Reuters: “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”

 

Allegations of War
By Nicholas Stix
October 1, 2001
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer

In the real world, America finds itself at war. But not so, in the virtual reality of many of the Western world’s largest, most powerful media organizations.

Apparently, media executives think that they can define this war out of existence. Their parlor trick is to use the word “alleged.” Thus have these executives’ organizations turned terrorists into “alleged hijackers.” Next thing, they’ll take on the laws of physics: ‘the alleged law of gravity.’

CNN and Reuters are both playing this diabolical game, and in New York, the New York Times and WCBS-AM 880, have joined in. On the front page of the Times’ September 28 Internet edition, a picture of one of the terrorists is captioned, “Hijacking suspects and Air Safety.” And on September 29 on WCBS-AM, Tom Foti reported on the Algerian pilot (Lotfi Raissi) who was linked “to some of the suspected hijackers.”

After years of abuse at the hands of suspected propagandists and alleged journalists, some readers may be confused. In 1995, a psychopath named Michael Vernon walked into a Bronx shoe store, and massacred five people and wounded three more, before surrendering to police at the scene of the crime. But Vernon was still referred to as “accused killer Michael Vernon.” Calling Vernon the “accused” was a mere formality. It had to do with the presumption of innocence that characterizes our system of law, the fear of judges’ wrath, possible lawsuits and editorial habit.

But such legal niceties do not apply to dead criminals, and they most certainly do not apply to acts of war. When a criminal dies in the commission of a crime, we are not obliged to refer to him as a “suspect.” We close the book on another bad man. When terrorists die while murdering civilians, we name the guilty. The term “suspect” applies, if at all, to those who gave the terrorists their orders.

Reuters has decreed that, in the words of its news chief, Steven Jukes, “We’re trying to treat everyone on a level playing field, however tragic it’s been and however awful and cataclysmic for the American people . . .” Steven Jukes has also written that, “We all know,” he wrote, “that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist . . .”

Suspected propagandist Steven Jukes is a man of “principle.” Got it?

We could, with equal validity, say, ‘One man’s genocidal murderer is another man’s national liberator.’

Let’s see. Idi Amin, national liberator. Pol Pot, national liberator. Mao Tse-Tung, national liberator. Josef Stalin, national liberator. Adolf Hitler, national liberator.

The real reason for Steven Jukes’ word games is that Arab “freedom fighters” had threatened to ventilate his alleged reporters.

But the word games currently engaged in by Jukes and his peers at the other propaganda agencies are inseparable from a history of such games. The main trick they employ is to define certain people, with whom they sympathize, as simultaneously “victims” and “persons of color,” while defining those whom they hate, as “victimizers” and “whites” or “Caucasians” (or colorless people?).

The longstanding problem is that the “victims” seem to be the ones doing most of the killing. A problem specific to Israel, and now the war, is that the victims are both mass murderers and white. For whether the terrorists were Saudis or so-called Palestinian Americans, both such groups are white, as the terrorists’ pictures testify. If it is true that the terrorists were “Palestinians,” you could dress and groom them the same as Israelis the same age, and you would not be able to pick them out of a Jewish crowd in Tel Aviv.

But why should Steven Jukes and his peers fear for the lives of their alleged reporters? After all, mainstream suspected journalists have been bending over backwards for years, slanting, omitting, and even lying in their coverage of the PLO and other Arab and Islamic terrorists.

Only a few months ago, we heard much from mainstream media propagandists about how reporters go to Israel sympathizing with the Jews, only to change their sympathies to the Arabs. These are smug characters who are used to having the power to say that it’s raining, as they pee on our leg.

Let’s see. The vast majority of today’s journalists attended “J” schools like the Columbia School of Journalism, where they cannot get admitted, let alone graduate, without making constant loyalty oaths to “diversity.” That means that Jews and, particularly, Israel, are the bad guys. Then they work at politically correct, American media outlets rife with anti-Semitism, which support the PLO and other genocidal, Arab terrorists, and where pro-Israel statements could get you fired and whitelisted. But we’re supposed to believe that these intrepid correspondents arrived in Israel sympathetic to the Jews?

(You’re probably wondering, but aren’t the media lousy with Jews? Aren’t many of the media bosses, as anti-Semites always remind us, Jews? True and true. As my mother said just the other day, “Jews are the worst anti-Semites.” Alright, she was exaggerating. But only a little. And as I learned as the descendant of German Jews on my father’s side, the only thing worse than a German, is a German Jew!)

Poor Steven Jukes. Poor CNN. After all that their reporters have done, in the service of terrorism, the Arabs have turned around and confiscated their films of Arab celebrations of the September 11 attacks, and have threatened to kill all their obsequious journalists, if they don’t do under duress, what they had for years done voluntarily. Where’s the gratitude?