In the course of just one week, while taking on two of the most controversial issues in our body politic, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has twice been caught lying. Saturday, in an effort to boost Barack Obama’s call to restrict our Second Amendment civil rights, Bump used mass-shooting stats so phony that even the gun control extremists at the New York Times felt compelled to debunk them.
On Monday, as part of the Washington Post’s never-ending quest to destroy Donald Trump, elect Hillary Clinton, and cover for Barack Obama, Bump went to hysterical lengths to dismiss and downplay poll numbers that tell the disturbing truth about the state of Islam. Let’s start with his lies about guns.
In his headline, and using the terror attack in San Bernardino to boost the case for gun control, Bump told his readers that “[t]he San Bernardino shooting continues a disturbing trend: No week since 2013 without a mass shooting.”
This is such a brazen lie that the same New York Times that published a gun control editorial on its front page this week felt the need to correct it:
On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
Bump’s left-wing zealotry hits its zenith over Donald Trump’s call for a temporary halt of Muslim immigration. In his statement calling for the pause, Trump cited polls backing up his claim that Islam is a serious problem here in American and throughout the world.
Here is how Bump chose to describe the poll results:
The polling firm has found that [1] Muslims across the globe are overwhelmingly opposed to the Islamic State and [2] in 2007 that Muslims were much less likely to view suicide bombings as justified than five years prior. Pew also found a partisan split in which Republican Americans were far more likely to hold negative views of Muslims than Democrats. In 2011, they learned that [3] U.S. Muslims almost never consider suicide bombings to be justified.
The only effective way to expose what a brazen liar Bump is, is to take these one-by-one. Bear with me.
- “Muslims across the globe are overwhelmingly opposed to the Islamic State”
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Throughout the world. According to the poll Bump links to but hopes his readers will not think too much about, anywhere from 1% to 14% of Muslims view ISIS favorably.
In other words, millions and millions of Muslims view ISIS favorably, and in service to Barack Obama, Bump spins that terrifying fact as “overwhelmingly opposed.”
- “[I]n 2007 … Muslims were much less likely to view suicide bombings as justified”
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Throughout the world. According to the polls Bump links to but hopes his readers will not think too much about, of the 16 countries polled, anywhere from 8% to 42% of Muslims view suicide bombings as justified.
In other words, tens of millions of Muslims view suicide bombings as justified, and in service to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Bump spins that horrifying number as “much less likely.”
- “U.S. Muslims almost never consider suicide bombings to be justified.”
There are close to three million Muslims in the United States. According to the poll Bump links to but hopes his readers will not think too much about, only 81% of U.S. Muslims say that suicide bombings are never justified. One-percent say they are often justified; 7% say sometimes; 5% say rarely.
In other words, close to a half-million AMERICAN Muslims do not agree that suicide bombings are never justified, and in service to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Bump spins that spine-chilling fact as “almost never consider.”
When confronted with these facts Wednesday, Bump replied with snark:
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@NolteNC lol you are so cute when you are mad
— Philip Bump (@pbump) December 9, 2015
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Turning 4 mass-shooting into more than a hundred… Using rhetorical tricks to cover up very disturbing truths about Islamic extremism, is not journalism, not bias, and not even spin. Bump’s lies, the lengths to which he and the Washington Post are willing to go to cover up inconvenient facts, are outright Orwellian.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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