Explaining away Iryna’s murder, Charlotte exposes Wikipedia bias and other commentary

From the right: Explaining Away Iryna’s Murder

The shocking murder of Iryna Zarutska “has shocked social-media users — but only, it seems, those on the right,” observes Spiked’s Jenny Holland. Black, homeless and mentally ill, the killer counts as “one of the liberal media’s victim-identity groups” and so is “beyond criticism.” This “terrible and senseless murder” reveals “how divided the US is,” with opposing factions living in “separate realities” fed by different “news ecosystems.” Some mainstream outlets eventually covered “the reaction to the event,” but not “the event itself.” The murder shows how “liberals’ toxic, phony empathy leads to a lack of genuine empathy.” The left invariably fails to “condemn even the most vicious crimes” if the perpetrator “belongs to a sacred minority group.”

Media watch: Charlotte Exposes Wikipedia Bias

“Wikipedia editors don’t want you to know about” the Charlotte light rail murder, observes Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press, as “editors have fought to have it deleted” following online tussling around how to “identify” the killer as “’black,’ ‘Black,’ or a ‘career criminal.’ ” Some have flagged the topic as potentially not “notable,” a threshold meaning that “an event, idea, or individual must be covered by multiple reliable sources in a substantive manner.” The incident “touched a bundle of political and cultural nerves,” and laid bare a “double standard” in coverage of racially-inflected crimes. The debate about whether it “merits a Wikipedia page is more than an editorial squabble” — indeed, a “real-time demonstration of how information is filtered.”

Conservative: Trump Raids Fuel Self-Deportation

“Millions” with “no claim to stay in the U.S.” arrived in the Biden years, and “many should be deported,” argues Byron York at the Washington Examiner — except that it’s “easier to get them to deport themselves.” The feds can remove as many as 600,000 people a year, but 1.6 million reportedly left between January and July; “stepped-up enforcement” of immigration laws has given “illegal immigrants the reasonable fear” of a “major problem for them” one day. Team Trump’s actions have “fired up a debate” over whether to enforce immigration laws, but “if the Biden years proved anything,” it’s that there has “to be consequences for entering the United States illegally” — without them, “the flow of illegal crossers” will only “get bigger and bigger.”

Culture critic: Rock’s Sick Antisemitism

“Despite all the bellyaching, artists aren’t being censored and blacklisted and having their careers destroyed by ‘speaking out for Palestine,’” grumbles Commentary’s Seth Mandel, but “artists who don’t ‘speak out for Palestine’ ” get targeted. A Wall Street Journal look at “the effect of the Gaza war on the music industry” reported that “Israeli-Iranian singer Liraz Charhi says she lost shows for refusing to post ‘Free Palestine’ on social media”; Azealia Banks reportedly had similar problems. An online “cottage industry” of anti-Zionists is “dedicated to making sure dissenters are punished.” The Journal identified “anonymous accounts such as Zionists in Music” that “track pro-Israel statements” and Reverse Canary Mission, which “catalogs musicians who haven’t spoken out against Israel’s actions in the Gaza war.” “The backstage anti-Semitic pressure campaigns are bad enough; the on-stage conformism is getting a little boring.”

Foreign desk: To Mend Ties With India

“Waves of anti-American bitterness” hit “across the spectrum of Indian politics” after “the Trump administration slapped punitive tariffs of 50% on India” for “buying Russian oil while giving China a pass,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead. Yet India is “America’s most important potential long-term partner in the Indo-Pacific.” If the “pre-Trump strategy” — encouraging “India to challenge China as an export-oriented manufacturing platform” by “using India’s cheap labor to drive industrial growth by producing for Western markets” — will no longer fly, a more “sustainable way forward” is for both countries “to deepen cooperation in areas that matter” including by building “a technosphere that China doesn’t dominate,” and “fracturing the troubling Sino-Russian alliance,” as well as “reducing Chinese influence in India’s neighborhood.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board