Last week in Mumbai we witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see. The seven-venue atrocity was coordinated in a highly sophisticated way. The terrorists used BlackBerrys to stay in touch with each other during their three-and-half-day rampage, outwitting the authorities by monitoring international reaction to the attacks on British, Urdu and Arabic Web sites. It was a meticulously organized operation aimed exclusively at civilian targets: two hospitals, a train station, two hotels, a leading tourist restaurant and a Jewish center. There was nothing remotely random about it. This was no hostage standoff. The terrorists didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted to murder as many Hindus, Christians, Jews, atheists and other “infidels” as they could, and in as spectacular a manner as possible.…

So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of ’s most respected TV journalists, use the word “practitioners” when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors? Why did ’s highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the “militants” showed a “wanton disregard for race or creed” when exactly the opposite was true…? Why did the “experts” invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale…harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?…

What is the motivation of journalists in trying to mangle language—such as going out of their way to refer to terrorists as “militants,” as one Mumbai story on yesterday’s Times of London Web site seemed to do? Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable? How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can’t even identify them as such?…

You would be hard pressed to find any talk of radical Islam on the BBC in recent days, or mention of the fact that Islamists think should be a Muslim country. Instead the BBC continues to try to persuade its massive global audience that “it is a local Indian problem,” that “the subcontinent has a history of unrest,” and so on.…

For some time, many have argued that an element of anti-Semitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that anti-Semitism may even be at work in the way the BBC covers foreign news in general. For much of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that “an office building” had been targeted…. Then on Friday morning, TV pictures of Indian commandos storming the besieged Jewish center were broadcast by networks around the world.… While Sky News and other channels were gripped by these dramatic pictures, BBC World was not, almost pretending there was no siege at the Jewish center—even though by then it was one of only two sites that remained under attack in Mumbai.…

Meanwhile—perhaps even more disgracefully—a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.” Has the New York Times learned anything since the Holocaust, when, even after the war ended in the spring of 1945, the paper infamously refused to report that the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and so on killed in the camps had been Jews, and killed as Jews?… Even the Times’s British equivalent, the Guardian, began its news story: “The inclusion of the headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group was obviously intended to send its own message.” Does the New York Times think that the seeking out and murder by Muslim terrorists of the only New York rabbi in Mumbai and his wife was “an accidental target”?

There was nothing accidental about any of the seven sites that the terrorists attacked. And it was no accident that Mumbai was hit. It is the most multireligious city in —with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees and Jews living in relative harmony.