Week 9 Media won't report radical Islamic events

Because there are several articles here, for easier reading I have printed the articles in red, and my words in boldface black.



Media won't report radical Islamic events
By Tony Blankley
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Denial is an often useful innate human trait. Few of us would be able to function in the present if we did not put out of mind many unpleasant realities — such as our inevitable death. The Woody Allen character in the movie "Annie Hall" stated the comic extreme version of not using the denial mechanism when, as a child he refused to do his homework because in 5 billion years the sun would explode, "so, what's the use?"
But when a person, or a society, denies emerging or imminent dangers, the peace of mind it gains will be extremely short term, while the harm may be sustained or fatal.
Most of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.
The latest minor example of the latter is occurring at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As has been generally reported, an Iranian Muslim student drove a jeep into a crowd of students, causing only minor injuries. He turned himself in and informed the police and the media that he was trying to kill the students to "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world."
Neither the university nor most of the media has been willing to characterize this event as a terrorist attempt by a radical Muslim. Mr. Colmes, on "Hannity and Colmes" seemed to express genuine puzzlement as to why it mattered whether we called it that or merely an act of violence. Similarly, the attack at the Los Angeles International Airport a few years ago was for nine months just called a violent attack, before it was finally characterized by police as a radical Muslim act of terrorism.
I have been in contact with British politicians who tell me that there is increasing radical Muslim street violence in Britain that is explicitly motivated by radical Islam but is not reported or characterized as such. Even in its cleansed versions, I am told, these incidents are being extremely underreported.
In Antwerp last month, according to the reporter Paul Belien, rioting Moroccan "youths" went on a rampage destroying cars and beating up reporters, but the police were instructed not even to stop them or arrest them. According to an anonymous policeman, "An ambulance was told to switch off its siren because that might provoke the Moroccans." This event, too, was under reported, or not reported at all in American media.
And of course, last October in Paris and other French cities, hundreds of buildings were torched and tens of thousands of cars burned by Muslim "youths" through weeks of rioting, while both the French government and most of the "responsible" experts denied there was any radical Muslim component to the greatest urban violence to hit France since World War. It was all to do with poverty and teenage angst and alienation.
Of course poverty and alienation can't explain the Iranian student in North Carolina. He has just received one of the finest educations available to a privileged American. He reportedly has received advanced degrees in philosophy and psychology from one of our top universities.
The media has pointed out that there is no evidence he was connected to Al Qaeda or another terrorist cell. But that is exactly the point. As I discussed in my book last year, the threat to the West is vastly more than bin Laden and Al Qaeda (although that would be bad enough.)
The greater danger is the ferment in Islam that is generating radical ideas in an unknown, but growing percentage of grass-roots Muslims around the world — very much including in Europe and, to a currently lesser extent, in the United States.
A nation cannot design (and maintain public support for) a rational response to the danger if the nature and extent of the danger is not identified, widely reported and comprehended.
What are we dealing with? A few maladjusted "youth"? Or a larger and growing number of perfectly well-adjusted men and women — who just happen to be adjusted to a different set of cultural, religious (or distorted religious) and political values. And does it matter that those values are inimical to western concepts of tolerance, democracy, equality and religious freedom?
The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported. But a witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam.
As the danger grows but is not publicly described, the public will first be ignorant and fail to demand sufficient remedial action.
But as incidents and rumors are encountered over time, the public mind will inevitably suspect the worst and demand the strongest action. Demagogues will emerge to gratify that vox populi. (The Dubai port deal is a small example of such a process — although in that incident the threat is real and there are many sincere and rational voices amidst the many demagogues.)
Institutional voices are not being responsible by suppressing honest description of radical Islamic events. Denying the existence of evil (or refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn't understand that point.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times.


Why is it almost every time we see any hint of terrorist violence it is minimzed? The U of North Carolina refuses to label the recent incident there ( where a Muslim student deliberately ran into a crowd of students ) as terrorism, racism, or anything else. The UNC says it isn't their job to label, although the student who did it is reported to have said himself that he did it to avenge US actions against Muslims. But it isn't the university's job to label it? What if a group of students wearing white robes burned a cross on the university grounds? Do you think they'd have any trouble labelling that? Or what if a man said that ( as did the president of an Ivy League school last summer) maybe women don't do as well at math and science because they aren't interested in it, would the university say it wasn't their job to label that? Ha! We can be sure that the university would have conducted a press conference 27 seconds after either of these things happened and distanced themselves by calling the first one racist hatred and the second "gender hate speech". I suspect that this type of incident ( the student running down fellow students in revenge for US policy toward Muslims) is about the only type of incident that WOULDN"T be labelled and repudiated. The fact that the University of North Carolina is so "politically correct" that it can't, or won't, call it what it plainly is, shows us that the problem is even worse than we'd thought. Mr. Blankley is correct, the West is in a denial mode about radical Islamic violence, and until we can define the problem and call it what it is, things will only get worse. As Mr. Blankley says:
"Denying the existence of evil (or refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn't understand that point."



