Terry Jones, the wacko Christian preacher in Florida, burned a Koran in public the other day. That was followed by wacko Muslims rioting in Afghanistan.
We’re willing to call both sides wacko, but Reuters can’t bring itself to do the same. It only seems to have a problem with one side of this issue and we’re pretty sure you can probably guess which side it is.
In an 859-word article headlined “Ten dead in Afghan Koran burning protests,” the huge European news service refers to Jones as “a radical fundamentalist Christian” and “extremist Christian preacher Terry Jones.” Yet no similar incendiary adjectives were used to describe the Muslim Afghan protesters who rioted in the streets of Kandahar and killed ten people. Quite to the contrary, they are called “deeply religious.”
For example, shouldn’t someone performing a suicide attack be considered extremist? Not to Reuters:
A suicide attack also hit a NATO military base in the capital Kabul, the day after protesters over-ran a U.N. mission in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and killed seven foreign staff, in the deadliest attack on the UN in Afghanistan.
Taliban extremists are transformed into “burkha-clad insurgents” by Reuters:
In Kabul on Saturday, a small group of burkha-clad insurgents attacked a coalition base,
Riot all you want and commit mayhem for days on end, but if you’re Muslim Reuters will not use harsh adjectives to describe you:
A band of around 150 men who had taken to the streets to denounce the Koran burning set tires alight, smashed shops and assaulted an Afghan photographer, Reuters’ witnesses said. Some of the attackers were carrying guns.
The photographer was hit over the head and had his camera taken from him and smashed, by protesters who discussed killing him.
They’re demonstrators, not extremists and certainly not fundamentalists:
Around 5,000 demonstrators flooded into the streets…
The violence was extreme, perhaps, but not those who committed it:
Some were horrified by the extreme violence but not all had sympathy for the foreign dead.
And finally, the article concludes with this:
More volatile protests are possible across deeply religious Afghanistan…
So the way we understand this totally impartial article, Terry Jones is a “radical fundamentalist…extremist” because he burned a Koran in public, but the Afghan rioters who killed ten people, slit at least one throat, injured dozens, and destroyed private property are “deeply religious.”
And that, friends, is what Reuters calls balanced reportage.
Source: Reuters
