NY Times’ Politically Correct Coverage of Mumbai Massacre

By Don Feder Monday December 1, 2008 In a series of six alleged “news” stories on the Mumbai massacre, from November 27 to December 1, The New York Times (America’s newspaper which sounds like a broken record) refused to call the terrorists Muslims or Islamic extremists. The killers were variously described as “terrorists,” “gunmen,” “militants’ and “assailants,” but never Muslims. The only time readers could catch a glimpse of the terrorists’ motivation was when the paper quoted them directly - as when they complained about the treatment of Muslims in India and the Kashmir or called for the release of “mujahedeen prisoners.” The Times adamantly refuses to recognize a connection between Islam and worldwide terrorism, even though most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, terrorist groups have names like jihad-this and Islamic-that, and terrorists regularly quote the Koran’s kill-the-infidels verses. Collectively, this constitutes the greatest denial of reality in the history of journalism. That aside, The Times frequently got the facts wrong or omitted important details. In a November 30 story, the paper described the murders as “indiscriminate.” Hardly. When a Turkish couple told their captors they were Muslims, they were immediately released. The terrorists targeted Mumbai’s Chabad House (a center of Jewish activity in the city) for one reason and one reason only - they wanted to kill Jews. The only terrorist captured by Indian commandos said he and his comrades were told to target foreigners (particularly Americans and Brits) and Jews. Indiscriminate, did you say? In thousands of words of coverage, The New York Times never mentioned that victims’ bodies frequently bore the marks of torture. One of the doctors who performed post-mortems was quoted on the Indian news website Rediff.com as saying “of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks.” For news of the latest developments in the terrorist war on civilization, the last place you want to look is The New York Times.