ISIS Video Purports to Show Execution of Christian Men in…
Why “purported” all over the place, in headlines, on the radio? Why is an element of doubt introduced, as if it might be a hoax,something put up by those who want to make the Islamic State look bad?
And while we’re on the subject, why does NPR constantly refer to the “so-called Islamic State.” Why “so-called”? Is that in order to signal that those who call the “Islamic State” the “Islamic State” are clearly wrong, that this “Islamic State” which does not commit any atrocity without giving a full Qur’anic justification for it, or adduces support in the Hadith when it needs to, “has nothing to do with Islam”?
Why does NPR, if it is so interested in this word “so-called” not use it, not once, before other fixed tendentious phrases, far more doubtful.
For example, why not use the phrase “the so-called Palestinian people” so as to properly cast doubt on this recent (post-Six-Day-War) invention of a people out of the local Arabs, done solely to appeal to creduolous Westerners, who might forget that the phrase, the idea, was never heard or seen before the Arab defeat in the Six-Day-War, and was created, as Zuheir Mohsen famously noted in an interview with James Dorsey that appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, “solely for political reasons.”
Or why not put the “so-called” before the word “occupied” as in “the so-called occupied West Bank”? Why not show a little doubt, or more than a little, about the misapplication of the word “Occupied” to territory to which, according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine (not to be tampered with by the U.N. — see Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and the World Court’s interpretation of its significance) Israel has a superior legal title. And that legal title comes out of the recognition, by such statesmen and Clemenceau and Jan Christian Smuts and others who tried to deal fairly with the diffferent peoples, not only Muslim Arabs, who lived in the lands that hd been held for half-a-millennium by the Ottomans, of a long record of history, and a moral claim. too, to that tiny sliver on the dusty edge of Asia. This is not a “so-called” legal, historic, and moral claim. It’s the real thing. Not so-called. Deeply called-for.
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2 Responses
While I watch cultural programs on PBS, such as the Opera and Downton Abbey, I no longer watch their news programs. Although Fox sometimes grates on my taste aesthetically, I find it more reliable, honest, and informative than PBS or CNN. I have also given up sending money to Channel 13 (the PBS station where I live). Their smug claim to honest impartiality is an insult to my intelligence. Nor am I a right-wing ideologue. The Democratic left, who are trying to transform America, are the real ideologues.
Something was bothering me about the media’s reporting of the slaughter of those Christians. I just couldn’t put my finger on it even though it was staring me in the face. It’s that darned word “purported” being bandied about by virtually the entire print and electronic media. The more I analyze it, the more sinister the usage appears to be. Merriam-Webster defines “purported” as follows: “Said to be true or real but not definitely true or real”. The Western media elites want to cast doubt and confusion regarding the global Jihad, and create a false sense of hope that what we are taking in with our five senses about Islam isn’t real ,and can’t be trusted. It all might be a hoax by that merry band of jokesters in the “so-called Islamic State”.