Tendentious

So a little over a week ago, on July 30, during the weekend of the Seattle murders, I noted that the ADL's Abe Foxman devoted seemingly all of his energy toward not forgiving Mel Gibson, a contrast I though was horrifying, as I said on one of the message boards I post at:

...on this of all weekends, when Jews are being mowed down by Muslims in Seattle, the ADL can find time to condemn an actor for things he said in a drunken haze.

I'm speechless.

I was surprised that people jumped on me for saying that ("That's where it starts, bonehead!" said one genius to me). But I am in good company:

Dennis Prager at townhall.com, August 8:

On July 28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and wounding five others.

On the same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer who arrested him.

Question: Which story has most troubled the Left?

The answer is known to any American who can hear or read.

Or Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, August 6:

By any rational calculus...[the Haq story in Seattle] was more significant.....after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson's drunken outburst.

Mark Steyn, August 6:

But let's say you're a northwestern American municipality -- Seattle, for example -- and you haven't lobbed missiles at anybody, but a Muslim male shows up anyway and shoots six Jewish women, one of whom tries to flee up the stairs, but he spots her, leans over the railing, fires again and kills her. He describes himself as "an American Muslim angry at Israel" and tells 911 dispatchers: ''These are Jews. I want these Jews to get out. I'm tired of getting pushed around, and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.''

Well, that's apparently entirely "proportionate," so "proportionate" that the event is barely reported in the American media, or (if it is) it's portrayed as some kind of random convenience-store drive-by shooting. Pamela Waechter's killer informed his victims that "I'm only doing this for a statement," but the world couldn't be less interested in his statement, not compared to his lawyer's statement that he's suffering from "bipolar disorder.'' And the local FBI guy, like the Mounties in Toronto a month or so back, took the usual no-jihad-to-see-here line. ''There's nothing to indicate it's terrorism related,'' said Special Assistant Agent-In-Charge David Gomez. In America, terrorism is like dentistry and hairdressing: It doesn't count unless you're officially credentialed.

On the other hand, when a drunk movie star gets pulled over and starts unburdening himself of various theories about "f---ing Jews," hold the front page! That is so totally "disproportionate" it's the biggest story of the moment. The head of America's most prominent Jewish organization will talk about nothing else for days on end, he and the media too tied up dealing with Mel Gibson's ruminations on "f---ing Jews" to bother with footling peripheral stories about actual f---ing Jews murdered for no other reason than because they're f---ing Jews.