Why CBS kept mum for four days about the sexual assault of correspondent Lara Logan by a Tahrir Square mob we just don’t know. Did Logan, flown from Cairo to a US hospital hours after the attack, request secrecy as a brutalized victim?
Were news executives, or Logan herself, concerned that news of the assault would detract from the “democracy” drama? Such a blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by Tea Party-goers at a massive Glenn Beck rally.
A keening outcry would have arisen from the mainstream media (MSM), accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the mob’s brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.
But in the Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime.
We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers.
What CBS didn’t mention – what was later attributed to an unnamed network source – was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”
This essential piece of the story, this clue to the hysterical, obsessive anti-Semitism of the Islamic world including Egypt, was broken by the New York Post. It has sparked little comment, which in itself is worth comment.
Imagine, as if in answer to fervent Leftist fantasy, it came out that 200 Constitution-loving thugs had committed such an assault while yelling racial slurs. The MSM would directly attribute it the fact that George Washington owned slaves.
But Islam, even with its Koranically-enjoined anti-Semitism and misogyny, isn’t considered a factor here. Islamic misogyny might as well not exist. Islamic anti-Semitism might as well not exist.
But imagine further if the foundational documents of the Tea Party movement, its official leaders and heroes, were steeped in equivalent hatred and misogyny. There would be no instinctive reaction in the MSM to universalize the attack and strip away all possible context.
But that’s exactly what happened here. It took a tweet from a movie critic even to broach the misogyny topic in the MSM when Roger Ebert wrote, “The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.” (Given that Israel is in the otherwise Islamically-dominated “Middle East,” Ebert is employing the quasi-accepted euphemism for Muslim.)
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, noting the “undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism,” only concluded that “not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind.” (The light might have dawnethed more brightly had the MSM actually reported on the widespread anti-Semitic iconography visible in the demonstrations, as amply archived by John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media.)
Missing is any understanding of the fact – the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact – that Islam’s attitudes toward women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Koranic truth, as frequently expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Ahzar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.”
As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”
Rather than contemplate sources of violent animus that appear to have driven the assault on Logan, who, by the way, is not a Jew, the MSM let it all go.
The crowd was “whipped into a frenzy” just as CBS said. But was the frenzy cultural? Religious? Don’t ask, and certainly don’t tell.
That would spoil the story.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
