream media's coverage. "I think it's ironic that this shooting happened around the same time as Mel Gibson's arrest for drunken driving. Clearly, this anti-Semitic violence and killing [in Seattle] is less of a story to our celebrity-obsessed news media than the Mel Gibson story."
Haq told authorities following his arrest that he was angered by the war in Iraq and U.S. cooperation with Israel, and tired of his fellow Muslims "getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East." His family released a statement through an attorney following the shootings, offering their condolences and sympathies to the victims and their families and calling their son's actions "utterly contrary to our beliefs and Islamic values."
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
