C4 News 'Doctored' Mumbai Massacre

Channel 4's once highly respected News has come in for savage criticism over its reporting of the Mumbai massacre, with presenter Jon Snow singled out and now tarred with the same deluded brush as the heavily biased BBC. 

Tom Gross, writing in the Wall Street Journal, expresses the disbelief of many who watched the Mumbai outrage unfold with barely a mention that the perpetrators were Islamic terrorists, when anyone with an ounce of sense realised what was going on here. 

There's stinging criticism for much of the western media who pussy footed around but Snow is given a special mention for talking about 'practitioners' as if they were some kind of doctor. 

"Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors? Why did Britain's highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the "militants" showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed" when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected."

The BBC too comes in for a lot of flak but that was to be expected and was highlighted by Ron Liddle in the Sunday Times, who pointed out you'd be hard pressed to find the words radical Islam or jihad in any reports. As Gross points out: 

"Instead the BBC continues to try to persuade its massive global audience that "it is a local Indian problem," that "the subcontinent has a history of unrest," and so on."

The Orange Party was particularly incensed over reporting of the attack on the Jewish centre as almost an afterthought and indeed as an 'accidental target'. The torture, outrages and cold-blooded killings committed there are too sickening to repeat in any detail. 

Gross points out: "For much of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that "an office building" had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such)."

The Orange Party does not subscribe to the view there is some kind of antisemitic conspiracy at work here. as Gross suggests but is does believe the western liberal media is burying its head in the sand by refusing to acknowledge the real threat of fundamental Islamic terrorism. How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as radical Islam?

This wasn't a dust up in the back streets of Bradford where events are often played down so as not to inflame the situation. This was a very carefully planned attack on the so-called 'infidels' whether they were Jews, Christians or Hindus, deliberately targeting the Jewish centre, hospitals, a train station, hotels and a tourist restaurant.

Some journalists do walk around with their eyes wide open. The BBC is probably a lost cause but it is time for Snow and the team at C4 News to open theirs.