Like They Really "CAIR"

Fort Hood Massacre: A Day of Media Cowardice
by Bruce Bawer, Pajamas Media

The brave soldiers who were massacred at Fort Hood had trained to fight the jihadist enemy abroad. But they seem to have ended up being murdered by the same enemy on American soil, in a place where they thought they were safe -murdered, apparently, because a series of military and medical officials recognized what was going on with this major and chose to do nothing about it. Most of the people in the mainstream media, I suspect, could also see early on exactly what was going on - but to an outrageous degree, they, too, spent Thursday evening doing their best to turn away from the obvious truth. Throughout the evening military and other authorities kept saying, and the talking heads on CNN kept repeating, that there was no sign that this was "a terrorist act"- as if Nidal Malik Hasan had to be officially connected to al-Qaeda to be a jihadist, a pious Muslim who saw the infidel as his enemy. Living in Norway, I get CNN International, which is different from CNN in the U.S., though when major stories are breaking in the U.S. the international network often switches to the U.S. feed for hours at a time. CNN International's sponsors are disproportionately Middle Eastern airlines, tourism authorities, and such; so it was that in between ads for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, for Abu Dhabi tourism, for some art show in Abu Dhabi, and for the Dubai World Championship, not to mention cozy promos for an apparently soft-feature series called Inside the Middle East (presented "in association with Qatar Foundation" ), CNN reporters kept hammering home the line that Hasan had been the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice by his military colleagues. Repeatedly they read out, and showed onscreen, a long statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemning the massacre- never mentioning, of course, CAIR's well-established terrorist links.