Palestinians Fleeing Iraq. Wonder Why?

We're a day late on this, due to Blogger's difficulties yesterday, but check out this fascinating reportage from the NYTimes:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 20 — More than 100 Palestinians fleeing violence in Baghdad and seeking refuge in Jordan have been denied entry by Jordanian border officials for their failure to have proper entry permits, a spokesman for the Jordanian government said today.

Ooh, those terrible Jordanians. But wait, there's more:

In recent weeks, as Iraq has experienced a surge in sectarian violence, Palestinians have increasingly become the targets of Shiite militias, both because they are Sunni Arabs and because they enjoyed certain privileges under Saddam Hussein that provoked animosity among some Shiites. Many Palestinians were members of the Baath Party, and Mr. Hussein granted them free schooling and free housing, among other favors.

Residents of Baladiat, an eastern Baghdad neighborhood where Palestinians are concentrated, say that dozens of people have been kidnapped in recent weeks and that many have turned up dead in the morgue. The residents have accused Shiite militias operating in the area, which is located adjacent to Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum.

Hmmm. Could some of these dead Palestinians have been numbered among the vast "Civil War" casualties the media loves to crow about? Ah, more than likely, their plight is Israel's fault. Time to get fisking:

Most of the Palestinians who were stopped at the border over the weekend were residents of a housing complex that the Baath Party created for Palestinians who
fled to Iraq following the creation of Israel in 1948. They had arrived at the border crossing on Sunday in two buses, government officials and Baladiat residents said, and were permitted to pass through the Iraqi checkpoint, but they were turned back on the Jordanian side of a no-man's land.

Of course, we have no details about whether any of these people or their descendents are actually FROM the 1948 diaspora. Maybe Al Qaeda just recruited them last month. But what the heck, let's let the non-sequitur go unchallenged. It was, after all, written by a NYTimes reporter. Who are we to quarrel with this logical lapse when dealing with our intellectual superiors? But let's get back to our, er, story:

The issue unfolded against a backdrop of more violence around Iraq.

The Iraqi police found nine bodies in Baghdad today, each handcuffed and blindfolded with their hands bound and gunshots to the head, in the latest indication that new sectarian vengeance appeared to be sweeping the capital.

The bodies were found in six different locations and brought to more than 210 the number of execution-style victims that have been dumped and found in the streets and fetid swales of the capital in the past two weeks alone.

"Fetid swales?" Guess the swells at the NYT are trying to stretch out the vocabs of the unwashed bit, eh? Pulitzer Prize, anyone? For creative writing? Note also the "more violence" meme, relentless over the last few weeks as lefty journos, sensing figurative Republican blood flowing in the midst of actual Middle Eastern blood, continue to hammer relentlessly at anything that might further sink Bush's poll results, which themselves are largely being caused by advocacy push-polling. But we digress:

While corpses have periodically turned up in the city since the invasion, the frequency of such reports has leaped since the bombing of a leading Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, last month. That attack provoked an eruption of reprisal attacks in the days after, mostly by Shiite militias in eastern Baghdad against Sunni Arabs and their mosques, leaving hundreds dead.

The authorities have not declared a motive for most of the slayings since then, but many follow a pattern usually associated with sectarian reprisal killings, with the victims, many of them Sunni Arab, pulled from their homes by gunmen for no explicit reason and hauled away to their death.

Aren't Palestinians generally Sunni Arabs? And if so, is that largely who's getting whacked here? And if so, are they getting "hauled away" for no reason? Except maybe they had served as Saddam's enforcers? Or helped to blow up the Shiite mosque in Samarra, where they had an appointment with the devil? Wonder why they're trying to "get out" of Iraq? Maybe they've been part of Al Qaeda and/or the "insurgency," eh? A reporter can't speculate, of course (though they always do if they think it will hurt Bush). But you'd think the NYTimes might just be a tad curious about why all these innocent Palestinians are getting offed, dontja think?

Moving right along, no NYTimes story on Iraq is complete without either some off-topic interlude of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld bashing or a snide aside or two about our always-willing-to-be-brutal military. This time, it's the military's turn, even though, of course, the patriotic press supports them. So let's take a brief detour and describe how Americans might be killing civilians:

American troops are frequently accused of killing civilians, although most of the allegations are later proven to be untrue.

Oh, right, it's not generally true, but let's report it anyway. Wonk has never yet seen or read of a media type who has been honest enough to report that ALL TERRORISTS ARE "CIVILIANS." They are not part of any hostile foreign army. They're just hostile. Which is why, this time around, we can't possibly declare war in a legal sense, because wars are declared against states or governments.

Clever, eh? So if the U.S. is, on occasion, whacking "civilians," just what political philosophy might those "civilians" represent? Of course, for a lefty media used to regularly distorting the language for the purpose of, say, portraying the Noam Chomskys of the world as "patriots" and supporters of "free speech," distinctions like this one are easily lost as they are quite inconvenient to their 24/7 anti-U.S., anti-ChimpyBushMcHitler meme. By failing to distinguish potential or actual terrorist "civilians" from real ones, the press, trapped in a 1968 time-warp, has continually striven to subtly undermine the military effort by accusing our soldiers, implicitly, of atrocities that in fact may be, and probably mostly are, legitimate attacks on enemy forces.

Media dishonesty and propaganda in this clash of civilizations has really gotten beyond the pale. For every agenda journalist disguising his or her propaganda as a "story," there are probably two or three who actually don't have a clue while writing in that style anyway. So steeped are they in the Marxist mythos they may actually think that the undisguised contempt flowing from their metaphorical pens is unbiased journalism.

This "story" isn't actually the worst we've seen, but it does exhibit the typical lack of MSM journalistic curiosity with regard to "Sunnis," "civilians," and so forth. Used to having won the battle of language in the late 1960s, they and their younger successors fail to recognize when the same propaganda tricks are actually being pulled by someone else like the "insurgents."

The media is clearly skeptical of only one side: ours.