Listening to the radio in the NYC area over the past few weeks, I think many people wanted it to be - for the excitement factor.

If police had released the information earlier that the ATM card of one of the family members had been used several times at a Bank of America branch following the murders, there probably would have been less talk about a religious motive to the slayings (though from the police point of view, that was less important than getting the security camera tapes of who used the card without them knowing about it).

It's the cops fault folks jumped to bigoted conclusions?

Well, initial reports were that none of the jewelry was taken, making robbery seem unlikely as a motive. There were also death threats against the family. And Copts are a persecuted minority in Egypt. I wouldn't agree that it could be assumed to be Islamic terrorism, but until the news about the ATM card came out it certainly looked like the way to bet. Or are you saying that if someone gets killed, people who previously made death threats shouldn't be prime suspects?

I'm saying that people jumped to conclusiuons because of their own hatreds.

oj,

Jersey City was the home of the blind sheik. It was the home base of the Muslims who tried to blow up the WTC the first time. There is significant violence between the Coptic community and the Muslim Egyptians there.

The family had been subjected to death threats from Muslim extremists before they were murdered.

Bigotry? Hardly. Merely a logical inference from the information at hand. The press didn't exactly play up the two lowlives with the apartment in the Armanious' building.

Bart:

That it is what you believed hardly mitigates against the idea that it was simple-minded bigotry.

OJ --

Lots of people suspected a Muslim connection with the 2002 D.C. sniper shootings, even though outlets like the New York Times, with Jayson Blair in the lead, dreided those folks as racist and pointed in the directions of domestic right-wing white supremacists as the likely killers. As it turned out, lots of people were right (and eventually Blair was out of a job), though in this case the religous-based hatred of the killers came from a domestic, instead of a foreign-born source, as was the case with the Jersey City WYC bombers in 1993.

Based on the evidence offered up through the media, and the demographics of Jersey City in general, the idea of a religous connection to this crime was not far-fetched, without the added information about the stolen ATM card, which supplied the motive for it being a more commom, yet horrific, murder-robbery case.

John:

Yes, the attempts to make the snipers part of al Qaeda were equally silly.

OJ --

Al Qaida's a subset of the wider anti-western attitudes of radical Muslims. Muhammad and Malvo fell into the larger category, and those who suspected a Muslim anti-American connection in general were not wrong, although those who chose to be more specific in their beliefs were. Even paranoids can have real enemies, though they may not be as all-powerful as suspected by their intended victims.

In the Jersey City case, no one believes there was any international plot hatched in some cave in Afghanistan to kill off Coptic Christians in northern New Jersey. But the initial evidence offered up by the police and through the media, along with Jersey City's history as home to people willing to destroy the World Trade Center, made the idea of the crime being religously motivated a not-irrational possibility.

The snipers seem to have been nuts, not Muslim activists.

Yes, the media was hysterical about the Copt killings, which was my point.