This photo of Kassim Alhimidi, weeping over his wife’s body, appeared with the Times’s initial story on the murder of Shaima Alawadi. None of the subsequent stories featured a photo of him under arrest or in court.

HERE is a classic case of twisted reporting to make white Americans appear to be hateful, racist, bigots who have not been welcoming to the people of the world even though they have accepted, and been friendly to, nonwhite foreign immigrants everywhere.

In March, 2012, Shaima Alawadi was murdered in suburban El Cajon, California. Shortly before she was killed, according to her relatives, a note was found taped to the family’s front door that said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” A similar note was found next to the Iraqi Muslim woman’s body when she was discovered stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. The New York Times promptly ran a long piece on the murder that appeared on March 27, 2012 in the A-section of the newspaper. Two reporters worked on the story. Ian Lovett and Will Carless wrote:

Whatever the police eventually determine, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that many Muslim women in the area were worried that Ms. Alawadi had been targeted because she wore a headscarf in public, as many observant Muslim women do.

“The majority of the community that wears scarves are concerned,” Mr. Mohebi said. He cautioned against a rush to judgment before the police had finished investigating. Still, he added, “the community has gone through some hate crimes before, and the assumption the people have is that they’re going through one now.”

Two decades ago, El Cajon, just northeast of San Diego, was largely white and English-speaking. But as wars in their homelands pushed more and more Iraqis and others to emigrate, the Middle Eastern population here has exploded. El Cajon now houses one of the largest Iraqi communities in the country. Middle Eastern groceries and restaurants dot Main Street, while on the sidewalks, many families stroll by speaking in Arabic.

Ms. Alawadi and her husband moved to the United States from Saudi Arabia in 1995 after fleeing Iraq during the first gulf war. They then had five children, and for the most part, Mr. Alhimidi said, their neighbors here made them feel welcome.

Still, even before this month, he was already familiar with the kind of language he says was on the notes left at his house.

“Some neighbors, I say ‘hi’ to them, and they just turn away,” Mr. Alhimidi said in Arabic, with his son Mohammed translating. “More than 95 percent of the time, I feel welcome. But once in a while, people shout at you. They shout ‘terrorist,’ or ‘go back to your country.’ ”

Two days before, a Times blogger had written:

The death in San Diego on Saturday of an Iraqi immigrant, the victim of what appeared to be a hate crime, provoked a wave of outraged comments from bloggers who compared the killing to the shooting of an unarmed Florida teenager last month. The woman, Shaima Alawadi, died three days after her daughter discovered her body in a pool of blood inside their home along with a note that said, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”

On Twitter, where her death became the most-discussed topic worldwide within hours, bloggers and journalists traced a connection between the headscarf that the pious mother of five wore and the hooded sweatshirt that the Florida teenager, Trayvon Martin, was wearing when he was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford.

Welcome to America, where you get killed for being suspicious for wearing a hoodie & a Hijab. #RIPShaima #RIPTrayvonMartin

— Yemyoom (@Yemmeyummy) March 25, 2012

A family friend told the U-T San Diego newspaper that Ms. Alawadi, 32, was a “respectful, modest muhajiba,” meaning that she wore the hijab in accordance with Muslim tradition. Josh Shahryar, an Afghan journalist, added the sardonic warning, “CAUTION: Wearing a headscarf,” to video of an emotional interview with Ms. Alawadi’s 17-year-old daughter, Fatima, who also wears the hijab.

In April, a much-shorter article appeared in the A-section, stating that there had been problems in the family. After tarring the town of El Cajon as a hotbed of bigotry, how did the newspaper cover the charging of Alawadi’s husband with murder? With this small brief on page A-13. The conviction and the recent sentencing in June of Kassim Alhimidi also were reported with short, one-paragraph briefs.

As Anne Corcoran at Refugee Resettlement Watch mentions, the Times has not yet reported on how the citizens of El Cajon felt when they were tarred on a national stage as racists. In each of the subsequent briefs, the Times suggests that the report of the initial note taped to the Muslim family’s door was true, never raising the logical question as to whether that was a story planted by the husband.

— Comments —

Buck writes:

The twisted reporting that you highlight will propably continue to serve the needs of our brain-dead white population. It’s a symbiosis psychosis.

One element of this intractable psychosis is our sick and suicidal open immigration policy and unconstrained tolerance. I noted that: “Mr. Alhimidi said in Arabic, with his son Mohammed translating.” Has this non-English speaking murdering alien barbarian who has been in “America” since 1995 avoided the need to learn sufficient English to speak for himself? Of course he has. Who’s going to make him?

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