According to Media, Muslims Are Rarely Terrorists, Always Victims

Have you noticed that mainstream media profiles of Muslims rarely portray any individual person as an Islamic terrorist? 

We do seem to have lots of "insurgents" on hand.  We also have lots of completely innocent, wide-eyed Muslims who are victims of overzealous law enforcement, bloodthirsty American soldiers, or citizens engaging in unfair anti-Muslim backlash.

Andrew C. McCarthy hits a home run with "The Elephant in the Room" at National Review Online:

Over the weekend, Canadian authorities apparently smashed a frightening plot involving Islamic terrorists who planned a series of bombings against sites in southern Ontario. Instinctively, the mainstream media went into its now-familiar coverage template, Phase One of which avoids like the plague any mention of the fact that accused terrorists are Muslims.

As Cliff May and I noted here on NRO, and Roger Simon detailed on his website, readers of the New York Times were told that the 17 men arrested “represent the broad strata of our society … Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed.” In point of fact, however, they represent a very narrow stratum of Canadian society: They are Muslims, many of whom attend the same mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre for Islamic Education in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga.

Not only were all those arrested Muslims. The reported evidence against them fits to a tee the shopworn pattern of Islamic terrorism repeated for much of the last two decades. Young men were radicalized at the local mosque and its companion school by elders preaching from the Koran. They participated in paramilitary training in rural outposts. The training involved firearms and communications equipment. The plotters may have conducted surveillance on specific targets. And they ordered prodigious amounts of explosives components—in this case, tons of fertilizer in preparation for the construction of crude but deadly effective ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) bombs.

Nonetheless, the rigorous media practice in Phase One is to suppress any reference to Islam, the single thread that runs through virtually all modern terrorism—from New York, to Virginia, to Bali, the Djerba, to Baghdad, to Mombassa, to Tel Aviv, to Nairobi, to Dar es Salaam, to Ankara, to Paris, to Riyadh, to Amman, to Sharm el-Sheikh, to Aden, to London, to Madrid, and, now, to Toronto.

Consequently, the piece of information most obviously pertinent to the public’s understanding of what could be catalyzing this global savagery is consciously withheld. Such a revelation might, after all, lead people to ask the sensible question: What is it about Islam that makes it such a fertile breeding ground for this pathology?

Instead, we are given the defendants’ nationality, or, even more vaporously, the continental region from which they emigrated to wherever they happen to be making mischief at the moment.

. . . .

Yes, public discussion of Koranic verse and all things Islamic is permissible only when the coverage template moves into Phase Two. This phase is basically the group hug for Muslims—modern journalism’s act of contrition for reluctantly having to report on all these pesky arrests and plots and ANFO bombs. And somehow, the media-mined verses are never, for example, “[F]ight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)” (Sura 9:5). Rather, they are about a humble, unarmed man laid low by the infidels … while he’s dabbling in chemical explosives.

Phase Two was also in full swing Monday, as the Times returned to the Canadian plot. The conspiracy’s leaders, we were told, may have “led prayers” and given “fiery speeches,” but this doesn’t mean they “openly embrace[d] violence.” After all, it’s just Islam (many of whose fiery scriptures openly embrace violence).

Read it all.  It's worth your time.