“The real Middle East terrorists? Look in the mirror. We’ll never face it because the media won’t level with us.” That was the sub-header for a Salon piece Saturday, which argued that America is intentionally slaughtering huge numbers of innocent civilians, and the “compliant media” is covering up the truth.
Titled “‘Sorry we killed your family’: We are the terrorists in the Middle East, and our compliant media will never tell the truth,” the piece accused the United States of engaging in “Western terrorism.” The article’s author, Dana E. Abizaid, suggests that America is intentionally killing journalists, hospital workers and Red Cross personnel, among countless other innocent civilians in the Middle East. (RELATED: Did Hospital U.S. Bombed In Kunduz Break International Laws?)
“Sorry we killed your family”: If “terrorism” means killing innocent civilians, the US are terrorists, too https://t.co/dggOCQTyNo
— Salon.com (@Salon) November 28, 2015
Saturday’s article is just the latest effort from Salon to argue that Americans are either the cause of terrorism or the terrorists themselves.
Two weeks ago, the day after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris, Salon ran a piece titled “Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves.”
Ben Norton, the author of that piece, argued that the Iraq War — rather than radical Islam — was to blame for the Paris attacks and claimed that Americans’ “knee-jerk Islamophobia” prevented them from recognizing their own culpability. Islam, Norton argued, was simply a “scapegoat” for the “imperialist West.”
Salon ran another America-bashing piece less than three weeks ago, again blaming America for ISIS’s atrocities. Phil Torres, the author of the piece, conceded that “it may be tempting to blame religion,” before proceeding to blame the Iraq war for ISIS’s cruelty.
Salon’s bashing of Americans doesn’t appear to be a recent phenomenon, either.
Just last year, for example, the progressive blog ran a piece with the headline “We are the terrorists too.” The piece attempted to make the case that actual terrorist organizations are no less “terrorist” than the United States.
Earlier in 2014, Salon ran a piece with the title: “You’re being lied to about Afghanistan: The terrorists there include us.”
That article defended Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s decision to back out of agreements with the U.S. because he was “right to cast the American presence as a primary source of terror among Afghans.”