Media Hush Up Tampa Pilot's Arab Name
Back to the Media's Behavior Page
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2002
It's curious how nearly all the media are afraid to mention that the name of Tampa's teen-age suicide pilot, Charles Bishop, was changed from Bishara, an Arab name.
We heard Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes note this factoid last night on Fox News Channel's "Special Report With Brit Hume," and NPR liberal Mara Liasson immediately flew into a snit and tried to gloss over this bit of reality.
A search of the news wires today for "Bishara" produced zero results until some interesting facts turned up at the bottom of a New York Post article.
One of Bishop's teachers, Gabriella Terry, told the Post that on Sept. 12 she told students not to judge people on their ethnicity or religion.
Bishop thanked her, said no one could be sure of someone else's background and "even hinted that, for all anyone knew, he could be part Arab."
"I remember him saying his father was foreign, but I don't remember what nationality," classmate Derek Perryman told the Post.
Public records show the family's name had once been Bishara, the newspaper reported, and the boy's long-gone father is "believed to be Syrian or Lebanese."
Now, maybe all this has nothing to do with Bishop's copycat attack on the Tampa skyscraper, but after all he did express admiration for terrorist Osama bin Laden. Why not just tell the truth and let the public decide?
As one NewsMax reader wrote, "Of course this is a terrorist action, because as Barnes notes, Osama called on young people around the world to rain a storm of airplanes into buildings."
Can you imagine the media censoring themselves if Bishop were, say, a fundamentalist Christian?
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