Amerika

How do you turn an Iranian into a white neo-Nazi?

With media spin, of course.

From yesterday’s The Local:

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people before killing himself in Munich on Friday, was proud to be born on April 20th 1998 and thus share a birthday with Adolf Hitler, the FAZ has been told by people close to the investigation.

David Sonboly, who was born to Iranian parents in Munich, was allegedly proud to be German and Iranian, which he considered to make him “Aryan,” people who knew him told investigators.

…Investigators are now looking into whether he intentionally killed foreigners. Seven his nine victims were Muslims and all nine of them had migrant backgrounds.

Here is how the lie is built:

He was already known to have an affiliation to the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, whose atrocity took place five years to the day before Sonboly’s.

Actually, we do not know that. We know he had at least one book about spree killers. That means it had multiple spree killers in it. That means it was unlikely he was fixated on Breivik unless he has said so. Did he? Can anyone tell us? Because so far, the only people making the Breivik comparison are white police officers who did not know him.

Next, we have this mysterious leak to the FAZ. One reason that old-school journalists distrusted leaks is that they force public institutions into the impossible position of trying to prove a negative. “X person said this, is it true?” can only be countered by telling a full narrative, which is almost always irresponsible at that point in an investigation.

But look how craftily this has been assembled. First they said he was a white shooter; then they said no, he was not white, but he was inspired by Anders Breivik; finally, since the previous lie went unchallenged by anyone in the lap-dog media, they spun out the narrative to include these dubious allusions to Hitler.

One way this could go down is a lot like it did at Columbine, where the shooters were also reported as Nazis until someone found out that one of them was in fact Jewish: disturbed person likes a lot of things, symbolized by say ten bookshelves. On those bookshelves are found books about Hitler, in addition to 200 other things.

The press will report only the Hitler link and overlook the other 200. This is called “cherry-picking” data and they get away with it because listing all 200 would probably bore their audience, so they choose the one they can build a story around, instead of getting the full story.

In the same way, Ari David Sonboly clearly had a lot of influences and conflicting impulses within him. The Left will filter these and mention only the ones that advance the Leftist narrative, and discard the rest as “details” and “miscellany.”

Tags: anders breivik, ari david sonboly, leftism, media