Survival speak
Posted: January 2, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
URL:http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30289
As I was pulling together some material for a "Year in Review," I noticed something interesting – you've probably noticed it, as well. In the eyes of the federal law enforcement, virtually everyone is a potential terrorist, particularly Islamic men between the ages of 17 and 34 of Middle East extraction. But not exclusively Islamic men.
If you've ever been through new normal airport security, you know what I mean. World War II's greatest ace (and former South Dakota governor) Joe Foss, 87 years old, found himself in custody last year for refusing to give up a bit of metal to airport screeners.
It seems the screeners thought the 87-year-old governor was going to use his Congressional Medal of Honor to take over an airplane.
The INS is having no problem defining potential terrorists. It recently rounded up hundreds of legal aliens based entirely on how well they fit the 9-11 ethnic profile. The White House and the administration have no trouble identifying what constitutes a "terrorist" although the administration remains totally myopic about the philosophy that spawns it or its Saudi roots.
It's the media that is clueless about what constitutes a terrorist. Take this example from a report earlier this week from the "Voice of America." An Islamic gunman got past security at the American-run Baptist Hospital in Yemen. He shot and killed three American missionaries who were in Yemen to provide free medical care to indigent Yemenis.
Here's how the "Voice of America" described it; "Security officials say a gunman, suspected of being a Muslim militant, entered the American-run hospital in the southern town of Jibla Monday posing as a patient, then opened fire."
"Suspected" of being a Muslim "militant"? What does one need to do to be "confirmed" as a Muslim "terrorist" to the media, anyway?
I set out to find the answer, using the simple expedient of typing the words "militant" and "terrorist" into the Google news search engine. The search engine crawls the Web, as I comprehend it, and finds occurrences of that word in recent news coverage from around the world. I ended up with 6,810 news stories, with the first page devoted to the Yemeni murders.
When I entered the word "terrorist" I got a lot more hits, some 17,500, but what was interesting was the context.
The first hit for "terrorist" wasn't the Yemeni attack, but from Interfax in reference to Chechens. The next hit came from Iran, applying the word "terrorist" to Israel.
Not one single news story on the first page of Google's news search returning hits on the word 'terrorist' originated in the United States.
Russia, Israel and ... the Fiji Daily Post – but I waded through three pages before a U.S. source employed the word "terrorist" and that was a story about a "suspected" terrorist whose charges were dismissed by a Michigan judge.
I had to go to page six of the Google hit list before I found an American media source that identified a terrorist by name. And that name was Osama bin Laden.
Not a single hit to this point in the exercise took me to the Yemeni attack by using the keyword "terrorist." Remember, using "militant" as a keyword gave me a page of choices of stories about the Yemen attack.
Last Sunday, the FBI issued a warning that five men, aged 19-33, all of Middle Eastern descent, entered the United States through Canada using forged passports. In its initial alert, the feds were loath to identify the men as even being potential terrorists, saying only they were wanted for questioning in an "ongoing" investigation.
As information reported by the New York Post developed about another 15 possible al-Qaida agents already in place in U.S. cities, the FBI finally agreed the alert (issued on a Sunday afternoon) was terror-related.
Wouldn't want to offend anybody by assuming these guys might be terrorists just because they are between the ages of 17 and 34 and came from the Middle East.
I wonder – is the possibility of being killed through ignorance of a threat somehow secondary to surviving at the expense of offending someone's ethnicity? Have we all gone nuts? (Somebody better turn up the burner on America's melting pot – there are still a few lumps in the broth.)
The media, and most politicians, are reluctant to identify a terrorist as a terrorist, preferring the term "militant" – all the while assuring America that "most of Islam is moderate and not all militants are terrorists." Even a quick reading of my book, "The Everlasting Hatred, the Roots of Jihad," would dispel that fantasy.
It's all residual "political correctness," but recent events demonstrate that "PC-speak" is more than just an unrecognized hangover from the liberal, pre-9/11 past. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 proved on a national basis what is often said of the individual, that "a liberal is a conservative who has never been mugged."
America was mugged once, but since the media seems to be the sole custodian of what is politically correct, the nation is being insulated from the lesson.
Americans learned little from 9-11 about how to identify the enemy because of PC-speak. Here's a quick refresher. In the 1960s, the "militants" burned draft cards and brassieres. Islamic "militants" want to burn people.
The media had no problem identifying terrorists in the 1960s. They were the guys who hijacked airplanes, like Yasser Arafat.
If we are going to survive as a nation, we need to get used to the coarser, but much more accurate "survival speak" of the 21st century.
One thing is certain – if you refuse to recognize who is trying to kill you, he has a much better chance of succeeding. |
