Stop deluding ourselves on who the enemy is

Christopher Hitchens has a powerful column trying to force people to understand the evil that we face. And the problem is that two modern beliefs are in conflict with each other. There is the belief that we should respect equally all religions and ethnic groups and then there is our respect for the equal rights of women. And, often it seems that the women are losing out. He points out that, despite such delusions as the attacks were revenge for British foreign policy or prejudice against British Muslim immigrants, the London bombing last week was specifically aimed at women.

Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

Remember that second bomb that was supposed to kill those who came to help the victims of the first bomb. This is a technique often used in Israel. There is something particulary diabolic about trying to make people fearful of helping those victims because of the possibility of a second attack.

As Hitchens points out, the subjection of women is a specific and important element among these radical Muslim groups. He mentions something I hadn't heard about - that due to the high rate of intermarriage among Muslim immigrants from Pakistan in Britain, approximately 11% of the population in Yorkshire is responsible for about 70% of the birth defects. That is astounding. And forced marriage is just one element in the way that these groups treat women.

The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim "community" alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name. For a start, it is the female victims of this tyranny who are "disenfranchised," while something rather worse than "disenfranchisement" awaits those who dare to disagree.

That reference to "disenfranchisement" refers to a New York Times story that erroneously referred to South Asians in Britain as being "disenfranchised" when, of course, they have as much right to vote as any other group in Britain. But liberal journalists are quite ready to buy into the plays upon our modern sensibilities that radicals like making without regard for the actual facts, as Hitchens points out.

On the following day, July 1, the same newspaper informed us that Britain contained a "disenfranchised South Asian population." How this was true was never explained. There are several Muslim parliamentarians in both houses, often allowed to make the most absurdly inflammatory and euphemistic statements where acts of criminal violence are concerned, as well as several districts in which the Islamic vote keeps candidates of all parties uneasily aware of what may and may not be said. True, the Muslim extremist groups boycott elections and denounce democracy itself as profane, but this does not really count as disenfranchisement.

The New York Times report is all part of the same sensitivity that Prime Minister Gordon Brown makes when he orders his government officials to avoid referring to any of the terrorists as Muslim. How refreshing it would be to have leaders who weren't so tender about offending those who are trying to murder people out for an evening's entertainment around our cities.

UPDATE: Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee describes over at Pajamas Media what he is calling Decapi-gate of how the Associated Press passed on uncritically an unsourced story about finding 20 decapitated bodies in a village near Salman Pak. Something didn't sound right about the story to Owens because the sources for the story were anonymous police officers located 12 and 75 miles away from the village. Of course, the story was picked up all over the world and many of the reports buried the sourcing for the story and the distance of the police officers from the supposed crime. After contacting officials in Iraq connected with the Iraqi ministry and public liason officers, a statement was issued about the report. It was totally false. Of course, the publication of the denial of the story received much less prominence and attention than the original false story. Reuters added their own explanation of how difficult and dangerous it is for reporters in Iraq.

Verifying reports in Iraq is very hard for journalists, who have been systematically targeted by different militant groups and rely extensively on local sources for information.

Paris-based press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders estimate that over 180 journalists and media assistants have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, making Iraq the most dangerous place in the world to report.

As Owens makes clear, such lies, just as we saw last summer in the war with Israel, are a standard weapon used by our enemies. It should be the responsibility of journalists to be constantly aware of how they are being manipulated for propaganda purposes and to be more alert to such a possibility.

Reuters is absolutely correct: reporting in Iraq is very dangerous work, and insurgent groups and terrorists do target journalists for assassination.

But it is equally true that insurgent groups and terrorists also use the media to plant false stories, and that media organizations consistently fail to find credible, independent sources to verify alleged atrocities and attacks before presenting an alleged story as fact.

Further, it appears that some news organizations, through a combination of questionable news-gathering techniques, insufficient editorial practices and indifferent -perhaps intractable- management, are more susceptible to running false and fabricated stories than others, with the Associated Press and Reuters being among the worst offenders.

