According to the media narrative, whatever unpleasant behavior a person or group is engaging in — from criminal and gang activity to sheer terrorism — if you're white and the other party is not, that proves that the behavior is entirely your fault.  Your insufferable racism and xenophobia have pushed these people over the edge; their criminal behavior is a reflection of their many grievances against you.

This would certainly require ameliorating if it were true.  It's not.  This is not to say there is no racism, a thing that cannot be "legislated"; rather, it is to say that the overwhelming majority of criminal behavior is and always has been fueled by things other than grievances.

Take Islam for instance.  Following the savage 9/11 terror attacks, the great question was "why do they hate us?"  The answer from the media and their array of "experts" was that they had grievances against America.

Thereafter followed a litany list of supposed American or Western crimes against Muslims: originally, it was Western political "sins" — from the Crusades to colonialism to the creation of Israel.  With each new terrorist attack or Islamic outrage, the "grievances" Muslims had grew: free speech, churches, even teddy bears were included.

The media might as well have mentioned your sheer existence as a prosperous and free infidel as the ultimate grievance, which would have been closer to the truth.  After all, unjustified Islamic attacks on Western peoples began nearly 1,400 years ago, a few years after Islam was born.  They continued for a millennium, swallowing three quarters of the Christian world and bombarding every corner of Europe, whence many millions of slaves were abducted.

Even America's first war as a nation was with African Muslims, who were raiding American vessels and enslaving their occupants.  When Jefferson and Adams asked the Muslim ambassador what "injury" the newborn American state could possibly have committed to provoke such attacks, "the ambassador answered us," Jefferson wrote to Congress in 1786, "that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, ... that it was their right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all."

Muslim attacks on the West finally went on hiatus in the early nineteenth century, when Europe, fed up with Islamic depredations, invaded and colonized the Muslim world.  "The whole complex process of European expansion and empire," explains Bernard Lewis, "has its roots in the clash of Islam and Christendom[.] ... The victorious liberators [Europeans], having reconquered their own territories [from Muslims], pursued their former masters whence they had come."

Regardless, the West has been so inundated with "it's your fault," Muslim "grievances," and "Islamophobia" propaganda from their own media that the Islamic State itself (ISIS) made it a point to clarify that it hates and terrorizes the West first and foremost because Islamic law requires it to do so, irrespective of Western behavior.

Or just look to the abysmal way Muslims around the world treat their non-Muslim minorities, chiefly Christians.  How could these peaceful, tiny, and politically disenfranchised communities possibly "aggrieve" Muslims?  They are often the same rac and ethnicity and speak the same language as their Muslim counterparts.  You cannot tell them apart except for religion — and that is the "grievance" their persecutors have: non-Muslim minorities are "infidels" and therefore to be despised and oppressed. 

Despite such outrageous discrimination and persecution, the Western media seldom touch on this topic, and never honestly: doing so would throw a wrench in their "grievances" narrative that Muslim misbehavior is a byproduct of "grievances" against the West.

Now consider how the media are using this same grievance paradigm to justify criminal behavior and violence.  A black man was tragically killed by a police officer.  Although he has been arrested and charged with murder, that's not enough.  If you're white, the current turmoil — the looting, burning, and killing — is, once again, ultimately your fault: "grievances" coming to roost.

And yet, just as with Islam, the media's "black lives matter" narrative is extremely selective and manipulative: the cold-blooded murders of several admirable black Americans, such as 77-year-old retired police captain David Dorn, who was shot to death for protecting a pawn shop from looters, apparently do not matter (who's "protesting" for them?), nor do the many lives of American blacks whose businesses have been ransacked and destroyed. 

Nor, for that matter, does the fact that several thousand black lives are snuffed out by other blacks every year matter to the media (American blacks have killed 324,000 other blacks between 1979 and 2014).  As for the fact that, although accounting for about 15 percent of the U.S. population, blacks commit half of all murders — which at the very least means they end up in violent confrontations with police — what difference does that make?

Only those very, very few black lives that can possibly be made to conform to the grievance narrative will ever matter.

The irony of all this is that only a naturally fair-minded people would even care, let alone allow the accusation that they are not being fair enough to their minorities to terrorize them.  Try telling any non-Western nation (we've already seen how it goes under Islam) that they are mistreating their minorities — or better yet, that they need to get on their knees and apologize for their race — and see where that gets you.

Raymond Ibrahim, author most recently of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.