On his weekly appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, Mark and Hugh discussed the stabbings at the University of California in Merced. Like everything else in the news, they're nothing to do with Islam. Just ask the Merced County Sheriff:
[Sheriff Verne Warnke] told a crowd of reporters Thursday "there is nothing to indicate this was anything other than a teenage boy who got upset with fellow classmates."
Asked if the manifesto made any references to Allah, Warnke said there were, but dismissed any suggestion that Mohammad was motivated by religion.
"His belief was through the Muslim faith, but there's nothing to indicate anything other than that," Warnke said. "It'd be like a Christian referring to the Lord Jesus."
On the radio Hugh questioned Mark about the authorities' see-no-Islam approach:
HUGH HEWITT: Here's the big story that Jeff and I were talking about, and Donald and I were talking about. Yesterday, a knife-wielding student at UC Merced stabs four people before he's shot dead. We can't get his name. 24 hours passed, his name is released this morning. It turns out that his name is Faisal Mohammed. Not three hours goes by, and UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland comes out to say that the attack was not in any way related to terrorism. It appears to have been motivated by personal animosities, not a political agenda, and that, "it would be irresponsible to draw any link to terrorism based solely on the ethnicity of the suspect. The Sheriff said it was an act of an individual for a vendetta, nothing to indicate that there was any political or religious motivation." Mark Steyn, that is not rational, unless and until they have absolutely gone through his computer and found that there are no jihadi videos or references to Palestinians' sudden attacks on Israelis with knives, which is immediately what I thought of.
MARK STEYN: Yeah... Whenever some guy called Mohammed - sometimes Mohammed is his first name, sometimes it's a surname, sometimes it's both names - and the first thing that anybody does anywhere around the Western world is rush to assure us that this has nothing to do with either Islam or terrorism. So there's nothing, no reason to worry, folks - because if someone suddenly decides to come at you and he's shouting 'Allahu Akbar!', that's just Arabic for 'there's nothing to see here'... The headline in the newspaper, on ABC News' website, it struck me. It said: 'Suspect in UC Merced stabbng ID'd as 18 year old from Santa Clara.' So this is the way it's presented now. It's like 'You know, those crazy teenagers from Santa Clara... these juvenile delinquents they've got down there in the leather jackets, these Santa Clara teens, beware of them. They're crazy guys. The Santa Clara community, you don't want to go near any of them.' And we all know the reality of what is going on here...
JEFF HUNT: Yeah, Mark, this is Jeff Hunt. I agree absolutely with you. I don't understand why the police officers are taking this side. I mean, for the most part, you can understand why politicians do this. It kind of flies in the face of the narrative that there's no terrorist attacks here, there's no threat here in the United States on these types of things. But for law enforcement, who tends to be very neutral, to take that line and to note definitively that this had nothing to do with terrorism. Meanwhile, you have a stabbing epidemic that's taking place in the Middle East, and we're just kind of, like you said, this is just an 18 year old from Santa Clara that has nothing to do with the stabbing epidemics in the Middle East. I think it's irresponsible of the police to jump to that conclusion so quickly. I don't quite understand it.
MS: Well, you say police are neutral, but in fact, there is a politically correct aspect to law enforcement these days, particularly where this issue is concerned. I could reel off a hundred examples – 19 men in Toronto were found to be plotting to behead the prime minister on live television. And the Toronto police chief stands up there at the press conference and says 'oh, these are men from a diverse range of communities'. They were 19 young Muslim men. They weren't in the least bit diverse. But he was concerned to de-Islamize the incident. The London Tube bombings in 2005, I believe it was the deputy chief constable of the Metropolitan Police in London, again stood up at the press conference and did this no Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam... Before they've even sealed the scene, there's some police chief somewhere standing up and saying there's no Islam to see here.
You can read the interview in full here - and listen to it here.
~On Monday Mark will be starting the week with Sean Hannity coast to coast on Fox News at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific.
