I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t read it with my own eyes… The newspaper with the relatively large (and declining) circulation based in a city east of the Appalachian Mountains, writes about the difficulty they have calling the murderers in Bombay “terrorists”:
They were “militants,” “gunmen,” “attackers” and “assailants.” Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city’s largest train station, five-star hotels, a Jewish center, a cafe and a hospital — were described as “coordinated terrorist attacks.” But the men themselves were not called terrorists.
This is the same New York Times that has no problem calling the Republican President a fascist, or Sarah Palin a religious nutcase. However, god-forbid you call a Moslem that murders innocent civilians a terrorist… The attempt to rationalise and justify their decisions makes it feel like I’m reading an explanation from Chauncey Garner while he’s a guest star in Alice in Wonderland (how’s that for complex metaphors?).
Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said The Times may eventually put that label on Lashkar, but reporters are still trying to learn more about it. “Our instinct is to proceed with caution, not rushing to label any group with the word terrorist before we have a deeper understanding of its full dimensions”…
Perhaps one day the journalists from the Times will read their analysis on this topic and understand why they no longer have a job.