ISIS has claimed responsibility for the bombings of Christians and tourists in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. They are also specifically citing it as revenge for the Mosque shooting in New Zealand.

ISIS claimed responsibility on Tuesday for the Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka, as an official in the country said the preliminary investigation into the attacks shows it was “retaliation” for the massacre of Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The coordinated bombings on Sunday, targeting churches and hotels in and around the Sri Lankan capital, killed more than 320 people.

“The preliminary investigations have revealed that what happened in Sri Lanka was in retaliation for the attack against Muslims in Christchurch,” state minister of defence Ruwan Wijewardene told parliament. No other Sri Lankan officials repeated the assessment of the intelligence, and it was unclear what Wijewardene based his judgement on.

Given the complexity of the attacks, it’s actually probable that the smaller groups that actually carried out the attacks had outside help. The blasts were coordinated down to the minute and the bombs themselves were not just thrown together. The fact that all eight of them actually went off shows a level of sophistry and experience you’d see from sources that have done this before.

The responses to the bombings from the left and the media have predictably been far different than those to the Christchurch shooting. We aren’t seeing impassioned eight person panels on CNN decrying Islamist ideology, nor are we seeing these attacks tied to unrelated political opponents. Major newspapers aren’t publishing countless think pieces about the dangers surrounding the rise of radical Islam.

None of that fits the normal narrative, so instead the media shift back into passive fact reporting. Perhaps that should be their disposition in all these instances instead of turning certain tragedies into political cudgels? Just a thought.

The media treats "Islamophobia" as an established fact that no one is allowed to question in good faith, while the "War on Christianity" goes in scare quotes and is treated like an emotional breakdown or political scam that informed readers are supposed to sneer at.

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 23, 2019