When we all know the press is lying

By Thomas Lifson

The masterful Mark Steyn captures the madness that has gripped the liberal media in reporting the Mumbai massacres, in a piece titled "Jews get killed, but Muslims feel vulnerable." The stunningly obtuse (or devious -- your call) New York Times reportage insulting the intelligence of its readers by claiming the attack on Chabad House was random chance, a target that they stumbled upon, comes in for well-deserved mockery:

Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.

The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity - and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.

The question ruminating in the back of my mind is this: does anyone, Times reporters and editors included, actually believe this stuff? Are there any Americans who do not know that Muslims have been attacking infidels around the world, with special attention given to murdering as many Jews as possible in the most unpleasant manner possible?
Or is this willful media blindness just a matter of going through the motions, the way Isvestia and Pravda reporters under Stalin assured readers that those Jewish doctors really were counter-revolutionaries, knowing all the while that to speak up and tell the truth meant the gulag? There may be a few truly delusional souls, but most of them have to know they are dissembling, don't they?

So what constitutes the gulag for them, keeping them in line? Is it the threat of unemployment? Is it rejection as politically incorrect souls never again to be invited to the best cocktail parties? Or is it complete submission to the notion that victim status, real or imagined, trumps fact?

America has reached a point where the clear majority of people believe our media lies to them, because they see reporting and commentary that defies the evidence before all of our eyes. As we face security and economic crises of a dimension as yet unknowable, this is not a hopeful sign.