On July 29 in Brooklyn, New York, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley was stabbed to death after an altercation at a gas station. The press has made two things abundantly clear: Sibley was a gay black man, and the stabbing is being investigated as a hate crime. One glaring omission has been consistent across most of the media’s coverage. The men who attacked Sibley were Muslim and, according to one witness, shouted, “We Muslim and we don’t like gays!”
The media are twisting themselves in knots to avoid mentioning this. This piece from NBC describes his attackers only as “a group of men.” An article at CNN uses similarly vague language and includes a handpicked quote from the assistant chief of NYPD’s detective bureau: “The suspect is being charged with a hate crime based on statements from the group in general. You have a lot of anti-gay statements, and a lot of derogatory statements being made — anti-black — from the group and from the defendant himself.”
CNN could not be less descriptive and more obtuse if it tried. The vagueness is intended to let readers’ minds wander, using their own biases to draw conclusions about who might stab a black gay man.
A tweet from The New York Times describes Sibley’s attackers only as “men” who used “slurs.” An article at MSNBC covered the incident in a typical dishonest fashion by excluding the motivation of the attackers, but MSNBC did not miss the opportunity to conflate this stabbing with people who oppose lewd sexual performances in the presence of children. “Because across this country, what we are seeing is a coordinated attack on queer people being free in public.”
In other words, if you are the type of person who opposes drag shows in front of kids, you might be capable of stabbing a dancing gay man to death outside a gas station.
Despite referring to a section of the article as “key facts,” Forbes went out of its way to avoid any mention of the religious motivation, but made sure to include, “the men began yelling homophobic and racist slurs at Sibley.” Once again, the omission of the religious motivation combined with the inclusion of this sentence is intended to mislead readers.
The journalistic giants over at Teen Vogue described the incident by including a cherrypicked statement from Otis Pena, a witness and friend of Sibley who was present at the time of the stabbing: “They murdered him because he’s gay, because he stood up for his friends. … His name was O’Shae and you all killed him. You all murdered him right in front of me.” Teen Vogue did not bother to mention that Pena offered a more relevant and descriptive statement about the incident. Pena’s first Facebook post after the fatal stabbing said, “They hated us because we are gay! Screaming we Muslim and we don’t like gays!!!”
Not to worry, the intellectually curious readers of Teen Vogue will surely track down the truth on their own. These generic descriptions are used for the express purpose of either misleading readers or avoiding uncomfortable facts. If religion is the motivation for a crime, but the specific religion is not mentioned, you can be sure it is Islam.
In a shocking display of quasi-journalism, USA Today mentioned that Sibley’s attackers were motivated by their Muslim faith, but failed to do so until the second-to-last paragraph — an ordering of facts not based on relevancy but on the correct assumption that most readers will not digest the entire article and therefore miss this piece of inconvenient information.
There are too many examples to list them all, but because it is politically damaging and makes them extremely uncomfortable, the media are for the most part omitting the fact that the attacker cited his Muslim faith just prior to stabbing Sibley. This omission is outrageous for several reasons, not least among them is the stark contrast to the coverage this incident would have received if the attacker had not been Muslim.
If the suspect were a white Christian, this story would be the banner headline on every major news publication in America with the suspect’s race and religion mentioned in the headline itself — even if the suspect made no statement that indicated his race or religion played a role in the crime (it is worth acknowledging that since Islam is a religion and not a race, the suspect could have been a white Muslim, but you get the point).
The dishonest coverage of Sibley’s stabbing comes as no surprise. Leftists have put themselves in this position by trying to form a coalition comprised of various groups whose beliefs are often at odds with one another, hoping that none of those groups notice that without their consent they are being lumped in with people they have nothing in common with.
The idea is that, despite their differences, a relentless message of oppression would bind these groups together and convince them to hate America, specifically straight white men to which all their woes are attributed. As the left rapidly devolves into a morally depraved and perverted cult increasingly obsessed with the sexualization of children while insisting on absurdities including the claim that men can get pregnant, things are not going as planned. Various minority groups are starting to push back against this agenda.
The religiously motivated stabbing of Sibley by a Muslim could have easily occurred years ago, evidenced by the deadly 2016 Islamic terrorist attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, but perhaps something else is going on. As recently noted by Douglas Murray, support for gay marriage among the public is on the decline in the U.S. Murray, who incidentally happens to be gay, correctly explained that the gender ideology movement is the source of the decline in support for gay marriage, pointing out that the movement is “losing control of itself” and declaring that children are “the trip wire for the general public” when it comes to drawing a line in the sand.
In addition to children whose innocence and physical well-being are under attack via macabre surgeries and the use of puberty blockers, the left’s gender ideology is unintentionally creating another group of victims: gay Americans. It would be dishonest to claim without evidence that Sibley was stabbed because the Muslim man who attacked him was fed up with the trajectory of gender ideology, but it is reasonable to assume that the nonsense spouted by its adherents is fostering the very climate the left claims to fear.
Groups such as Gays Against Groomers have seen the writing on the wall and recognize the threat posed by this bizarre gender ideology. I have met members of Gays Against Groomers at a protest (they were there to oppose the sexualization of children), and what they will tell you is that after having worked to achieve a level of acceptance among the public, their progress is being eroded by the very people who claim to champion them.
What we are witnessing is a mathematical certainty when a belief system has no limiting principles. It will eat its own. If the left truly fears an environment that is hostile to gay Americans like O’Shae Sibley, perhaps they should examine their behavior and consider the consequences of their insatiable desire to take things too far.
Don’t hold your breath. This tendency to accept virtually any behavior is foundational to leftism. In The Long March, Roger Kimball eloquently summarizes by saying, “critics of liberalism will note that liberalism’s tendency to let tolerance and openness trump every other virtue renders it peculiarly impotent when faced with substantive moral dilemmas: absolutized, tolerance and openness become indistinguishable from moral paralysis.”
