Gibson Beats Haq, 888 to 236
The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is disturbed by a disparity in the national media's treatment of Mel Gibson's liquored-up anti-semitic rantings versus Naveed Haq's shooting spree at the Jewish Federation:
Unless you've spent the past week submersed in the Mariana Trench, you know that the intoxicated driver in Incident A was Hollywood's Mel Gibson, who railed at a Los Angeles County police officer about the "[expletive] Jews" and how "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." The story was soon everywhere. In the first six days after his arrest, the media database Nexis logged 888 stories mentioning "Mel Gibson" and "Jews." And that didn't include the countless websites, talk shows, and smaller publications that also took it up.We're often suspicious of stories involving database searches (the 21st-century version of that old phrase should be lies, damned lies, and Googling), but Nexis isn't any old database, and Jacoby's got a point.By any rational calculus, Incident B was far more significant. According to police and eyewitness reports, the killer forced his way into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle by holding a gun to the head of a 13-year-old girl. Once inside, Naveed Haq announced, "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel," and opened fire with two semiautomatic pistols. Pam Waechter died on the spot; five other women were shot in the abdomen, knee, or arm. When one of the women managed to call 911, Haq took the phone and told the dispatcher: "These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."
At a time when jihadist murder is a global threat and some of the most malevolent figures in the Islamic world -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, to name just two -- openly incite violence against Americans and Jews, the attack in Seattle should have been a huge story everywhere. Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson's drunken outburst. Why the disparity?