Throughout the Iraq War, and with seemingly increasing frequency over the past year, these media outlets have become increasingly reliant upon anonymous sources and questionable sources hiding behind pseudonyms to deliver “news” with no apparent basis in fact.

In some of these instances, these wire services have been forced to retract days later, as they have with the false Um al-Abeed beheading story. Sadly, the international and national news outlets that often carry the initial claims as “page one” material fail to do so with the refutations, leaving most media consumers with the impression that the original account was accurate.

Remarkably, these news organizations continue to employ the same reporters and editors that have published multiple erroneous or highly suspect claims, or who have consistently cited discredited or disreputable sources.

Further, these wire services continue to employ newsgathering techniques that rely upon anonymous sources with little or no direct involvement with the story being reported, and often publish these claims as absolute fact, without any indication they are publishing what is often, at best, hearsay.

The follow-up story should be about who the anonymous police officers were who tried to plant the phony story. Instead, AP acts like this happened out of the blue and they were totally uninvolved. Either they uncritically wrote up a story reported by anonymous men whom they didn't even know which would be a total abrogation of their journalistic responsibiities or they know who those men were and are now shielding them after their duplicity has been exposed. I can see shielding sources in such a volatile region, but why shield people who are feeding your journalists lies that you then spread to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, there was a real atrocity to report as Michael Yon described on his site a couple of days ago with photographs and interviews. He posted an update putting the number of victims at 10-14. And he noted how other reporters in Baqubah have not come out to research the story themselves or to avail themselves of the video and pictures he is willing to make available to them. The only sources who have picked up on the story are conservative ones like National Review and Fox News and conservative bloggers. The same press that was happy to trumpet the false story of decapitated villagers don't seem interested in real atrocities.

But for those publications who actually had people embedded in Baqubah when the story first broke and still failed to cover it, their malaise is inexplicable. I do not know why all failed to report the murders and booby-trapped village: apparently no reporters bothered to go out there, even though it’s only about 3.5 miles from this base. Any one of the reporters currently in Baqubah could still go to these coordinates and follow his or her nose and find the gravesites.

Instapundit, in wondering why Al Qaeda atrocities don't get media attention, reports this response from an anonymous journalist.

WHY DON'T AL QAEDA ATROCITIES GET MEDIA ATTENTION?

Because that might help Bush.

UPDATE: A journalist whose name you'd recognize emails:

Yon's story doesn't get attention because it is humiliating.

It is humiliating because it is obvious that we media – and our allies in the state department, the legal trade, the NGOs, the Democratic Party, the UN, etc., - can’t do squat about such determined use of force.

Our words, images, arguments and skills can’t stop the killing. Only the rough soldiers and their guns can solve the problem, and we won’t admit that fact because the admission would weaken our influence and our claim to social status.

So we pretend Yon’s massacre – and the North Korean killing fields, the Arab treatment of women, the Arab hatred of Israel, etc. - doesn’t exist, and instead focus our emotions and attention on the somewhat-bad domestic things that we can ‘fix’ with our DC-based allies. Things such as Abu Ghraib, wiretapping, etc. When we ‘fix’ them, then we get status, applause, power, new jobs, ego, etc.

Please don’t be surprised. We media are an interest group not much different from the automakers, the unions, and the farmers.

I wonder why this journalist whose name Glenn Reynolds assures us that we'd recognize prefers that his criticism of the media's focus be anonymous? Is it that verboten in media circles to point out their obvious focus on criticizing America and Israel rather than the real authors of atrocities out there? I guess we know the answer to that.

Of course, the reason why something domestic is easier to fix is because we have a relatively open society responsive to the media and public pressure. Critics don't get beheaded. Instead, they can be glorified by an all-too-willing media. And then there is the ever-present moral equivalence that seeks to equate some shameful action by Americans that is publicized and punished with the daily stories that could be written about our true enemies. So humiliating treatment and pictures at Abu Ghraib can be constantly thrown back at us as if there is some match between that story and what happened in the village Michael Yon described.