Two Attacks. Two Narratives. One Selective Standard.

There were two recent attacks that involved two sets of children. But there is one unfortunate truth that needs to be said.

Let’s start with the irony of it all because it tells you everything. Two teenagers shot up the Islamic Center of San Diego on May 18. They killed three men. A security guard named Amin Abdullah stood his ground and likely saved 140 children inside. The killers were neo-Nazis who left behind a manifesto. And in that manifesto, their writings were not only anti-Muslim, they were also intensely antisemitic, and in key sections identified Jews as the primary enemy.

One of them wrote that he didn’t really hate Muslims. He called Jews “the most evil creature in the world.” They denied the Holocaust and they praised the men who shot up Tree of Life and Chabad of Poway. They saw Muslims and Black people as tools controlled by Jews. The FBI’s lead agent said it clearly. They didn’t discriminate on who they hated.

Just think about this. The men who attacked a mosque framed Jews as the central force behind the world they hated. But now, let’s explore how the story got reported in the press.

The Washington Post framed it as an attack on Muslims amid rising anti-Muslim rhetoric. NPR did the same. It tied the shooting to Gaza, to the war with Iran, to the election of a Muslim mayor. The wire copy that seemed to run everywhere led with a “climate” of bigotry. There were the “words have consequences,” that advocacy groups declared. I will agree with that. But they seem to only count words against their selected groups, Jews not among them.

Here is what mostly didn’t happen. The antisemitism at the dead center of these killers’ own writing got folded into a line. They hated everyone, so there was “nothing to see here.” The thing the manifesto obsessed over became a footnote to a story about something else.

I’m not saying the anti-Muslim hatred wasn’t real. It was. Three men are dead and a mosque full of children was a target. That is evil, and we all should be able to say that.

And here is a fact the coverage mostly skipped. The mosque’s imam, Taha Hassane, defended October 7. Thirteen days after the massacre he told his congregation that resistance is justified, that you cannot call a man fighting for his life a terrorist. That is a real moral failure. It does not mean he deserved a single thing that happened to his community.  But an honest press could have held both. The news outlets that set the dominant frame, the ones that led with anti-Muslim rhetoric, mostly left it out. What about those words the activists were referring to?

What I’m saying is that the press has a reflex. And the reflex points in one direction. And now, here is my proof.

In March, a man named Ayman Ghazali rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He was armed. There were more than 100 people inside, most of them small children. The security team stopped him, though the building caught fire. The FBI called it a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.

There were uncanny similarities. Both were religious institutions with over 100 children inside. Both involved heroic security guards who saved lives, and both were victims of hate crimes. But now let’s examine the difference.

The coverage of Temple Israel went immediately for context. The Detroit News said events in the Middle East “appear to have precipitated” the attack. Much of the coverage emphasized the attacker’s grief. He had lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. A niece, a nephew, and brothers. Neighbors were quoted calling him “the best,” quiet, pleasant, and a hard worker. The press debated whether his dead brothers were Hezbollah. The motive, they kept saying, was still under investigation.

A man drove a vehicle into a building full of Jewish children. And the story became why he might have done it. Picture that same response applied to San Diego. Could you imagine reporters digging for the tender backstory of two neo-Nazis or imagine neighbors quoted about what “good boys” they were? It’s unthinkable.

This is the asymmetry, and it is the whole point. When a Muslim attacks Jews over a grievance tied to Israel, the press goes looking for the grievance, for the “context.”

When Muslims are the victims, the press goes looking for a different context. The Islamophobic climate or the rhetoric of hate and all of the bigotry in the air. See the difference?

And in both cases, the contextualizing never addressed the hard question. It never dares to raise questions about Islamist or anti-Israel ideology as a thing that produces violence. That question is treated as off limits. The grievance gets explored when it explains an attack on Jews. It gets ignored when it might complicate an attack on Muslims. And mention Islamism or jihadism as terrorism and you get accused of being Islamophobic.

Of course, there were those who condemned both attacks without qualifiers. The Temple Israel attack was widely condemned. Governor Whitmer called Temple Israel antisemitism at its absolute worst. A prominent Dearborn imam, Hassan Qazwini, condemned the synagogue attack flatly and said the airstrikes gave no blank check to anyone. That is what decency sounds like and there are still those capable of it.

But condemnation is not the same as scrutiny. You can condemn an attack and still spend your column humanizing the attacker. That is what happened with Temple Israel. The condemnation came packaged in an explanation. The synagogue attacker got a backstory. The mosque was given a climate of bigotry. The Jews at the center of the San Diego manifesto got a footnote, and the imam who excused October 7 got a pass.

I run a school and have more than 40 years in Jewish education. I know what it is to harden a building meant to be a safe haven for children. I know what it is like to teach children to love who they are and also show them where the exits are because of all of the hate and antisemitism. That is our Jewish reality in America and we call that normal? Jews think about hiding their Jewish stars or not wearing a kippah in public, yet a keffiyeh draws no such fear. On the contrary, it has become a symbol of resistance, pride for all sorts of Westerners in our streets.

So here is what honesty should have demanded. Condemn the murder of three Muslim men completely, with no hedging or “but.” Their mosque should have been safe. Their children should never have been targets.

And say the rest clearly too. The killers in San Diego hated Jews most of all. The attacker in Michigan was handed grievances and a “but.” The men murdered at the mosque got no ‘but’ at all.  Different extremist ideologies produced both attacks, and both turned houses of worship and children into targets. Hate is hate.

So why does the press and pundits sort the scrutiny by the religion or ethnicity of the victim? If they can only see clearly when the victims fit their narrative, they are not pursuing truth, they are protecting a story, and we must call it out.