Friday, April 04, 2008

The Usual Suspect

Some of our jihadi enemies wanted to kill a lot of Westerners. The first paragraph of the story tells us why:

Six Britons accused of plotting to blow up at least seven transatlantic airliners recorded martyrdom videos saying the attacks would be revenge for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a London court was told on Friday.


Iraq was the motive.

The headline for the article loudly proclaims this:

Aircraft bombings in "revenge for Iraq"
But then the article quotes tapes of the men:

In extracts of the videos heard in court the men said they wanted to punish non-Muslims and threatened "floods of martyrdom operations" because Osama bin Laden's warnings had been ignored.

"If you think you can go into our lands and do what you are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and keep on supporting those who are fighting against Muslims and think it will not come back on your own doorstep may you have another think (sic) coming," Umar Islam, one of the eight defendants said.


Huh. Well that's strange. After the headline and first paragraph tell us that Iraq (and therefore implying only Iraq) motivated the jihadis, the jihadis actually said that even the "good" war in Afghanistan inspired them? And of course, the Jews.

What mental processes allow our media to just filter out non-Iraq issues from our enemies' motivations? It's almost as if the facts are irrelevant to the stories they've already written.