To Dodge Border Crisis, NY Times Pins Cartel Killings on Religion

Breaking news coming out of Mexico detailed the horrific cartel killings of an American family, which, astonishingly, The New York Times tried to pin on (get ready for it) fundamentalist religion. Specifically, the Mormon faith.

An American family living in Mexico was ambushed and massacred by a cartel, with three women and six children murdered. The scene as described by surviving family members is horrific:

“They described a terrifying scene in which one child was gunned down while running away, while others were trapped inside a burning car. Two of the children killed were less than a year old, the family members said. The car they were in with their mother was set ablaze.”

In one article, the family is described as being part of a “fundamentalist Mormon community,” while in another the spotlight is on the victims’ faith.

In fact, a quick Google search of the NY Times coverage of the tragedy yielded the following headlines on articles put up at various times during the day by the Times: “9 Members of Mormon Family in Mexico Are Killed in Ambush,” “A Storied Mormon Family Reels After Mexico Murders,” “What We Know About the Killing of 9 Mormon Family” and “US Victims in Mexico Attack From Mormon Offshoot Community.”

In between these headlines, another mainstream media source, NBC chimed in with its own coverage: “Slain U.S. citizens were part of Mormon offshoot with sordid history,” which detailed, well, the “sordid history” of the group which they called a “cult.”

Responses on the Twitter-sphere were fast and furious:

Some parodied The Washington Post’s similarly outrageous coverage of America’s take down of ISIS terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last week.

With its single focused political views (read:anti-Trump), the mainstream media is now more engaged in creative, rather than factual, reporting.

Acknowledging the real issue of cartel killings, violence and terror infiltration on America’s southern border would have given a nod to the wisdom of Trump’s solutions for the border crisis: the need for increased security and more stringent immigrant vetting, and challenging sanctuary cities across America that provide safe havens for criminal and illegal immigrants.

So, instead, the NY Times and other mainstream media outlets decided to make these cartel killings an issue of religious fundamentalism.

Ironically, when it comes to Islam, the mainstream media doesn’t seem to have any problem not blaming religious fundamentalism. In fact, the media narrative since 9/11 has been that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

As Clarion’s National Correspondent Shireen Qudosi wrote following The Washington Post‘s Baghdadi headline gaffe,

“Any message deviating from the this mainstream mantra was punished, including when I challenged what I call ‘fantasy Islam’ (that Islam is only peace) during a congressional hearing on radical Islam [where] I called Islam a religion of peace and war.”

The fact is that how we talk about victims matters just as much as how we talk about oppressors. President Trump got that right. Tweeting the news, he offered Mexico help in fighting the real culprits, the cartels:

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