Seeking to be inoffensive toward those who would harm them, National Public Radio recently ordered all correspondents and anchors, in all circumstances, to employ the daffy, Obama-like phrase “the so-called Islamic State” when referring to the most vicious Muslim terrorists yet found.
Who knows why left-wing journalists wander down baffling, bizarre paths?
Normally, cowardly left-wing journalists recoil from Muslim mentions.
Those are marching orders, not merely suspicions.
At the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, editors and correspondents long ago were instructed the fewer references to Muslims and Islam the better in crime stories. “Only when absolutely necessary,” the bi-coastal memos read. Don’t blame Muslim terrorists for their boasted-about heinous crimes — unless quoting law enforcement.
Hence, if you had read in either newspaper Sunday’s accounts of the Muslim terror the day before in Copenhagen, at a free-speech event where a controversial cartoonist was on the agenda, and at Copenhagen’s largest synagogue, you might have presumed a homeless Christian man from North Carolina pulled the trigger.
The Los Angeles Times, which dismissed the Copenhagen terror in several innocent, throwaway paragraphs yesterday, gingerly went out on a shaky limb this morning.
They didn’t identify the terrorist. That would have been a dead giveaway.
Instead, displaying little-girl courage, the Times allowed that Hussein, the multiple murdered who pulled the trigger at both sites, maybe, possibly, might have been “inspired by the Islamic State.”
At least they didn’t say “the so-called Islamic State.”
