National Review Online
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
On Saturday, an internet troll named Jake Lang staged an
anti-Muslim protest in front of Gracie Mansion — currently the residence of New
York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Both its title (“Stop the Islamic Takeover of New
York City”) and scheduled main event (a “pig roast”) made its nature as an
attention-getting provocation clear enough. Lang expected angry
counterprotesters and received them in due course.
What neither he nor any of the peaceful counterprotesters
in attendance expected was for two young men — identified in reports as Emir Balat (age 18) and Ibrahim Kayumi (age 19)
— to rush forward, shout “Allahu akbar,” and hurl improvised explosive devices
into the crowd. The bombs, filled with bolts and screws, thankfully failed to detonate, and the
two men were immediately apprehended by a fast-moving NYPD.
There is no doubt as to their motivations: Both men spoke
freely and unrepentantly to police at the scene, proudly claiming inspiration
from ISIS and stating they had intended their terrorist atrocity to be “bigger than Boston” — a reference to the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombing that took the lives of three and injured scores more. Only the
incompetence of the bombers prevented Saturday from turning into one of the
darkest days in recent New York history.
Yet one would know none of this were one to go only by
the headlines and framing devices the mainstream media have consistently used
to explain this story to American readers, who — like it or not — primarily
consume their news in headline rather than article form. NBC New York got an
early start on what would quickly become an overwhelming trend, telling
a curiously noncommittal story over the weekend: “Multiple arrests made after
‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran
Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The Daily News’
headline whimpered, “Protestors throw smoking improvised device,
clash over Jake Lang pig roast at ‘anti-Islamification’ rally at Gracie
Mansion.” The tone-setting New York Times itself wrestled
with curiously tortured locutions: “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at
Protest Near Mayor’s House.”
It is impossible not to notice that all of these
headlines — or countless others from similarly situated media outlets — are
carefully crafted to avoid stating a politically inconvenient truth: Islamic
terrorists came horrifyingly close to detonating bombs in a crowd of
protesters. Instead, our attention is directed toward the “hateful” nature of
the rally, and readers are asked to fill in the missing narrative gaps with
their own imaginations instead.
By Tuesday, the sugarcoating of the obvious — that
homegrown, self-radicalized jihadis had targeted a protest and nearly murdered
who-knows-how-many people outside Gracie Mansion — had moved well into parody.
CNN led the morning with a widely mocked (and subsequently deleted) tweet framing the acts of Balat and Kayumi as a
soft-focus human interest story: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New
York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the
city during abnormally warm weather . . .” the piece begins. (You’ll never
believe what happened next!)
The pattern at this point is clear: The media are
consistently choosing not to report on the attack outside Gracie Mansion
honestly, instead employing all of their creative writing skills to craft
craven, obfuscatory headlines that aim to deceive by omission and suggestion.
Elected Democrats, too, have resorted to this obfuscatory
framing. First it was former Comptroller Brad Lander, who on Saturday
afternoon, after the names and motives of both suspects were already widely
known, tweeted, “Happy to know that our Mayor and First Lady are
safe, but horrified that there was such a disturbing threat of violence outside
their residence. Vile displays of Islamophobia will never be tolerated in our
city.” Needless to say, the threat on Saturday came from a diametrically
opposed direction, but Lander gave no hint of that.
Neither did Mamdani, who chimed in with the same
deception. Opening with a denunciation of Lang’s bigotry and Islamophobia, he
then generically condemned “what followed” as being “even more disturbing” —
without providing the same sort of specificity regarding the culprits.
“The hardest thing to see,” Goethe said, “is what is in
front of your eyes.” Judging by the performance of the media and New York
Democrats in the aftermath of this attack, it’s even harder for them to tell
the truth about what they’ve seen.
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