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| Terrorist blames conservative media for his failed mass shooting plot. |
The Huffington Post has this interesting story about some White extremist who is accused of plotting a mass shooting at the San Diego branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations. He allegedly binged watch on that right wing news channel during it coverage of the Charlie Hebdo and San Bernardino massacres.
The agitators of the racist right and Republican presidential candidates have taken this tongue wagging offensive on handling terrorism. They claim that "radical Islam" is the scourge of America.
The junk food media's obsession with scaring people with terrorism. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has gotten about the same promotion as Republican front runners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
John David Weissinger decided to take responsibility for his actions. Weissinger pled guilty in August to felony charges of possessing an illegal firearm and making a criminal threat determined to be a hate crime, along with a misdemeanor charge of interfering with civil rights.
He left a chilling message threatening CAIR. The civil rights organization turned the voice mail over to the FBI and California State Patrol.
This Tuesday, during a sentencing hearing, Weissinger's attorney advanced a peculiar argument: His client, who was drunk when he made the threats, had committed the crimes “after a week of watching Fox News over and over.”
“Fox News is a hate machine, spewing out horrible things” about Muslims, attorney Michael Malowney said.
Malowney said he wasn't trying to make up a "lame excuse" for Weissinger -- who he said struggles with depression and anxiety -- or say that "Fox News made him do it." But Malowney did argue that Islamophobia, of the sort propagated by media outlets like Fox News, helped push a susceptible man over the edge.
According to the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America, in the week after the Charlie Hebdo attacks -- when Weissinger was watching Fox News constantly -- the cable channel ramped up its rhetoric against Muslims.
The most annoying conservative agitator to host a show on that network is Sean Hannity. He is the biggest concern troll and racial agitator second to Matt Drudge.
Sean Hannity, for example, asked whether the U.S. should "insist" on assimilation from Muslim immigrants. Bob Beckel, the channel’s supposedly liberal counterweight, flat-out declared, "I'm an Islamophobe."
Fox News invited one polemicist after another to rail against Muslims in broad, blanket terms. Steve Emerson, a self-styled "terrorism expert" of limited credibility, appeared on the channel at least four times in the week after the Charlie Hebdo killings. Emerson claimed that Birmingham, England, was a "totally Muslim" city "where non-Muslims just simply don't go in." Birmingham is in fact 22 percent Muslim. In another appearance, Emerson said that Europe was "finished" because it had too many Muslims who hadn't assimilated to Western culture. In response, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called Emerson "clearly an idiot."
Robert Spencer, director of the anti-Muslim website Jihad Watch, claimed on Fox News' “Hannity” that a "core principle" of Islam is "the idea of emigrating to a new place to conquer and Islamize it." Spencer is a known personality on the anti-Muslim circuit who “engages in fear-mongering through steady reference to theories like 'stealth jihad,' eminent 'Islamization of America,' and the infiltration of Congress by 'Muslim spy interns,’” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Brigitte Gabriel, once described by an editor of The Oxford History of Islam as a "professional Muslim basher," is the founder of ACT! for America, a group the SPLC says has "eagerly tapped into a groundswell of anti-Muslim rage and done what it could to fan the flames." Gabriel appeared on Fox News multiple times after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, arguing that Europe was "paying the price" for allowing Muslims in after World War II. Europe, she said, had "ignored the cancer growing within its body when it was at stage 2."
Fox News also had Frank Gaffney on the air, a man described by the SPLC as "the anti-Muslim movement's most paranoid propagandist." Gaffney once accused the prominent conservative Grover Norquist of being a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood.
"Agenda-driven media outlets like Fox create an atmosphere in which hate crimes are more likely to occur," CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper said. "It's not a shock to anyone that someone taking on a steady diet of Fox evening talk programs would come away with Islamophobic view points.”
The judge didn't buy Weissinger’s Fox News defense on Tuesday, sentencing him to a year in the iron college and five years’ in-house.
Does Fox News Promote Hate?
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