Kasab remains a gunman for New York Times

NEW DELHI: Never mind loud claims that it���s at the forefront of the war against terror, but the US media is not ready to use the brush for removing its dangerous political correctness. Even after Kasab has confessed about his links with a totalitarian ideology and jihadi murderers in Pakistan, he still remains a ���gunman��� and not a ���terrorist��� for the New York Times.

���Mumbai Gunman Enters Plea Of Guilty,��� the Post headline read a day later, and the 428 words of the report from New Delhi do not include ���terrorist��� ��� not even to qualify the ���attack���. Kasab is ���one of the 10 gunmen who laid siege to India���s financial capital for three days last November���, Lashkar-e-Toiba is ���outlawed, Pakistan-based group��� and the attack that claimed over 170 lives is ���the deadly carnage���.

The NYT report with the headline ���Suspect Stirs Mumbai Court by Confessing��� has 1,050 words, but terrorist is not among them. Kasab is ���suspect���, ���gunman��� and ���attacker���.

The Wall Street Journal calls the incidents ���terrorist attacks���, but those behind them were ���10 suspected gunmen���. For the Los Angeles Times, the 21-year-old Pakistani is ���the only suspected gunman���. This is, of course, no different from the terminology the American media used in reporting those ghastly events on November 26-29 last year.

The reluctance of the media to name the killers and their organisation was criticised by emiment columnists like Mark Steyn.

���In the assault on Bombay, much of the media abandoned offending formulations ��� ���Islamic terrorists���, ���Muslim extremists��� ��� and found it easier to call the perpetrators ���militants��� or ���gunmen��� or ���teenage gunmen���.��� The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow opted for the more cryptic ���practitioners���.

At the Habad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as ���ultra-Orthodox���, ���ultra��� in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalised code for ���strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn���t have been over there in the first place.��� Are they stranger or weirder than their killers,��� asked Mark Styen in an article.

NYT has come out with a curious explanation to the tendency of the paper to call one man���s ���terrorist��� another man���s ���assailant���? The answer was given by the NYT���s public editor Clark Hoyt.

Writing in December when those gory images were still fresh in memory, Hoyt noted that the ���10 young men��� who ���went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children��� were described in The Times by many labels.

���They were ���militants���, ���gunmen���, ���attackers��� and ���assailants���. Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city���s largest train station, five-star hotels, a synagogue, a cafe and a hospital, were described as ���coordinated terrorist attacks���. But the men themselves were not called terrorists.���

He reprinted a comment posted on the newspaper���s website by a reader: ���I am so offended as to why the NY Times and a number of other news organisations are calling the perpetrators ���militants���. ���Murderers, or terrorists perhaps but militants? Is your PC going to get so absurd that you will refer to them as ���freedom fighters?������

Hoyt noted that the Mumbai terror attacks ���posed a familiar semantic issue for Times editors: what to call people who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians.���