"Hey, we just got bombed by 'you won't know who'!"

In a joking post the other day, I poked fun at the fact that the English police are now refusing to hearing descriptions of malfeasors that might contain politically incorrect terms, such as fat. I envisioned a future police blotter that says nothing at all. On the same day, I did a post about the fact that the Western press has a long, long history of pretending that certain dictatorships are just hunky-dory, and even shilling for their evil ideologies. There you have it: a society that pretends evil or ugliness or even reality doesn't exist -- or, at least, insofar as these things can't somehow be blamed on George Bush. Unsurprisingly, today I read a Mark Steyn column in which he tackles the Western press' absolute refusal to inform the public that the bloody "insurgencies" going on in Russia now are powered by Islamists:

In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence. *** I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it.

It's classic Steyn -- witty, informed, and pulling no punches. Do yourself a favor this Sunday and read the whole thing.