Why They're Called The "Enemy" Media

Here is what the New York Times saw fit to splatter across its op-ed page last week:

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a ten-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for eighteen months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

Upchucking your diarrhea yet? Those are the whoppers of Ahmed Yousef, the noted and notorious Hamas flack. You know, the Iranian-sponsored Islamist terrorist gang that has taken over the West Bank and is gleefully shariazing everything and every one in sight.

Observed the AmSpec's Phil Klein:

No doubt, by publishing this, the NYT's editors believed they were showing themselves to be "even handed" about the Middle East. There's nothing wrong with presenting both sides of an argument, but when one side is pure, unadulterated evil, it should not be presented as having an equally valid perspective. Barbaric terrorists [There's another kind...?] who glorify death should not be granted such a forum in a civilized society.

By lib imam Roger Ebert's reckoning, that comment probably merits Klein a media fatwa:

The Americans who complain about "negative" news are the ideological cousins of those who shoot at CNN crews. The news is the news, good or bad, and those who resent being informed of it are pitiful.

Or who "complain" about the "paper of record" printing Islamist propaganda, on its op-ed AND "news" pages. Whether it's a Hamas flack or war "coverage" with such a jihadi slant that would make al-Jazeera hesitate, we're supposed to just shut up and swallow this bilge like good little dhimmis.

It brings me back to Mark Steyn's words quoted below:

That's what's happening in the free world incrementally every day, with every itsy-bitsy nothing concession to groups who take offense at everything and demand the right to kill you for every offense. Across two decades, what happened to Rushdie has metastasized, in part because of the weak response in those first months. "Death is perhaps too easy"? Maybe. But slow societal suicide is easier still.

Except, in a way, it isn't a suicide. It's more of an inside-contract homocide carried out by a press culture that is so self-righteously absolutist about cultural self-loathing and militant pacifism that they've aggressively "Stockholmized" themselves without a single overt enemy threat even being necessary. They are as intolerantly determined to squash their political opponents as the enemy is to squash us all.

And to think people like Ebert really think that the beheadings and massacres and mayhem and car bombings and riots and other chaos will somehow not touch them.

Explain again how libs can call themselves "the reality-based community" with a straight face and without a facial tick?