I really miss the days of slow news cycles when the press would have to look for excuses to bury a story like this instead of somewhat legitimately burying it under the latest terrorist atrocity, whether by Islamists or Black Lives matter.
Remember those innocent days of a decade ago? When stories about US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib could warrant Page 1 coverage at The New York Times for 32 straight days?
This is, of course, because the Left is naturally against torture. This is because they are better people than the rest of us and need to expose such terrible acts. That said, however terrible what happened in Abu Ghraib was, I think we can safely say that it pales next to what Members of the Religion that Shall Not Be Named committed at the Bataclan Music hall last year:
A government committee’s testimony translated by Heat Street, a conservative site owned by News Corp., on Friday spotlights beheadings, gouged-out eyes, and sexual abuse at the Bataclan theater last year. The Islamic State terror attacks killed 130 across the city and 89 at the concert venue alone.
A translation provided by the website show France’s Commission of Inquiry asking an investigator about the remains of victims on the second floor of the theater. The questioner said that injuries attributed to shrapnel seem dubious given that one man had his testicles removed and placed in his mouth.
“Some of the bodies found at the Bataclan were extremely mutilated by the explosions and weapons, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to reconstruct the dismembered bodies,” an prosecutor said. “In other words, injuries described … may also have been caused by automatic weapons, by explosions or projections of nails and bolts that have resulted.”
“Would those have put a man’s [testicles] in in his own mouth?” the committee member fired back.
“I do not have that information,” the prosecutor replied.
But prosecutors claimed these reports of torture were “a rumor” on the grounds that sharp knives were not found at the scene. They also claimed that maybe shrapnel had caused the injuries.
The lies and coverup are the result of the government not trusting that the people can handle the truth. Horror of horrors if there’s an anti-Muslim backlash or voters demand that the French government do more in the fight against ISIS. It’s far easier to suppress the truth than deal with the reality that the terrorists are operating on another moral plane than the rest of us, which gives them a significant advantage.
So how did the Old Gray Lady compare in its coverage between the two? When I plug in the search term on their site of “Abu Ghraib Torture” I get 887 hits. You get more by excluding the word “torture” but I included it so as not to mix up how they covered Bataclan. Take a guess how many hits “Bataclan Torture” gets? Go ahead. If you guessed anything above zero you’re wrong. The motives are obvious – smearing our troops in an effort to make your country lose a war versus burying a story that doesn’t fit your narrative is why the media is so reviled and distrusted.
As I was finishing this piece I did a little bit more searching, and found some Leftists questioning the validity of the story. The author at Red State who goes by Streiff gave a fair reading of the arguments, and I can’t excerpt it here – it’s a “Read the Whole Thing” kind of piece well worth five minutes of your time. Spoiler: It doesn’t give a definitive verdict. And it’s a damned shame, because now more than ever we need to be able to trust our media to report honestly and responsibility on hat’s happening, and we need to be able to trust our government to protect us from these threats. This story is another sad example of how and why that trust has been shattered and won’t be repaired any time soon.
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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
Image at the top of the post appears via The Peoples Cube
