I fell off my chair when I read what James Taranto had to say in an article in the WSJ entitled Losing His Religion. Taranto seems to think political correctness gets in his way as well as others in the news media from making the erroneous assumption that any act of terrorism must be committed by a Muslim and so news outlets didn’t want to say that Yonathan Melaku was Muslim. I immediately fired off this comment to the editor:
Please stop inferring that media and others in the public sphere are hindered by political correctness or that you are either courageous for making the connection or victimized by a climate that oppresses you for saying this latest perpetrator was a Muslim, when neither is the case, especially after a week that began with Newt Gingrich insinuating that Muslims are like Nazis during a political appearance where no one spoke out against such blatant anti-Semitic remarks, or only a few days ago when Congressman Peter King held his radicalization hearings, for the second time, on Islam which spoke exclusively about the dangers Muslim inmates poise to the prison population and by inference to others not in prison. You are writing, according to BurrellesLuce in November of last year as ‘not only one of the few daily newspapers to post an increase in daily circulation during the year ending Sept. 30, 2010, but it also opened up a 230,000 lead over second-ranked USA Today.’ It takes no courage to write racist tinged op/ed pieces for a publication where other similarly minded people write with the result being a first place ranking among American publications. That’s not to say however, that others haven’t joined you in reciting the meme so often heard that not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims, when they have and it doesn’t take a genius to realize such proclamations can result in profits for news organizations like yours and Fox. Unless you are Muslim, you are not a victim, so stop portraying yourself as one.
It’s been mentioned here in Miscellany101 more than a few times the terrorism appellation is a selective and discriminatory one that has come to be seen as applicable only to Muslim and that even when non-Muslims commit and are motivated to commit the same crimes as those commonly associated with terrorism, they are given the politically correct pass-over from the media. Members of the right however want to insist that people are intimidated into not saying what to Taranto and others like him think is the obvious that most if not all acts of terrorism are committed by Muslims. I would like to remind him of this news story of just over a year ago which took place at the Pentagon and resulted in the wounding of two officers of the law and the death of the “terrorist” and there was NO mention of Patrick Bedell’s Christian beliefs despite Taranto’s rantings to the contrary.
Related articles
- The Face of American Terrorism (miscellany101.wordpress.com)
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