Media ‘Played Down' Muslim Killing of Jew in Seattle

While the press was going to town with story upon story about Mel Gibson's arrest and disparaging remarks about Jews, a far more egregious act of anti-Semitism that occurred on the same day received far less media attention.

On July 28, several hours after Gibson's arrest, Naveed Haq – who holds an engineering degree from Washington State University – barged into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, announced "I am a Muslim American angry at Israel," and shot a 58-year-old woman to death. Five other women, one of them pregnant, were also shot.

In the first six days after the two events, the media database Nexis showed 888 stories mentioning "Mel Gibson" and "Jews," but only 236 mentioning the Seattle shooting.

Calling that coverage "only modest," Jeff Jacoby asks on the Web site Townhall.com "why the Seattle bloodshed was played down," noting that Haq is not the first seemingly non-violent Muslim to erupt in a violent rampage this year.

In March, Iranian-born Mohammed Taheri-azar, a psychology major at the University of North Carolina, intentionally rammed a car into a crowd of students, hitting nine of them. He said he wanted to "avenge the death of Muslims around the world."

In June, Michael Julius Ford killed one person and injured five when he opened fire at a Denver warehouse, before he was shot dead by a SWAT officer. His sister told the Denver Post: "He told me that Allah was going to make a choice and it was going to be good and told me people at his job [were] making fun of his religion."

If Mel Gibson's nonviolent outburst is "a legitimate subject of media scrutiny, all the more so is the animus that has spurred Muslims like Naveed Haq to jihadist murder," says Jaboby, an Op Ed writer for the Boston Globe.

"How many more Haqs must erupt in a homicidal rage … before we stop assuming that these are merely random incidents?"

Instead, the New York Sun noted, Americans need to open their eyes "to the possibility that they are part of a war in which understanding the enemy is a prerequisite for victory."