By Alexandra DeSanctis
Monday, March 29, 2021
Last week in Washington, D.C., two teenaged girls
attacked and killed an Uber Eats delivery driver while attempting to steal his
car. The girls, whose names haven’t been released as they are minors, entered
the car of 66-year-old Mohammad Anwar carrying a Taser.
Anwar’s death was caught on video, but I warn you, the
footage is horrifyingly graphic.
“This is my car!” Anwar shouts at one point as he
attempts to reenter the car, which he had exited to make food deliveries. The
suspect behind the wheel then accelerates with Anwar hanging halfway out of the
car, stuck between the driver’s seat and the door. At the next intersection,
the car veers and crashes between parked cars, and Anwar can be seen flying
from the vehicle and landing on the sidewalk, no longer moving.
National Guard members who happened to be present removed
the girls from the car, and one of the girls walks past Anwar, lying lifelessly
on the sidewalk, without looking at him. Unaccountably, the National Guard
members present did not appear to stop and try to help the victim. Anwar died
in the hospital from his injuries. Police later said that the suspects had used
a Taser on him.
According to the Metropolitan Police Department, the
suspects are a 13-year-old girl from southeast Washington, D.C., and a
15-year-old girl from Maryland. They have been charged with murder and armed
carjacking. Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 2014, worked
for Uber Eats in order to help support his wife, children, and four
grandchildren.
In the wake of this brutal and senseless murder, some of
the public responses have been especially egregious. For example, D.C. mayor
Muriel Bowser, who offered no comment on Anwar’s murder, nonetheless tweeted a video on how to prevent carjacking.
“Auto theft is a crime of opportunity,” Bowser tweeted.
“Follow these steps to reduce the risk of your vehicle becoming a target.
Remember the motto, #ProtectYourAuto.”
Her tweet appears to have since been deleted.
CNN, meanwhile, shared the site’s news story reporting on
the murder on Twitter with this thoughtless tweet:
Police said the girls, 13 and 15,
assaulted an Uber Eats driver with a Taser while carjacking him, which led to
an accident in which he was fatally injured.
Anyone who’s seen the video or has read about what’s
shown in the footage is well aware that the incident wasn’t “an accident” that
fatally injured Anwar. The only word for it is murder. One can’t help but
wonder if the reluctance to condemn this crime stems from left-wing hesitancy
about naming the race of the perpetrators, who are African American.
Hunter Walker, a White House correspondent for Yahoo
News, for instance, tweeted over
the weekend that “there are a lot of far right commentators sharing this
horrific story and highlighting the fact the perpetrators are Black.”
Walker went on to assert that “there are also more
mainstream conservatives sharing this story including from outlets like the
Daily Caller and GOP operatives. In some cases, they’re cooying [sic] videos
taken directly from the far right explicitly racist voices including popular
Gab and Telegram accounts.”
But of course, the race of the perpetrators doesn’t
matter at all, and no credible source on the right is suggesting that it is the
key issue here. What matters is that an innocent man was senselessly murdered,
and his horrible death deserves attention and outcry no matter who killed him.
Big Tech Targets Religious Groups, Too
A new report from the Napa Legal Institute suggests that it’s
not just conservatives and right-wing groups that have had trouble with
social-media and tech companies removing their content. The report highlights
the many occasions on which big tech companies have banned, silenced, or
otherwise flagged online content from religious groups and individuals, as
well.
According to the report, religious leaders and
institutions have experienced this behavior from tech companies about once per
week this year alone. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Napa
Legal Institute president Josh Holdenried has more details:
The previous month, Twitter blocked
a post from the Daily Citizen, which is run by Focus on the Family, an
evangelical Christian nonprofit, and suspended its account. The reason: a tweet
that respectfully challenged the underlying premise of transgenderism. Twitter
made a similar move against Catholic World Report, though the company later
said it had acted in error. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center saw Amazon ban his book criticizing transgenderism, “When
Harry Became Sally.” Amazon shows no signs of changing course.
Books from specific publishers are
often targeted, such as Catholic TAN Books. One of its authors is Paul Kengor,
who wrote an anticommunist tract called “The Devil and Karl Marx. ” TAN Books
can’t advertise his work on Facebook, or
that of Carrie Gress, who wrote a book on “rescuing the culture from toxic
femininity.” Facebook has also banned ads for Kimberly Cook’s book, “Motherhood
Redeemed.” The offending ad called it “a book that challenges feminism in the
modern world.”
When posts are removed, ads are
blocked, and accounts are banned, public pushback and media criticism often
lead tech companies to rethink their actions. Last October, after the pro-life
Susan B. Anthony List was targeted by one of Facebook’s third-party
fact-checkers for “misleading claims” about Joe Biden’s policy on late-term
abortions, the group went on a media blitz, securing both a reversal and an
apology.
There’s no question that tech companies see themselves as
having a role to play in our “cancel culture,” though progressives generally
prefer to call it something like “combatting disinformation.” But if a book as
sensible, compassionate, and rigorously researched as Ryan Anderson’s When
Harry Became Sally is no longer allowed to appear on Amazon’s shelves,
we are left to believe that, in the view of tech companies, there’s simply no
room for debate.
Conservative views on marriage, sex, and gender are, in
essence, anathema in the world of the Internet — and, according to this new
report, all the more so when those arguments or beliefs are put forth from a
religious perspective.
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