After I finished this post, I came across this article, since it reinforces the above, I decided to include it:






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NYT imam series not even Journalism 101
By Diana West

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Way back when I was a cub reporter, I got hold of a book about the "art" of interviewing. It was a thin book — no use spending thousands of words to tell a reporter, cub or old Grizzly, to bone up on a subject and let natural curiosity take its course.
That thin book came to mind on reading a three-part series in The New York Times about an imam named Reda Shata, who presides over the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, N.Y. As far as the art of interviewing goes, the reporter got it exactly backward: Thousands of words; negligible expertise; and no curiosity.
Both the New York Post and the New York Sun have already pounced on the most egregious flaw of omission: not a mention, in 11,000-plus words, of the day in March 1994 when a man walked out of that same Bay Ridge mosque and, inspired by the anti-Jewish sermon of the day (delivered by a different, unidentified imam), armed himself and opened fire on a van carrying Hasidic Jewish children. Ari Halberstam, 16, was killed. The Times series, as it happened, concluded on the 12th anniversary of his death.
Such journalistic jaw-droppers abound: not only gaping holes, like the one above, but also dead ends that leave countless questions that the female reporter, it seems, never thought to ask. For example, she notes, over six months of interviews, the Egyptian-born imam refused to shake her hand. "He offers women only a nod," she writes. Why is shaking hands with a woman "improper"? What does the imam think about sexual equality? She doesn't tell us. In Belgium last year, she doesn't mention, the female president of the parliament made headlines for canceling a meeting with an Iranian delegation over this same refusal to shake a woman's hand (the parliamentarian's own); while in Holland, the English-language blog Zacht Ei reported, a Muslim man lost a month's worth of welfare benefits for not only refusing to shake hands with female municipal employees, but also refusing to acknowledge their presence. This is supposed to be "the story of Mr. Shata's journey west," but the story bypasses such landmark issues.
Instead, we get a load of happy talk: "Married life in Islam is an act of worship," Mr. Shata says. So impressed were the editors of The New York Times by this load that they ran the quotation, not just above the fold, but across the very top of the front page over a gold-bathed family photo four columns wide. Does Miss Reporter ask the imam to reconcile this ecstatic notion with the Islamic custom of arranged and forced marriages, the spate of spousal abuse and "honor killings" within European Muslim communities — as recounted in clarifying detail in Bruce Bawer's important new book, "While Europe Slept" — or the tradition of polygamy, which exists to this day in portions of Islamic society?
No, no and no. She writes: "One Brooklyn imam reportedly urged his wealthier male congregants during a Ramadan sermon last year to take two wives. When a woman complained about the sermon to Mr. Shata, he laughed. 'You know that preacher who said Hugo Chavez should be shot?' he asked," referring to a comment by Pat Robertson about the Venezuelan leader. "'We have our idiots, too.'" One clumsy feint and presto — The New York Times loses all interest in polygamy, from Mohammed's Mecca to Bloomberg's New York.
Then there was the series' look at terrorism. "What I may see as terrorism, you may not see that way," Mr. Shata says. What does he mean by that? The reporter doesn't tell us. Hamas is a powerful symbol of resistance, he says; the assassinated Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin was the "martyred" "lion of Palestine," he sermonizes; and yet the imam says he condemns all violence. How does he square that? She doesn't tell us. And when he sanctions violence against soldiers, not civilians, how does he define "soldier" and "civilian"? She doesn't tell us that, either.
When asked about a 2004 sermon that "exalted" a female suicide bomber as a "martyr," Mr. Shata seems "unusually conflicted," the reporter writes. He declines to comment for fear of "(inviting) controversy," and alienating New York rabbis he has "forged friendships with." And there the question lies: She just lets him slip away. All the news that's fit to print, apparently, doesn't include the heart of the matter.

Even I could have done a better interview, and that isn't saying much. : (