NY Times: Were Those Mumbai Folks Really Terrorists?

by William Teach | December 14, 2008 4:27 pm

Only in the liberal MSM, and particularly the New York Times, can they have debates on what to call terrorists and whether they are actually terrorists[1]

WHEN 10 young men in an inflatable lifeboat came ashore in Mumbai last month and went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children, they were initially described in The Times by many labels.

They were “militants,” “gunmen,” “attackers” and “assailants.” Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city’s largest train station, five-star hotels, a Jewish center, a cafe and a hospital — were described as “coordinated terrorist attacks.” But the men themselves were not called terrorists.

Many readers could not understand it. “I am so offended as to why the NY Times and a number of other news organizations are calling the perpetrators ‘militants,’ ” wrote “Bill” in a comment posted on The Times’s Web site. “Murderers, or terrorists perhaps but militants? Is your PC going to get so absurd that you will refer to them as ‘freedom fighters?’ “

The Grey Lady just can’t understand what all the kerfuffle is about. As Public Editor Clark Hoyt explains

The Mumbai terror attacks posed a familiar semantic issue for Times editors: what to call people who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians. Many readers want the newspaper, even on the news pages, to share their moral outrage — or their political views — by adopting the word terrorist, with all its connotations of opprobrium. What you call someone matters. If he is a terrorist, he is an enemy of all civilized people, and his cause is less worthy of consideration.

Say, Clark? Throughout the rest of your pretzel twisting over “taking sides” (funny how they didn’t worry about taking sides when they were revealing the terrorist surveillance program, other secret opps, wondering if McCain had an affair, could get cancer again, was considered natural born, etc and so on), you might want to consider what you just wrote. “People who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians” are, yes, terrorists.

And Liberals/Progressives wonder why Conservatives call liberals/progressives PC pansies. Then the L/Ps start whining about shades of grey and not everything being black and white, and we ask them if they have Kotex in their manbag’s.