Anxiety About Muslim Refugees Is Stoked Online by the Far-Right Media, by Cailtan Dickerson.
Type the word refugees into Facebook and some alarming “news” will appear about a refugee rape crisis, a refugee flesh-eating disease epidemic and a refugee-related risk of female genital mutilation — none of it true.
For the months leading up to the presidential election, and in the days since President Trump took office, ultraconservative websites like Breitbart News and Infowars have published a cycle of eye-popping stories with misleading claims about refugees. And it is beginning to influence public perception, experts say.
That shift was evident on Friday, as many Americans heralded the news that the Trump administration intended to temporarily curb all refugee resettlement and increase the vetting of Syrians.
“There really is a kind of cultural battle going on,” said Cecillia Wang, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no question that kind of xenophobic or anti-Muslim bias is infecting our political discourse about refugees.”
On the other hand, the mainstream media encourages only complacency and ignorance by misinforming and not informing the rest of the population what is going on — slipping it quietly under the door.
And it’s not just Muslim refugees, but Muslim immigration. How many people have heard of Rotherham? Type “Rotherham” into the Search box below and read some of the horrific stories that come up and be amazed at the numbers. If you only look at one story, see this one.
The media hushed all this up, to the point where hardly anyone in the west knows. The police and government organizations did nothing while the calamity rolled on for over a decade, because the opinion makers in charge didn’t want to risk being seen as “racist” at their dinner parties. A British political party (the BJP) was even started to complain over Rotherham because officials weren’t listening, but were howled down as racists.
You cannot begin to say the west has had an informed discussion on Muslim immigration unless most everyone is aware of Rotherham.
This PC defense here of picking a couple of more exaggerated stories to imply that is all that is going on is typical of the misinformation we’ve come to expect from our media. It seems pretty clear that the PC crowd are promoting open borders to assist the left in the political contest and to dilute or erase our successful western culture. They use the guise of not wanting to “discriminate,” but the PC crowd practice plenty of discrimination so don’t accept this distracting excuse.
Robert Spencer comments:
Here’s some real news for the fake news purveyors over at the New York Times: the “far-right media” isn’t responsible for “anxiety about Muslim refugees.”
Who is actually responsible? People such as Somali Muslim migrant Mohammad Barry, who in February 2016 stabbed multiple patrons at a restaurant owned by an Israeli Arab Christian; Ahmad Khan Rahami, an Afghan Muslim migrant who in September 2016 set off bombs in New York City and New Jersey; Arcan Cetin, a Turkish Muslim migrant who in September 2016 murdered five people in a mall in Burlington, Washington; Dahir Adan, another Somali Muslim migrant who in October 2016 stabbed mall shoppers in St. Cloud while screaming “Allahu akbar”; and Abdul Razak Artan, yet another Somali Muslim migrant who in November 2016 injured nine people with car and knife attacks at Ohio State University.
What’s more, all of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. In February 2015, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. The Lebanese Education Minister said in September 2015 that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country.
Meanwhile, 80% of migrants who have come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t really from Syria at all. So why are they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe, and now the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, 4,000 Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.” …
But as far as the fake news purveyor known as New York Times is concerned, it’s all just fearmongering by the “far-right media.”
hat-tip Stephen Neil
