Media Bias, Part XXXII

Press bias against Jews isn't new. And the media has long downplayed the culpability of Islamofascists, acting more as press agents than as reporters, appending artful non-judgmental names in place of "terrorists".

But the media's mendacity covering the Bombay terror attacks is mind-boggling--as several observers detail [hyperlinks added]:

• Abraham Cooper & Harold Brackman in the New York Post:

  The international media have already morphed the horrific slaughter in Mumbai into the murky realm of euphemism and apologetics.
  
  Al Jazeera and The Guardian label the terrorists "gunmen"; CNN calls them "militants." Some analysts identified the underlying cause as the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Psychological guru Deepak Chopra called it the result of "collateral damage" from the US war on terrorism and the Iraq war.
  
  But how does the especially bloodthirsty attack on Mumbai's Nariman-Chabad House fit into this puzzle palace? . . .
  
  The BBC initially chose to hide the Jewish character of the target by describing it as just "an office building." Al Jazeera refused to show Chabad House as the site of the carnage. Some Western media outlets unsympathetically labeled victims there as "ultra-Orthodox" or "missionaries."

• Tom Gross in National Review:

  You would be hard pressed to find any talk of radical Islam on the BBC in recent days, or mention of the fact that Islamists think India should be a Muslim country. Instead, the BBC continues to try to persuade its massive global audience that it is a local Indian problem, that the subcontinent has a history of unrest, and so on.
  
  Even the Pakistani angle has been presented as some kind of local Pakistan-India dispute rather than as a problem with radical Islam this despite the fact that according to numerous reports the Mumbai terrorists themselves were screaming Allah Akbar (Allah is the Greatest) as they murdered the Jews and the infidels in line with Bin Ladenist ideology. . .
  
  For most of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that an office building had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such).

• Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

  Then too, the multicultural media suppressed the fact that the jihadists were targeting Jews. Outside of Israel, it took the media nearly two days to report that the Chabad House had even been taken over by the jihadists. And once they did finally report that Jews were being targeted, they made every effort to downplay the strategic significance of the jihadists' decision to send a team off the beaten path simply to butcher Jews.
  
  Emblematic of the Western media's attempts to play down the story was The New York Times. Two days into the hostage drama, the Times opined, "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
  
  Jews were not the only ones who had their identity obscured. The jihadists did too. For almost an entire day, major news networks in the West suppressed the fact that the murderers were Muslim jihadists, claiming oddly, that they could also be Hindu terrorists. This was odd not because there are no Hindu terrorists, but because the perpetrators referred to themselves from the outset as "mujahideen," or Islamic warriors.
  
  Once the jig was up on their attempts to hide the identities of the perpetrators and their victims alike, the jihadists' multicultural enablers started blaming the victims. For instance, on Sunday, The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum attacking Indian Hindus. After blithely dismissing the atrocities that were still under way while she wrote as "probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir," Nussbaum focused her ire against India's Hindus. . .
  
  After ignoring India's long and recent history of jihad, Nussbaum condemned an imaginary double standard which she claimed labels all Muslims as terrorists and gives Hindus a free ride in subjugating them. Of course, thanks to multiculturalists like Nussbaum, the double standard we suffer from is the exact opposite of what she described: Muslim terrorists, we are told, are victims of persecution and represent a teensy-tiny fraction of Muslims. On the other hand, all non-Muslims involved in even marginally violent activities against Muslims are murderers, fanatics, extremists. Moreover, they are representative of their non-Muslim societies.

• Victor Davis Hanson on The Corner:

  [H]ere and in India intellectuals, pundits, and Bollywood actors variously suggested that grievance and injustice to India's Muslims apparently better explain the violence — even why (?) the Pakistani-based terrorists singled out iconic targets in Mumbai's elite districts, gave reprieves to some Muslim hostages amid their serial executions, and were especially interested in murdering British, American, and Jewish citizens. Last time I looked, however, the abject poor in Panama or Haiti were not targeting icons of globalization in their cities, or roaming their streets looking for Jews, Americans, and Brits.
  
  Too often lost in too many exegeses were the politically-taboo adjectives like "evil" or "thugs" and "killers". Photos and stories of abject murderers with automatic weapons in wire-service reporting out of India transmogrified into mere "militants" and "suspected gunmen." . . .
  
  Moral equivalence and obfuscation were ubiquitous. So we were reminded that radical Islam holds no monopoly on international terrorism — as if Christian, Hindu, or Sikh Indian terrorists cross borders and routinely invade Pakistan to murder innocents and blow up buildings to express their anger at their own poverty, or the ravages of globalization and modernism, or the excesses of radical Islam, or indeed travel to the US and Europe to do the same.

Last weekend, the New York Times compared the trampling death of a Long-Island Wal-Mart worker to the Spanish Civil War. But a CNN security analyst couldn't understand why terrorists targeted a Jewish center.

I agree with Cooper and Brackman's conclusion:

Terrorism may not succeed in destroying our civilization -- but politically correct euphemisms and apologetics are already crippling our ability to defend it.

Islamic terror is a global enemy that particularly targets Jews, Americans and Brits. It's neither imagined nor evaporating on January 20th. Despite what the media reports.

(via Little Green Footballs)