On October 6, teenagers shouted a prayer phrase from the doorway of a western Vienna church during Mass, then left. On October 19, LifeSiteNews headlined them “Arab teens”, which rests only on the priest’s guess. No one has been identified. Read the LifeSiteNews headline as a sentence. Its actors are ‘Arab teens’, and their weapon is a prayer phrase. Neither is established. The story’s own third paragraph says the priest ‘estimates’ they are 14 or 15 and ‘of Arab ethnicity’; its fifth says he saw ‘no actual threat’ and filed no police report. No one has been identified, and no report quotes the police. ‘Arab’ is the verdict noun at work: a label that convicts before the facts arrive, where ‘teens’ was the plain word. Vienna’s own press wrote it smaller. Heute and oe24 led on October 9 with ‘Teenies’, teens. CNA Deutsch kept the ethnicity in quotation marks as the priest’s guess. Report24 went the other way, ‘Moslems stürmen’, Muslims storm, a faith on the march. The habit the headline rides is old: when strangers’ kids make trouble, it is their kind; when ours do, it is being 14. The priest himself called it youthful exuberance. On the stages of villainization, LifeSite’s line sits at Essentialization: the act belongs to a category, not to the two or several boys at a door (the counts differ). The tell is the group named where a person acted. A frame of Islam against Christianity in Europe hands attention to whoever carries it and a cause to whoever offers to defend the faithful. The one fact that would settle the label is the one every page leaves open: nobody knows who they were.
