Vilmar at Kickin' and Screamin' is more than a little agitated:
For years while President Bush governed the country and terrorists struck out cold-heartedly against innocent civilians in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, etc. the press tried its damnest to change the terminology from “suicide bombers” and “Islamic terrorists” to simply “freedom fighters” or “militants” or other politically correct terms to distance themselves from the evil that is permeating our world in the name of Islam. After all, who can forget the CNN admission to coddling Saddam Hussein and spreading his propaganda in order to not get kicked out of Iraq?
But……………..now that Barack Obama is elected President, I find NPR beginning to lay the groundwork for a classic “shift of ideology” by all of a sudden questioning why we don’t call these heinous human wastes of skin what they truly are: “EVIL.”
Funny, huh? Under Bush they were simply militants defending their views. Under Obama they are now “evil.” On top of that, you might even expect them to start bringing the Bible into the discussion….as is done in the link I refer to below.
So pay attention in the future to see if this trend continues with the rest of the media joining the fray in order to defend Obama’s having to continue to wage battle against them. Except in this case it will be “justified” because the militants are “evil terrorists.”
Draw your own conclusions and read it all here.
A taste:
I get increasingly uncomfortable with the convention of journalism that requires us to say that so far, we don’t know the motives of the people who carried out this week’s attacks in Mumbai.
A word like “motive” seems to imply there was reason or purpose. It suggests that, however profane their actions, the terrorists had the incentive of some goal in mind.
But after covering too many killings, as a reporter or host, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Oklahoma City or Somalia, I’ve come to the conclusion that the perpetrators of such crimes might just be … evil. (my note: oh, really? After 20 years only NOW you come to this conclusion?)
Evil is a word that many people of my generation shrink from using. It seems so imprecise and uneducated - biblical, rather than cerebral and informed.
But there are times and crimes that remind me how often the Bible gets it right.
To be fair, Scott Simon, the NPR journalist quoted by Vilmar, is no stranger to the concept of evil.
Back in June of 2006, he pisses off a socialist web-site for writing a novel that deals with evil in ways most progressives don't... and he's taken to task for it. What follows is but a small snippet:
...
Not much more can be expected from a writer whose mission is not to reveal in an artistically truthful manner the effects or causes of war, but to propagate the official government and media line as fact. Had Simon spent less time detailing the banal intricacies of sniper shooting and moralising and more time on considering the roots of the tragic conflict, he would have discovered that neither the Bosnian Serbs, nor the Bosnian Moslems or Croats for that matter, were the “evil” in this conflict. Rather, all the peoples in the region were the victims of bankrupt nationalist politics of their various leaders—Milosevic, Tudjman and Izetbegovic—and the imperialist intrigues of Europe and the US. It was after all, the recognition of the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, first by Germany and then the US, which began the process of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, with tragic consequences. Simon, however, is not interested looking at such things.
I love liberal on liberal violence and this certainly fits the bill but it also, in my less than humble view, puts a bit of a crimp in Vilmar's point.
Oh well... trust me, there'll be other examples of journalistic hypocrisy. I'm just not sure there is here particularly.
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