If I were running the place, Mr. Kafala would have been out of a job so fast he would have suffered whiplash. From the UK Independent:
Paris attacks: Do not call Charlie Hebdo killers 'terrorists', BBC says
The Islamists who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris should be not be described as “terrorists” by the BBC, a senior executive at the corporation has said.
Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine.
Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, told The Independent: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”
Mr Kafala said: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like terrorist which people will see as value-laden.”
Sorry to upset your widdle apple-cart but you, Mr. Kafala, are either practicing Taqiyya or you are clueless. You have spent too much time in the echo-chamber of your peers and have lost your touch. The world out there is a lot different from what you imagine it to be and to call yourself a journalist is the utmost of hubris. Your nuanced and measured reportage is lipstick on a pig. When all is said and done, it is still a pig.
