Al Jazeera English Bans Use of "Extremist", "Militant", "Terrorist", "Islamist"- Per Leaked Email Memo

ISIS-affiliated jihadists have claimed responsibility for the attack and car bombing of the Corinthia luxury hotel in Tripoli, Libya early this morning. The death toll varies, but it's around 9 or 10, with one American casualty.

Soon after the attack, Carlos Van Meek of Al Jazeera English sent out an email memo to Al Jazeera correspondents telling them they are not to use the terms "jihad", "Islamist", "extremist", "terrorist" or "militant" when referring to Islamist, extremist, terrorist militant jihadists. They want to "avoid characterizing people," because "one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." Right, because trying to establish an imperialist global caliphate is just freedom fighting. Beheading journalists, raping and killing Yazidi women, and keeping some as sex slaves is just freedom fighting.

BUT, it's perfectly okay to use the term militant when referring to people like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, or Norway's 'mass murderer' Anders Behring Breivik.

National Review Online's Brendan Bordelon got his hands on a leaked copy of that email:

From: Carlos Van Meek
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 10:06 AM
To: AJE-Newsdesk; AJE-Output; AJE-DC-Newsroom
Subject: Terrorists, Militants, Fighters and then some…

All: We manage our words carefully around here. So I’d like to bring to your attention to some key words that have a tendency of tripping us up. This is straight out of our Style Guide. All media outlets have one of those. So do we. If you’d like to amend, change, tweak.. pls write to Dan Hawaleshka direct who is compiling the updates to the Style Guide and they will be considered based on merit. No mass replies to this email, pls.


EXTREMIST – Do not use. Avoid characterizing people. Often their actions do the work for the viewer. Could write ‘violent group’ if we’re reporting on Boko Haram agreeing to negotiate with the government. In other words, reporting on a violent group that’s in the news for a non-violent reason.

TERRORISM/TERRORISTS – One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. We will not use these terms unless attributed to a source/person.

ISLAMIST – Do not use. We will continue to describe groups and individuals, by talking about their previous actions and current aims to give viewers the context they require, rather than use a simplistic label.

NOTE: Naturally many of our guests will use the word Islamist in the course of their answers. It is absolutely fine to include these answers in our output. There is no blanket ban on the word.

JIHAD – Do not use the Arabic term. Strictly speaking, jihad means an inner spiritual struggle, not a holy war. It is not by tradition a negative term. It also means the struggle to defend Islam against things challenging it. Again, an Arabic term that we do not use.

FIGHTERS – We do not use words such as militants, radicals, insurgents. We will stick with fighters. However, these terms are allowed when quoting other people using them.

MILITANT – We can use this term to describe individuals who favour confrontational or violent methods in support of a political or social cause. For example, we can use the term to describe Norwegian mass-killer Andres Behring Breivik or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. But please note: we will not use it to describe a group of people, as in ‘militants’ or ‘militant groups’ etc.

Makes one want to slam one's head into the wall.

It's not the first leaked email to show just how biased the Qatar-based news agency is. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, National Review Online also managed to get a hold of other emails where Al Jazeera execs criticised the overwhelming global support for freedom of speech.

Maybe it's time Al Jazeera crawls back to Doha where it belongs.

Source: NewsBusters

Katherine Russell, The Hijabi Wife of Boston Bomber Jihadi Tamerlan Tsarnaev

While MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry argues about the irrelevance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wicked brother Dzokhar's Islamic faith- since "there is no evidence suggesting the suspected attackers may have embraced a radicalized version of Islam"- more information is emerging indicating the bombers were not your run-of-the-mill secular Muslims. As much as liberals would like to believe.

The boys' mum started wearing a hijab in recent years, and Tamerlan's young Christian-turned-Muslim wife and mother of his child, Katherine Russell, also started wearing full Islamic garb.  Non-religious Muslims don't wear hijab nor do their husbands expect them to. Not to say that all religious Muslims are radicalized, but I would venture to say they could be one step away from that.

As for Tamerlan's wife, if we can believe her lawyer Amato DeLuca, it turns out that Katherine had no clue her husband was plotting to blow up innocent people.  Apparently she was too busy working her butt off as a home health care aide 70 - 80 hours per week, while her hubby took care of their 3-year-old daughter Zahara, and worked out the details of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack with his little bro.

According to DeLuca:

“When this allegedly was going on, she was working, and had been working all week to support her family."

Who knows if this is true or not, at least her lack of knowledge, but it's a little hard to believe that she would be so totally clueless since she lived in the same cramped apartment.

The DailyMail has some interesting information, as does AP's Big Story, on Katherine and how she became involved with Tamerlan. According to friends and others, this promising artist was dominated and influenced by her religious husband, a man she married in spite of being violently beaten up by him in 2009.

Too bad she took the wrong fork in the road when she married Tamerlan.

Please Remember Me- Video Tribute To Britain's Fallen Soldiers

A tribute in honor of Britain's fallen troops who have fought the war on terror alongside our men and women in the military.

Rest in peace, sweet warriors of freedom.

Reporter Lara Logan Says Taliban and Al Qaeda Stronger Than Ever

Lara Logan was the South African CBS news journalist who was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the post Arab Spring celebrations after Hosni Mubarak's resignation.  A top notch war correspondent who has reported from most of the major hotspots in the Middle East and Africa, including Iraq and the battlefields of Afghanistan, she knows whereof she speaks.

Logan was the keynote speaker at the Better Government Association annual luncheon, and she had some sobering words for the 1,100 movers and shakers in politics, government, the legal and corporate world in attendance, including Laura Washington from the Chicago Sun-Times.  Our enemies are as strong as ever, and we're being lied to by our government.

Washington felt a little "queasy" that as a journalist Logan was stepping out from telling the story to being the story, but the speech frightened her "as an American."

According to Ms. Washington, Logan told the captive audience that:

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She also blasted the U.S. government for

.... downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

Logan also wants the U.S. to "exact revenge"  for the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and the three other US. officials in Libya, in order to

".. let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

Good luck with that.

Although Ms. Washington mentions that "in the good old days, reporters did not advocate, crusade or call for revenge",  she also gives kudos to Logan for breaking those journalistic rules in a post-9/11 world.

I would venture to say that to most of us non-liberals, Logan's words are nothing new. Those of us who don't have our heads buried in the proverbial sand know that our enemies have not slipped off into the sunset to commune with their camels and six wives. It doesn't take a genius to see that the Taliban have no intention of integrating into Afghan society, so have no desire for  peace. For some reason Obama and his minions are in denial about the war on terror, which makes it doubly important that he does not get a second term.