Filmmakers are currently wrestling with four different projects to document or dramatize the story of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in early 2002, leaving behind a pregnant wife.
An Israeli commission of inquiry held Sharon, who was Israel\’s defense minister at the time, indirectly responsible for not anticipating the carnage. Sharon was forced to resign, which, at the time, seemed to end his political career.
The Israeli daily Ha\’aretz, a favorite of the intelligentsia in Israel and the West, and widely cited by the North American press, is frequently referred to as \”Israel\’s New York Times.\” But a New York Times it is not.
On April 1, Los Angeles County children\’s social worker Jules Weingart sent the Los Angeles Times a letter protesting its predilection for calling Palestinian suicide-bombers \”militants.\” As a courtesy, Weingart attached a list of normative definitions of the terms \”militant,\” \”terrorism,\” \”terror\” and \”extremist.\”
On April 18, Weingart received a response from Times Readers Representative Jamie Gold. \”The word terrorist is not applied to combatants in Israel,\” Gold informed Weingart on behalf of the newspaper, \”because it is considered a politically loaded word.\”
That this is some perverse form of political correctness, few can doubt. But as Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked repeatedly over the last year, \”Political correctness for whom — suicide-bombers?\”
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