Prayer at Home Plate

Once again, the media plays its old trick. A story that should’ve been headline news, blazing across every front page, is buried so deep you need a shovel to find it. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative they want you to swallow.

Take what happened on September 21 in Katy, Texas. Three men—Mahmood Abdelsalam Rababah, Ahmad Mawed, and Mustafa Mohammad Matalgah—fired into a crowd of kids at a youth baseball game. Their target was a field full of twelve-year-old boys bowing their heads in pregame prayer, and a coach went down with a bullet in the shoulder.

If you blinked, you missed it, because most outlets gave it very few lines. Worse yet, some sanitized the language, calling it “recreational shooting from a nearby pasture,” as if a trio of young men just happened to squeeze off rounds in the direction of children in prayer.

No mention of terrorism, motive, or that this was something much darker than “careless gunplay.” The press turned a near-massacre into a shrug.

Why? Because the suspects don’t fit the preferred storyline.

If the shooters had been three disaffected farm boys from rural Texas, every talking head on the tube would still be howling about domestic extremism, about “Christian nationalists,” and America’s supposed gun sickness. But since the suspects carry names the media doesn’t want to touch—and because the victims were kids praying—the narrative collapsed.

Better to file it away under “local crime blotter” than to ask hard questions about ideology, intent, or terror.

Young boys in light-blue uniforms sprinting for cover. Parents screaming, and a man crumpled on the dirt near home plate.

That isn’t “reckless shooting.” That’s targeting, intimidation, and terror, plain and simple.

But the word “terrorism” is radioactive in the newsroom unless it fits a template. If it points outward, if it’s tied to Islamic motives, it’s swept under the rug, because it’s safer to pretend it never happened.

And so a coach who literally stepped in front of a child and took a bullet for him doesn’t become a national hero. He’s just another casualty of “recreational gunfire.”

Think about that—“recreational gunfire.” What kind of phrase is that?

It’s PR spin, not reporting.

The sheriff’s office did its job. They arrested the suspects and charged them with deadly conduct with a firearm.

Bond is $100,000 each, but law enforcement doesn’t control the national conversation. That’s the media’s job, and news agencies are flat-out refusing to do it.

Instead, it’s parents who are left to pick up the pieces. One mother told local reporters she won’t be taking her son back to The Rac.

“That’s where guns are,” she said.

You can hear the fear in her voice and the confusion. She’s not wrong to be scared, but she’s wrong to think this was just “guns.”

It was three men firing on children in prayer. The gun didn’t pull its own trigger. People did—and with a possible intent that nobody wants to examine.

The Rac responded with a polished statement about “enhanced security measures.”

Metal detectors, off-duty police, and extra patrols. All well and good, but you can’t fix the deeper problem with a few more badge-and-gun types standing around.

The deeper problem is silence.

Silence about why it happened. Silence about who did it, and silence about this not being three bored guys in a pasture.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth–if you fire rounds into a crowd of praying children, you aren’t careless. You’re sending a message, and that message looks a lot like terrorism, no matter how badly the press wants to call it something else.

But our media has made itself a hostage to its own script. It only sees certain villains.

Certain storylines get endlessly repeated, while others vanish from the public eye. Some violence gets downplayed, and attacks on people of faith get ignored.

Anything that hints at ideology outside the approved narrative gets folded into the “random crime” file. The selective blindness is dangerous.

Because if we can’t even name what’s happening, we can’t prepare for it, let alone stop it. We let the truth get buried under spin until the next tragedy comes along.

Meanwhile, the people who actually lived it—the kids, the parents, the coach—don’t get to bury it. They’ll carry it forever.

They’ll remember bowing their heads in prayer, hearing gunfire, before seeing their coach go down. They’ll remember the sound of mothers and fathers screaming, and they’ll know, deep down, that the world doesn’t make sense anymore.

And what will the rest of us remember? Probably nothing—because the story got shoved to the back pages and replaced with celebrity gossip, political squabbles, and whatever shiny distraction came next. And that’s how the media works today.

They’re not in the truth business anymore; they’re in the narrative business. And narratives don’t care about facts—they care about control.

The facts here are simple enough: Three men opened fire on a prayer circle of kids. A coach took a bullet for a child.

It could’ve been a massacre. And the media didn’t want you to notice.

That’s not “local news.” That’s national news, and a wake-up call. It leads to the question we should be asking: What else are they burying, because if we can’t trust the press to tell us the truth about something this clear, this visible, this documented on video—then we can’t trust them at all.

The coach is alive, thank God. His scar will heal, though the memory won’t.

The kids will grow up, maybe faster than they should. Some will never step back onto a ballfield, while some will, but all of them learned a lesson the press doesn’t want to admit: danger exists.

And that’s the real story here. Not the sanitized version, not the spin, but the truth, which, these days, is the rarest thing of all.