Media ignore militants’ Muslim identity - Mark Steyn
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline — “British Muslims fear repercussions over tomorrow’s train bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round - Bombay - it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”
Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you would be hard-pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I” and ending in “slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations - “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” - and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok.”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution “practitioners.” “Practitioners” of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
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