The Oklahoma City bombing was immediately blamed on Muslims before evidence emerged
Evidence
So inflamed against Islam has the media environment in the United States and the West generally become that when the Oklahoma City bomb attack took place in April 1995 the alarm was sounded that the Muslims had struck once again; I recall (with residual chagrin) that I must have received twenty-five phone calls that afternoon from newspapers, the major networks, and several resourceful reporters, all of them acting on the assumption that since I was from and had written about the Middle East that I must know something more than most other people. The entirely factitious connection between Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism was never more forcefully made evident to me; the sense of guilty involvement which, despite myself, I was made to feel struck me as precisely the feeling I was meant to have. The media had assaulted me, in short, and Islam — or rather my connection with Islam — was the cause. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 10
Categorization
- XREF: The preemptive misattribution of a mass-casualty attack to an out-group mirrors how moral panics assign blame by scripted templates before facts — the same dynamic covered in the cultural panic work on the author’s shelf.