https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273466/enemy-people-bruce-bawer
Since 9/11, thousands of deadly jihadist atrocities, big and small, have taken place around the world. Almost uniformly, the Western media totally ignore the small ones, and also ignore the big ones that take place in Israel, the Muslim world, and non-Western locations generally. As for the large-scale terrorist acts that occur from time to time in major Western cities – that is to say, the attacks that are too massive and too close to home for the media to get away with ignoring – the mainstream journalists who cover them devote a good deal of their time to tiptoeing around, or openly and vociferously denying, the connection between these actions and the religion of Islam.
Indeed, it is by now an indelible part of the media narrative in these instances that the real victims – or the first victims, or the ultimate victims – of jihadist terror are the members of Western Muslim communities who, we are repeatedly told, have been unfairly stigmatized ever since September 11, 2001, and who, in the wake of every new act of Islamic terror in the West, experience, or at least tremble in fear of, a fresh, powerful, and unjustified anti-Muslim backlash. Virtually never does any mainstream Western journalist ever acknowledge that jihadists, when they massacre infidel men, women, and children, are following explicit instructions set down in the Koran – the book that every believing Muslim on earth considers holy. Even now, going on eighteen years after 9/11, some journalists honestly don’t know that jihad comes right out the Koran; others do know, but would never publicly connect these dots. Neither would most politicians or media commentators or supposed “experts” in Islam. For to do so would be to violate the most important unwritten commandment of the post-9/11 Western world: namely, thou shalt not admit that those who commit murder in the name of Allah, far from being traitors to their faith, are, on the contrary, the most obedient of its adherents.
