Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich made an important point when he called the war on terrorism “phony.”
Unfortunately, he was almost totally misunderstood by many in the mainstream media reporting his remarks. His “phony war” allusion was to the early months of World War II, when opposing troops quietly sat in their foxholes silently staring at each other without firing a shot.
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Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — lost in denial about the Nazi threat — implored the British press not to write mean things about Hitler, lest they provoke him to attack. Gingrich thinks much of the U.S. political class is in a similar state of denial about the Muslim jihadists who want to kill Americans and destroy America.
Chamberlain would relate to many in the contemporary American media, who too often seem to prefer obliviousness in the face of the obvious. Take the brutal murder last week of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, allegedly by a member of a radical black Muslim group. Officials previously linked members of the group to violent attacks on local stores to stop liquor sales because drinking is against Muslim law. Police arrested Devaughndre Broussard, who reportedly confessed to killing Bailey for past articles he had written about the radical Muslim group and new articles the group feared were about to be published.
Curiously, several days passed before most of the national media paid attention to Bailey’s assassination, and even then, according to the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince, most of the coverage “was relegated to brief items of a paragraph or less.” Could that paucity of coverage be evidence of multiculturalism blinkering newsrooms?
It’s hard to say much about Islamic extremism in a one-paragraph story, of course, but aren’t any journalists interested in knowing whether they, too, should fear aggressively covering the black Muslim groups that exist in every major U.S. city? Will we ever see a “60 Minutes” documentary on the relationship, if any, between radical black Muslims here and the most extreme elements of the Muslim political world? Have al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah made contact with leaders of the rapidly growing and violent black Muslim movement within the U.S. prison system? Politically correct newsrooms don’t do such stories for fear of appearing “Islamophobic.”
But imagine the media uproar that would have erupted if, instead of being gunned down on an Oakland street in broad daylight by a black Muslim radical who didn’t like his reporting, Bailey’s cell phone calls were inadvertently overheard by the National Security Agency.
Professional journalism groups would pass hotly worded resolutions and demand congressional investigations, while editorials solemnly express their “gravest of concerns” and reporters insolently cross-examine President Bush whenever he’s within shouting distance.
That’s what they do in a phony war.
