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Today at 9pm Eastern John Allen Muhammad will be executed by the State of Virginia. Muhammad, you'll recall, was one half of the two "snipers" who killed ten people in and around Washington, DC seven years ago. His execution is especially timely in the light of last week's slaughter at Fort Hood. As Michelle Malkin points out, the two cases are very similar: "jihad-inspired killers, media whitewash" - a point I made on the air to Hugh Hewitt in my instant reaction a few hours after Thursday's carnage:
HH: Yeah, we of course will be watching to see if it is indeed sudden jihad syndrome, Mark Steyn, as we have been following John Mohammed’s execution watch. We never quite figured out whether or not he was motivated by Islam, but we know, or his own…
MS: Oh, no, I think that’s actually pretty clear, that if you look particularly not so much with John Allen Mohammed, but with his boy sidekick Malvo…
HH: Right.
MS: He had all kinds of pictures showing the planes going into the Twin Towers, and Allahu akbar written on them and all the rest of it. And again, it was the same thing at the time. If you remember, all during the Washington sniper incidents…
HH: Yup.
MS: We had all these experts on the air telling us oh, it looks like the work of an angry, white male, probably a hunter.
So here's what I had to say in The Sunday Telegraph seven years ago - and you'll notice several of the lines could be transfered direct to any column on Fort Hood. And stick around for a postscript on my then Chicago Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper:
After weeks of assurances that the sniper was an "angry white male", it turns out the only angry white males connected to this story are the ones in America's newsrooms. On Thursday, after being informed that the two suspects were a black Muslim called Muhammad and his illegal-immigrant Jamaican sidekick, The New York Times nevertheless reported in its early editions that the pair were being sought for "possible ties to 'skinhead militia' groups". The Feds had already released a photo of Muhammad looking like one of the less goofy members of the Jackson Five and, though one should never rush to stereotype, it seems unlikely that a black Muslim with big hair would have many "ties" to skinhead militias.
But in the early hours of Thursday morning, the Times wasn't ready to give in: C'mon, there's gotta be some angry white male, National Rifle Association, Right-wing, redneck, gun-nut, neo-Nazi militia types in here somewhere, preferably living in a compound Janet Reno can come out of retirement to surround and torch.
Sadly not. Instead, we have a Muslim convert. A Muslim convert who last year discarded the name "Williams" and adopted a new identity as "Muhammad". A Muslim convert called Muhammad who publicly expressed his approval of al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks. A pro-al-Qaeda Muslim convert called Muhammad who marked the first anniversary of 9/11, to the exact minute, by visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles in Camden, New Jersey. Two minutes after he left the building, the cops arrived to deal with a mysterious bomb scare.
What are we expert profilers to make of such bewilderingly contradictory signs? Well, obviously, those of us in the media should not to be too hasty in connecting the dots. Instead, we should rush to disconnect them. So CNN's Aaron Brown found it easier to call Mr Muhammad "Mr Williams", a formulation likely to be encouraged by the guy's lawyers, once they're in place. And my local radio news described him as "an ex-soldier" and "an African-American male". Anyone spot the missing category? You can discern the preferred narrative: an African-American male from a deprived background driven psycho by military culture. But he left the army years ago and his transformation into a killer seems to be more or less coincidental with his transformation into Mr Muhammad.
The media behaved much the same way the last time a 40-year old radical Muslim called Mohamed opened fire on US soil. July the Fourth, Los Angeles Airport, the El Al counter, two dead. CNN and the Associated Press all but stampeded to report a "witness" who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling, "Artie took my job." But, alas, this promising account proved to be a prank. Instead, it was a Muslim called Hesham Mohamed Hadayet.
Mohamed! What are the odds of that? As with last Thursday's arrests, no one could make head or tail of this strange turn of events. As The New York Times put it, "Officials Puzzled About Motive Of Airport Gunman". Hmm. Egyptian Muslim kills Jews on American national holiday. Best not to jump to conclusions. Denial really is a river in Egypt.
Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it's more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male. I'm in the former camp and, apropos the sniper, said as much in the Telegraph's American sister papers. I had a bet with both my wife and my assistant that the perp would be an Islamic terrorist. The gals, unfortunately, had made the mistake of reading The New York Times, whose experts concluded it would be a "macho hunter" or an "icy loner".
Speaking as a macho hunter and an icy loner myself, I'm beginning to think the media would be better off turning their psychological profilers loose on America's newsrooms. Take, for example, the Times's star columnist Frank Rich. Within a few weeks of September 11, he was berating John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, for not rounding up America's "home-grown Talibans" - the religious Right and "the anti-abortion terrorist movement". In a column entitled "How to Lose a War" last October he mocked the administration for not consulting with abortion clinics, who had a lot of experience dealing with "terrorists".
You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.
Oh, well. It's not just the media who bend over backwards to look the other way. Mr Muhammad was twice reported to the FBI for suspected terrorist links. Though living in a homeless shelter, he had the wherewithal to travel extensively round the country by plane, as the shelter's director discovered when a ticket agent called up to confirm Mr Muhammad's booking. "At the mission, not many airline agents call and ask for residents," says the Rev Al Archer. I'll bet. But, even after September 11, a guy in a homeless shelter stacking up the frequent-flier miles wasn't enough to attract the bureau's attention. Given the performance of the FBI, the Immigration Service and other federal agencies, it may be time for at least one white male to get a little angry: the President.
Seven years on the bending over backwards has only intensified. For some reason, in The Chicago Sun-Times Richard Roeper chose to pick a fight with me and various other right-wing madmen over our predictions about the eventual identity of the sniper. Here's what I wrote in response:
I see my colleague Richard Roeper has been kind enough to apologize to readers on my behalf. "If there's one thing conservatives despise more than liberals, it's admitting they were wrong. About anything," wrote Richard the other day. "Too many of them are bullies, and bullies aren't good at backtracking."
Who could he be talking about? Well, as it turned out, he was talking about me, and everyone's favorite excitable blond, Ann Coulter, and the New York Times' token non-leftie William Safire. What were we bullies bullying on about this time? "An awful lot of conservatives really, really wanted the snipers to be terrorists," explained Richard.
"But they were wrong. I'll say that because they never will."
As it happens, in the same week Roeper said I'd never say I was wrong, the Sun-Times' sister papers, the Spectator and the Jerusalem Post, ran a column of mine on the midterm elections headlined, "I Was Wrong Again! Hurrah!" From this, the casual observer will deduce two things: 1) I said I was wrong; 2) and not for the first time, either.
Indeed, I find that in that week's Sunday Telegraph in Britain I also said - quote -"I was wrong," prompting Professor Glenn Reynolds to write on his Instapundit Web site "You've got to admire a pundit who can admit when he's wrong." It would appear that I've cheerfully said I was wrong more times this month alone than Richard Roeper has in his entire career - and we've still got a week to go! If it weren't that I'd look like an even bigger bully, I'd issue a strong demand for Roeper to have the guts to admit he was wrong about me never admitting I'm wrong.
As for the snipers, well, John Allen Muhammad is a supporter of al-Qaida who celebrated the Sept. 11 attacks by changing his name and intensifying his Islamic identity. John Lee Malvo, his "ward," is an illegal alien or, in the current PC euphemism, "undocumented." This particular member of the Undocumented-American community is from Jamaica, and Roeper has great sport with conservative paranoia about the poor schlub being "one of those evil non-Americans" from "our dreaded rival, Jamaica."
Include me out on that one. In those terms, I'm an evil non-American myself. Malvo and I were both born subjects of Her Britannic Majesty, he in Jamaica, I in Toronto. The issue is not where he's from but where he went: America. He was detained and released by the INS in breach of their own procedures. That's what ties young Malvo to Sept. 11: Like the Saudi mass murderers with their perfunctorily filled out joke visa forms, he's yet another guy let loose in this country by the federal bureaucracy to kill Americans.
