ISLAMOPHOBES FIND A GERMANWINGS STORY THEY LIKE

No reputable media outlet has reported on any possible motivation for the downing of Germanwings Flight 9525 apart from the claim that copilot Andreas Lubitz was suffering from a significant level of depression -- so elements of the Islam-hating right are now just turning him into a Islamist terrorist, based on evidence that appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking on their part.

Here's Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit:

GERMAN NEWS REPORT: Co-Pilot of Germanwings Airbus Was MUSLIM CONVERT ...’Hero of Islamic State’?

... A German news website claims Andreas Lubitz was a Muslim convert.

Speisa.com reported:

According to Michael Mannheimer, a writer for German PI-News, Germany now has its own 9/11, thanks to the convert to Islam, Andreas Lubitz.

Translation from German:

All evidence indicates that the copilot of Airbus machine in his six-months break during his training as a pilot in Germanwings, converted to Islam and subsequently either by the order of “radical”, ie. devout Muslims , or received the order from the book of terror, the Quran, on his own accord decided to carry out this mass murder. As a radical mosque in Bremen is in the center of the investigation, in which the convert was staying often, it can be assumed that he -- as Mohammed Atta, in the attack against New York -- received his instructions directly from the immediate vicinity of the mosque.

Converts are the most important weapon of Islam....

This is signed,

Michael Mannheimer, 26.3.2015

Michael Mannheimer is described as "a writer for German PI-News," but PI-News, a Muslim-bashing German site where many of Mannheimer's essays can be found (check the "Downloads" box in the right column on PI's English-language page), denies any responsibility for this report:

.@muthakufr There was no such statement on our site. We mentioned various CTs, one of them saying the co-pilot might have been Muslim.

— PI News (@P_I) March 27, 2015

("CTs," I assume, are conspiracy theories.)

It's not unreasonable to imagine that Mannheimer would love to see the rap pinned on Muslims, regardless of the facts. Titles of his essays include "Eurabia: The Planned Islamization of Europe" and "Islam as Victor of Western Value Relativism." On his Facebook page, there's this, in Google's translation:



There are more essays at the Islamophobe blog Gates of Vienna. Here's one called "Islamization: The Thousand-Year Crime Against Germany and the Peoples of Europe." Here's another, about the Anders Breivik massacre, titled "Why No Guilt Attaches to Islam Critics for the Massacre in Oslo."

And as Gawker's Jay Hathaway notes, the evidence for Mannheimer's claim is virtually nonexistent:

[The] story came from PI-News blogger Michael Mannheimer's personal website, where he put together the following information:

* Lubitz trained as a pilot in Bremen, which is also the home of a mosque that was investigated in December for alleged supporting the Islamic State. (This is true, according to Der Spiegel.)
* Lubitz took a few months off at one point before returning to work and getting recertified to fly. (This is also true: Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr confirmed that Lubitz "took a break in his training six years ago. Then he did the tests again. And he was deemed fit to fly.")

From these two data points -- a mosque recently under investigation and a break Lubitz took six years ago -- Mannheimer concluded (and this is roughly translated from the German by Google): "Probably Lubitz converted to Islam during this interruption."

Yeah, that's a bit of a leap.

We're also supposed to believe this was a jihadist attack because a couple of pro-jihad Facebook pages have appeared honoring Lubitz. You can see screenshots of a French one at the Gawker link; Pam Geller posted a screengrab of another one, which looks decidedly sketchy, and, for all I know, was posted by Islam-haters to discredit Muslims:



But now it's too late. Like 9/11 truthers or Newtown truthers, Islamophobes will never, ever believe that Lubitz wasn't a jihadist killer. Some will just float idle speculation "responsibly":

It's just a report at this point and hasn't been confirmed authoritatively. We'll need to watch as news unfolds.

— Andrew C. McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) March 27, 2015

Others will turn the story into rage-porn for themselves, like Debbie Schlussel:

We don’t know what Lubitz’s religion was at the time he crashed the plane, but why else would he lock the pilot out of the cockpit after he went to the bathroom, and deliberately murder Westerners? I’m sure we’ll now be told the usual crap: he was mentally disturbed, it had nothing to do with Islam, he had financial troubles or was angry that he still lived with his parents (in this case, he did) and didn’t have a girlfriend. Or one of the other lines we’re typically fed....

We don’t know a lot about this guy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately it comes out that the guy had a prayer mat at his family home, or if he secretly was known as “Abdullah” or “Mahmoud” or “Al-Tayar” (Arabic for “the pilot”). I also wouldn’t be surprised if we are actually never told about Lubitz’s true intentions and behavior. Authorities want us to like Islam and be “tolerant” of this “peaceful” religion of death and destruction, and they try to sugarcoat and whitewash it at every turn.

Could this be true? It's possible. Anything's possible. But these people know nothing. Yet now, in their world, this is all but established fact.