The Los Angeles Times reported that last week, a gunman by the name of Kori Ali Muhammad "stalked the streets of Fresno, fatally shooting three white men outside the Catholic Charities building with a .357 revolver."  Muhammad, a self-proclaimed "black soldier" with a belief that there is "a war going on between blacks and whites" who refers to white people as "devils" in anti-white tirades on social media, allegedly shouted "Allahu akbar" just prior to surrendering to police. 

In spite of some peculiar evidence suggesting otherwise in the above-mentioned facts, the media and authorities almost immediately dismissed Islam as a non-factor in the incident.

Make no mistake: it takes a lot of work to paint a picture where Islam had nothing to do with these murders.  It requires skillfully hiding facts, manipulating words and context, and even the publication of outright lies.

Media Subterfuge

The Associated Press has been the most obvious offender.

In a Tuesday tweet, we notice that the AP reported that the "suspect" "shouted 'God is great' before killings." 

The AP literally reported this outright falsehood as fact; Muhammad never once said "God is great."  If their aim had been to report facts, doing so would not have been hard.  Constructing an appropriate lie, on the other hand, took calculation.

And it was an unwise calculation.  After nearly a day of their reporting this embarrassing lie as the truth on their Twitter feed, and after being excoriated by people who discerned the P.C. ploy, the AP deleted the tweet.

We deleted a tweet about a Fresno slaying suspect shouting "God is great." It failed to note he said it in Arabic. A new tweet is upcoming.

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 19, 2017

But the question remains.  Given the context of this killer's shouting of "Allahu akbar," why offer the literal translation in the first place?

Under what rock and on which planet must one live to not know that "Allahu akbar" is the ritualistic mantra uttered by jihadist Muslims as they look to slay their path to heaven by murdering infidels?  That is the salient point, not the literal translation of the phrase.  Sure, there are Muslims who utter that same phrase without all the violent undertones.  But this man repeatedly shouted the phrase as he murdered people.

Yet the AP news feed avoided use of the actual, well known phrase altogether throughout multiple updates on Tuesday.

At 1:20 P.M.: "A man shot and killed three people on the streets of downtown Fresno on Tuesday, shouting 'God is great' in Arabic."

At 1:35 P.M.: "Authorities say Muhammad yelled 'God is great' in Arabic while being taken into custody." 

At 2:35, they again cite that the murderer "shouted 'God is great!' in Arabic." 

Hold on – at 4:40 P.M., the AP feed cites that the killer "posted status updates that included the phrase 'Allahu akbar,' or 'God is great,' in Arabic." 

Did they come clean about the words the killer actually said as he murdered those unfortunate men?  Nope.  This update is in reference to his prior social media posts, not in reference to his actually shouting of "Allahu akbar" before, during, or after the incident.

Ask yourself, and be honest.  If a white American had repeatedly shouted "Praise Christ!" as he murdered a bunch of people, would it be humanly possible to immediately conclude that his religion had nothing to do with his undertaking of that action?  Moreover, do you think the Associated Press would vehemently report that this event has nothing to do at all with his religion?

At 6:15 P.M., the feed reports that police chief Jerry Dyer says "this is solely about race."

Nothing to see about Islam here, folks.  Move along.

As Sean Davis tweets, "[d]eliberately altering a terrorist's direct words to obscure his motive is how you got Trump." 

Indeed.  Despite all their indignation about it, more and more Americans are agreeing and cheering every time Trump calls the mainstream media "fake news."  This kind of stuff is the reason why.

Jihadi Privilege

So the mainstream media have been thoroughly discredited, sure.  But the fact that the mainstream media so willingly and obviously engage in subterfuge in order to protect Americans from the truth about an Islamic terrorist's direct words?  Well, that presents something of a twisted irony.

You may recall that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, a short manhunt took place in which the murderous Chechen Muslims, the Tsarnaev brothers, had not yet been identified as the culprits, and the motivation of the attack was still in question.

We all made educated guesses as to the religious makeup of the perpetrators.  Even left-of-left David Sirota had a pretty good idea it might have been a jihad attack, which is why he penned his infamously stupid column, "Let's hope the Boston bomber is a white American."  After all, if he didn't think it was entirely plausible that it would be discovered that the attackers were Muslim extremists, he probably wouldn't have felt the need to pre-emptively defend Muslims from the fallout that would take place after the revelation that Muslims were responsible.

Sirota suspected, as we all suspected, that the Boston bombings could well have been the result of Islamic terrorism.  Yet the purpose of his screed wasn't to address that subject.  He wanted to address "white privilege."

Meanwhile, in 2015, lone psychopath Dylann Roof murdered nine innocent black Americans in a Charleston church.  In all of the left's frothy-mouthed madness in the wake of the shooting, Roof was indeed "reflexively portrayed" by the media as a representative of a larger conspiracy of white racism everywhere, and particularly in the South.  Pictures of him with the Confederate flag on his social media accounts made anyone ever seen with the Confederate flag an instant racist.  Public vandalism of Confederate memorials was brushed aside or unreported.  And as Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page Magazine, the "media rushed to ban everything right down to the Dukes of Hazzard." 

Contrast this to Tuesday in Fresno.  An openly racist black Muslim killed three white men outside a Catholic Charities building while chanting "Allahu akbar" to both his victims and his captors.  Yet the media are doing narrative backflips to suggest that the killings had nothing at all to do with Islam.

Kori Ali Muhammad, the media are insisting, was just a "lone wolf," representative of nothing but his own hate.

The truth is that the mainstream media lie to distort, diminish, or altogether ignore the role of Islam in acts of Islamic terrorism.  They work tirelessly to ensure that we can never address the ideology that leads to it in the first place by insisting that Islamic terrorism is not representative of a larger religious conspiracy, and that it's not a systemic threat to innocent people around the world, when it is clearly both of those things.

And ever more Americans are coming to realize that this is true, in spite of all the lies they are told in the news.

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.