More PC treatment of terror arrests

As in the coverage of the arrests of the 17 terror suspects in Toronto a few weeks ago, the press has great difficulty telling us who was arrested in yesterday’s roundup in Miami. Here’s a breakdown of the first eight paragraphs of the AP story running at the New York Times, Yahoo.com, and elsewhere:

Paragraph one: “Inside a city warehouse, authorities believe, a group was hatching the early stages of a widespread terror plot—one that targeted Chicago’s Sears Tower, an FBI office in Miami and other U.S. buildings.”

Paragraph two: “ … authorities swarmed the warehouse … and arrested seven people …”

Paragraph three: “Neighbors who lived nearby said young men, who appeared to be in their teens and 20s, slept in the warehouse, running what looked like a militaristic group. They appeared brainwashed, some said.”

Paragraph four: “It seemed like a military boot camp …”

Paragraph five: “ … the seven were mainly Americans with no apparent ties to al-Qaida or other foreign terrorist organizations.”

Paragraph six: “There is no imminent threat to Miami or any other area because of these operations,”

Paragraph seven: “Residents living near the warehouse said the men taken into custody described themselves as Muslims and had tried to recruit young people to join their group.”

Paragraph eight: “They seemed brainwashed,” she said. “They said they had given their lives to Allah.”

The part that really gets me is where the story says that the suspects are not Al Qaeda members, before it has said anything about whether they are Muslims. To point out that they are not Al Qaeda members means that the assumption is that they are Al Qaeda members; and for them to be Al Qaeda members they would have to be Muslims. But nothing has been said up to this point in the story indicating that they are Muslims. Just as in the reports on the Toronto arrests, the media lets us know that the suspects are Muslims, without using the dread word “Muslim.” And then, two paragraphs later, where the story does actually indicate that the suspects are Muslims, this fact, strangely enough, doesn’t come from the authorities but from nearby residents, passing on information that the men had given about themselves.

This is the bizarrely costive, post-modern journalism that results from the MSM’s (and the government’s) horror at the fact that our mortal enemies are members of a particular religion. The dominant liberal culture, which is totally unbuttoned and “liberated” when it comes to expressing paranoid hatred and suspicion of America, is anal retentive when it comes to stating inconvenient truths about minorities.

But there’s more. According to the Miami Herald (via Michelle Malkin):

Law enforcement sources told CNN that some of the suspects are members of a radical African-American Muslim group and that at least one had taken “an al Qaeda oath.” …

Sources told CNN that the arrests culminated a monthslong undercover operation. The suspects believed they were dealing with an al Qaeda operative, but the person was actually a government informant, the sources said…The FBI said one search warrant was executed in a warehouse near a housing project in Liberty City, a predominantly black and low-income area of Miami.

So the suspects, at least some of them, are American blacks (whether they are Black Muslims or Muslims who are black is not clear), and this interesting information appears nowhere in the AP story.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 23, 2006 08:40 AM | Send