The sinister media soft-soaping of Saturday’s ISIS bomb attack on the Upper East Side shows exactly whose side these corrupted news organizations are on — and it’s not yours.
They are so far in the tank for the revolutionary left that they aren’t even capable of hiding it with their usual cunning.
We are at the point where The New York Times, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC and USA Today will downplay, obfuscate or even justify an ISIS terrorist attack in New York City simply because it was aimed at people they loathe.
Never mind that we saw video all over social media Saturday showing one of the ISIS-radicalized suspects yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he tossed a bomb packed with shrapnel and “Mother of Satan” explosives into an anti-Islam protest near Gracie Mansion.
Just because the bombs thrown into the crowd that afternoon fizzled out before exploding does not make the terrorist attack any less ominous.
In the hometown of 9/11 heroes, the Times framed Saturday’s attack in a way deliberately designed to mislead the reader into thinking the offenders were anti-Islamic protesters and that Mayor Mamdani was their intended victim.
Headline gives it away
From master wordsmiths, this headline is deliberate craft, not journalistic prudence.
“Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House: Six people were arrested after anti-Islamic protestors led by right-wing activist Jake Lang clashed with counterprotesters near Gracie Mansion.”
The Times’ updated headline upgraded the threat but still obscured the culprits — “counterprotester” is meaningless and in any case, he was only one of six people arrested during a “clash,” so the impression is that both sides are equally to blame.
And since right-wing activist Lang is named, the shorthand message from the headline is that he is the biggest threat, while the prominence of “Mayor’s House” implies Mamdani must be the target.
“Homemade Bomb Thrown at Protest near NYC Mayor’s House: Police say,” was the updated headline.
“The counterprotester accused of throwing the bomb was one of six people arrested after a clash with anti-Islamic protesters led by the right-wing activist Jake Lang.”
The coverage portrayed the attackers as having been provoked by Lang, yet the planning and coordination for their attack, including gathering the components, building the bombs and storing a supply of bombs in a storage unit in Pennsylvania took more than the few days during which Lang’s protest was scheduled.
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This was a terror plot looking for an excuse.
The intent of suspects Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi was clear.
They both allegedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic terror group ISIS after they were arrested.
Balat also allegedly told cops he had hoped for a death count “even bigger” than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
But CNN initially framed the men sympathetically as “two Pennsylvania teenagers . . . enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather:
“Their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs.”
Tuesday night — a full three nights after the bombs were thrown — CNN anchor Abby Phillip read a script from her teleprompter that framed the near-tragedy as “an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani” and managed to blame Republicans.
Feeding Dem prejudice
Portraying Mamdani as the victim was exactly what the media framing was designed to do.
It was the opposite of the truth, but it served a useful purpose, feeding into the prejudices of Democrats and their media organs.
The lie was halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to get its pants on, as the saying goes.
CNN apologized, but their initial coverage was part of a pattern we saw across the media and from the mayor himself, who responded to the attack with a statement that first condemned “white supremacy,” “bigotry and racism” before he got around to saying “violence at a protest is never acceptable” in his second paragraph.
It took him three more attempts before he was shamed by straight-talking NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch into acknowledging the nature of the terrorism.
At best, Mamdani was drawing a moral equivalence between speech he decries as “hate” and actual violence that could have killed and maimed dozens of people on his doorstep.
The subtext from the mayor and allied media is that violence is something to tolerate for the right cause.
The website Honestreporting.com has done a great job archiving a string of examples of the media misleading the public about the attack, obscuring the ideology of the culprits and implying that Mamdani was the intended victim, even days after the suspects had been arrested and confessed to ISIS sympathies.
There is no excuse for the omissions since Balat and Kayumi were arrested immediately after the bombs were tossed, thanks to the quick action of NYPD hero Chief Aaron Edwards, who leapt over a barricade and chased them down.
Their “Allahu Akbar” war cry was a giveaway, too.
Yet more than 24 hours after the attack, at 2:09 p.m. Sunday, NBC News tweeted: “Breaking: device ignited outside Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral residence yesterday during an anti-Islam protest and counterprotest was confirmed to be an improvised explosive.”
Tuesday, USA Today ran a rant against “Islamophobia” in New York City titled, “Don’t let Gracie Mansion bomb scare obscure far-right’s danger.” Nothing about the actual physical danger to New Yorkers of Islamist terrorism, which we understand all too well.
Hosting Khalil
Mamdani left no mystery about where his sympathies lie the night after the attack, when he and his wife hosted a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Hamas protest agitator, an Algerian citizen whom the Trump administration has been trying to deport.
“[Wife] Rama [Duwaji] and I were honored to welcome Mahmoud, [his wife] Noor, and their son Deen to Gracie Mansion to break our fast together,” he tweeted with a photo of the occasion.
The message the mayor and his media fellow travelers want us to take away is that the villains are not the ISIS sympathizers who built bombs packed with shrapnel with the stated aim to kill and maim more people than died in the Boston Marathon bombing.
In fact, the terrorists are “sympathetic” figures, and their intended victims, being “Islamophobes” and purveyors of “hate speech,” are the real villains.
It’s the same malign narrative that has led to the lionization of coldblooded alleged assassins Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, because they murdered their ideological foes in a “just” cause.
The message is “my enemy’s enemy is my hero.”
It’s no accident, and it puts us all in danger.
