Earlier this week, Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player, was brutally killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. Police have charged James Edwards and Chancey Luna with first degree murder for killing Lane. Lane was white; Edwards and Luna are black, though an accomplice, Michael Jones, charged with being an accessory after the fact, is white. Australian papers are reporting that Edwards had tweeted “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM” and boasted of assaulting whites after George Zimmerman was found to have acted in self-defense in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. There is thus far more evidence of racial animus in this case than there ever was in the Zimmerman case, which became a media cause celebre and prompted unctuous comments by Barack Obama on how Trayvon Martin looked like him or how he could have been Trayvon Martin, coupled with a directive to Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether Zimmerman had violated Martin’s civil rights.

So far, Obama and Holder have been silent about Lane’s murder, and places like The Huffington Post are indignant that anyone is taking note of the race of Lane’s killers. Obama’s silence on this issue is no more surprising than his silence concerning the Moslem Brotherhood’s burning of sixty or so Coptic, Catholic, and Protestant churches in Egypt. As Steve Sailer has long pointed out, contemporary media analysis is governed by the Leninist dictum of Who? Whom? If an event lends itself to being portrayed as evidence of further victimization of a member of a certified victim class, it will become a major news story and the source of endless hand-wringing. If an event cannot be fit into that framework, or indeed challenges that framework, it will be ignored or downplayed and those trying to call attention to it, if persistent enough, will be accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia” or the like.