New York Daily News writer Linda Stasi this weekend blamed one of the San Bernardino shooting victims for his own death because of his vocal opposition to Islamic extremism. The allegation is in character for Stasi, who has a habit of shifting the blame for terrorist attacks away from the terrorists themselves and onto critics of Islamic extremism instead.
When terrorists attacked Paris newspaper Charlie Hebdo last May–slaughtering 17 people in the process–Stasi responded by arguing that solidarity with the victims was misplaced because the newspaper had published cartoons of the prophet Muhammed. “American journalists and American citizens actually don’t tolerate hateful, anti-religious bigotry,” Stasi wrote at the time. “No, we don’t kill over it, but we sure as hell don’t tolerate it either,” she continued.
Later in the column, Stasi–who once claimed that the NRA was more of a terror threat to Americans than ISIS–pointed out that Charlie Hebdo had satirized the “same movie that was believed to have prompted the deadly attack on the American embassy in Benghazi.” (The Benghazi attacks, in Hillary Clinton’s own words, had nothing to do with the film Stasi refers to in her column.)
Similarly, Stasi blamed political activist Pamela Geller for an attack by a pair of Islamic extremists at a “Draw Muhammed” contest in Texas last May. Stasi claimed that Geller–who organized the contest–was no different from ISIS. “Geller, like ISIS and al Qaeda, revel in hate and nothing would make any of them happier than to be the catalyst for the killing of hundreds of innocent Americans to prove a point,” Stasi wrote. “Don’t think for a minute that violence isn’t what she, just like the murderers of ISIS, want,” Stasi went on to say.
Later in that same column, Stasi again blasted the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, arguing that their “pornographic cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed led to the slaughter of 17 people by maniacal Muslims in Paris.”