Posted by
Dave Perkins on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 2:54:17 PM
.... in the media about
this story is just astounding.
Get a hundred longhaired oddballs on a Los Angeles streetcorner to protest Bush and it makes international headlines.
But when a couple of hundred young, male, aggrieved Muslims carry on rioting for three days at a major European city's central train station, the wet blanket descends and quickly muffles all sounds...
I lived there in Brussels for almost four years, and have caught many a train from the Midi station. it was never the best of neighbourhoods, but this is ridiculous. My wife and I often agree that if we were asked to return, even for a very nice increase in earnings, we'd quickly decline. It just isn't the same now. I remember how brief the moment of reconciliation was after 9/11, when my neighbours wrote nice letters to me and people in the streets echoed Jacques Chirac, "aujourd'hui, nous sommes toutes Americaines".
It lasted about a week, then morphed into "ecoutez-moi, cochon Yankee, ne faites pas la guerre"-- listen here, yankee pig, you'd best not be making war....
So why no reporting on this riot? And why no AP or Reuters photographers dispatched to the scene?
Sure, I know there aren't any Jews or "Amrikis" there causing trouble. I know it'll be hard for you to sell pictures that don't make America or Israel look wrong and bad. But use your brains here, people! Couldn't you just photo-shop the malefactors into the picture?
You know, put an Israeli tank in the middle of the Gare Midi parking lot and show it killing the mobs with cannon-fire... Or what about this? Garey Busey and Billy Zane are in a new movie now playing in Turkey, in which they appear as gun-totin' GI's running around killing helpless Muslims. Those scenes would fit right in! TV news editors, you could just air Busey movie trailers and tell viewers it's video from the riots in Brussels.
Come on, you've made it this far on faked and staged and manipulated images. Why not go all the way?
They're mad, by the way, because apparently a Muslim male convict in a local prison has died, and they insist he was killed by guards and his death covered up with a story about bad reactions to drugs or something.
If recent history is anything to go by, these "disaffected youths" don't need much, and it doesn't need to be true.
Oh by the way... a couple of months ago, maybe longer, was a story about a young Belgian man being murdered for his cell phone. Witnesses said a group of dark-looking young men followed him into the station and down an escalator (I'm going from memory here), then beat him to death and stole his phone and wallet and so forth.
The story stuck with me for two reasons-- first, because I hardly ever heard anything about local violent crimes like that when I was living in Brussels up 'til 2004, and second because
it happened in the same train station. The subhumans who killed that young man are probably out tonight, burning up a Renault or two. But they can't claim that the young man they murdered and robbed had "insulted Islam"...