New Duranty Times? Why do we call the New York Times by that name? Read here and here. Duranty, you see, glossed over Stalin’s Communist genocide in the Ukraine. And the Times is doing it again, missing today’s jihad almost completely — note these two stories from today’s fresh steaming pile of newsprint:
Schools in Thailand Under Ethnic Siege
YALA, Thailand – On the weekends now, the military firing range here is crowded with teachers – in shifts of 50 – trying out their pistols, an essential new accessory in a place where teaching school has become one of the most dangerous professions.
In an escalating campaign of violence here in the largely Muslim south of mostly Buddhist Thailand, government-run schools and the teachers who work in them have become particular targets of bombs and gunmen.
“Bombs” thrown by whom? “Gunmen” adhering to what religion and ideology?
In the past year and a half, dozens of schools have been damaged or destroyed by arson. The local teachers union said 18 teachers had been killed in that period in the three most dangerous southern provinces, an average of one a month. Some give higher figures.
A long-simmering separatist movement in this former Malay sultanate lies at the heart of the violence, hand in hand with resentment at discrimination against Muslims and attempts at forced assimilation by the government….
A harsh, militarized approach by the government has generated its own spiraling dynamic of violence and revenge. Experts say that there is no evidence yet of direct involvement by foreign Islamist groups but that fertile ground is being created for them.
Ah. It is all a reaction to discrimination against Muslims, you see. Jihad? Sharia? Caliphate? Pah.
And meanwhile, in Sudan:
Children of Darfur Know About Life Amid Carnage
A crayon drawing by “Taha,” who is 13 or 14 and lives in North Darfur, showed helicopters in the sky and houses engulfed in flames. “Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened,” says the label accompanying the drawing. “We became homeless.”
And on another label there was this from 13-year-old “Salah,” from West Darfur, who drew men mounting women or pointing guns at one another: “The women were screaming. They seized them, they took them by force. The pretty ones were taken away … girls were taken, small girls, too, I think 5 and 7 and 14. Some came back after four or five hours. … Some we haven’t seen again.”
The 27 drawings that went on display yesterday at New York University depict the world of the young artists, Darfur refugees who escaped the killings in Sudan. So their crayon and pencil offerings show rape, men on horseback with guns, burning villages and helicopters raining weapon fire from the sky….
The group’s goal is to focus attention on Darfur, a western Sudanese region the size of Texas. In a conflict that pits the Sudan government against rebel groups from Darfur, the United Nations estimates that as many as 200,000 have starved to death or been killed and 2.4 million have been displaced since the conflict began in February 2003.
The militia, composed of Arabs known locally as “janjaweed,” has hurled racial insults at the black Sudanese as it has committed the atrocities depicted by the young artists. Those atrocities have included reports of children being raped or castrated, or having their eyes gouged out.
Racial insults. It’s all racial, you see? And it is to a degree, but once again the Times makes no mention of the jihad element, which has been affirmed by a Sudanese general.
Walter Duranty would be proud.