They have eyes, but cannot see

Daniel Pipes, in this article uses the heinous murder of the Coptic Christian family in Jersey City, as a springboard to a larger point -- the fact that, worldwide, police authorities are resistant to pointing the finger at religiously motivated murders, if the murders have Islamist sympathies. As part of his point, he identifies multiple instances in which the logical mind would see fundamentalist Islamism as the motive, yet the authorities refute that idea:

* The 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane by the Islamist El Sayyid Nosair was initially ascribed by the police to 'a prescription drug for or consistent with depression.' * The 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990, killing 217 - by a co-pilot not supposed to be near the aircraft's controls at that time who repeated 11 times 'I rely on God' as he wrenched the plane down - went unexplained by the National Transportation Safety Board. * The 2002 purposeful crash of a small plane into a Tampa high-rise by bin Laden-sympathizer Charles Bishara Bishop went unexplained; the family chimed in by blaming the acne drug Accutane. [This one surprised me, because the MSM mentioned only the Accutane factor and said nothing about bin-Laden sympathies.] * The 2003 murder and near-decapitation in Houston of an Israeli by a former Saudi friend who had newly become an Islamist found the police unable to discern 'any evidence' that the crime had anything to do with religion. Nor is this a problem unique to American authorities. * The 1993 attack on foreign guests dining at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo, killing five, accompanied by the Islamist cry 'Allahu Akbar,' inspired the Egyptian government to dismiss the killer as insane. * The 2000 attack on a bus of visibly Jewish schoolchildren near Paris by a hammer-wielding North African yelling 'You're not in Tel-Aviv!' prompted police to describe the assault as the result of a traffic incident. * The 2003 fire that gutted the Merkaz HaTorah Jewish secondary school in a Paris suburb, requiring 100 firefighters to douse the flames, was described by the French minister of the interior as being merely of 'criminal origin.' * The 2004 murder of a Hasidic Jew with no criminal record as he walked an Antwerp street near a predominantly Muslim area left the Belgian authorities stumped: 'There are no signs that racism was involved.'

The question Pipes is left with is, why this official denial? His answer:

Because terrorism has much greater implications than prescription drugs going awry, road rage, lunatics acting berserk, or freak industrial accidents. Those can be shrugged off. Islamist terrorism, in contrast, requires an analysis of jihadi motives and a focus on Muslims, steps highly unwelcome to authorities. And so, police, prosecutors, and politicians shy away from stark realities in favor of soothing and inaccurate bromides. This ostrich-like behavior carries heavy costs; those who refuse to recognize the enemy cannot defeat him. To pretend terrorism is not occurring nearly guarantees that it will recur.