Misrepresentations of reality by word choice

Raising Questions Within Islam After France Shooting by David D. Kirkpatrick. It might seem further evidence supporting my argument Are Washington Post and New York Times commenters becoming more conservative? And actually, it is. But that's not why I am quoting it.

Even during a running series of massacres and terrorist killings in France that are continuing, the NYT is running this deeply ambivalent, morally equivalent argument as reporting.

I found the opening two paragraphs fascinating in their word choice. Emphasis added.

Islamist extremists behead Western journalists in Syria, massacre thousands of Iraqis, murder 132 Pakistani schoolchildren, kill a Canadian soldier and take hostage cafe patrons in Australia. Now, two gunmen have massacred a dozen people in the office of a Paris newspaper.

The rash of horrific attacks in the name of Islam is spurring an anguished debate among Muslims here in the heart of the Islamic world about why their religion appears cited so often as a cause for violence and bloodshed.

By asking why it is cited, the NYT is suggesting that there is a disproportionate focus on Islamic terrorism compared to other terrorist acts that are being committed.

Though they will not say so in the article, the overwhelming majority of terrorist acts being committed today are being committed by parties self-identifying as Islamic. But the NYT is, through their word choice, subtly intimating that this is not the case and that instead Islamic terrorism is being unfairly cited.

The article goes on from that point forwards with an on the one hand and then on the other hand approach to reporting. In their PC blindness, the NYT is trying to skirt what everyone else knows. The disproportionate majority of terrorist activity happening globally is Islamic. The NYT wants to know why people are point this out and trying, through elision and definitional sleight of hand, to make the hard facts disappear. Looking at the comments, there are a handful of the hand-wringing moral relativist, cultural suicidalist trying to make Islamic terrorism a product of Western civilization but the overwhelming majority are once again calling out the NYT for being so deceptive and blind.