WaPo Responds To Sri Lanka Massacres By Focusing On ‘Far-Right Anger’

In response to a horrific series of radical Islamist jihadist attacks Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka that killed 290 and left an additional 500 injured, Rick Noack of The Washington Post has decided that the proper subject of his ire ought to be…”far-right anger in the West.”

Yes, seriously.

Here is a portion of Noack’s piece, entitled, “Christianity under attack? Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West”:

To some, [the attacks were] further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack. Several churches were targeted in Sunday’s bombing attacks, along with hotels and a banquet hall. At one Catholic church in Negombo, more than 100 people were killed. The attack took place on Easter, one of the most important dates on the Christian calendar. …

Regional branches and sites associated with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party framed the Sri Lankan bloodshed as an attack “against us Christians,” even though the party officially claims to be open to members of all religions …

Local party branches in the city of Solingen and eastern Germany lashed out at journalists for initially refraining to establish a link to Islamist terrorism. Some far-right groups claimed hypocrisy and double standards, arguing that attacks on Christians failed to receive the same response as attacks on Muslims. …

Katie Hopkins, a British writer and provocateur, complained on Twitter that American liberal figures such as former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not using the word “Christian” to describe those killed in the church bombings. …

American far-right activists offered their own responses. “Followers of Jesus worldwide are being killed and otherwise terribly persecuted every day,” Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration aide now best known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, said on his radio show. “All too often, their losses go unremarked.”

Well, as it turns out and as The Daily Wire reported earlier today, Islamic State has belatedly taken credit for the Sri Lanka massacre. And as it turns out, “followers of Jesus worldwide,” to use Frank Gaffney’s language that Noack apparently deems so irksome, are those who attend church on Easter Sunday. Really, this is not rocket science.

What Noack really seems to have an issue with is notion of the oppressed Christian — but the oppression of Christian in Islamist and totalitarian societies is a well-known fact, as The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh pointed out yesterday. And as Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner notes, “Christians in the Middle East have just survived a genocide attempt by ISIS. Christians in pitiless, autocratic regimes, including Iran, China, and North Korea, are subjected regularly to persecution. In fact, Christianity is the most harassed faith in the world, followed closely by Islam, according to the Pew Research Center.”

This is hardly the only recent instance of The Washington Post publishing a defamatory hit on Western conservatives. Just last week and in a similar cultural context, as The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported, The Washington Post published a disgraceful and calumnious smear against Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro:

Self-described “expert” on “far-right extremism” Talia Lavin has struck again, this time falsely accusing Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro of stoking the flames of racism against Muslims and pushing conservatives toward a race war over the destruction of Notre Dame cathedral. …

Shapiro, she claims, blew a dog-whistle for anti-Muslim violence when he commented that Notre Dame was a “monument to Western civilization” and “Judeo-Christian heritage.” To drive her point home, she juxtaposed Shapiro with Richard Spencer, perhaps the best known American neo-Nazi, as if Shapiro had anything to do with Spencer, whom Shapiro has repeatedly and vociferously condemned.

Lavin’s claims are downright bizarre. Notre Dame is, indeed, a monument to the civilization — the Western civilization — that built it over the course of several hundred years. It is not simply a work of art and architecture, but a monument to Christianity, and specifically Catholicism. It is a place of worship that houses one of France’s largest collection of holy relics and religiously-inspired art and sculpture.