Former Christian Converted to Islam Terrorized with Anthrax? Double Standards Galore

Joshua Evans, a former Christian missionary and youth minister from South Carolina, converted to Islam some years ago.  He began preaching again, but this time explaining why he converted religions.  Evans relocated to Florida, and someone detonated a pipe bomb in front of the Jacksonville mosque in which he worships.  Just this week, Evans’ received in the mail an envelope full of white powder which he feared might be anthrax.  The Florida Muslim preacher was rushed to the hospital, and the substance was tested.  Thankfully, it was no more than a scare, and officials determined that the powder did not pose a biological threat.

Can you imagine for an instant if it had been the creators of South Park who had received such an envelope?  Or perhaps if a former Muslim converted to Christianity (such as Fathima Rifqa Bary) had?  Just flip “former Christian” to “former Muslim” and “convert to Islam” to “convert to Christianity” and you would have the ingredients necessary for a front page news article.  All the networks would be covering such a story non-stop, and pontificating pundits and so-called terrorism experts would remind us of the existential threat of radical Islam.

This selective media bias has allowed many Americans to erroneously think that all acts of terrorism are committed by Muslims, when in fact the reality is that official FBI records show that only 6% of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1980-2005 have been committed by adherents of the Islamic faith.  According to official Europol reports, less than one percent (0.4% to be exact) of terrorist attacks in Europe are committed by Muslims.  Yet, in the public perception, 99% of terrorist attacks are committed by Muslims.  This huge discrepancy is only possible due to the profound media bias and their selective reporting.  Said quite simply: had this been Fathima Rifqa Bary (a former Muslim converted to Christianity) whose church had been attacked with a pipe bomb and who had received white powder in the mail, the mainstream media would have lost its mind.  Yet, with Joshua Evans either his story is not reported at all, or if it is, then it is done in passing and in the most apathetic way possible.

Matthew Yglesias wrote of the bombing of the Jacksonville mosque:

Apparently there was a terrorist attack on American soil earlier this week. What’s more, though fortunately nobody was killed in the attack, unlike in the much-hyped Underpants Bomber or Times Square plots, the perpetrator actually managed to build a working bomb. But somehow this attack, despite its greater technical sophistication, hasn’t obtained nearly the same level of media attention.

The Huffington Post writes of the anthrax scare:

Hey, have you heard about all the terrorist attacks that have been going on down in the Jacksonville, Florida region? Probably not, actually, because the would-be victims of these attacks have been members of Florida’s Islamic community, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t deemed eligible by the media to be victims of terrorism. Which is too bad, because they are getting terrorized like the dickens!

Back in May, someone planted and detonated a pipe bomb at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida while 60 people were inside. Fortunately nobody was hurt. But despite the fact that this bomber managed to do what Captain Crotchfire Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad couldn’t do — successfully explode a device — the event failed to get as much media attention, for, you know, some reason.

Flashforward to this week, and we find that “a Florida Muslim leader named Joshua Evans was at the center of an anthrax scare, when he received a ’tissue stuffed inside with white powder’ in the mail.” As Amanda Terkel points out:

What is disturbing about this incident is that it is the third high-profile anti-Islamic incident in the Jacksonville, FL area in recent months. As ThinkProgress reported in April, when University of North Florida professor and Fulbright scholar Parvez Ahmed went before the city council for confirmation to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, he had to answer irrelevant questions “about gay marriage, God, Islam and prayer in public places.” Another councilman mocked him for being Muslim and requested that he “say a prayer to your God” during a public hearing.

Sounds like a charming community!

This double standard was in play during the South Park controversy as well.  Comedy Central axed a show due to threats from a couple radical Muslims.  The media went into hyper-drive and once again the so-called experts explained to us what’s wrong with Islam and Muslims.  Glenn Greenwald, a lone voice of reason, wondered at the profound double standard: Corpus Christi, a play that depicted a gay Jesus, was canceled multiple times due to extremist Christians who threatened to “kill the staff” and “exterminate” the producer.  Greenwald writes: “Both back then and now, leading the protests (though not the threats) was the Catholic League, denouncing the play as ‘blasphemous hate speech.’”  But you would have hardly heard about this, leading you–the average American–to think that only Muslims do such things.

The Islamophobes want us to react with a fecal incontinence level of trepidation when it comes to radical Islam–or, as the Queen of Islamophobia Pamela Geller puts it: they want to “scare the bejeezus outta ya.”  On the other hand, the Islamophobes say that Islamophobia barely exists, as Robert Spencer claims in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).  This conforms to their hate-filled paradigm, one that is reinforced by the piss poor job that the mainstream media does.

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