The Patriot Post® · The Left's Temporary Obsession With a Killer's Race
When we had nothing more to go on than the video footage of the suspect being led away shirtless and in handcuffs, Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar and her race-obsessed ilk were quick to pounce on the color of his skin.
“The shooter’s race or ethnicity seems front and center when they aren’t white,” she complained. “Otherwise, it’s just a mentally ill young man having a bad day.”
When it was later revealed, however, that the killer was 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Trump-hating Syrian-born Muslim, Omar’s “white supremacist” narrative went up in smoke — at least temporarily. At that point, she probably wished she’d simply said something less incendiary and less accusatory. Perhaps something like she said about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: “Some people did something.”
Or perhaps something like the latter of these remarkable before and after tweets from a more anonymous race-baiter.
Translation: The killer is white! Oh, wait, he’s Muslim? [Cue crickets.]
To be clear, this wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue for Omar. She’d said much the same thing a week earlier in the wake of the Atlanta spa murders, which were perpetrated by a man who happens to be white: “It isn’t hard,” she tweeted, “to understand why it’s so normalized for law enforcement to protect the humanity of white mass murderers and their willingness to continually make excuses [sic] them.”
Omar’s knee-jerk racism got the best of her, but she wasn’t alone on the Left. As Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece put it in a since-deleted tweet, “The Atlanta shooting was not even a week ago. Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”
As for the Boulder killer, it’s already clear that he’s a very sick young man, just as the Atlanta killer is. As the Associated Press reports, “A law enforcement official briefed on the shooting said the suspect’s family told investigators they believed Alissa was suffering some type of mental illness, including delusions. Relatives described times when Alissa told them people were following or chasing him, which they said may have contributed to the violence.”
A former high school wrestling teammate said Alissa would act strangely sometimes, turning around suddenly or glancing over his shoulder. “He would say, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ We wouldn’t see anything. We always thought he was messing with us.”
Deeply disturbed or not, there seems to be a clear double standard on the Left when it comes to covering these mass killers. “If the shooter is a white supremacist,” tweeted columnist David Harsanyi yesterday, “the event is an indictment of all white people and America. If the shooter is an Islamist, it is a completely individual act that has nothing to do with ideology.”
Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza put it this way: “If six out of eight Asian American victims in Atlanta automatically made that murder spree a hate crime, what can we conclude now that we know all 10 of the Boulder shooter’s victims were white?”
Here’s a thought for those on the Left: Mass killers of innocent people are by definition profoundly and deeply disturbed. Unless there’s clear-cut evidence that race played a role in the killer’s motives — as it did with, say, Dylann Roof and Frederick Demond Scott — let’s just mourn the dead and stick to the relevant facts.
(Updated.)