ABC News Uses Antisemitic Attack To Parrot Hamas Front Group’s Talking Points On ‘Islamophobia’
Just two days after an alleged radical Islamist terrorist set a group of peaceful demonstrators on fire in Boulder, Colorado, ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson wants readers to know that “Islamophobia” is the real concern.
Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman — illegally residing in the U.S. — allegedly set Jewish demonstrators on fire. The demonstrators were calling for the release of hostages still held by Hamas. Two dozen were injured, including a Holocaust survivor.
The attack came on the heels of several other disturbing antisemitic attacks, including one in which a couple was murdered in the streets of D.C. as they exited the Capital Jewish Museum, and the suspect shouted, “Free Palestine.” Prior to that a 38-year-old man was charged after allegedly firebombing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home. The perpetrator seemingly had antisemitic motivations for targeting Shapiro.
But for Hutchinson, the attack in Boulder came “amid record incidents of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes.”
Hutchinson first cites an audit released from the Anti-Defamation League that shows antisemitic incidents have, as reported by Hutchinson, “jumped 344% over the past five years and increased 893% over the past 10 years.”
The ADL reports that “for the first time in the history of the Audit, a majority (58%) of all incidents contained elements related to Israel or Zionism.” Since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the ADL says there have been “more than 10,000 anti-semitic incidents … in the United States alone.” As the scope of the crisis becomes clear, Hutchinson pivots: “Islamophobic attack[s] have also been on the rise.”
To substantiate this claim, Hutchinson turns not to law enforcement data or the purportedly nonpartisan Anti-Defamation League, but to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was created in 1994 “as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony,” as reported in these pages. CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, said one day after the Oct. 7 attack that “All Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, Oct. 8 — and every day — in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime [Israel].”
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Yet this is the organization Hutchinson presents as a neutral source of information on Islamophobia in America.
According to this Hamas front group, there have been more than 8,650 complaints in 2024. But by equating CAIR’s internal tally with the ADL’s audit, Hutchinson engages in a false equivalence that undermines the gravity of real antisemitic violence.
In 2016, the late Norm Macdonald captured this dynamic in a single tweet: “What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?”
It was a joke, of course, but it exposed a dark truth: The propaganda press is often more concerned with how Islamist violence might reflect on Muslims collectively than with the suffering of the victims.
Nearly a decade later, Macdonald’s satire reads less like comedy and more like a newsroom assignment memo.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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