Those who watched only the first of the three-part Netflix series "American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing" and knew nothing of the actual bombing had to think ill of America.
The producers let Imam Ismail Fenni and sanctimonious Boston Globe reporter Phillip Martin go on at length about how the authorities prejudged Muslims as likely suspects in the April 2013 bombing that killed three innocents and severely wounded many more.
Watching this 10 years after the fact, I found myself yelling at the screen, "Islamic terrorists were responsible for the bombing!"
As it happens, I know the story well, particularly its media coverage. I was at home recovering from surgery and watched pretty much non-stop from April 15, 2013, the day of the bombing, until the capture of the second suspect 101 hours later.
For the first two days of that coverage, until Boston Police Superintendent Billy Evans prevailed upon the feds to show the photos of the suspects, I listened to endless chatter about who the media hoped the bombers were.
It was not hard to confirm my memory. A CNN headline from April 16 of that year captured the thrust of that network's coverage: "Boston, Oklahoma City, Waco: Why Patriots Day?"
"Only the Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing actually occurred on April 19, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord," reported CNN's Emanuella Grinberg, "Still, to many following developments in Boston online, the proximity of Monday's attack to the April 19 anniversaries was enough to suggest an act of domestic terrorism."
Grinberg seemed to overlook the fact that the FBI, not the Branch Davidians, chose April 19 as the day of the siege. McVeigh and cohorts likely selected their date in response, but one event does not a pattern make.
Esquire's Charles Pierce thought otherwise. Within hours of the bombing, he was reminding his readers that April 15 is the official Patriot's Day holiday, but that "the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh."
For two days, until the authorities released the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers, this kind of speculation was unapologetic and unceasing. In the Netflix documentary, there was no mention of it. Only Muslims and their allies were allowed to complain about media coverage.
Ever since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, a bombing Bill Clinton and his acolytes exploited to its maximum political potential, the media have been eager to blame just about every lethal event on white right-wingers.
Case in point, the D.C. snipers. In 2002, given the three-week length of the siege, the media reported ad nauseam and without caution that the snipers terrorizing the District of Columbia were white men. They weren't.
"Pundits and criminal profilers got it all wrong," reported the Baltimore Sun. "They had predicted that the deadly accurate sniper would turn out to be a young to middle-age white man with a political or social ax to grind."
The article in question sought to console African Americans for the fact that the killers were black. Dr. Na'im Akbar, former president of the National Association of Black Psychologists, "said many African Americans know that the race of the serial sniper suspects will reflect negatively on them."
Blacks were not the only ones with cause for concern. "Similarly," the Sun reported, "some Muslims fear a possible backlash." They needn't worry too much – the first mention of the faith of the lead sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was in the 27th paragraph.
The media never fret about possible backlash if the killer or killers prove to be white. Nor do they apologize. One would think that the unraveling of the Jussie Smollett or Bubba Wallace hoaxes might have induced an apology to MAGA America, but none was forthcoming.
If the viewer fast forwards through the whining by Martin, Fenni and especially Tsarnaev friend Youssef Eddafali, "American Manhunt" is worth watching.
The producers delve into the Islamic radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, the former killed on the scene, the latter now on death row. And the saga of the event's one living hero, Danny Meng, adds some surprising new information.
For better or worse, the producers leave it largely to the viewers to judge the legality of the house-to-house search of Watertown and the sanity of the lockdown of the entire Boston metro.
The latter struck me as an eerie projection of what 2020 held in store and the former a scary reminder of what Boston patriots rebelled against 250 years ago when the phrase "Boston Strong" actually meant something.
Jack Cashill's book "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities" is now available for pre-order in all formats.
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