Obfuscation, equivocation and denial.
Less than one week after the slaughter in Chattanooga, Tennessee of four U.S. Marines and one sailor by Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, a Kuwaiti-born Islamist who grew up in suburban Chattanooga, a pattern has emerged in Middle East studies scholars’ analyses of the shooting: obfuscation of any Islamist or jihadi motives accompanied by efforts to depict Abdulazeez as one among many troubled killers whose recent actions have shocked the country. No specialized knowledge of the Middle East is required for such politicized and misleading analyses, and none is evident in the examples that follow.