LGF in the WSJ
LGF is mentioned in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, in connection with the suicide bombing at the University of Oklahoma: Student’s Suicide Sets Off Explosion Of Theories by Blogs.
From the start, the case was prime territory for bloggers. The conservative blog Little Green Footballs titled one post “Jihad at the University of Oklahoma?” and wrote, “The story of the suicide bomber at the University of Oklahoma football stadium, determinedly ignored by mainstream media, is beginning to get interesting….”
Several facts about the case fed the speculation: Suicides committed with bombs are rare, as are those committed in public near a crowded event. Mr. Hinrichs (pronounced HIN-ricks) had a Pakistani roommate. They shared an apartment one block away from the only mosque in Norman — the same mosque attended in 2001 by Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to helping plan the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In some photographs, Mr. Hinrichs can be seen with a scraggly beard.
Adding to community concern was the revelation that two days before he blew himself up, Mr. Hinrichs visited a feed store and inquired about buying ammonium nitrate — the same chemical Timothy McVeigh put in the bomb he used in 1995 to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, 20 miles to the north. An off-duty Norman police officer, overhearing Mr. Hinrichs’s conversation in the store, ran a check on his license plate and found no cause for alarm.
To that unsettling set of facts, blogs and local Oklahoma TV stations added several apparent inaccuracies, including: that Mr. Hinrichs was a Muslim and visited the mosque frequently; that he tried to enter the stadium twice but was rebuffed; that he had a one-way airplane ticket to Algeria; that there were nails in the bomb and that Islamic extremist literature was found in his apartment.
One point to make in response: I advanced no speculative theories at LGF, simply asked legitimate questions based on the information available about this very curious case. Not only that, I deliberately shied away from covering the story in the first couple of days, when the only reports available were from unreliable sources.
Here’s the LGF post cited by the Journal: Jihad at the University of Oklahoma? The question mark is, of course, intended to signify that the story is questionable.
The really fascinating part of the story to me is the almost total lack of interest in the mainstream media.