Up against fanaticism (WHO KILLED PAT TILLMAN ???)

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.

We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn't like it. Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them. Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt.

We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia,etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims.

We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them. One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more that 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City.

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.

Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years. Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again.

Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound Familiar?

Let's consider the concept of a "long war.!". Last time it was 200 years,give or take. Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between theindividual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death. That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.

There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the million gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.

Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity", we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.

It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions. Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you. Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight. Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is.

But many Americans don't get it. That's why we published those pictures. If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.

This guy is great: Check out his editorial from last week!:

Enough to make you sick

By Phil Lucas
Executive Editor

The stories we tell define the nation. Stories poorly told can destroy it.

It works the same with children. If you tell 10 stories a day to a lovely child and nine of them say she is weak, ugly and stupid, she will come to believe it. She may be pregnant by 15, a meth addict by 17, join a cult by 19, then elope with the family cat to get married in Massachusetts.

So it goes with the country. Consider our national storytellers: the media.

Ten days ago, American and coalition forces engaged Iraqi “insurgents,” as the national press politely calls them. Sane Americans know them as the enemy, gunmen of an Islamic religious leader. An American brigadier general gave a televised briefing on the battle for several cities. As he explained the fight for Fallujah and how we had taken three bridges at Kut, suddenly across the bottom of the screen appeared a Fox News Alert: EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!

Fox immediately switched to a camera shot of a Baghdad skyline. The voice of a reporter came on, urgently speculating about an explosion, perhaps caused by a car bomb or a mortar or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade, to the unwashed) or whatever else the reporter could think of. Then the camera zeroed in on a hole in some concrete, perhaps a parking lot or sidewalk. The hole appeared to be about the size of a wheelbarrow, the evident location of the EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!

They got an expert on the phone. The TV guys keep a herd of experts handy for just such an event. The reporter asked the expert what could have happened.

He said to her, and I paraphrase, “I’ll tell you what happened. This is a war of information. You were showing the general’s briefing, and they wanted you off it, so they set off a bomb in Baghdad.”

The reporter stammered, “Uh, oh . . .” and commenced to get the guy off the phone. He had more expertise than she expected.

A quick flick to CNN showed the same camera shot: a hole in concrete. On MSNBC: a hole in concrete.

No doubt the general continued his briefing, the subject of which was the most intense and costly fighting in a year.

A war of information. Of storytelling. Comically inept, you think? True. But this sort of reporting by the national press is not the exception. When the press reports about Iraq and virtually all other contested issues in the news, ineptitude is the rule. This is true of television and also of print reporting. We zero in on the worst thing that happens, time after time, day after day, the effect of which is to present the worst thing as the norm, even when it is only one-tenth of the whole story. For good measure, we throw in our personal opinions, arrogantly certain they are correct.

We have all noticed that the few stories we get from people who have served in or visited Iraq rarely match the sky-is-falling enthusiasm we get from our press.

Some call this biased reporting. I call it deceitful, or just plain lying.

Four weeks ago the Israelis killed Ahmed Yassin, the Islamic religious leader who founded Hamas, one of the purposes of which is to kill Israelis. Some news reports called him “revered spiritual leader.” Revered by whom? Israelis? Americans? Palestinians? Is there any doubt as to the reporters’ opinion?

Virtually all news reports said he was “assassinated,” which means murder, an illegal act. From the Israeli point of view, is it illegal to chop the head off a snake trying to strike you? Reporters could have written “executed,” a word loaded in the other direction, implying legality and favoring the Israelis. Or they could have just written “killed” and let readers and viewers decide what is right and what is wrong.

Here’s a line from an Associated Press story about the president’s press conference last week. “Bush sidestepped at least two opportunities to say he wanted to apologize or take personal responsibility.”

“Sidestepped?” “Opportunities?” Nobody sidesteps opportunities. You sidestep duck droppings on the sidewalk. Think this reporter has an opinion he wants to share? If he reveals this kind of blatant bias in any part of a news story, it casts a shadow over every word he writes.

USA Today wrote this: “Offered numerous chances to second-guess his approach to Iraq, he rejected them all.”

Nobody “rejects” any “chances” worth taking. It defies human nature. As for “second-guessing,” we don’t need to guess whose opinion that is. The reporters’ two names are in the byline. Assuming perhaps that their readers were too stupid to get it, the reporters used these words a few paragraphs down: “denied,” “argued” and “conceded.” All referred to Bush. These are words for the opinion pages, like the one you are on now, unless you draw no distinction between news and opinion, unless you believe your opinion is the news.

Press folly plumbs new depths when witnessed live, as in the televised press conference itself.

It was enough to raise old editors from the dead, their standards and self-discipline sorely missing from the modern newsroom. Others of us just squirmed with embarrassment, partly for the president, prone to trip over a syllable, but mostly for the profession. Reporter after reporter couched questions in the negative, assuming the worst was true, knowing the worst was true, looking for the kill. They used words like failure, defeat and mistake, time after time after time. That’s not reporting. That’s not seeking truth. That’s an agenda.

Smelling blood, the pack salivated for an apology from the president.

On this point I agree. An apology is in order.

So here it is.

I am sorry our storytellers have us by the neck. We are better than they picture us. We are better than they are.

As an editor, I apologize to Americans for the national disgrace of inept and self-indulgent journalists, who hound after the worst and ugliest to the exclusion of much else, who strut their opinions with conceit, and who spew it all forth upon the public and call it news.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.