MSNBC is rightly considered among the more fetid branches of the left-wing fever swamp, alongside the Daily Kos blog, Dennis Kucinich's fan club, and just about any fundraiser for Elizabeth Warren. But what MSNBC airs on weekends exceeds its often dazzling levels of left-wing lunacy.
This morning on the network's Melissa Harris-Perry show, for example, guest host and Columbia University poli-sci professor Dorian Warren spoke about the murders of three Muslim residents of Chapel Hill, N.C., this week with a panel of fellow liberals, all of them Deeply Concerned, the requisite emotional state for anyone spending time in Harris-Perry's empathic presence.
As part of an ongoing effort on the left to divert attention from the accused gunman's inconvenient politics, Warren focused on the killings as yet another example of hate crimes against Muslims by white guys with nothing better to do.
In the process, Warren asked a question of Southern Poverty Law Center president Richard Cohen that surely had the dozen or so conservatives who were channel surfing and accidentally landed on MSNBC at that moment to ask aloud, Did he just say what I think he said? --
WARREN: Richard, really quickly, I just want to get you to respond to this question about the difference in the response we've seen to, say, the Boston Marathon bombing, the massive and immediate mobilization when the perpetrators of acts of violence at home are Muslim, versus when the victims are Muslim. Why do we fail to ask some of the same questions or respond in the same way?
COHEN: That's a good question. You know, of course, 911 was the Pearl Harbor of our time and it, you know, it just changed the focus of law enforcement tremendously, all resources going to kind of jihadi terrorism and kind of ignoring domestic, non-jihadi terrorism. And the incident, you know, in North Carolina and so many other incidences (sic) tell us that we have to have a balanced approach to the phenomenon.
Actually, it's a dumb question, but the chances of Cohen saying so are roughly the same as him pointing out that Craig Stephen Hicks, the accused killer in Chapel Hill, "liked" the Southern Poverty Law Center on his Facebook page.
Warren does have a point, albeit puny -- there are parallels between the murders in Chapel Hill and the Boston Marathon bombings nearly two years ago. In each case there were three fatalities, at least initially in Boston. Muslims were the victims in Chapel Hill; in Boston, they were the accused killers.
Beyond that, the parallels fall apart, mainly due to scale -- the explosions in Boston also injured 264 people, including 14 victims who suffered dismemberment or amputation after they were rushed to local hospitals. It was the worst terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 -- which began with the departures of two commercial airliners from nearly Logan Airport.
Warren is either uninformed or dishonest to claim there was an "immediate" and massive mobilization of law enforcement in Boston because the suspected perpetrators were Muslim. In fact, photos and video footage of the Tsarnaev brothers was not released by police until April 18 -- three days after the attack. The identities of the suspects and their faith wasn't known until the following day, by which time Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, had been killed during a shootout with police when his younger brother allegedly drove over his body while fleeing from the scene.
For more than 72 hours after the bombings, the unidentified suspects remained at large -- and given the savage cruelty of their initial attack, it was reasonable to fear that further attempts at mass murder were coming. It was also not known if the perpetrators were part of a larger conspiracy.
On April 19, the day the surviving brother was captured, residents of metro Boston were ordered to stay at home or work -- "shelter in place" -- to help law enforcement in their pursuit. The Tsarnaevs are also accused of killed an MIT police officer, carjacking an SUV, battling Watertown police in a gun battle, and shooting a Boston transit police officer who nearly died from loss of blood. Compare this to the aftermath of the triple homicide in Chapel Hill. Hicks was quickly arrested by police and no evidence has surfaced that he was part of a conspiracy.
Warren and his guests cited the "trending" hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter, an obvious echo of #BlackLivesMatter. With a nod to Orwell, some Muslim lives clearly matter more than others -- such as when their accused assailants are white American men. But when they die at the hands of other Muslims, and on a vast scale -- #NotSoMuch.
