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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

At the NYT, Jews are not victims in European jihadist spree



From the New York Times coverage of the latest terror attack in France:
France has had three major terrorist attacks in the space of 19 months: an assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and other locations around Paris in January 2015, which killed 17 people; coordinated attackson a soccer stadium, the Bataclan concert hall, and cafes and restaurants in and around Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people; and a rampage on July 14 in the southern city of Nice by a man who rammed a cargo truck into a Bastille Day crowd and shot at the police with a handgun, killing 84 people.
"And other locations"? The other location was the Hypercacher kosher grocery store where 4 Jews were mowed down.

Was this just a simple oversight not to mention it even in passing since "only" four were killed and it was related to the Charlie Hebdo attack?

The link given is only for Charlie Hebdo so that doesn't tell us about the Hypercacher attack. The "other locations" isn't hyperlinked to Hypercacher.

But again, this could just be a simple oversight, right?

However, elsewhere in the article there is this paragraph:

President François Hollande blamed the Islamic State for the attack — the latest in a series of assaults that have left Europe stunned, fearful and angry — and soon after the terrorist group claimed responsibility, calling the attackers its “soldiers.”
The hyperlink for "series of assaults" goes to an article that also doesn't mention Hypercacher. And that article in turn has links to two more articles about attacks over the past two years that doesn't mention Hypercacher, or any background that would link to the Toulouse school murders of 2012 or the Brussels Jewish museum murders of 2014.

For a news source with such a large data store of stories on terrorist attacks in Europe, it is disconcerting that the current articles cannot be used by a curious reader to find links, even indirectly, to any terror attacks on Jews in Europe in recent years.

This is more that a coincidence. The subconscious thinking by editors at the New York Times, and elsewhere, is that attacks on Jews by Islamists are in a different category than attacks by Islamists on everyone else. Attacks on non-Jews are regarded as more outrageous than attacks on Jews. In a small way, antisemitic attacks are sort of understood. Not condoned, of course; not acceptable and terrible, but in a small way they are not quite as bad as attacks on, well, let's call them "normal people."

(H/t Richard)


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