Three Christian Schoolgirls Decapitated: One Head Left At Church

While our family was trick-or-treating Saturday in the West Seattle Junction, killers who were doubtless Islamic jihadists were busy decapitating three Christian schoolgirls In Poso, Sulawesi Island, Indonesia as they took a short cut through a field on their way to school. Two of the heads were left at a police station, the third in front of a new church. Many mainstream media reports on the horrific incident, like this one from BBC highlight previous "sectarian violence" between Christians and Muslims near Poso in recent years, lazily imputing some sort of partial justification for the beheadings of innocents Saturday. All's fair in love and jihad, doncha'know? By the day after, BBC was not even able to mention until the seventh paragraph - although it is an undisputably central aspect of the story - that the victims were Christian schoolgirls. Then there is more of the "both sides are to blame" palaver.

Except, as the Financial Times reports today, the 1998 spark for violence around Poso came Islamic jihadists; the area has been a "jihadist training ground;" and as recently as May of this year, a bombing that killed 22 in the region was blamed on Islamic extremists.

Indonesian police have increased patrols in a region that has been the site of sectarian violence and a jihadi recruiting ground in recent years after the weekend beheading of three Christian school girls by mysterious killers dressed in black.

....The killings have again increased fears that extremist groups are trying to incite another round of violence in Poso, the scene of sectarian conflict between 1998 and 2002 that left more than 1,000 dead. Much of that violence, which began after a December 1998 brawl between Christian and Muslim youths, was fuelled by outsiders from Indonesian jihadi groups.

You see how easily that last sentence could have been excised by a foreign desk editor because of "space limitations," or more likely, never even included to begin with, in the AP or Reuters version of such a story. Baked-in news section bias is more and more prevalent in U.S. daily papers, and is often the tipping point in cancelled subscriptions.

Notice also the telling distinction between FT's assessment that the earlier violence was "fueled" by outsider jihadists, versus the BBC's assessment (in the first link, above) of that violence as having "drawn" jihadists from outside the region. Passive voice versus active. Such nuances matter.

Whenever you read something in your hometown rag about Iraq, Iran, Israel, Indonesia, Palestine, Pakistan, or Islamic extremists, get additional sources. You're rarely getting the whole story, or the straight story. That's why you need Google News, where, as bloggers know, a simple key word(s) search will provide varied versions of each new story, from different providers, and you can see which mainstream media sources are skewing left, and how. One of my hometown papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, did a fairly credible job, overall, on the Sulawesi beheadings, with a detailed AP story. The Seattle Times, on the other hand, gave it three scant grafs in an international news round-up.

TO COMMENT: The regular "comment" feature is not in operation. E-mail comments to address under "Contact" on main page masthead, and I'll add them, here.

Tom Rekdal: Notice also that Indonesia is a democratic state (sort of), as are India, which was hit by more Islamic terrorism last week, Turkey, Spain, and Britain.

At the very least, such incidents should give some pause to the argument that the "root cause" of terrorism lies primarily in the absence of electoral democracy.

The kind of murderous fanaticism we are now witnessing is something we have not thought about since the seventeenth century, and it seems to me unlikely that its causation can be conveniently captured in the social science categories were are familiar with.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 31, 2005 08:04 PM