MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell was so desperate to absolve Islam as a motive for yesterday’s terror attack by a Tennessee Muslim she tried to get a classmate of the murderer to say that the killer liked southern culture, guns, and hunting like other southerners do. Because, you know, conservative southerners are more prone to terror than Muslims are, right?
Mitchell was interviewing one of id’d murderer Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’ classmates about what other kids thought of him when he was at Red Bank High School in Red Bank, Tennessee–a city just across the river from Chattanooga.
Mitchell launched into an odd line of questioning about Abdulazeez, a line of questioning that confused the killer’s classmate. Mitchell wanted to know if the killer was “part of small-town Tennessee activity” like shooting and gun culture.
“Were guns a big part of activities—social or other activities?” Mitchell asked the young woman who went to high school with the killer..
You could tell that the young woman was quite confused by the question. Mitchell then repeated her question and added more of the context she was trying to tease out of the girl.
“Did he hunt, did he shoot?” Mitchell asked. “Was that just part of small-town Tennessee activity?”
Finally understanding the line of pap that Mitchell was trying to invent, the woman replied with a firm no.
“Um, he actually wasn’t one of the guys I heard about going hunting,” Abdulazeez’s classmate averred. “He wasn’t really that kind of guy.”
So, what was that about? Well, what that is about is that Mitchell was desperate to absolve Islam and was trying to say that Abdulazeez became a murderer because of conservative, Tennessee values, not Islam.
That’s right, Andre Mitchell was trying to blame the South, not Islam, for this mass killing.
