Mark Steyn on the Fort Hood murders - and the reaction.

Mark Steyn is one of the world's best thinker/writers. A talented, fearless smasher of Liberal icons, he's written several great things on the Fort Hood murders by Major Hasan ... and especially on the media reaction.

Shooting Raises Fears For Sanity Of Entire Western World

The Headline of the Day, from the BBC:

Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army

Really? Right now the body count stands at:

Non-Muslims 13
Muslims 0

I was reading from some of this kind of coverage on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Even if you are concerned that it would be terribly unfair if all Muslims were to be tarred by Major Hasan's brush, it is, to put it at its mildest, the grossest bad taste to default every single time within minutes to the position that what's of most interest about an actual atrocity with real victims is that it may provoke an entirely hypothetical atrocity with entirely hypothetical victims. I refer you yet again to this note-perfect parody:

British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing

This kind of media coverage is really a form of mental illness far more advanced than whatever Major Hasan's lawyers eventually enter in mitigation, and apparently pandemic, at least among the western media.

The world has seen murders and shootings by mentally deranged people and will continue to see them. The media conflate what happened at Fort Hood and, for example the Virginia Tech murders. But while they try to connect the dots, there are some dots that they refuse to connect. So the MSM dots of choice are murder = insane.

But there is a much more obvious connection, 9/11 = Muslim, LA Airport shooting at El Al Airline counter = Muslim, Sergeant kills American officers in Kuwait = Muslim, the Beltway sniper = Muslin, the Fort Hood massacre = Muslin. This is only a very partial list of actual attacks that have succeeded and not the ones that have been foiled.

But the media template is now firmly set. There can be no dissent. Steyn uses the horrific murders in Bombay in 2008 as a perfect example of the media's tone perfect political correctness ...

This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”

Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution “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 known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”

Read the whole thing.