I know that good liberals are not supposed to find much worthwhile in the writings of Mark Steyn. Well, I think of myself as a good liberal, and I still find much that Steyn writes is clever and a good deal of it is deep. The particular piece I'm calling to your attention, moreover (and heaven forgive), was in National Review on-line on Saturday. It is titled "Silence=Acceptance," with a sub-head that needed publication only in the dopey world: "Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy."
Steyn focuses on the practice of commentators to assiduously avoid the word "terrorist" in defining, well, terrorists. Like the ones who brought their bloodletting to Mumbai last weekend.
The Australian called the killers "teenage gunmen." A British TV anchor called them "practitioners." " 'Practitioners' of what, exactly."
"Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage. The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: 'It is not know known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, of if it was an accidental hostage scene.."
Well, the Times did better than it did during the Nazi genocide of Jews. Then, they hardly recognized that Jews were being put to death in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions. That's the news that didn't fit.