The Drive-By-Media Fails to Identify Terrorists: You Can't Tell the Players Without a Program

From The Corner at NRO Online:

Muslims? Plotting Terrorism? You Don't Say ... [Andy McCarthy]

Well, no, you most certainly don't say. Not if you're the New York Times and not if your one of its serial imitators in the MSM. Not in the story referred to by Cliff and Roger Simon about the terrorist plot thwarted in Canada yesterday. And not in the reports that first arose on Friday about the possible chemical bombing plot that was interrupted in London.

This initial report about the British plot, from Sky News on Friday, was careful to say only that the two men arrested were "both of Bengali origin."

Yesterday's report in the Times — which, by the way, makes the story about the fact that one of the apparent plotters was shot by the police, not that mass murder of British civilians was apparently being planned — mentions toward the end that two of the men associated with what appears to be a "known terrorist group" might both be members of a family "of Pakistani descent."

How do we know they are Muslims? Because of sympathetic comments from a friend, reported in the tenth and twelfth paragraphs at the end of the story (italics mine):

Sky News broadcast what it said was an interview with two unidentified friends of the man who was shot. They spoke with their backs to a camera, their heads covered and faces hidden. One of the men prefaced the interview by reciting a Koranic verse. "They shot an unarmed man because he wanted to try and protect his family," one man said.



He called the wounded man "a humble guy" who had gone "to your schools, your workplaces and paid his taxes, and at 4 a.m. the police gave him a present — they gave him a hole in the chest."





The police carried out the raid, the man said, because "they want to give us Muslims a bad name."

So here's my question: if these groups in Canada and England are not affilitated with al Qaeda, what could it possibly be that they have in common with members of al Qaeda that might lead them to want to commit bombing attacks against the West, just like al Qaeda? Hmmmmmm ...