Media Obfuscates Jihad

On Monday morning a reporter contacted me to remonstrate with me for my treatment of the reporter in this video, in which I respond to a biased and misleading question by the Swedish reporter Per Gudmundson. The reporter thought I was too hard on Gudmundson, despite the “when did you stop beating your wife” quality of his question; however, I am finished with playing along with the grand pretense that reporters are objective, neutral observers of events, and not the relentless and viciously unfair ideologues that they are. Also on Monday, a minor Associated Press piece about some minor jihadists in Toledo, Ohio, offered a case in point as to why mainstream media journalists deserve no professional respect whatsoever.

Look first at the headline: “Federal judge in Toledo sentences 2 terror plotters.” Two “terror plotters” were sentenced. So far they could be anyone. Islamic jihadists? Maybe. Could also be “Christian extremists” (who will surely be along in a minute to bear out every well-indoctrinated schoolgirl’s desperate and paranoid fear of them). Or maybe Tamil Tigers. Maoist fanatics. You never know. So let’s read on.

Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. They were “Chicago-area cousins.” That seems to be the most important bit of information about them, because that’s what the AP reporter chose as the lead identifier for them. So did they take part in a “plot to attack American soldiers overseas” — maybe lazy recruits in a sleepy, outmoded, and no longer necessary Cold War outpost in Germany, for all we know from the story so far — because they were from the Chicago area? Is Chicago in rebellion against the United States government? Or is it that this is some sort of weird cousins’ plot, a Manson-family type thing? Ah. They were “men.” And they had ties to three other “men.” So maybe the problem here is males, the source testosterone. Extra screening for men in airports! Now! Hmmm. Khaleel Ahmed and Zubair Ahmed. What an odd coincidence: both names strongly suggest that these two are adherents of the Religion of Peace™! Yet Barack Obama and John Brennan tell us that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. Brennan said in May that “describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism, that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.” He said that using Islamic terms to describe the enemy “would actually be counterproductive. It would play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims.”

But of course, they portray themselves as religious leaders defending a holy cause, and they are widely perceived as such among Muslims, and have Islamic texts and teachings to establish their case. Is it really wise to pretend that that isn’t the case? Nonetheless, as this is the prevailing dogma to which all must adhere, AP doesn’t even come close to mentioning the possibility that it could have had anything to do with their motivations.

Egypt, eh? How odd. One would think that one of the many peaceful adherents of Islam in Egypt would have stopped them there.

In any case, the AP story, like all other mainstream media stories, leaves the reader thoroughly unequipped to understand why the Ahmed cousins got involved in this plot, and what they hoped to accomplish. No wonder the state of awareness about the jihad threat in America is so abysmally low today.