Media won't report radical Islamic events

By Tony Blankley

Most of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling
likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even
accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.

The latest minor example of the latter is occurring at University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. As has been generally reported, an Iranian Muslim
student drove a jeep into a crowd of students, causing only minor injuries.
He turned himself in and informed the police and the media that he was
trying to kill the students to "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the
world."

Neither the university nor most of the media has been willing to
characterize this event as a terrorist attempt by a radical Muslim.
Similarly, the attack at the Los Angeles International Airport a few years
ago was for nine months just called a violent attack, before it was finally
characterized by police as a radical Muslim act of terrorism.

I have been in contact with British politicians who tell me that there is
increasing radical Muslim street violence in Britain that is explicitly
motivated by radical Islam but is not reported or characterized as such.
Even in its cleansed versions, I am told, these incidents are being
extremely underreported.

In Antwerp last month, according to the reporter Paul Belien, rioting
Moroccan "youths" went on a rampage destroying cars and beating up
reporters, but the police were instructed not even to stop them or arrest
them. According to an anonymous policeman, "An ambulance was told to switch
off its siren because that might provoke the Moroccans." This event, too,
was under reported, or not reported at all in American media.

And of course, last October in Paris and other French cities, hundreds of
buildings were torched and tens of thousands of cars burned by Muslim
"youths" through weeks of rioting, while both the French government and most
of the "responsible" experts denied there was any radical Muslim component
to the greatest urban violence to hit France since World War. It was all to
do with poverty and teenage angst and alienation.

Of course poverty and alienation can't explain the Iranian student in North
Carolina. He has just received one of the finest educations available to a
privileged American. He reportedly has received advanced degrees in
philosophy and psychology from one of our top universities.

The media has pointed out that there is no evidence he was connected to Al
Qaeda or another terrorist cell. But that is exactly the point. As I
discussed in my book last year, the threat to the West is vastly more than
bin Laden and Al Qaeda (although that would be bad enough.)

The greater danger is the ferment in Islam that is generating radical ideas
in an unknown, but growing percentage of grass-roots Muslims around the
world -- very much including in Europe and, to a currently lesser extent, in
the United States.

What are we dealing with? A few maladjusted "youth"? Or a larger and growing
number of perfectly well-adjusted men and women -- who just happen to be
adjusted to a different set of cultural, religious (or distorted religious)
and political values. And does it matter that those values are inimical to
western concepts of tolerance, democracy, equality and religious freedom?

The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully
and fairly described and reported. But a witch's brew of psychological
denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of
government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to
radical Islam.

As the danger grows but is not publicly described, the public will first be
ignorant and fail to demand sufficient remedial action.

But as incidents and rumors are encountered over time, the public mind will
inevitably suspect the worst and demand the strongest action. Demagogues
will emerge to gratify that vox populi. (The Dubai port deal is a small
example of such a process < although in that incident the threat is real and
there are many sincere and rational voices amidst the many demagogues.)

Institutional voices are not being responsible by suppressing honest
description of radical Islamic events. Denying the existence of evil (or
refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for
defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn't understand
that point.