The Left's Top Six Boston Bombing Lies

You have to admire how, when it comes to pushing their agendas, the American left stays relentlessly on point. Nothing stalls, much less derails, their locomotive, not even a terrorist act on our own shores. As Mad Men’s adman extraordinaire Don Draper tells his clients, “If you don’t like the conversation, change it.” The left doesn’t like the current Boston bombing conversation because it’s about Islam, their partner in an unholy alliance; so they quite simply do everything in their power to change it. How? Let us count the ways.

Blame the right. Immediately after last week’s Boston Marathon terrorism, the mainstream news media began speculating that right-wingers were behind the blasts. And by speculating, I mean demonizing, because that was the left-leaning media’s fervent intent – to not let the crisis go to waste, to cast suspicion upon the overlapping segments of society they are hell-bent on “otherizing,” to use their own terminology: law-abiding Tea Partiers, patriots, veterans, Republicans, the NRA, white people, Christians. A CNN analyst, to name only one example, focused the discussion on “right-wing extremists.” More blatantly, Salon put its hateful bigotry on display in an article entitled, incredibly, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”

Blame the NRA. Once the ongoing investigation revealed it to be beyond dispute that the terrorists weren’t Tea Partiers, the left didn’t miss a beat. Even while the remaining fugitive was still at large, MSNBC’s attack dog Lawrence O’Donnell shamelessly blamed the National Rifle Association for hindering the investigation by having lobbied to block a taggant “that would enable tracing of the purchase of gunpowder”:

The NRA’s effort to guarantee that America's mass murderers are the best equipped mass murderers in the world is not limited to those who use automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. The NRA is also in the business of helping bombers get away with their crimes.

O’Donnell conveniently neglected to mention that an independent scientific ruling years ago had recommended, for various reasons, against the use of taggants.

Blame Guns. Along that same line, the left kept the conversation focused on their current obsession, gun control, since the terrorists used firearms in their shootout with police. Turns out – surprise! – they weren’t licensed firearm owners. This would seem to be strong evidence that gun control laws do little if anything to hinder criminals and terrorists; but the left isn’t the party of logic, so even though the terrorists used bombs to wreak their havoc, the left made it about guns: “Why does America lose its head over ‘terror’ but ignore its daily gun deaths?” the left-wing Guardian asks (note the scare quotes around “terror”). “US gun law bigger threat than terrorists,” claimed another editorial. “Terror in Boston: It's About Guns, Not Bombs,” blathered a leftist professor at University of North Carolina.

Islam is Innocent. Another tack the left used is to claim simply that Islam is an irrelevant factor. The Atlantic posed this defiantly moronic question: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s longest-running embarrassment, actually said “What difference does it make why they did it, if they did it?” Imagine the spit-flecked accusations this hypocrite would be hurling if the perpetrators had been Christian. Imagine the broad brush the multiculturalist left, in their all their non-judgmental tolerance, would be using to smear everyone on the right.

Melissa Harris-Perry, the race-obsessed MSNBC host who says your children don’t belong to you, took the “Islam is irrelevant” argument a step further by claiming that any attempt to point toward the terrorists’ Muslim nature is “otherizing” them: “Given that they're Chechen, given that they are literally Caucasian, our very sense of connection to them is  this framed up notion of, like, Islam making them into something that is non-white,” she said inarticulately. What she’s getting at is that white Americans want to distance themselves from the terrorists by labeling them – framing them, as she puts it – as “something that is non-white,” hence Islam. First of all, Islam is not a race. Second, the only Americans who give a damn what color terrorists are are the left, because they want them to be white. Third, denial that the terrorists were carrying out violent jihad is simply a lie.

The terrorists are the victims. These kids weren’t radicalized by Islam and al Qaeda, this theory goes. They placed bombs that killed women and children because they couldn’t fit in, because they felt alienated from our racist, Islamophobic society. “To understand the Boston bombers,” mused a self-hating coward at Slate, “we need also to understand and be honest about ourselves, the ways in which we both take in and don’t take in people from other countries, the trickier side of the American dream.” “Expecting hospitality,” sympathized an American University professor, “they felt alienated and disillusioned, even with all of the opportunities and privileges available to them as citizens of this country.” Those poor terrorists. If only eight-year-old Martin Richard had made these privileged immigrants from war-torn Chechnya feel more welcome, perhaps they wouldn’t have blown him and others to smithereens.

We are the real terrorists. The reprehensible filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that, because the terrorists turned out to be American citizens, “the rest of the world is safe now,” steering the conversation away from jihad’s central responsibility in worldwide terrorism and toward the suggestion that America is the world’s true terrorist. This echoes the very accusation leveled at us by our most hateful enemies, so Moore has once again proudly shown where his allegiance lies.

Like 9/11, the Beltway Snipers, the Ft. Hood massacre, the Little Rock recruiting center murder, and the dozens and dozens of failed or thwarted plots on American soil, the Boston bombing (and subsequent murder of a police officer) is about Islam. It’s about two radicalized Muslim-Americans, instructed by al Qaeda online, and probably assisted by co-conspirators. But the left is making it about gun control, about NRA obstructionism, about America herself alienating immigrants, about whites “otherizing” Muslim innocents, about any message that furthers their nihilistic agendas, because the left knows how to never lose control of the narrative – a lesson the right would do well to absorb and emulate.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/25/13)