Mark Steyn: "Taqiyya for Easter"

The press was busy on Easter Sunday deflecting the news that Islamic suicide bombers killed hundreds of Christians in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is a popular tourist destination, so there were many western victims of yesterday's attack, including young ones: from an eleven-year-old English boy and a ten-year-old Australian girl to three of the four children of Denmark's wealthiest man, retail billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen. Yet throughout Sunday the UK, Aussie, Danish and the rest of the world's media saw their job as thorough obfuscation of the truth. I heard about yesterday's attack from the BBC, which had extensive rolling coverage with correspondents on the ground - and yet seemed mainly to be trying to tell us as little as possible. A lady think-tanker from Chatham House was keen to focus on the brutality with which the Sri Lankan government had ended the Tamil insurgency a decade ago: a fascinating topic no doubt, but utterly irrelevant to the mound of Christian corpses in Colombo that morning. In the entire hour, hers was the only mention of Islam - when she cautioned that it would be grossly irresponsible and "Islam-phobic" even to bring up the subject.



She didn't really need to spell that out, did she? It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday's coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative - or Official Lie. All day yesterday and into today, if you had glanced at the telly, switched on the radio or surfed the big news sites of the Internet, you would have thought the Tamil Tigers were back "with a vengeance", as The Economist put it - even though with one exception (the 1990 police massacre) the death toll was higher than any individual attack the Tigers had ever pulled off.