A Conspiracy Of Silence

Mark Steyn notes the way the media identifies terrorists and their complete inability to figure out what motivates them – or who their targets are. He’s writing about the latest terror attacks in Mumbai.

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 Bombay 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. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay 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.”

Yes, indeed. The terrorists managed to find, torture and kill the few Jews in a city of some 20 million. And the Times is unable to connect the dots. The media is unable to mention the name of the religion the killers are hiding behind. Heck, the media is unable to use the word “terrorist”. Let me help the Times out here. They entered the only Jewish center in Mumbai, the tied up and tortured the people inside – including the pregnant wife of the Rabbi, then they killed every one of them. Hint: it wasn’t an accident.

From Wikipedia:

The expression conspiracy of silence, or culture of silence, relates to a condition or matter which is known to exist, but by tacit communal unspoken consensus is not talked about or acknowledged.

That about wraps it up. I’d say the media are “practitioners” of a Conspiracy of Silence, indeed. Or at least the Western media. The Times of India is having no problem calling the murderous thugs by their true name: terrorists.

The one hopeful sign in all this was the refusal of Mumbai Muslims to bury the bodies of the nine dead terrorists. In fact, some Indian Muslims have demanded that the bodies not be buried anywhere in India.