Letters to the Editor March 31, 2021: Sooper bloopers

• Published date: 30 March 2021
• Date: 30 March 2021
• Author: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Regarding "Colorado shooting: Ten killed including one policeman" (March 23) and "Boulder shooting suspect will undergo mental health assessment" (March 25), I find it puzzling and even disturbing that at no point does The Jerusalem Post ever bother to share with its readers the simple objective and relevant truth that the shooter is Muslim and that he traveled out of his way specifically to massacre people at an identifiably Jewish target.

The murderer, who praised ISIS, passed a number of closer supermarkets in order to massacre shoppers specifically at the King Soopers supermarket, which advertises itself on the Web as "Your one-stop shop for kosher groceries" and is included on a Vaad Hakashrus of Denver list of stores that carry kosher items. A simple Google search shows, for example, that the yelp.com website includes King Soopers in its list of "Top 10 Best Kosher Supermarkets" in the region.

The Post and virtually all of the American mainstream news outlets never even mention these easily accessible facts, yet one can easily imagine how they would have reacted and reported if a Jew – say one who identified with Meir Kahane – had mowed down shoppers in a market that advertises that it caters to Muslims.

How can one explain the media's reluctance to even mention these relevant details of this news event? Political correctness taken to an extreme? Are they afraid of being accused of Islamophobia? Are they afraid they will be attacked for their honesty by Islamist terrorists, as was Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015?

The Post article says, "Police have not yet... identified a motive for the killings." Okay, maybe the motive was not anti-Jewish; perhaps the murderer was nothing more than a spurned lover. But don't American Jews who frequent Jewish sites like kosher markets and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh at least deserve to be told the known objective facts so that they can make informed life-and-death decisions?

LAURIE JACOBS

Tel Aviv

It is interesting to note that when US Vice President Kamala Harris's niece assumed that the shooter at the King Soopers supermarket in Colorado was a white male, she quickly (and wrongly) tweeted the racist remark that "violent white men" are the "greatest terrorist threat" to the US.

Disturbingly, that tweet went viral, liked and shared by multitudes. Yet when it turned out that the shooter was a Muslim born in Syria, she was forced to delete the tweet and then (correctly) refrained from generalizing about Muslims from one anecdotal event.

Apparently anti-white remarks are fine, but anti-Muslim remarks would be racist.

One might have thought that the vice president (or the mainstream media) might have something to say about this, but (unsurprisingly), no.

YAIRA HALBERSTADT

Haifa

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