Guardian piece on U.S. soldier arrested for planning terror attack leaves out one “small” detail

When even the New York Times can’t avoid noting the Islamist motivations of the Army private who was arrested this week, near his (Fort Hood) military base in Texas, in what local law enforcement officials described as a serious “terror plot” to kill other soldiers, it’s quite revealing that the Guardian somehow managed to pull off such a rhetorical feat.  

According to officials quoted in the NYT report, the suspect, Naser Jason Abdo, had a gun, more than one wall clock, a cellphone, duct tape and a shopping list for what appeared to be explosive components, as well as an article on “how to make a bomb in your kitchen” from the English-language al-Qaeda magazine Inspire.

The Guardian piece, US soldier arrested near Foot Hood admits to attack plan, July 29, evidently found the apparent religious inspiration of the suspect -who was planning to murder US soldiers at Ft. Hood, in a way reminiscent of the attack in 2009, on the same military base, by Nidal Malik Hasan, which left 13 people dead, and 29 injured – of no particular significance. 

And while the Guardian piece noted the 2009 Ft. Hood shooting in a short sentence in the last paragraph, it similarly failed to note the religious motivation, nor the fact that the suspect of that attack, Nidal Malik Hasan, was radicalized by an American Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, with ties to al-Qaeda.  

Abdo’s religious background was only mentioned obliquely, in the context of noting his complaint that his religious beliefs were inconsistent with serving:

Abdo applied for conscientious objector status in 2010 after he decided Islamic standards would prohibit his service in the US army in any war, military officials said.

Inversely, the Christian faith, and extreme right-wing political ideology, of the Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, behind the recent deadly terrorist attack is routinely noted in both straight news stories and CiF commentary.

While the New York Times’ motto, printed in the upper left-hand corner of the front page, “All the news that’s fit to print”, is the cause of much derision by the Gray Lady’s many critics who note the paper’s egregious political slant, compared to the ideologically driven bias which informs almost everything the Guardian reports, and what they don’t report, the New York Times is practically The Encyclopedia Britannica.  

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