Brendan Loy looks at the Toronto terrorist bust and writes of the details that--shocker!--Reuters chose to omit:

Michelle Malkin has a list of the would-be terrorists’ names. ThreatsWatch calls them “twelve adult Muslim jihadists and five juveniles…some of them second-generation Canadian citizens and some of them recent immigrants.” Canada’s National Post says they are “homegrown extremists…young followers of the al-Qaeda ideology.” The Star elaborates, calling them “Western youths who have never set foot in Afghanistan but allegedly were radicalized here, and who are thought to be potentially as dangerous as the cells that once took orders from Osama bin Laden. Western governments, including Canada’s, have repeatedly warned of this phenomenon and blamed recent attacks, such as last July’s bombings in London, as the work of such groups.” The Canadian authorities themselves called the plot “al Qaeda-inspired,” according to CNN.

Yet for some reason, Reuters didn’t see fit to mention any of that, or to specify whether the arrested terrorists are Muslims, or Arabs, or Islamists, or Al Qaeda members/sympathizers, or… anything. From the Reuters article, you wouldn’t know whether these guys are Osama bin Laden’s band of brothers, or a band of angry rednecks from Saskatchewan. Well, actually, maybe we do sorta know, because if they were angry rednecks from Saskatchewan, I’m sure Reuters would have told us that. But the fact that they’re members of the global Islamist terrorist movement? No, that’s not newsworthy. (The only reference to the global jihad is the second-last paragraph: “the Canadian Security Intelligence Service..[is] trying to keep track of ‘350 high-level targets’ as well as 50 to 60 organizations thought to be linked to groups such as al-Qaeda.” But that doesn’t tell us anything about these terrorists, the ones who have just been caught red-handed trying to blow sh*t up in Canada.) And all the “Oklahoma City” references, though sensible and relevant in context, might lead a reasonable person — if he was getting his news only from Reuters — to conclude that this wasn’t an Islamist thing, but rather an OKC-style plot by white extremists. (Then again, I suppose “reasonable people” generally don’t get their news only from Reuters, or particularly trust Reuters at all, precisely because of crap like this.)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not political correctness; this is dangerous obtuseness. We need to know the nature threat we face, and although 99.9% of Muslims are not terrorists, 99.9% of the terrorists we need to be worrying about right now — including these bastards who wanted to take down a major building in Toronto — are Muslims. That aspect of their identity is an indisputably important, newsworthy fact, not because we want to smear all Muslims but because we need to know our enemy. Luckily, most news organizations have more good sense than Reuters, so we do know that these evil men are a homegrown arm of the global jihad, and not some band of Timothy McVeigh clones. But if Reuters had its way, we wouldn’t know any of that. This obscuration of newsworthy facts by a “news service” is shameful and indefensible — but alas, not surprising.

Update: Glenn Reynolds wonders "what's cooking here in the United States"; Don Surber wonders if the near-simultaneous busts in Toronto and London "may or may not have prevented another set of digits -- 6/6??? -- from being associated with death and destruction".

Another Update: Meryl Yourish asks, "Do you think it’s time we stopped discussing root causes?":

Because the last time I checked, Canada was an obnoxiously multiculti, socialist-oriented nation replete with national healthcare and hate speech laws.

* * *

Does anyone doubt that we are truly in a global terrorist war? WWIV has been ongoing since before 9/11, but 9/11 was the day it was announced to the world.

We have a long way to go. And the Cindy Sheehans of the world are not helping.