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March 8, 2006
Media Refusing To Report Radical Islamic Events
In his Townhall.com opinion piece today, Tony Blankley reminds us that a nation cannot design (and maintain public support for) a rational response to a danger if the nature and extent of the danger is not identified, widely reported and comprehended. The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported.
He describes a "witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness" that is "suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam," and warns that "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". While most of the world today not only is "in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam," it more often than not refuses to even accept the "unambiguous evidence of its existence" and it's ever-growing hold on the Muslim community:
(...) 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.Blankley closes with the important point that 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. In the media's failing to report radical Islamic events, they are not only contributing to the death of the West at the hands of Islamic extremism, they are at the same time hastening the end of their opportunity to report Islamic events accurately. The press will certainly find sharia to severely restrict their valued right to be liberal.(...) 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.
Be sure to read all of Media won't report radical Islamic events. and also - On The West's Last Chance: 'An Islamist threat like the Nazis'.
Cross posted by Hyscience
Posted by Richard at March 8, 2006 9:36 AM
