Common Sense Political Thought

I am not a $100,000 a year editor for The Los Angeles Times. I am not a $60,000 a year top reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m not even a starting out reporter for The lexington Herald-Leader. And while I did spend two years on the staff of the University of Kentucky’s student daily, the Kentucky Kernel, I am not a journalism school graduate; my degree is in political science and history.

So, it is with some amazement that I noted that people like non-journalist Patrick Frey and one of his “jurors,” aunursa, were able to figure out the answer to something very simple, something that analysts from CNN could not:

(CNN Security Analyst Mike Brooks) And we still – but we still do not know a motive. You know, you look at the Jewish center. Why did they hit the Jewish center? You know, and you look at the other places, you know, big icons where there are going to be a lot of people. And that’s what terrorists do. They hit places that they consider soft targets where they can have the most bang for the buck, if you will, and where there are a lot of people – hotels, train stations, those kind of things.

Aunursa engaged in a good bit of mockery:

Analyst Mike Brooks figured that the terrorists wanted to kill as many people as possible. He didn’t understand why the they would attack a building with just a few potential victims. I looked at the TV set in amazement — that a CNN analyst in 2008 would wonder why the terrorists would attack a Jewish target.

Commenter Not Rhetorical pointed out that The New York Times, a paper owned and run by a Jewish family, said that “the Holtzbergs’ Chabad house became an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen.”

Mr Frey (Patterico) said:

It’s not terribly surprising that they’re surprised. I’ll never forget how, after a Muslim terrorist shot up a Jewish Center in Seattle, the L.A. Times ran a box on the front page saying that the gunman’s motive was a “mystery”,

and included the following picture:

In an interesting coincidence, our good friends at the Delaware Liberal are concerned that Gannett may pull the trigger on laying off people at the Wilmington News-Journal.

The writers at Delaware Liberal have never been particularly kind to the News-Journal, though they are certainly concerned about people losing their jobs.

Per a comment from one of our readers, it looks like Gannett has started calling their staff to inform them of layoffs. Perusing the Gannett Blog, it appears that manager are being called today (many being laid off) and tomorrow, they are coming in to lay off their staff. It will be interesting to see what comes of it, but one thing is for certain, there is going to be a further erosion of the quality of product coming out of Basin Rd.

Looks like when it comes to local reporting, the blogs are soon to be the only game in town.

While I wouldn’t normally say that blogs run by biased and untrained “citizen journalists” are a reasonable substitute for what are supposed to be unbiased and professionally trained reporters,¹ when I read about the (supposedly) top news organizations in the country — CNN, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times — being mystified as to why terrorists, especially Islamic terrorists, would select specifically Jewish targets, I have to wonder just how well-trainmed those news professionals really are.

Well, maybe they are well-trained — in political correctness. The obvious link, the elephant in the room that the journalists can’t see or won’t touch and definitely can’t mention, is that the targets were chosen because Islamic terrorists wanted to kill Jews, specifically Jews. Mumbai is a long way from Israel, and India, the first champion of the old, so-called “non-aligned nations,” hasn’t exactly been a big supporter of the Jewish state.

The description of the Mumbai Chabad house, from The New York Times:

In 2003, barely out of their teens and newly married, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, moved from Brooklyn to the coastal city of Mumbai, India, to manage a mix of educational center, synagogue and social hall known as a Chabad house, one of about 3,500 outposts around the world run by the Lubavitch Hasidic movement.

The place soon became a year-round magnet for Israeli backpackers and the Jewish businessmen and tourists who flock to Mumbai, as well as for the Iraqi and Indian Jews who live there. Mrs. Holtzberg served visitors coffee and homemade kosher delicacies. Rabbi Holtzberg always offered a helping hand to someone who was sick or stranded, often calling worried parents or spouses miles and miles away to calm them.

Not exactly an Israeli government outpost, nor much of a hotbed of encroaching Israeli nationalism. It was simply a target filled with Jews.

What our professional journalists won’t touch is the fact that militant Islamism is targeting Westerners — we can talk about that, because it’s such a wide and still vague term — and specifically Americans — we can talk about that, too, ’cause it’s all George Bush’s fault anyway — and Jews; talking about Jews being targeted simply because they are Jews is verboten, the German term used very deliberately.

After all, if we note that Jews are a particular target, why that might bring up memories of the Holocaust, and, why the Holocaust and all of those dispossessed Jews was the reason that the West agreed to the creation of the state of Israel, and that has offended the poor, poor Muslims just no end, so we can’t say anything that might generate any actual sympathy for the Jews, now can we?
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¹ – And yes, I include this site in that statement.