This time round – Mumbai – 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'd 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 Mumbai 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 Mumbai 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."
As I've written many times, how is it being sympathetic to Moslems to cloud the responsibility of Islamist terrorists for terrorist attacks? People will figure out that "practitioners" or "militants" almost always turn out to be Moslems. If the press cannot distinguish between the violent minority and the entire religion, which implies that there is no distinction bwtween jihadis who are Moslem and all Moslems, why shouldn't ordinary people--the victims of Islamist terrorism--conclude that Islam itself is at fault?
We need to destroy the Islamo-fascist terrorists just to save Islam at this point. If we can kill enough jihadis to make it safer for moderate Moslems to speak out against the jihadis without too much fear that they will be beheaded by said jihadis as a lesson to keep quiet, perhaps we will finally have an Islamic Awakening just as we created the conditions for a Sunni Awakening in Iraq.
So who's more sympathetic to Moslems? Those who point out that Islamists are killing us and seek to kill the violent jihadis? Or those who pretend there is no difference between the two groups and ignore the whole issue?
