Mumbai Media Monitoring

I'm disgusted, but not surprised, to see opportunistic RW Jews attempting to capitalize on the Mumbai atrocities. A sampling of their agenda-driven nonsense:

(1) Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center published a silly letter about political correctness which included the following examples of foolishness:

Al Jazeera and The Guardian label the Al Qaeda-associated Islamist terrorists responsible as "gunmen"; CNN calls them "militants.

Yes, so? "Gunmen" and "militant" are both perfectly appropriate descriptions for the villains. The suggestion that either word absolves the perpetrators of responsibility is ludicrous. Anyway, in under a second Google reveals that CNN, and the Guardian also called them terrorists, while FOX also described them as gunmen and militants. [Al Jazeera does not appear to have called them "terrorists" but for heavens sake, what do you expect from Al Jazeera already?]

Some Western media outlets unsympathetically labeled victims there as "ultra-Orthodox" or "missionaries."

The problem with political correctness is that it often obscures reality and puts feelings ahead of fact, ie: a word like "handicapped" may be true, but it isn't "sympathetic" and therefore should be avoided. This is precisely the the sort of wishy-washyness Cooper and Brackman appear to be advocating. The Holtzbergs were missionaries by any definition; they and the other Naimen house victims were certainly ultra-Orthodox. A criticism of the media for telling the truth is a strange thing to find in a letter decrying political correctness while their assertion that the word "ultra-Orthodox" is a negative which ought to be avoided is simply bizarre.

(2) Yakov Menken published a moving eulogy of the Holtzebrgs but couldn't resist marring it with a trumped up, tacked-on attack:

Do we need further evidence that the “grey lady” has severe Alzheimer’s? Who could justify the NY Times reporting with a straight face that “it is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene?”

The sentence that offended the easily-offended Rabbi Menken appeared in a profile on the Holtzbergs which warmly recounted their acts of kindness, and featured sympathetic portraits of the Chabad community. Why didn't our fair-minded, non-biased paradigm of objective writing compliment the paper for this love letter to the Lubovitch? Why did he pick one barely imperfect sentence, and use it -against all the evidence!- as an example of the NYT's mendacity? Anyway, Menken's actual complaint is bogus. The paper didn't "report" that the facts were in question, or ignore something already known. It made a simple statement of fact: On November 27 when this article was published it was still reasonable to wonder if the chabad house had been purposely targeted, because as the very next sentence said (conveniently omitted by our crusading media monitor) "the center lacked the size and prominence of the attackers’ other targets." An unwillingness to jump to conclusions before the facts are known is usually considered good journalism, but as usual, Yaakov's pretend interest in good journalism is just a cover for his politics.

(3) VIN briefly had an article condemning Obama for demonstrating insufficient sadness over the attacks. [see second item.] The piece has since disappeared [click] which can only mean the site recognized their error. I congratulate them for setting a fine example.

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