Victims of the Media

Submitted by Rick (United States), Mar 14, 2006 at 10:22

This fellow does fit the pattern of a Muslim who is seemingly well adjusted to Western life in the US. Why the change into a fanatic jihadist attempting to kill his fellow students? In this fellow's case although I am not trying to underestimate the philosophy of hate common to jihadists, I sense the media was ultimately the force which lead him to carry out this act of terrorism.

I do not know how much Islamic media - foreign or American, replete with emotional Islamic calls for jihad, he followed but I can say that the American media alone in its anti-Bush bashing, its furtherance of essentially an anti-Israel presentation of that problem, a one sided view of the Iraqi situation - not that there aren't real problems for Bush but the unwillingness to stress the horror of Arab-Arab violence and the positive feeling many Irawis have for Americans.

The media's context of the "cartoon war" was always from the Muslim side as if printing cartoons did or may justify burning, sacking, and boycotting and no where did I see a stand up position for the Freedom of the Press in the press! Here was an issue that went to the heart of who and what the media is supposed to be about and they still took a dhimmi view of how to respond - even with blurred images of a cartoon on television! Even alleged criminals aren't afforded that courtesy of their rights.

Imagine an impressionable Muslim kid reading this - seeing this from the Western press! It is the Western press that ignores Darfur but sends camera teams and correspondents galore to Israel to report on any action Israel takes to defend her citizens. In fact many of the AP / Reuters personnel on the scene are connected to Hamas and other terrorist groups. One of the reasons the Times never uses the "T" word to describe palestinian terrorists. Israeli leaders are likewise demonized in Western media. The anti-Semitic cartoon of Sharon naked and eating palestinian babies which won the best political cartoon in Europe immediately comes to mind. There is not and never will be a cartoon of Abbas waving goodbye and good luck in a send off of the terrorists of Munich in 1972.

Anyway, you get the idea. If this student lives in a nation that more or less agrees with the prevalent Arab/Muslim view that the US is the biggest terrorist of all, his inclination to carry out an "operation" as the "militants" do in Israel or in Iraq or in Afganistan is not far behind.

The media in this nation acts in a manner like putting a gun in the hands of a mentality challenged person, cocking it and walking away. They have failed to upheld their responsibility to report rather than do soundbits but fail to understand that the people they seek to "understand" are the very enemies of a free and open society that allows them to act in the less than responsible nature that they do.

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