Adjectives are your friend
They were muslim terrorists. Adjectives are important.
Last week in Mumbai we witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see.
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There was nothing remotely random about it. This was no hostage standoff. The terrorists didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted to murder as many Hindus, Christians, Jews, atheists and other “infidels” as they could, and in as spectacular a manner as possible. In the Jewish center, some of the female victims even appear to have been tortured before being killed.
So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain’s most respected TV journalists, use the word “practitioners” when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors?
Why did Britain’s highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the “militants” showed a “wanton disregard for race or creed” when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected.
The Times of India instructed its readers: “Terrorists have no religion.” That’s a lovely sentiment but it bears no relationship to reality. In Mumbai — as in London, Madrid, Bali, New York, Jerusalem and so many other places — the slaughter was carried out by men who regarded themselves as jihadis, holy warriors, doing Allah’s will.
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Reuters and the Guardian, echoing Al-Jazeera, used the even more nonjudgmental term: “gunmen.” And as Mark Steyn notes, in some cases, they were merely “suspected gunmen” — even those photographed carrying rifles.
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…one might argue, if such issues as Kashmir and Palestine could be resolved, surely that would remove fuel from the fire. Then, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group apparently behind the carnage in Mumbai) and al-Qaeda and the Taliban and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran’s mullahs would find fewer angry young Muslim men susceptible to being radicalized and recruited for terrorist missions.
Not so.
…there still would be millions of impoverished and frustrated young Muslim men from Casablanca to Cairo to Gaza to Karachi who would be susceptible to an ideology that tells them they deserve to rule, and that whatever they lack has been taken from them by infidels whom they are permitted — indeed encouraged — to kill.
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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that the assault on Mumbai raises “huge questions about how the world addresses violent extremism.” Actually, it answers those questions. It should be more obvious than ever that Islamist terrorists — or even just “violent extremists”— must be fought. That requires such ungentlemanly tactics as aggressive surveillance and rigorous interrogations. We either take the fight to the terrorists or we wait for the terrorists to bring the fight to us — as they did in Mumbai. There’s no third option.