So, for the moment, there are a lot of fellows who should be way ahead of me and Ann and Safire in the Apology line. Not just the feds, but state and local authorities, too. We now know that the snipers were stopped in the vicinity of the shootings at least 11 times, but on each occasion cops let them go because, as the D.C. chief told the Washington Post, "everybody was looking for a white car with white people."
Racial profiling, anyone? Federal sensitivity to the "undocumented" gave John Lee Malvo his opportunity to kill; state and local deference to the prevailing cultural biases enabled him to boost his body count.
Whether Muhammad and Malvo shot their victims as part of an Islamist scheme remains to be seen. If they didn't, I can assure Richard Roeper that this is one right-wing blowhard who won't stand on his dignity. After all, generally speaking, we conservatives take the world as we find it, instead of trying to jam weird new pegs into the old ideological holes: "Stop Your Racist War!" "It's all about oil!"
What was it Richard Roeper said? "An awful lot of conservatives really, really wanted the snipers to be terrorists"? Hmm. From The New York Sun:
When Malvo asked Muhammad why, he said, "For the sheer terror of it - the worst thing you can do to people is aim at their children."
Midway through the spree, Malvo said, Muhammad described the plans to take money they would extort from authorities to end the sniper shootings and establish a Canadian commune to train 140 homeless children in terrorist shooting and bombings to "continue the mission" in other cities.
From The Daily Telegraph:
Malvo alleged that Muhammad had said: "We are going to go to the Washington DC area and we are going to terrorise these people."
Yes, yes, but that doesn't mean they were Islamic terrorists, does it?
Well, see the following trial exhibits:
Exhibit 65-006: A self-portrait of Malvo in the cross hairs of a gun scope shouting, "ALLAH AKBAR!" The word "SALAAM" scrawled vertically. A poem: "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why."
Exhibit 65-013: The word "INSHALLAH" above a portrait glorifying "Muammar Kaddafi" as "The Liberator" dressed in full military regalia.
Exhibit 65-016: A portrait of Saddam Hussein with the words "INSHALLAH" and "The Protector," surrounded by rockets labeled "chem" and "nuk" (sic).
Exhibit 65-043: Father and son portrait of Malvo and Muhammad. "We will kill them all. Jihad."
Exhibit 65-056: A self-portrait of Malvo as sniper, lying in wait, with his rifle. "JIHAD" written in bold letters.
Exhibit 65-057: A drawing of the Twin Towers burning with a plane flying toward the buildings. Captions: "JIHAD ISLAM UNITE RISE!" along with "America did this" and "You were warned." Portrait of Malvo as sniper labeled "Believer" and portrait of Osama bin Laden labeled "prophet." A poem: "Our minarets are our bayonets, Our mosques are our baracks (sic), Our believers are our soldiers." The American flag and the Star of David drawn in cross hairs.
Exhibit 65-067: A suicide bomber labeled "Hamas" walking into a McDonald's restaurant. Another drawing of the Twin Towers burning captioned: "85 percent chance Zionists did this." More scrawls: "ALLAH AKBAR," "JIHAD" and "Islam will explode."
Exhibit 65-103: A lion accompanies chapter and verse from the Koran ("Sura 2:190"): "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you and slay them wherever ye catch them."
Exhibit 65-109: Portrait of Osama bin Laden, captioned "Servant of Allah."
Exhibit 65-117: The White House drawn in cross hairs, surrounded by missiles, with a warning: "Sep. 11 we will ensure will look like a picnic to you" and "you will bleed to death little by little."
Exhibit 65-133: Reference to "Islamic counter attack force . . . ICAF."
Exhibit 65-114: Self-portrait of Malvo as sniper. Rant says "they all died and they all deserved it."
Exhibit 65-101: Malvo's thought for the day: "Islam the only true guidance, the way of peace."
Oddly enough, I don't recall Richard Roeper ever apologizing. But then they never do, do they?
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