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George Orwell was an anti-radical, anti-totalitarian socialist who admired the United States.

{Originally posted on authors’ website,  This Ongoing War}

Via Reuters tonight: French police on Saturday shot dead a male terrorism suspect after he stabbed and seriously wounded two officers in a police station, authorities said. A spokeswoman for the Indre-et-Loire prefecture in central France said the man was killed after he attacked the policemen with a knife in a station in Joue-les-Tours, a suburb of the city of Tours. The counter-terrorism section of the Public Prosecutor’s office has opened a probe for “attempted murder and criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist organization“, the Paris Prosecutor’s office said, without giving further details. According to the website of the French daily Le Figaro, the man could be “an Islamist known by the French DGSI intelligence service for his radical positions”. The BBC, chronically unable to deploy the word “terrorist”, has a uniquely-BBC approach to reporting this attack, under the headline ‘Allahu Akbar’ attacker shot by French police.” The only mention of “terror” comes when they write “Anti-terrorism investigators were now working at the scene…”

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The BBC has a formal policy document [here] that explains their rules. Extract: Use of Language | 11.4.5 We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Terrorism is a difficult and emotive subject with significant political overtones and care is required in the use of language that carries value judgements.  We try to avoid the use of the term “terrorist” without attribution. When we do use the term we should strive to do so with consistency in the stories we report across all our services and in a way that does not undermine our reputation for objectivity and accuracy. The word “terrorist” itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding… We should not adopt other people’s language as our own; our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.” [BBC Editorial Guideline: Language when Reporting Terrorism]

And so on. Most of the time, they stick to it, except when they don’t.

 

 

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Frimet and Arnold Roth began writing and speaking publicly soon after the murder of their fifteen year-old daughter Malki Z"L in the Jerusalem Sbarro massacre, August 9, 2001 (Chaf Av, 5761). They have both been, and are, frequently interviewed for radio, television and the print media, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, and others. Their blog This Ongoing War deals with the under-appreciated price of living in a society afflicted by terrorism which, they contend, means the entire world. Frimet is a native of Queens, NY while her husband was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. They brought their family to settle in Jerusalem in 1988. They co-founded the Malki Foundation in 2001 and are deeply involved in its work as volunteers. They can be reached at [email protected] .