The fire that burned the interior of Notre Dame in France last Monday was a tragedy for all in the West and for Christians everywhere. However, the media’s coverage of it—or for what it refused to say and report on—highlights the more dire consequences of the dangers of not having a free and honest press.

Less than two hours after the blaze started, media outlets were announcing that the entire frame of the church had been completely destroyed. Yet in a bazaar twist, the mayor and church leaders on site reported live on air that they had time to actually go rent a truck and remove valuables that still remained in the church despite the intensity of the blaze.

According to a report by the New York Post, a Paris spokesperson with the prosecutor’s office said it had opened an inquiry into “accidental destruction by fire” and had not yet declared it was arson. However, less than 24 hours later, officials were reporting that it wasn’t arson. The premature verdict on the cause of the fire did little to assuage the feeling that French officials and media reports were not accurate, particularly when Reuters reported that 50 individuals had just been assigned to investigate all aspects of the incident.

By Thursday, a New York Post article said that French investigators believed an electrical short-circuit was most likely behind the massive blaze that ripped through Notre Dame cathedral. The French judicial police official, who spoke anonymously about the investigation, seemed to confirm the prevailing theory that the inferno was not intentionally caused.

Reportedly there were three separate fires started in the church, one on the roof, which makes an electrical short-circuit theory suspect. Even more bizarre, the French press confirmed that there were no construction workers present at the time of the fire. Yet, a Fox News chyron reported that the fire was a construction accident, stating “the spire was under construction before the fire, collapse.”

If any workman had been present where arcing or electrical tools were used there would have been someone assigned as a fire watcher, the normal procedure on any construction work site. A retired Notre Dame architect also questioned the intensity of the fire, saying on French television when asked about the velocity of the fire, “No. You know, oak that is 800 years old doesn’t burn like that….You would need a lot of kindling to succeed.”

Despite the unusually quick response to blame renovations for the cause of the fire, the chief architect of historical monuments responsible for the restoration of the spire of Notre Dame, Philippe Villeneuve, disputed this official hypothesis of what caused the fire. “The work had not started yet, only the scaffolding was being assembled.” From his point of view, “the hot spot hypothesis is therefore not the right one.” There were no workers in the cathedral and no heat sources near the timber frame.

Reuters reported that French police had started to question workers who were making repairs to the cathedral’s roof after it had closed for the night, around 5:00 p.m. local time. Workers were supposed to be gone by 5:30. A heat sensitive alarm went off around 6:20 p.m. local time, according to the Daily Beast, almost an hour and a half after workers supposedly left the site. An official fire alarm went off around 20 minutes later, at which point the blaze had already broken out. This account of events directly contradicts Villeneuve’s statement that work had not yet started in the cathedral—only the assembling of scaffolding.

But it isn’t just what the media and officials are saying that doesn’t add up, it’s what they are not reporting. According to the UK Sun, 875 churches were vandalized in 2018. The French Interior Ministry said that 59 cemeteries were also vandalized. In an interview with Fox News’ Shepard Smith, Phillipe Karsenty, identified only as an elected French official, brought up the fact that churches across France were being desecrated and vandalized on a weekly basis. Karsenty said, “Even the Nazis didn’t dare destroy it [Notre Dame cathedral], and you have to know for the last year we’ve had churches desecrated each and every week all over France so of course you will hear the story of the politically correct, which will tell you it is probably an accident.”

Smith immediately cut Karsenty off. “Sir. Sir! Sir! We’re not going to speculate here of the cause of something for which we don’t know.” It was disconcerting to watch a news reporting agency not encouraging questions or questioning an official narrative. Smith would not let his guest speak and eventually ended the call saying, “No sir, not here, not on my watch!” He then warned his audience on entertaining “conspiracy theories.” Not to be out done, Fox News host Neil Cavuto also cut the mic of a guest who speculated the fire was no accident.

It is irresponsible for media to not report on the frequency and number of churches vandalized in France and across Europe, where at least three churches a day are desecrated on average and last month the more than 800-year-old Basilica of Saint-Denis in the now densely migrant-populated suburbs of Paris was also vandalized, damaging the organ and breaking the stained glass windows.

In September 2016, a Muslim was arrested after his car was found packed with explosive gas cylinders outside Notre Dame cathedral. Days later, three more Muslims were arrested over a Notre Dame Cathedral jihad bomb plot. Notre Dame was the target of a Muslim terrorist attack again in June 2017, when French police shot a man outside of the cathedral who was in possession of kitchen knives and a hammer. The man turned out to be an Algerian native and journalist named Farid Ikken, who won an award for his prize-winning human rights writing in Sweden before returning to Algeria where he started an online news site and then moved to France on a student visa, where he was pursuing a PhD in communications. According to the prosecutor, a video in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS was found at his apartment.

A WND report had the honesty to point out that, “Social media users with Muslim names are celebrating the catastrophic fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Monday.”

The Geller Report, provided “a sampling of the Facebook users taking delight in the tragedy” and invited readers to “notice anything in common:”

• Wahid Hadji
• Oubbad Jsk
• Yusuf Mohammedzai
• Hessam Massa
• Mohamed Hiadi
• Mohamed Bensalem
• Alaa Atfeh
• Raidh Khaled
• Ammar Sofiane
• Abdelhakim Noui Oua
• Mohamed Amin

The media’s lack of accurate and honest investigative reporting on religiously motivated attacks throughout the West is reaching absurd levels. Perhaps the media has forgotten that a Catholic priest was beheaded by jihadists in front of horrified onlookers during mass in 2016. Father Jacques Hamel was first forced to his knees before he was murdered while jihadists “filmed themselves preaching in Arabic by the altar.” Canadian Muslim political candidate Eve Torres stated that the Notre Dame fire was divine retribution and that “firefighters should sleep in the church on Notre-Dame Street in Montreal.”

Even big tech knows a terrorist attack when it sees, but was quick to assert that its own algorithms were to blame for the hiccup. While the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned on Monday, Google-owned YouTube placed a link under live coverage of the fire to information about the 9/11 attacks. The link, which YouTube said was placed under videos by mistake, was eventually removed. “The video site’s algorithms may have misinterpreted the imagery from the videos as footage from the World Trade Center tragedy.”

“Last year, we launched information panels with links to third-party sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for subjects subject to misinformation,” a YouTube spokesman said in a statement. “These panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call. We are disabling these panels for livestreams related to the fire.”

The misinformation and silence is rampant among media worldwide and only growing worse. The hijacking by the media and officials of the words terrorists, Muslim terrorists and Christians has reached new lows, with Obama and Hillary referring to Christians as “Easter Worshippers” in tweets following the Easter Sunday Muslim attacks in Sri Lanka. While the media went into hysteria overdrive following the shooting in a New Zealand mosque, they have said little about the Christian attacks that continue worldwide, endangering those in the West by not accurately reporting on real threats. According to the group Open Borders, Christians today are the most persecuted group in the world.