{"id":36730,"date":"2016-12-21T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T09:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36730"},"modified":"2017-04-15T23:18:36","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T03:18:36","slug":"the-western-press-has-been-colonized-by-isisal-qaeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/21\/the-western-press-has-been-colonized-by-isisal-qaeda\/","title":{"rendered":"The western press has been colonized by ISIS\/al Qaeda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> on the way western media have been trained to report certain events to benefit terrorist organizations:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The British press is morphing into a mouthpiece for al-Qaeda<\/em>. Consider its coverage of yesterday\u2019s assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey. It is borderline sympathetic. The killer\u2019s words \u2014 or rather, certain of the killer\u2019s words \u2014 have been turned into emotional headlines, into condemnations of Russia\u2019s actions in Syria. That the killer\u2019s first and loudest cry was \u2018Allahu Akbar<\/em>\u2019 \u2014 the holler of the modern terrorist \u2014 has been downplayed, and in the case of at least one newspaper, the Express<\/em>, completely ignored. Instead the papers upfront the killer\u2019s other cries, about Aleppo. \u2018This is for Aleppo\u2019, says The Times<\/em>. \u2018Remember Aleppo\u2019, says the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s headline, but with no quote marks, because these were not the exact words spoken by the gunman \u2014 they\u2019re more like the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s own sympathetic echo of the killer\u2019s sentiment.<\/p>\n

To get a sense of how disturbing, or at least unusual, this coverage is, imagine if the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamists had led to headlines like \u2018This is for Afghanistan\u2019 or \u2018Remember Basra\u2019 (those two knifemen, like Karlov\u2019s killer, justified their action as a response to militarism overseas). Or if the 7\/7 bombings had not given rise to front pages saying \u2018Terror bombs explode across London\u2019 or \u2018BASTARDS\u2019 but rather \u2018While you kill us in Iraq, we will kill you here\u2019. Reading the early coverage of Karlov\u2019s killing, and noting how different it is to British press coverage of other acts of Islamist terror, one gets the impression that the media think this killing is justified, or at least understandable. \u2018Remember Aleppo\u2019: they\u2019re saying this as much as the killer is \u2014 a perverse union of terrorist and editorial intent.<\/p>\n

But the killer said, first, \u2018Allahu Akbar<\/em>\u2019. Which perhaps suggests that his sympathy was not with Syria as such but with certain forces in Syria. Forces likely to shout \u2018Allahu Akbar<\/em>\u2019 as they kill people. Islamist forces. Something peculiar has happened in British media and political circles in recent weeks. Having spent years telling us al-Qaeda<\/em>-style groups are the greatest threat to our way of life, these people have lately become spectacularly uncritical about, and even weirdly supportive of, the existence and influence of al-Qaeda<\/em>-style groups in Syria. The press coverage of Karlov\u2019s killing is in keeping with the superbly reductive, highly moralised media coverage of events in Aleppo over the past fortnight, in which there are apparently only two sides: defenceless civilians and evil Russia and Assad. The militants in Aleppo, which include some grotesquely illiberal and misanthropic groups, have been airbrushed out of the coverage as surely as some reporters airbrushed away, or at least demoted to paragraph six, the Turkish assassin\u2019s cry of \u2018Allahu Akbar\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill on the way western media have been trained to report certain events to benefit terrorist organizations: The British press is morphing into a mouthpiece for al-Qaeda. Consider its coverage of yesterday\u2019s assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey. It is borderline sympathetic. The killer\u2019s words \u2014 or rather, certain of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,370,53,1119],"tags":[387,173,982,47,249],"class_list":["post-36730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-middle-east","category-politics","category-russia","tag-alqaeda","tag-assassin","tag-isis","tag-islam","tag-turkey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9yq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36732,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36730\/revisions\/36732"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}