P.C. - Now it means censorship of your news

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NOW P.C. MEANS CENSORSHIP

September 26, 2001 -- YESTERDAY, I wrote about a display at a Palestinian university where visitors are:

* Directed to step on an American flag;

* Shown a celebratory re-enactment of the Sbarro suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed 15 people;

* Asked to pay tribute to leaders of Hamas, one of the world's most notorious terror groups;

* Shown a mannequin dressed like a Hasid and told by a tape recording, "There is a Jew behind me, kill him."

This celebration of suicide bombers at one of the largest universities on the West Bank should alarm us. The display is intended to encourage youths to join up and sacrifice themselves in the glorious cause.

It will probably be not all that long a journey for some young zealot from stepping on an American flag to carrying out a suicide bombing against an American target.

I assumed, when I wrote from a Monday Associated Press dispatch - complete with photos of the desecration of the American flag - that it would be all over TV on Monday night and prominent in U.S. newspapers yesterday. It wasn't. Not in The New York Times. Not in The Washington Post. Not on the networks.

And it won't be written about now either, because a publicity-conscious Yasser Arafat closed the exhibition down yesterday following a firestorm of criticism inside Israel.

I think that there is something going on in relation to political correctness in our news organizations that led to the suppression - for that is the only word that will do - of this story.

I believe that, because the United States and news organizations are coming down hard on bin Laden, the Taliban and other extremist Muslims, editors in these organizations feel it would be overkill to make a big deal out of this dangerous display.

I think, further, that the concern over the protection of Muslim civil liberties here at home is starting to extend to a concern that the Palestinians are going to suffer unfairly from the revelation of the terror network's reach into the West Bank and Gaza.

The PC concern is that the Israelis will somehow "take advantage" of the attacks and therefore that negative stories about Palestinians are to be handled as gingerly as stories about American Arabs and Muslims.

That's why you probably don't know about the Palestinian Authority's death threat against a videographer who took footage of a 4,000-person celebration on Sept. 11 - which led to the seizure of the news footage and its erasure. The fact that bin Laden's allies on the West Bank targeted a news photographer for death for filming Palestinians dancing at the news of the death of 7,000 Americans didn't make it anywhere near the front pages.

The news media usually make a stink when the media are threatened. Not this time.

Granted, a much larger story was going on, but this detail about the West Bank celebrations was a vital component of it -certainly far more geopolitically important than yet another story on vague "fears" of Arab racial profiling.

I think this tendency toward political correctness is evident in the Reuters decision to ban the use of the word "terrorist" in dispatches - because, says Reuters' Stephen Jukes, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Thus has one of the world's largest news organizations chosen moral equivalency when the West is being called upon to show its strength and its purpose.

This PC tendency is evident in the successful pressure on the media not to describe terror groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "Islamic" - even though they describe themselves as Islamic first and foremost.

Political correctness has always been about suppressing uncomfortable truths. Now it is aiming toward suppressing facts that Americans really cannot live without knowing.

-- Anonymous, September 26, 2001

Answers

there was a quote, something about news being what they wanted us to know...

-- Anonymous, September 26, 2001

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