Jake Tapper told not to rush to judgment by Juliette Kayyem when he described Tsarnaev brothers as ‘Islamic terrorists’
Jake Tapper of CNN stated in live coverage, “It certainly seems as if these two [Brothers Tsarnaev] were Islamic Terrorists,” which appears to have raised eyebrows and received some attacks, even though it appears to be a correct assessment.
“Yes, but those are two separate words,” Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor and former homeland security official, reminded Tapper.
The two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in a shootout with police, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is apparently hospitalized after a shootout with police, are Muslim and allegedly are terrorists.
Kayyem had been cautioning viewers and fellow journalists not to jump to conclusions, “The fact that they’re from Chechnya,” Kayyem said, “is not a motivation.”
Sadly there’s a faction in liberalism battling this “Islamaphobia.”
Salon’s David Sirota wrote a piece titled Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” It was still before we had any idea of who they were, when he added:
I hoped (though certainly never assumed) the Boston bomber ends up being a white non-Muslim American because in a country where white people are never collectively profiled, surveilled or targeted by law enforcement, that would best guarantee a measured — rather than a hysterical, civil-liberties-trampling — reaction to the atrocity. For this, I was lambasted by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly to their thousands of followers for being “race obsessed” (O’Reilly, in fact, took a step into straight-up slander by subsequently claiming that I am hoping Americans kill other Americans in terrorist attacks).