Joel Mowbray picks up on the latest example of egregious New Duranty Times obfuscation.
In what must have come as a shock to its readers, the New York Times reported that the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London brought “home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population.”
Imagine the surprise of many to learn that Britain is now under attack from “disenfranchised South Asian” people, not those who murder in the name of their Islamic faith.
Cruelly ironic is that in the course of attempting to avoid offending Muslims, the Times managed to defame two larger groups of people””all in a single sentence.
And that’s setting aside the fact that the deadliest 7/7 bomber was not even “South Asian.” Germaine Maurice Lindsay, who changed his name to Abdullah Shaheed Jamal after converting to Islam at age 15, moved to the UK from Jamaica.
A plain reading of the silly Times sentence would suggest that the British discussions of terrorism for the past two years have revolved, in large part, around fears of Indian Hindus, the single largest South Asian demographic in the United Kingdom. (According to the last UK census, immigrants who trace their ancestry to India, over 80% of whom are Hindu, are the only population of South Asian descendants topping one million in the country.)
Presumably, the Times was seeking a gentle way of pointing the finger at ethnic Pakistani Muslims, or perhaps even Muslims hailing from Bangladesh. But the self-proclaimed “paper of record” couldn’t bring itself to write anything more specific than “South Asian population.”
Read it all.